The Girl of the Sea of Cortez: A Novel

by Peter Benchley

  The smaller rays—stingrays and leopard rays and eagle rays—recluses who hid beneath a veneer of sand and exploded in a puff at a stranger’s approach, snared in flight from one hiding place to another.

  A turtle so young, still soft of carapace, its wrinkled throat garotted by a strand of netting, its flippers limp, its tail a tiny comma flopping on the belly shell.

  And others, like sergeant majors and parrot fish, grunts and chubs and hogfish and porgies, all killed and cast away to wash in the shallows and rot.

  The carnage was immense; this was not fishing.

  Here, kneeling on the dock, leaning over the edge and gazing into the water, Paloma saw her reflection shimmer in the moonlight, and she realized she was weeping.

  She wanted to run up the hill and call out to the other fishermen, the grown men, and lead them down and show them this massacre, but she did not, because it was nighttime and her interruption would not be welcome. She wanted to bring Viejo down, and point out to his dim eyes all the bodies, all the waste. But she did not, because she knew her outrage would not be shared. There would be some tongue-clucking, some intentions expressed to teach the young men how better to cull their catches. But that was all.

  And by morning, what she saw before her would be no more, for Jo was not an utter fool: They had arrived home at a full flood tide, and for the next six hours, as the tide ebbed, the bodies would be sucked out to deep water where some would sink and others would be eaten and others would be caught in passing currents and carried off somewhere, so that when the other fishermen arrived at the dock in the morning, all that would remain of the carnage would be a few floating fish and a few half-eaten skeletons on the bottom—a normal amount of flotsam and jetsam from a day’s work.

  Even now, the corpses on the surface were beginning slowly to drift away from the rocks on shore, obscuring her view of parts of the bottom but letting her see into new crannies.

  She saw an animal between two rocks. It looked to be curled up, like a sleeping puppy, as if it had chosen to lie cozy in death. She dropped to her stomach on the dock and reached down and stretched for the bottom, wrapped her hand around slick and solid flesh and brought it up and set it on the dock.

  It was a green moray eel, young and unscarred, and more than any other of the animals it touched her. For while the other animals were simply dead, not alive anymore, this moray was contorted in the agony of its death, frozen at its final moment. It was tied in a knot that made it seem to be more than merely dead: It seemed that it would be dying forever.

  This was a hideous snapshot of an animal that in life had had dignity but that in death had been transformed into a gargoyle.

  Paloma knew well that morays often died in this grotesque way. It was, in one strange sense, a natural death, for it reflected the morays’ behavior in life.

  Morays lived in holes or small caves or crevices or under rocks, and they lurked at the entrance to their lair, mouth open, gills pulsating rhythmically, hypnotically, skin color blending with their surroundings.

  When prey passed by, the moray would shoot out its body—a single tube of muscle—and snatch the prey and begin to swallow it. The mean-looking fangs in the mouth were but gatekeepers: Beyond, back in the throat, was another set of teeth that gripped the prey and forced it down, down in rippling spasms, down into the gullet.

  If the prey was large, larger than the eel’s weak eyesight had anticipated, and if it struggled and threatened to yank the eel from its hole, the eel would anchor its tail around a rock or a coral boulder and contract its central muscles until no free-swimming prey could resist.

  Thus, breath-hold divers were doubly careful about poking around in holes in reefs. First, there was the fear of being bitten, because the bite was excruciating and the wound it caused was ragged and would not close and the eel’s mouth was coated in a slime that contained virulent infectants. But worse than the bite was the knowledge that if the eel grabbed a hand or a foot or a shoulder and could not sense the size of the prey (for it would not actually try to eat something so much bigger than itself as a human), it would anchor its tail and sink its fangs deeper and hold on until the prey stopped thrashing and the eel could come out of its lair and see what it had caught.

  Once in a while, a moray would catch itself unawares—half out of its hole or swimming in the ocean from niche to niche—would snatch a prey and have no rock on which to fasten a grip. Then it would tug against itself.

  It would whip into a perfect knot, wrapping the tail around the head and back down through the loop made by neck and body, and it would pull its prey through the loop, flopping and bouncing and rolling down the reef and out into open water—secure that it had an anchor and its prey did not.

  Mostly, the eels knotted themselves this way when they encountered a force stronger than they—like a steel-barbed hook that fastened in the back of their throat and was attached to a filament that slid between the fangs and could not be bitten off and was connected, finally, to a man on a boat above who had strength and patience and the ability to tie off his line and let the moray exhaust itself.

  Fishermen hated morays. They bit at any bait, large or small, so there was no way to avoid catching them. They were useless, for no customers would buy them and no islanders would eat them. They were dangerous: They were never dead by the time they reached the boat, and they were always tied in a slimy, slippery knot, and unless you were prepared to cut away and lose your leader and swivels and hook, you had to retrieve the hook from down deep around the second set of teeth in the throat. The boat was rocking, the eel was thrashing, the other fishermen were grousing because you were upsetting them and their gear and the boat itself, while you tried to bash the eel on the head and render it unconscious so you could slit its gills or get inside its mouth with a pair of pliers.

  The combination was perfect for a severe, painful, perhaps incapacitating bite.

  So moray eels were “bad” animals—ugly, useless, dangerous, probably offspring of the devil or, at least of some of his underlings.

  One day, Jobim had hooked a moray and brought it up to the boat. It was tied in a knot, and as it struggled in the water it swung like the pendulum of a clock. Paloma had never seen a live moray before, and, looking down through the roiled water, she did not know what it was. It looked like a mess of living weed.

  “Give me the pliers,” Jobim had said.

  She handed him the pliers and watched as he gently brought the eel to the surface.

  “Hold this.” He had passed her the fishing line, and she felt it twitch and thrum with the eel’s desperation. He held the pliers in his right hand and, with the same hand, slid two fingers down the leader to within an inch of the eel’s mouth. Then he pinched the leader and pulled the eel clear of the water and, with his left hand, grabbed the eel behind the head and squeezed.

  She had never imagined a creature like this. It wasn’t a fish, it was a monster. Its black pig’s eyes bulged and glistened. Its mouth was agape and strung with strands of mucous slime. Its gills, what she could see of them amid the pile of bulbous green flesh, throbbed. It grunted. It hissed.

  “Kill it!” she shrieked. “Kill it!”

  “Why?”

  “Kill it!”

  “You want it dead, you kill it.” Jobim had nodded at the cudgel he kept in the boat to stun sharks.

  “Don’t you want it dead?”

  Jobim didn’t answer. He was staring fixedly into one of the eel’s eyes. The muscles in his arms and shoulders flexed and twisted as he fought to keep the eel from writhing free. Then he squeezed harder with his left hand, and the eel’s mouth opened wider, and he squeezed still harder, and the two jaws separated and made a line that was almost vertical, as if the bottom jaw had unhinged completely.

  Jobim opened the pliers and pushed his hand into the eel’s mouth.

  “He’ll bite off your hand!” Paloma had cried, and she grabbed the cudgel and raised it with both fists over the eel’s yawning mouth.<
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  Jobim pushed his hand farther down the gullet, and Paloma saw the eel’s flesh bulge as his knuckles passed through. His hand was gone, and his wrist, and half his forearm. Still the eel writhed and hissed, and every fiber in Jobim’s left arm danced. He lowered his eyes closer to the eel’s eye, and he probed with the pliers, feeling for the barb of the hook. He found it, and his hand twisted beneath the pulsing green skin, and slowly his arm and wrist began to withdraw, coating with shiny slime, and his hand came free, then the pliers and the steel hook.

  Still holding the eel’s head in his left hand, he lowered the entire body back into the water and slowly sloshed it back and forth to get water flowing once again over the gills. When he was sure the eel would not succumb to shock and stop breathing, he released it.

  The ball of green muscle sank a foot or two, then uncoiled like a waking snake, then wriggled to stretch the tired tissues, and then—suddenly aware and awake and sensing that it was vulnerable in open water—it darted with quick, snapping thrusts toward the bottom.

  Several times Paloma had asked Jobim why he hadn’t killed the moray, and, annoyingly, he had persisted in answering her question with a question. He was busy untangling the fishing line that had coiled around his knees as he fought to free the moray.

  “Why should I kill it?”

  “It could’ve bitten your hand off.”

  “It could not have bitten my hand off. It could have bitten me.”

  “Isn’t that bad enough?”

  “To make me kill it? No. I hooked the animal by accident. I hurt it. I put a hook in its throat and dragged it out of water, where it knew it couldn’t breathe and was going to die—instinct told it that—and I squeezed its head so hard that its mouth had to open, and then I jammed a steel thing and a big bone down its throat and poked around and caused it pain and terror. Bitten me? I wouldn’t have blamed it for biting my head off. Now, why, on top of all the things I’d already done to that animal, should I kill it?”

  As Paloma opened her mouth to speak, Jobim added quickly, “And don’t say, ‘Why not?’ ‘Why not kill?’ is a question you must never ask. The question must always be ‘Why kill?’ and the answer must be something for which there is no other answer.”

  Paloma had no good answer for “Why kill?” and so she said nothing.

  That afternoon, when they had finished fishing, Jobim had moved the boat to the shallowest part of the seamount and told Paloma that he would take her for a dive. She was tired and didn’t feel much like getting wet, but a dive with Jobim always promised fun and excitement and was a treat she would never decline.

  Jobim cut a fish into small pieces and put them in a plastic bag tied to his waist, and together they pulled themselves down the anchor line. On the bottom, he motioned for her to stay at the anchor line, and he went off among the rocks, looking for something. Soon he had found whatever it was, and he waved her over to him. His face was six inches from a crevice in the rocks, and he pulled her down beside him.

  In the second that it took her eyes to focus and her mind to recognize what she was gazing at, she concluded that her father had gone mad and was trying to kill her.

  Guarding the crevice with its gigantic head and puffing cheeks and black eyes and gaping mouth was a moray eel so large that it made the other one seem like a garden snake. Its head filled the hole, and each time the gills rippled they scraped the coral sides. Paloma believed that if the eel should shrug, it could consume her entire skull.

  She jerked backward in reflex, but Jobim caught her arm and forced her to return to his side. He took a hunk of fish from the bag at his waist and held it up to the moray’s face. For a moment the eel did not move. Then it slid slightly forward, as if on a mechanical track, and Jobim dropped the morsel of fish; the eel let it fall into its mouth and closed its mouth and swallowed, and the gills rippled in unison and the eel slid backward into its hole.

  Jobim fed it another piece, and another, and by then he knew that Paloma was short of oxygen so he motioned that they would go up.

  As they rose, Paloma looked down and saw that the eel had slid more of its body—four or five feet—out of the hole and had turned its head and was looking up at them. Then it must have decided that they were truly gone, for it slid back and disappeared.

  When, on the surface, Paloma tried to speak, Jobim waved her silent and touched his chest, signaling that he wanted to hurry and return to the bottom.

  This time the eel seemed to have watched the last part of their descent, for its head was a foot outside the crevice and its eyes were tracking them.

  Jobim handed Paloma the bag of bait. She shook her head, no: She wouldn’t do it. But he forced the bag into her fist and put a hand on her shoulder in assurance and embrace.

  She knew enough to keep the bag itself concealed, for any fish, once it knew the location of the source of the morsels you were feeding it, would ignore individual bits and would dive for the bag and rip it away from you.

  The first piece she held a full two feet from the eel’s mouth, until Jobim pushed her hand closer. The eel slid forward; Paloma dropped the bit of fish; the eel swallowed.

  With each new piece she grew bolder, for the eel made no motion to do anything but what she intended, and the last piece from the bag she actually lay within the eel’s lower jaw and pulled her hand back well in time for it to close its mouth on nothing but the fish.

  Back on the surface again, she was elated and amazed. Her thoughts came so fast that her words could not keep up with them. Finally, by pointing and puffing and speaking as slowly as she could, she was able to convey to Jobim that she wanted to cut up another fish and return immediately to feed the moray.

  “Not me,” he said somberly. “He could bite my hand off.”

  “What?”

  “It’s too dangerous.”

  “But …”

  “I think we should kill him before he hurts somebody.”

  Now Paloma knew what Jobim was doing, and she screamed and splashed water at him, and he threw back his head and laughed.

  While they rested, he cut up a bigger fish into bigger pieces, for the moray had been bigger than he had guessed it would be. He told Paloma that morays were like sharks, in that you never knew how big an individual might be: The hole you poked your hand into might contain an eel no longer than your arm and not as thick, or it might house a creature taller than a man and as broad as his chest. This one was probably seven or eight feet long, and its head was more than a foot wide.

  They had spent many minutes away from the eel, and it was not there when they returned. But as soon as one of their shadows crossed before the crevice in the rocks, the huge green head slid forward and hung there, gills and mouth pulsing together.

  Jobim was like a dog trainer, teaching the animal to beg for its food. Each morsel he held farther and farther from the hole, urging the eel to slide farther out. But he did not tease the animal: When Jobim had established where the food would be, there he left it. The eel’s decision-making machinery was rudimentary and primitive, and if Jobim had pulled the food back after the eel had committed to exposing itself a certain distance, the eel might have registered signals of betrayal and danger, which might have driven it into a defensive posture, which might have expressed itself in an attack on Jobim.

  The eel would not come all the way out of the hole. Apparently, it needed the security of knowing that its tail was anchored in the rocks so that if anything should go awry, it could dominate the encounter.

  And as Jobim told Paloma when they were back in the boat, he saw no reason to encourage the animal beyond its own limits, especially on first meeting.

  “You mean we can do it again?” It hadn’t occurred to her that something so special could be repeated.

  “We’ll see. Some people can.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “With most people, something like that is luck. They get there, the conditions are right, the animal doesn’t feel threatened, he’s hun
gry, they don’t do anything stupid, so they succeed. But they—the people—are not in control. They’re just fortunate that things went their way. Some people, very few, make it happen. There’s something—I don’t know what it is, maybe it’s like the sounds we can’t hear and the sights we can’t see. Some people have something special with animals. It may be the same thing some animals have with each other, that they send and receive each other’s signals so they understand each other. By nature, animals in the wild don’t trust people, and they shouldn’t. But these few people, the people who have this thing, animals trust.”

  “You have it, then.”

  “I have a little of the good thing, but not a lot. I never know from animal to animal. Maybe we were lucky with this eel today. Maybe he was in a good mood. We’ll see.”

  Paloma said hopefully, “Maybe I have a lot of the good thing.”

  “Maybe. But don’t hope too much. It’s nice, the good thing, but it can be dangerous, too.”

  “Why?”

  “You can believe in it too much, believe you can do anything. You try to put yourself in the animal’s mind and imagine yourself as the animal, and suddenly you think you can control it. You forget that you’re a human being and it isn’t. You try to reason with it. It can’t reason. You take one step too many. If you’re lucky, you end up with scars and a good lesson. If you’re unlucky, you get hurt. Or killed.”

  They had returned to the eel the next day after fishing. As Jobim set the anchor, Paloma had asked if he thought the eel would still be there.

  “Why would it go away? Where would it go?”

  “How would I know?”

  “Animals usually have a reason for going somewhere or staying somewhere. They don’t know they have a reason, but their bodies know. Their instincts tell them. Most sharks have to move because if they don’t they’ll sink to the bottom and drown. Simple. Schools of fish have to move because the little things they feed on move, and if they’re to continue to eat they’d better keep up with their food. Reef fish stake out a territory on the reef and patrol it all their lives unless something comes along and drives them off. Moray eels will find a hole and make it their own as long as enough food passes by for them to grab. When it doesn’t, they’ll find another hole. This big fellow has no reason to move now: He has comfort, safety and, best of all, since yesterday he doesn’t even have to hunt. Some fools are bringing him dinner.”