Three to Be Read

by Philip Wylie

  “Maybe,” Des suggested, “he could learn to catch flying fish in that hat.”

  Marylin spoke hotly. “Try isolating viruses, someday, Des. That, Ramsay can do—extremely well.”

  He answered contritely, “I’m sorry. But—no kidding—even though I admire him, I can’t help remembering. I never saw anybody get his foot caught in his tackle before.”

  After a while, she rose and bade them good night. She sounded uncertain and unhappy. “It’ll be an ordeal—from start to finish,” she said. “But please—please help me! Us.”

  “We’ll do what we can,” Crunch assured her, assisting her ashore. “But don’t expect miracles,” Des called.

  Skipper and mate sat a while in silence. “Think he’s stuck on her?” the latter asked eventually.

  “Yeah. Plenty. The way he flushed. Little things he said.”

  “I do, too.”

  “Poor galoot,” Crunch murmured. “I’d hate to be in his shoes.”

  “Sandals,” Des reminded his captain.

  II

  Marylin had said the fishing trip to Key West would be an ordeal. It was the business of Crunch and Des to see that, come high wind, high water and hades itself, no fishing trip was an ordeal for anybody. Sometimes they failed. But, as a rule, they brought back to the dock contented customers and when they said the time-honored, “Hurry back,” the Poseidon’s guests usually did return, if not this year, then next. The reputation of fishing guides depends upon the matter of “hurrying back.” It is not an easy business—and far more men, good men, have lost out in it than have ever, like Crunch and Des, made a sound living at it.

  Crunch had a delicate cargo and a tough assignment. He thought over the situation as he stood in the morning sun and steered south from the jetties off Miami—south and a little east till he reached the Gulf Stream. Then west a bit. On board the Poseidon, besides himself and Des, were Marylin, Ramsay Binney, Marylin’s brother Dodson, and a friend of his—one Olivia Brarely, an Atlanta girl.

  Des put out baits. The two couples drew matches and took places accordingly-Dodson on the center rod, Marylin port, and Olivia starboard. Ramsay Binney sat on the fishbox astern and talked, not to Marylin, but to Olivia. She seemed interested. A girl with long, black hair, flame-blue eyes, red cheeks and Dixie in her voice—a petite young woman, very well shaped and very much aware of that. Marylin affected to be just slightly amused that Ramsay was talking to Olivia—and it took only a fraction of Crunch’s discernment to measure the falsity of that pose. Crunch, himself, was slightly surprised by Ramsay’s attention to the southern girl, which had begun with their meeting and ripened, in half an hour to the present stage—the stage of anecdotes about life at Harvard, snatches of which Crunch could hear above the engine pulse.

  Dodson, who had invited the girl, did not care much about the monologue, either.

  That was to be expected, however. As far as Dodson was concerned, Ramsay Binney had two strikes on him and a glass bat.

  Things, for the first half hour of a doubtful trip, were not shaping up well, Crunch thought.

  Astern, and out to sea aways, was the Sea Pike—with Ronney Boles at the controls, Skid Wilkins as mate, and Mr. and Mrs. Brush together with Pierce, another son, as passengers. Presently the Sea Pike found something. Crunch saw her lose weigh, and turn a little; he made out a bent rod in the capable hands of Mrs. Brush. He shut down lightly on the gas levers and put the Poseidon in a very wide turn. When it was completed, he saw Skid lean over the Sea Pike’s side and gaff a nice dolphin. Both boats started down the Keys again in their original, relative positions.

  “Come over and sit by me a while, Ramsay,” Marylin said.

  She said it pretty sharply, Crunch thought. She was tired of the monologue to Olivia.

  “I’m okay right here.” Ramsay said it pleasantly, and returned to a story he was telling about ritual dances on Poaki.

  Marylin didn’t push the invitation. She slid lower in her chair, however, and sat very still. Dodson stared at Ramsay icily. And only Crunch saw that, a moment later, Ramsay almost did rise to go to Marylin’s side. He glanced at her—glanced again—and his jaw hardened. He sat back on the stern and started another island yarn for Miss Brarely’s benefit.

  Crunch wished something would break this up. He began to have visions of some first magnitude sulking—or even of scenes—on board his usually happy ship. His wish was answered. There was a change in the shimmer of the wake where Dodson’s bait bobbed and surged in the bubbles. Crunch opened his mouth to call. But Dodson was just as quick. He looked—looked again—and shifted his right hand to his reel.

  A fin came out—then a bill. The bill lunged foreward. Dodson slipped off the drag and let the line drop back. When the sailfish picked up the bait and ran with it, Dodson felt the slight acceleration and knew it was time to hit. He snapped on the drag, stood and struck. He then took a folded handkerchief from his pocket and put it between the rod butt and his abdomen, for padding. He struck again. The sailfish now hove itself into the air and every one saw it. Dodson waited until the fish reached the top of its leap—then he whipped back his rod slightly and spilled it on the sea-surface with a calculated and dazing smack. The sail jumped five or six times in succession—and Dodson threw it off balance every time. Then, when the fish ran wildly, he held his rod in one hand, propped against himself, and stuck the other in his pocket—insolently.

  It was perfect fishing, Crunch thought. In something less than twenty seconds, Dodson Brush had felt the tap, dropped back, hooked his fish, jarred it on every jump, and set himself for the ensuing run. The skipper looked at Ramsay Binney and found that the young doctor was watching—not the fish—but the angler. Watching with almost desperate concentration. And now, as Dodson began to reel smoothly and rapidly, Ramsay, unnoticed by anyone but Crunch, imitated over and over the movements he had seen Dodson make.

  Marylin was standing. “It’s big, Dod,” she said excitedly. “See how fast you can bring it in.” She looked at her watch. “Nine-eighteen.”

  Olivia said, “Yeaaaah, boy!” loudly. Then she added, “Kill it, Dod!”

  Dodson didn’t “kill it”—but he made short work of it, especially for light tackle.

  When the fish ran, he tightened the drag to the last possible ounce of tension. Any more would have snapped the line. When the fish came toward the boat, he gathered line with amazing speed. When it sounded he stepped close to the stern and put on pressure again—turning it back up toward the surface in two or three minutes. When it “tail-walked” he spilled it once more. In ten or twelve minutes, it was making mere half-jumps that did not clear the water, and Dodson was getting it nearer to the boat with each one.

  Not long after that, Des reached for the leader. “Want it?”

  Dodson smiled and shook his head. “Put him back to grow bigger.”

  Des nodded, leaned, grabbed the bill in a gloved hand, wiped his eyes clear of spray from the threshing tail, backed the hook out of the gristle in the jaw, and let go. The sailfish lay still for a second, receded astern, shook itself, and swam lazily away.

  “Eighteen minutes and ten seconds,” Marylin said. “Pretty good.”

  Dodson grinned and motioned Ramsay to his chair. “You’re up, pal.” He reached for the monkey rail and swung himself lithely up on the canopy. Olivia watched him go up and blew him a kiss.

  “Fun,” Dodson said to Crunch.

  “Very neat fishing,” Crunch answered. “Never saw better.” He noted that Dodson was not panting and there was no sign of perspiration on his face. A large, frank face with copper freckles set beneath reddish blond hair and above a pair of shoulders that might have belonged—and did belong—to a fullback.

  The two boats trolled uneventfully for a while.

  Crunch felt better. The taking of the sail had relieved a bad mood. Marylin began singing “Nature Boy”—and Olivia harmonized. She was good at it.

  “How do you like the professor?” Dodson quietly a
sked Crunch.

  Crunch turned from the long vista of horizon and low keys to the cockpit. He stiffened. “Hey, doc,” he called.

  Ramsey wheeled and gazed up enquiringly.

  Crunch gestured with his fingers and shook his head.

  Ramsay regarded his own fingers, then, and realized he had wound his line around them several times. A strike would have broken the line and probably cut his fingers. He flushed and extricated his hand.

  “Nervous guy,” Dodson said to Crunch. “Isn’t he?”

  “I like him.” The skipper eyed his passenger directly and candidly. “A lot, Dod.”

  “The clown prince of twerps.”

  “Use some imagination, Dod. Suppose you’d had his background?”

  Dod was bitter about it. “All right. Suppose I’d had. So what? I’d have learned something on that damned island! After all—it was surrounded by water. You should see the oaf in a swimming pool! We had him in ours—and he uses some kind of native breast stroke that looks like a bowlegged platypus swimming in maple syrup.”

  “I never saw him swim, I admit.”

  “You may. He’s the type that falls off boats. If I’d been raised on his’ island, Crunch, I’d have learned to climb trees. But he’s high-shy. Or shoot. Or throw rocks. Or use a bow and arrow. Or weave sisal. Or some damned thing. So far as I can find out—he just studied at home and taught the natives hymns. And then what? He’s been in America nine years. Nine years, Crunch! But he still talks like something out of the nineteen-tens—at least when he’s upset. And he hasn’t even learned to drive a car!”

  “He’s worked hard.”

  “To be a brain—he’s worked hard. To be a person—he hasn’t lifted a finger. Take a gander at the hair-comb on him! Looks like what you shake out of a vacuum cleaner.”

  Crunch chuckled. He couldn’t help it.

  Dodson shook his head sadly. “Marylin—that moron! We’ve only got one sister—

  Clay and Pierce and Dave and I—and we swore we’d make sure she married something A-number-one. This isn’t it. One part intellectual giant, one part matinee idol, and one part jellyfish. It won’t do, Crunch. What’ll be left for her when the honeymoon ends? How will she explain it, all the rest of her life? Ye Gods! Look at what’s coming up!”

  Crunch had been facing the bow, steering his course, during the homily. With a feeling of apprehension, he turned again. There was a sailfish behind Ramsay’s bait-and Ramsay had seen it. But Ramsay, having fiddled nervously with his line and having been warned against that, had transferred his fiddling to the ring that held his reel in its seat.

  The sailfish struck. Ramsay snapped off the drag. His reel slewed back and forth a few times and fell to the deck. With agonized eyes, Ramsay glanced up at Crunch, but Crunch had no solution for that one. It was up to Des—and luck. Unfortunately, Des was cutting a bait.

  Ramsay knew there had to be tension on the line to set the hook. So he grabbed the reelless rod and the line in both hands and struck. The line sizzled—but he hung on.

  And now the reel began to leap about the deck. Des made a pass at it and it bounced ten feet from his hand. Marylin nearly caught it as it hopped up and hit her chair. It ricocheted from the gunwale and struck Olivia, who cried, “Ouch!” Then the line on the reel backlashed, stopping the crazy revolutions of the spindle. The hooked sailfish, however, was still going away at something like thirty miles an hour. So the reel lifted itself from the deck, flung like a bullet at the rod, smacked Ramsay’s hands, and thus broke the line. Having done that, the reel dropped to the deck again.

  “Very pretty,” Dodson murmured to Crunch. “Ve-ry pretty!”

  Marylin began to giggle.

  Olivia wailed, “Darn it, I’m going to have a black and blue spot!”

  Des picked up the reel and studied it. “Humh,” he said.

  Ramsay Binney looked shamefacedly from Marylin to Olivia to Des and then up, to Dodson and to Crunch.

  “If anybody has any suggestions to make,” he said, grinning, “I don’t want to know what they are. Olivia, let me see your injury. I’m a doctor, you know.” And then, after a glance at the trifling bruise on the girl’s shin, he sat down quietly in his chair. “Bait her up again, Des,” he requested. “Hope we have plenty of tackle aboard.”

  For one moment, Crunch noticed a flicker of admiration in Dodson’s eyes. But it died. “That chump,” he muttered. “That nit-wit !”

  Key West is one of the most glamorous towns in America. But many people have gone there, looked, listened, and left with the impression that they have taken unnecessary lengths to visit a village of no great interest. Those are people without imagination, without sense, without the spirit of adventure—people to whom travel means invidious comparisons and nothing else.

  Key West is on an island, which, in itself, is romantic. The island is set in a spot where the Gulf of Mexico meets the Caribbean and both these meet the, Atlantic. The Gulf Stream runs around it like a purple sickle. Many of the town’s clapboard houses are made of solid mahogany—the original, Keys mahogany. It is maritime. Once the center of the sponge fisheries—Key West is still the chief port for green turtles and the steaks and the soup that are made from them. It has a beach and a ruined fort; coral grows under the sea in a gigantic garden all around Key West. At night, the United States Navy promenades its streets and drinks beer in its murky bistros. Spanish is spoken on its thoroughfares—black, Cuban hair gleams in its neon lights and black eyes flash in the glitter of its traffic.

  It looks like Salem, Massachusetts, or any other eighteenth century town with a sea-going tradition. Something like Salem. But the shade trees are different—cork oaks and sapodillas, mono strous, corrugated ficuses, gumbo limbos, palms, palmettos, mangoes spreading like maples, and great, mysterious branching mammoths that were brought by sailors from Madagascar and Ceylon and Java and the natives have forgotten the names of. Frangipanis bloom in Key West, cereus and jasmine by night, and orchids in people’s backyards—the kind that florists breed and the kind that spring up on stumps in the Everglades to the north. Here is to be found the southernmost house in the United States; and ninety miles away lies the tropical isle of Cuba.

  There is no frost.

  They sell electric refrigerators in Key West, automobiles, chewing gum, mixing machines-and the drugstore is any American drugstore, except that it is air conditioned—even in winter. The visitor can dine on a “turtleburger” as easily as on hamburger—or on Cuban bread and black bean soup, arroz can pollo, local limes and bananas, conch salad, Morro crabs; he can have local tortoise shell carved according to his fancy or buy a sponge, direct, from the man who harvested it. He can buy a seashell collection, too—or pick up his own, on the beaches.

  At night, the moon rises in one ocean and sets in another. Spicy pine from the upper keys burns on cooking fires and the aroma, mingled with the exotic honeys of the myriad flowers, floats through the streets and the treetops, pervades the old, gabled houses attached to the ground by steel hawser against the day of a blow, and drifts in high, hotel corridors. This scent-sweet, pungent and sea tinged-is the island’s spirit, its ester, and the sensitive visitor acknowledges it subtly. He—or she—is still in North America, still in the United States, to be sure; but the mood here is different from the rest of the land—more impassioned and yet languid, more primitive, and yet savored with old, unfamiliar cultures of hot countries.

  The Brushes, their guest Olivia, and Dr. Binney, had taken rooms in the Hotel Tropic of Cancer. Crunch and Des slept on board the Poseidon as did Ronney Boles and Skid Wilkins on the Sea Pike. By day, they fished on the reef and in the Stream. In the evenings, they dined together at the picturesque eating places of Cayo Huesco—which is what the Cubans called the town. Friends usually joined them—friends from the mahogany houses and friends from other fishing boats and houseboats, who had ignored the hurricane season. For the Brushes—mére, pére, fille and fils—were the sort of people who had friends everywhe
re on the earth, in every walk of life. Let an airplane containing a Brush be forced to land in Timbuktu or Patagonia and soon that Brush would be lunching with an acquaintance he or she had made years before in Alaska, or Tibet, or London.

  On the fifth night of the expedition, the Brush party was dining at a large table in the Pearl of the Caribbees Restaurant. At the head of the table sat Jerome, the senior Brush, a tall and powerful man—grey haired, grey moustached, and grey eyed, with a deep voice given to laughter. His attention wandered now and then, in spite of himself, to his daughter and thence to Ramsay Binney. Each time, he frowned all but invisibly. Mrs. Brush—handsome, ungreyed, poised perfectly—concealed her own inner anxiety. She affected to be pleased with Dr. Binney and took almost as much interest as Olivia in all that he said. Crunch and Des, of those at dinner who did not belong to the family, were aware of constant tension. And Binney himself, of course, was keenly conscious of it. But Mr. and Mrs. Weber and their two pretty daughters, from the yacht Beryl, had no idea they were present at anything but a delightful, informal dinner party.

  The room contained several dozen tables, a long bar, a dance floor and a band stand. Its walls were covered with trellises and upon these grew paper vines bearing implausible red flowers. Behind this mural bower, rosy lights glowed. There were many other diners-and waiters who spoke better Spanish than English.

  With the conch chowder, Pierce Brush rose and raised his wine glass. Pierce was the dark brother—the tallest and also the thinnest—the one who held the pole-vaulting records, the hurdler, the brother who was interested in the technical work at the Brush Foundation more than the executive opportunities it offered.

  “A toast,” he said, “to Ramsay.”

  “A toast!” one of the Weber girls cried, and lifted her glass.

  Others followed suit.

  Pierce looked into the wine thoughtfully. The table quieted. “To Dr. Ramsay Binney who, after misadventures and vicissitudes too numerous for mention, has, in the past few days, actually succeeded, alone and unaided, and virtually without incident, in bringing to boat several members of the genus Lutianus, locally known as snappers, as well as various mackerels and small members of the bass family-to wit, groupers. I suggest we rise in appreciation of this virtuosity, this intrepidity, this formidable exhibition of strength, skill and endurance, and confer—”