The Longest Silence

by Thomas McGuane

  I looked toward the stern. Guy was poised, line still slack, rod tip down. He gave the fish three full seconds and I watched him lift the rod, feeling foredoomed that the line would glide back slack. But the rod bowed in a clean gesture toward the fly line, which was inscribed from rod tip to still-tailing fish. Abruptly, the fish was again level in the water, surging away in a globe of wake it pushed before itself. A thin sheet of water stood behind the leader as it sheared the surface.

  The first long run ended with the fly pulling free. As Guy reeled in his line and backing, I let the boat drift on the tide toward the little community of stilt houses standing mysteriously in spiderlike shadows off Boca Grande Key. Nearby, an old sail-powered commercial boat rusted on the bank that had claimed it, a long row of black cormorants on its crumbling iron rail.

  “Well,” said Guy, “I guess they’ll take the fly.”

  By late afternoon Guy was poling. I stood in the “gun seat,” as we called the casting deck, trailing my loop of fly line. We zigzagged around in our grassy basin, fishing out the last of the incoming tide and getting shots from time to time at permit. From directly out of the light, a large stingray swam, and in front of it were two large fish, indistinguishably backlit. Because they were with the ray, these were necessarily feeding fish. I had time to roll my trailing loop into the air, make a quick false cast, then throw. The left-hand fish, facing me, veered off and struck. I had him briefly, yet long enough to feel an almost implacable power, enough to burn a finger freeing loose fly line. Since mutton snappers frequently accompanied rays into this basin from deep water, we presumed that is what had taken my fly.

  Rays are a common sight on the flats. The game fish seldom follow the pretty spotted eagle rays, whose perfection of shape and movement is beyond quick description. They are dark and beautifully spotted like a fawn or leopard; as a wing is lifted to propel them, the exquisite and creamy ventral surfaces are exposed. Spotted eagle rays mud less than stingrays; their oval mouths seem made for more exact procedures. When the boat is upon them they flush with long perfect sweeps of their wings, and when they are lost to the eye the swirls and turbulence of their surprisingly powerful movements continue to disturb the surface.

  The platitudinous stingray with his torpid, carpetlike movements, on the other hand, holds some special interest for game fish. Jacks, snappers, and permit will follow a feeding stingray throughout the tide, using the ray as a kind of stalking horse to scare up small fish and crabs. When a fish is found with a ray, it may be assumed that he is feeding rather than traveling. A suitable presentation must be made.

  We knew where to find rays, having often seen them on the soft backsides of banks whose harder edges we fished for permit. Our grandly complex set of banks stretched from the Atlantic to the Gulf of Mexico; we had laboriously laid out its tortuous inner channels and developed some sense of the sequence in which permit used its individual flats and banks. But always we had fished the edges.

  Today we wanted to go into the interior of the banks on incoming water and fish well up on the soft bottom. We made the long run from Key West in the early morning, the scattered keys looking deep, wet and green on the slate sea. We passed Mule, Archer, Big and Little Mullet, Cottrell, Barracuda, Man, Woman, Ballast, and Boca Grande, on out past the iron marker, west into the first gut.

  The flat was dotted with mudding rays. Guy took the pole and we tracked them down one by one, seeing the fleeting red forks or discovering the nervous snappers too late.

  Eventually we found a single large snapper working a stingray. The ray was making such an extensive mud that it seemed unlikely the snapper could even see a fly. In any case, the excitement of watching the tailing fish collaborate with the ray and the measuring in my mind’s eye of the breadth of that fork went a long way toward totally eroding my composure.

  The mutton snapper was tailing when I cast, and I threw well beyond the ray and retrieved the large fly through the edge of the slick. The tail dropped abruptly, and my first thought was that I had flushed the quarry. Then I saw the wake directly behind my fly and hoped for a take straightaway, but none came. I had to stop the fly and let it go to the bottom, an act that has always felt entirely unnatural to me. The fish tipped up, tail entirely out of the water. I lifted the rod tentatively, then came up tight, and the fish was running.

  Water streamed up the leader and the snapper peeled off in a bulge of water tinted by his own brick-red hue. The flat was broad and the snapper failed to clear it to deep water on his first run, at the end of which he turned perpendicular to the line and held there for awhile, implacable as a fire hydrant. Then, with an air of having made the decision himself, he allowed me to retrieve him at his own sullen rate. I began to look around for the net but found Guy one step ahead of me, the big net at parade rest.

  My glances for the net were premature. A number of runs remained to be endured. With a fish badly wanted, it is always simple to imagine the hook pulling free, the leader breaking, the dead feeling in the slack rod. Five minutes later the fish was at the boat, succinctly netted by Guy.

  It seemed bigger than I expected. A short time after landing the fish we ran into a local guide who weighed our fish: a little over fifteen pounds, the world record on a fly.

  That night this best-of-breed was dispatched as follows: deprived of head and innards, he was stuffed with shrimp, shallots, buttered crumbs, parsley, tarragon, and mushrooms, then rinsed down the gullets of hungry anglers with gouts of cold domestic Chablis. I would wish a similar fate upon all world records that are not released at the boat.

  The next day Guy took another big fish, this one thirteen pounds, and we began to feel we were getting the hang of it. This fish was given to a Cuban friend at the yard who remembered mutton snappers in the Havana markets. He carried Guy’s fish around in a formal march, under the stored hulls, through the dry shed, and out to the carpenter’s shop, before giving it the place of honor on the front seat of his pickup.

  When we looked for the snappers in the next few days we couldn’t find them anywhere. The rays came in on the same tides, but now they were alone. A week or so later the commercial fishermen located the snappers on the 120 contour offshore, 118 feet out of our depth.

  Tarpon Hunting

  BY MARCH IN the keys you’re thinking of tarpon. The fish have been around in small numbers all winter—not quite fishable numbers, somehow—when bonefish and permit have seemed the more logical subjects of attention. Night trollers and drifters have been taking tarpon in the channels and killing them for advertising purposes; they make the only sign a tourist will believe when hung up at the dock. The shrimp basin in Key West and the harbor always have quantities of fish, but these are domesticated brutes, feeding themselves on the culls of the commercial fishermen and rolling and burbling with the reptilian presence that half-tamed alligators used to have on Florida golf courses. We just stare at them unable to account for their feral behavior.

  But usually, sometime in March, while permit fishing or bonefishing on an edge adjacent to deeper water, we spot the first string of migrating tarpon, often juvenile fish up to fifty and sixty pounds. Below Key West they inevitably appear to be travelers, pushing wakes and rolling with their eyes coming out of the water. You are absolutely sure they see you in the skiff, transfixed and watching. The whole mystery of their cycle seems contained in the absolutely deliberate way they travel, deliberate as caribou or spring warblers.

  Mystery is not an altogether misplaced word regarding tarpon. Much serious research on the fish was dropped when schemes for converting these unparalleled creatures to fertilizer and cat food were abandoned. There seem to be vertical migrations of fish from deep to shallow water, in addition to the fish that appear to be traveling from the south, very probably Central America. But facing a lack of hard information, the angler feels the invitation to elaborate his own sense of the fish’s presence. An awareness arises of the distinction between a species like the tarpon and the offshore pelagic fishe
s with which, as a game fish, the tarpon is often favorably compared. But in the tarpon, the aerodynamic profiles and chameleonic coloring of blue-water fish are replaced by something venerable; they are inshore fish, heavily scaled; they gulp air; and as if to seal their affinity for the land masses of the earth, they require fresh or brackish water to complete their reproductive cycle. They migrate, as many fishes do, and when we touch or intercept these migrations, we sense, subliminally, the dynamism of the earth: tarpon migrate by season, season is a function of planetary movement, and so on. Which is no more than to say you can face bravely those accusations of loafing when you have ruined a month chasing tarpon, racking your brain to understand their secret, sidling lives.

  It is quite early in the morning. Not first light, because a higher angle of sun is required to see fish on the dark bottom we are working today. But it is early enough that as we cross Key West the gas stations are being swept down by sleepy attendants with push brooms, and the Cuban men are over on their end of Duval Street drinking cups of their utterly black coffee and eating bollos. In the still air you can smell the smoke from City Electric on the other side of town. The groundswell of Latinate noise—that first of all the things that make Key West another country—has not yet started, and as we go up Caroline Street all the side streets running down to the shrimp basin, marked for us because of the great trawling booms sticking up among the old wooden houses, are quiet. The shrimpers always line up first under the awning of the Fisherman’s Cafe. No one there yet, though someone is arranging ship-to-shore radios and fathometers in the window of Key West Electronics across the road.

  It feels like a tarpon day. Spring tides will give us a good push of water. The wind has swung almost into the full south and it’s already hot. Up the keys the yellow mosquito plane will be skimming in over the mangroves, its cloud of spray hanging and settling in the windless air.

  There are sponges drying on the balconies of some of the old wooden houses, and as if you might forget that the town is at sea, gulls and frigate birds soar high overhead. Next to Key West Oxygen Service, in an ugly asphalt parking lot that rivals the La Brea tar pits in midsummer, a bonefish skiff sits high on its trailer, bridging the imagination from the immediate downtown of Key West—both an outrageous honky-tonk and a memento of another century—to its gauzy, impossibly complex backcountry surrounds. When you’re at the drivein movie in Key West, watching adult fare with all the other sweating neckers, the column of light from the projectionist’s booth is feverish with tropical insects blurring the breasts and buttocks on their way to the screen. At low tide you smell the mangroves and exposed tidal flats nearby, and you’re within a mile of sharks that could eat you like a jujube. Once the movie is over and you’ve hung the speaker back on its post and are driving home, palmetto bugs and land crabs pop under the tires.

  This morning, when we get to Garrison Bight, we turn off before the causeway and pull into the dry shed where my boat is stored. Across the bight at the ramp, a skiff is being launched behind a station wagon. I take out the binoculars and look. It’s a Hewes guide boat. I see the chairs, the enormous engine, the push pole, the Teleflex steering up in the forward corner, and over me and my companion, Guy de la Valdene, comes that specific competitive tension you feel when another skiff is working the same country. If Saint Francis showed up with a guide boat behind his car, we would rather he stayed home. Every shallow-water fisherman down here is cordial on land, monstrous at sea.

  It’s not Stu Apte; his skiff has a center console. It’s not Bill Curtis; his is yellow, and furthermore he fishes Key West mainly on permit charters. Woody Sexton is in Loggerhead today. Jim Brewer fishes out of a Fibercraft and this is a Hewes. Bob Montgomery has an offshore charter. Cal Cochran? He’s supposed to have plenty of fish in his backyard at Marathon. Same with Steve Huff. Page Brown fishes out of a Mako and he would have told us if he was fishing Key West. It would be nice to know who it is so we could avoid running the same pattern. Possibly one of the sports from an angling club, chasing points, mounts, and records.

  Richard, the manager of the boatyard, comes out and says, “Morning, Mister Tom,” with that special look of philosophical resignation that is the hallmark of the Key West Conch. He climbs up on the forklift and heads into the shed for the skiff. I had it built right here at the yard only last winter, and the first rip of boat fever has not passed off. I love to watch the skiff come out on the fork so I can see the long, precise chine running from stem to bait wells. When the boat emerges, Guy says, “Yes, I know it’s beautiful, but please don’t say it again.”

  “I know, but—”

  “Don’t say it.”

  Richard rolls the forklift forward onto the concrete dock and lowers the boat into the slick water. To the untutored eye, nothing about the skiff is exceptional: bare nonfouling utility has been taken as far as the mind could create demands for the boat-builder.

  The glass hull, brought down bare from the mainland, is white, low, and spare. From the side it looks like a simple linear gesture, the blade of a scimitar or an arrow. It is seventeen-feet, two-inches long, not counting the integral bait wells. The boat was built up from this bare hull with three-quarter-inch marine plywood, the arm-and-a-leg variety. From above, the skiff appears as a succession of bare surfaces over which a fly line can blow without snagging; the forward casting deck is continuous with the broad, flat gunwales. The aft deck is set slightly below the gunwales and, like the casting deck, overhangs the bulkheads by half an inch. Set into the aft deck are the lids of two dry-storage boxes, a battery box, and an insulated icebox. All topside surfaces are blue-gray.

  The steering is forward and starboard, with the wheel set horizontal to the deck. Donald Duck’s picture is in the hub; a pacifier hangs from the ignition. The throttle and gearshift controls are in a single lever, and there is a tachometer with which I pretend to monitor my engine’s performance. I monitored my previous engine’s performance, noticing not a thing right up until the idiot light turned on, a plug blew out of a cylinder and the whole thing froze like a tractor in quicksand. There is a toggle on the dash for the power tilt, the 125 Evinrude on the transom being too heavy for hand-tilting as frequently as flats fishing requires.

  Guy is at the gas dock, filling the stainless forty-gallon tank under the casting deck. I get a block of ice and put it in the cooler with our lunch and twelve soft drinks. The rods go under the port gunwale, rain gear under the seat. The tackle box goes aboard with a couple dozen of Guy’s shock tippets rolled like surgeon’s suturing materials. And now we’re ready, suddenly feeling the anticipation that is the result of the watching weather, reading the Coast and Geodetic Survey tide book, and listening to all the baloney and general hearsay from guides and other anglers about just where it is the tarpon might be.

  Along the starboard gunwale, flexed tight against it, is the big kill gaff with its seven-foot hardwood handle, never to be used on a fish less than a world record, though Guy and I agree that the goal is to train oneself to release that fish, too. But at this early stage of development the gaff still goes along. Someday, when we have grown enough in the fishing, the gaff will be nailed up over my desk, with the stainless-steel gaff head that I wrapped and epoxied myself, a rather handsome old souvenir of barbaric times. On top of the port gunwale, resting in two teak chocks and secured with aviation shock cord, is a seventeen-foot push pole.

  Choked and started, the engine idles on the transom; the boat trembles and laps gently against the dock. Guy slips the lines and pushes us away from the dock and I put it in forward, easing us out past the crawfishing boats and two or three sponge boats with tongs laid across the seats, then out into the basin in the low angle of light. Idling along, the boat rides low in the water with radically little freeboard. This is a skiff that will run forty miles an hour in less than a foot of water; offshore, it would be as reassuring as a waterlogged mahogany plank. Its design, derived from numerous other boats but primarily those built by Eddie Geddiman, is a
pure, indigenous product of the fishing conditions of the Florida Keys. A fast, shallow-water boat.

  We pass under the Garrison Causeway as morning work traffic is beginning to rush overhead. We can smell its exhaust with the same emotions with which we perceive the hamburger stands over by the charter-boat docks. Once on the other side, there’s that damned guide boat we saw being launched, up on a plane now and way out at the front edge of a fan of wake. I hear the honking overhead and then a siren as a policeman runs down some sorry gob in a GTO. The brilliantly painted Cuban fishing boats are off to our left, gaudy as Arab smacks; behind them is the institutional slab of the navy bachelor officer quarters, built with the military’s usual flair for grace in design.

  By now the guide boat has upped and gone. We don’t know where he could be and are just hoping that our two skiffs don’t go wandering over the ocean making the same stops, tripping over each other as in some mis-timed, syncopated dance step.

  I run it up to 4500 rpm. The bow lifts, then the stern comes up under the power and kicks the bow down. I slack off to 3600 and we bank and turn through the markers. Key West drops quickly behind and finally clusters at the end of our long arrow of wake. There is a sense of liberation as we run, civilization melting away while another country—mangrove keys, shallows, and open seas—forms around us.

  When you pass them, the mangroves empty themselves of cormorants; the birds drop down slapping the water with their wing tips, then shudder as though it had been a close call. The backcountry is full of pelicans, frigate birds, ospreys, bitterns, egrets, and herons, not to speak of that mass of small shorebirds such as plovers, avocets, turnstones, surfbirds, and phalaropes or a number of glamorous “occasionals,” as the bird books call them: ibises, eagles, and the utterly incredible roseate spoonbills, the color of a Miami streetwalker’s lipstick, that wheel out behind a sandy little key.