The Girl of the Sea of Cortez: A Novel

by Peter Benchley

  It was after ten o’clock at night when he arrived at his destination, a spot of water in the open sea, to most eyes no different from any other spot of water in the sea, but to his at the precise juncture of imaginary straight lines drawn from three landmarks faintly perceived—more sensed than seen—by the light of the stars.

  From the bag he took a line and a killick. He dropped the killick overboard and waited for it to set in the rocks on the seamount. He checked his drift and the amount of anchor line left and decided that he had ample play: He could pull himself up-tide, or let himself drift down-tide, over a distance of a couple of hundred feet.

  From the plastic bag he took two gallon jugs, one red and one white. He poured half of each overboard, on opposite sides of the raft, which was a silly caution but one that gave him comfort. Then he poured the contents of the white jug into the half-full red jug, and screwed the cap into the red jug. The white jug he returned to the plastic bag.

  The cap of the red jug had been prepared ashore. A hole had been drilled through it, primer cord fitted through the hole and sealed. The primer cord looked like thin plastic clothesline, which was essentially what it was, except for the fact that it was filled with a substance like gunpowder that burned much hotter and many times faster.

  To the other end of the primer cord Jobim had connected, by electrical contacts, a hand-powered generator. You squeezed it, and squeezing it turned some wheels that squirted power into the primer cord.

  He lowered the full red jug into the water. If it had been empty and open, the plastic jug would eventually have filled and sunk. But filled now with a liquid of approximately the same density as water, and capped off with a bit of air trapped inside, it floated. Its neck bobbed, and the white primer cord waved back and forth, very visible against the black water.

  Jobim didn’t want the jug to float on the surface. He wanted it to have enough negative buoyancy so that it would tend to sink and yet be able to be held close to the surface by the tension of the tide working against the primer cord. The tide would try to pull the jug down and away; the primer cord would hold it up and near, and Jobim could pull in or let out more cord until he had the jug suspended where he wanted it—four feet below the surface.

  So from the plastic bag he took a handful of pebbles, and he dropped them into the red jug and recapped it and tested it and put more pebbles in and tested it again until, finally, it was right.

  And then he lay on his stomach on the raft, and he waited.

  With nothing to do but wait, he worried. He worried first that he had thrown away too much of the PLS liquid, that the combined gallon he had saved wouldn’t answer his purpose. But if his friend had said two gallons would blow a ferryboat to bits, surely one gallon would do for this job. After all, he was not trying to replicate World War II.

  Then he worried that he had too much of the liquid, that it would do too much damage. Maybe he ought to …

  Just then the light breeze brought the sound of voices. There were men approaching, and they were not being careful to keep their voices low. They had no fear of being overheard, this far out to sea. The only precaution they had taken was to paddle rather than use their motors, for they knew that the sound of a motor carries for miles in still air across still water.

  Jobim lay quietly on his raft, his head down so he would make no silhouette against the night sky. He heard four distinct voices separated into two distinct pairs: two boats, traveling together but keeping a convenient distance from one another.

  So far, he had guessed right: There had to be more than one boat, because to spread and gather the net from one boat would take so much time that dead fish floating on the surface would begin to drift out of range. A third boat, on the other hand, wouldn’t contribute much but would add risk: The more people who knew about these expeditions, the more chance there would be that someone would talk too much. Besides, the fewer partners, the larger each partner’s share.

  Now, Jobim guessed, the two boats would stay close together. One would drop an anchor, and the other would moor to the stern of the first boat. They would check the drift and ready their nets, and then they would throw the dynamite—probably one stick off each side. The dynamite would explode so deep that all they would feel up here would be a weak thump of pressure on their wooden hulls. Then the anchored boat would feed out the net, and the other boat would drop back and drift with the tide, dragging the net, and paddle in a wide circle, returning finally to the anchored boat.

  After a few minutes’ wait, all that would remain would be to draw the net tight and haul in the fish and fill their boats and paddle home.

  The voices drew closer, and still Jobim heard the sounds of paddles swirling through water, and he knew he had made a terrible error: By picking what he regarded as the ideal spot, he had picked the exact spot they were coming to. They were going to paddle into him, or at least into his anchor line.

  Then what? At worst, depending on who these people were, Jobim would find himself in a fight for his life against four men, all carrying knives as an item of clothing and who had sticks of dynamite that they could lob at him from a safe distance; he didn’t give himself much of a chance. If he could get close enough to them, and if he had time, he could blow everybody up, including himself, but that wasn’t what he had in mind. At best, the four men would deny everything and proceed along as if they had important business elsewhere, and tomorrow night they would show up somewhere else, somewhere Jobim could not wait for them.

  But the paddling stopped. Jobim heard the splash of an anchor and the rasping sound of the anchor line rubbing against wood.

  They had stopped precisely where he had hoped they would—between five and ten yards down-tide from him, in the line of the drift. He heard something bang against one of the glass net-floats in the anchored boat, and a casual argument about the length of the fuse on one of the sticks of dynamite. He hoped the argument would turn bitter, even for a moment, for raised voices would cover any noise he might make.

  Still lying flat on his raft, with his cheek pressed to the wood, he eased the red jug overboard and let it slip back in the tide. He could not place the jug yet—he would have to raise his head to do that—so he held the primer cord and waited for the men to busy themselves.

  He heard the scrape of a match and saw the flaring light as it reflected off a stubbly chin. A hand cupped the match, and two fuses touched the flame. The fuses hissed briefly, then sparkled, and an arc of sparks flew off each side of the boat as the sticks of dynamite were thrown into the water. Immediately the men turned to the net and began carefully to prepare it for an orderly slide into the water.

  Jobim raised up on his elbows and fed the primer cord behind his boat, letting it out a foot at a time, watching the white cord and hoping the men would not turn around and see it, trying all the while to see in his mind how far down the sticks of dynamite had fallen. It would be nice (not necessary, but nice) if the men could be made to believe that what had befallen them was the result of someone getting access to, and tampering with, their gear, for that would reinforce Jobim’s scheme—to convince these people that they were known and marked. But for that, his explosion would have to be coordinated exactly with the detonation of the dynamite below.

  He had the jug far enough back now, and he tied off the primer cord and picked up the squeeze generator and closed his eyes, envisioning the falling dynamite. His imaginary perspective was from the seamount, looking up, and he saw the two sticks falling in a slow spiral toward him, and almost on top of him, and so he squeezed the generator once, then again, then again, and he heard the wheel turn faster and faster as power built and built …

  There was a sound of ripping as the primer cord detonated, and then as Jobim opened his eyes the world before him erupted. The water beneath the two boats bulged and burst, and in graceful slow motion the wooden boats disintegrated. The force of the explosion directly underneath them separated their planks and dispersed them, and as the bulge of
water ruptured, it blew the four men upward, in disarray, like circus clowns on a trampoline.

  In a microsecond before the unleashed energy reached Jobim’s raft, he thought he had miscalculated and was going to follow the men into the air. But the rubber tubes lashed to his raft absorbed enough of the first hammer blow so that when the raft was heaved clear of the water it did not come apart, and it slapped back down on the sea in one piece, rocking crazily. Even his anchor held; all he had to do was keep from being rolled overboard. He reached into the plastic bag and brought out a powerful electric torch, one of those used to illuminate the surface of the sea for night fishing over the abyss. He did not turn it on, but knelt on his raft with the light in his lap, and waited.

  There was new turmoil as the men hit the water and sank and came up again and screamed, their shrieks tumbling over one another, unheard, for each man listened only to himself.

  “Help!”

  “I can’t swim!”

  “I’m hurt!”

  “Oh, God!”

  “Mother of Jesus!”

  “I’m drowning!”

  “Mother of God!”

  “Help me!”

  “Save me!”

  “Jesus, Mary and Joseph!”

  “Help help help!”

  Eventually each man found a piece of debris to cling to, and their panic subsided and transformed into anger and outrage and bickering and worry about drowning and drifting away and being eaten by prehistoric monsters of the deep. Floating in the sea in daylight was bad enough; at night, it was the stuff of nightmares. These men were fishermen. They knew what kinds of things lurked down there, and they knew there were things they did not know, things that had bitten off steel leaderwire and straightened giant hooks, things that came up in the night to feed.

  If only they could have the security of feeling their feet touch solid bottom … but out here, if their feet had touched anything, they would have gone into shock.

  “What was that?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Yes it was. I felt something.”

  “It’s in your head.”

  “There it is again. Oh God!”

  “What? What is it?”

  “It’s dead!”

  “What’s dead?”

  “It’s a fish! A dead fish!”

  “Where? Where?”

  “There’s one! Oh God!”

  “I felt one! It’s all puffed up!”

  “There’s another one! They’re everywhere!”

  “Jesus!”

  “I’m sick!”

  “I told you that fuse was too short!”

  “You fool!”

  “Somebody must have … Oh God! Another one!”

  “How far is it to …?”

  “Don’t think about it.”

  “We’re going to drown!”

  “Stop it!”

  “All of us! We’re all going to die!”

  “Shut up!”

  “Holy Mary Mother of God …”

  “Shut up!”

  “I’m drifting away!”

  “Kick this way, then!”

  “I am, I am … Oh God! Guts!”

  “Forget it!”

  “There it is again!”

  “What is?”

  “It brushed me!”

  Jobim switched on the torch, and the four floating men were stunned by the cone of light. They gasped and tried to look behind the light, but the beam was too strong, and they had to close their eyes or turn away. For a moment, they must have thought they were saved, for there were weak smiles. But when Jobim said nothing and did not move toward them, they knew they were not to be rescued, at least not now.

  Jobim waited until he was sure their minds had passed through befuddlement and worry and into true fear, before he spoke. Then he spoke slowly and made his voice as low as he could, trying to sound like an oracle or a cave creature or, in any case, something mysterious and menacing that each of the men would recall in private moments and that would make them shiver and the hair rise on their arms.

  “We are Los Vigilantes,” Jobim said, and he paused for dramatic effect. “We have followed you and found you out, and we know you. You are evil men.”

  “No!” cried one. “We’re just …”

  “Quiet!” Jobim roared. He wished there were drums and thunder behind him. “You are evil men, and evil gets what evil gives. You would take the food from the mouths of babies and bring pestilence upon the land.” (Words like that had to be effective, he thought. After all, that’s the way they talk in the Bible.) “You will die.”

  “No!” the four voices howled in chorus.

  “All men die. There is a time for dying, and your time will come. But perhaps not today.”

  Silence.

  “Perhaps not tomorrow.”

  Silence.

  “But be warned. Your faces are known to us now.” He moved the light among the men, so the core of the cone, the brightest spot of light, shone briefly on each face. “One of us will always be with you, through all the days of your life. And when next you sin, know it will not be a secret sin, for the one of us who is with you will know.” Jobim stopped. Something was taking shape in his mind, something mischievous. “You will not know who we are. We might be your closest friend, perhaps your brother. You can trust no one. No one. Never again.”

  Slowly the circle of four men was growing wider, for they had not had the wit to hold hands and so were drifting apart. In a moment, Jobim would not be able to keep all four within the beam of light. “If ever you return to this place,” he said quickly, “or to any other place to do the deed you have done, bid farewell to your loved ones, for you will not see them again.”

  Jobim switched off the light and sat still, hoping to appear to have vanished.

  There were a few moments of silence. Then the men realized several things at once: They were not, after all, going to be rescued; if they were to survive, they would have to stay afloat until either they reached land or daylight came and a passing boat could pick them up; and, finally and most alarming, like ripples from a rock dropped into calm water, they were spreading farther and farther apart.

  “Where are you?” called one.

  “Here!” two answered at once.

  “Come this way.”

  Splashes, swimming.

  “Not that way! This way!”

  “I did!”

  “What’s that?”

  “Another dead fish. They’re everywhere!”

  “We’re going to drown!”

  “Shut up!”

  “Shark!”

  “Where?”

  “I guess it wasn’t.”

  “Jesus …”

  Jobim sat on his raft and listened. The voices faded quickly, for the tide was strong. They would be many miles away by morning, and probably miles from each other as well, for each man was an object of different density and buoyancy and resistance to water movement and would thus move at a different pace and be subject to different eddies and currents.

  One or two might be picked up by boats, for there was occasional ferry traffic between the Mexican mainland and the Baja peninsula. They would be dropped at the ferry’s next port of call and would have to work their way home, begging rides from village to village to island. And when they got home, what would they say had happened? Suppose one of their comrades had arrived before them. How would they coordinate their stories?

  One or two were certain to drift onto uninhabited ground, there to scratch for survival until they could attract the attention of a fisherman going by or a family out to gather wood. There were lizards to eat if you could catch them, and a rattleless rattlesnake that tasted good if you could bite it before it bit you, and birds’ eggs if you could find the nests hidden in the crevices in the high rocks. There wasn’t much fresh water, and what there was lay in stagnant pools that probably contained bacteria that would make you sick. But you could survive.

  Jobim doubted that any of them would die
, and he did not consider himself responsible if one of them should die: He had cast them into the water whole and healthy and in good weather. Anyone should make it to shore who did not do something stupid.

  Furthermore, if one or more of them did die, Jobim would have considered it justice, for in his opinion what they had done to the seamount branded them as no more worth preserving than a rabid bat.

  Soon the voices were gone, and there were no sounds except the soft slapping of the water against the bottom of the wooden raft. Jobim pulled his anchor. As the killick came up and he reached for it, his weight shifted to one end of the raft, and that end dipped beneath the surface of the water. A big gold cabrío floated onto the raft, into Jobim’s lap.

  The concussion of the dynamite had not only killed the fish, it had disfigured it. Its belly was swollen; its tongue had inflated like a balloon and filled the yawning mouth; its eyes bulged from their sockets and stared in blank perplexity.

  The seamount was dead now. It would be many, many months before life returned in any profusion, and years before it returned to anything like normal.

  No, he would not be sad if one of the men did not make it all the way home.

  Paloma waited for silence, and then waited some more, in case Jo had turned around and rowed back and was lurking nearby. At last she ducked her head underwater and came out beside the pirogue. She was alone on the sea.

  She pulled herself up onto the overturned bottom of the pirogue and examined the hole Jo had dug with his harpoon. It was about the size of her fist, easy enough to patch with wood once ashore, but big enough to keep her from getting to shore.

  She tried to think through her choices. She could stay with the overturned boat until she drifted onto land—tonight or tomorrow or the next day, or … It might be many days, and she might succumb to thirst or exposure. And suppose the weather went bad. To try to ride out a chubasco by straddling a hollow log was suicidal.