Lord of the Deep

by Graham Salisbury

  “Keep back,” he said.

  Mikey ran to the six-foot fish box and tore off the foam seat cushion. He lifted the lid. With the ono still on the gaff, Bill carried the fish to the box and dropped it in.

  Four feet long, about. Spiky teeth gleaming.

  The girl came down off the ladder. Cal and Ernie— the rod still in his hands—crowded in to see the fish, long and slick and cobalt blue. A wahoo, with jutting jaw and shiny silver belly and dark vertical stripes along its flank.

  The girl opened her mouth, but no words came out.

  “Looks like he swallowed the hook,” Ernie said. He looked at Bill. “How you going to get it out?”

  “Pliers.”

  Bill closed the fish box.

  “But first I’m going to let him be dead a little bit longer. Bring her up to speed, Mikey.”

  Mikey ran forward and throttled up to eight knots. He set the course toward open sea, then put the boat on autopilot and went back out into the stern cockpit.

  “Beer, boy, three cold ones,” Ernie said. “One for Cal, two for me, and make it fast. I’m sweatin’ like a pig.”

  Mikey got the beers. Fast.

  While Bill reset the lines, Mikey scooped a bucket of water out of the ocean and sloshed it over the deck, then scrubbed the floorboards clean with a long-handled brush. The water swirled and sloshed and funneled out a deck hole, bringing a welcome coolness. Mikey stowed the bucket and brush.

  It wasn’t all that big, the ono, maybe thirty-five or forty pounds. But it was a decent catch and it was safely stowed in their fish box. And Mikey’d kept the line just where Bill wanted it, he’d scrubbed down the deck and gotten the boat back up to speed.

  The girl stood at the transom with her arms crossed, studying the wake. What was she was thinking about?

  Cal drained his beer and tossed the bottle into the ocean. He looked at the back of the girl’s head a moment, then went inside to the table and picked up the cards.

  The girl climbed up to the flying bridge.

  Bill took off his shirt and swiped it across his face and neck, then stuck it in his back pocket, where it hung like a tail.

  Mikey took his shirt off, too. He wiped his face and stuck the shirt in his pocket in the same way Bill had. Nothing felt quite as good as doing your job the way it was supposed to be done.

  They stood awhile, watching the water.

  “I’ve been thinking, Mikey,” Bill said, looking into the wake with his hands on his hips.

  Mikey turned to look at him.

  “What would you think about having a name like Mikey Monks?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Change your last name.”

  “You can do that?”

  “Little paperwork is all.”

  “Really?”

  Bill turned and grinned. He brushed a hand over Mikey’s hair. “You’d have to let me adopt you.”

  Wow.

  “Just something to think about.”

  Bill looked at the lines one last time, gave Mikey a wink, then went back in to the wheel.

  Mikey’s gaze followed him.

  When he saw Cal watching, he turned back to study the wake.

  Mikey Monks . . . yeah.

  The girl came into his mind. Why didn’t she want to fight the fish? That was why you chartered a boat.

  You can ask, he thought. You’re supposed to talk to her.

  Now’s as good a time as any.

  He climbed up to the flying bridge.

  “Hi,” Mikey said.

  She gave him a look that said Yes?

  Mikey hesitated. “Uh . . . how come you didn’t want to catch that fish?”

  “I don’t like fishing.”

  “Oh.”

  He thought a moment.

  “Well, why’d you come out with us today?”

  “Does it really matter?”

  Mikey wanted to go back to the lower deck. “Uh . . .”

  Cal saved him by popping his head up from down below. He stood halfway up the ladder with a cold strawberry soda in his hand.

  “Thought you might be thirsty, Ali,” he said.

  The girl glanced at him, then looked away. “I don’t like strawberry.”

  Cal opened his mouth to say something more, but decided not to. He started back down the ladder.

  “Wait!”

  The girl reached out.

  Cal smiled and gave her the can.

  Cal left.

  Mikey watched her take a long gulp.

  “You don’t get along with your father?” he said. Then wished he hadn’t.

  “What kind of question is that?”

  “I don’t know. Just seems like . . . well, like you don’t like him . . . or something.”

  “He’s my father. I have to like him.”

  Mikey nodded.

  A moment later, the girl spoke, so softly Mikey could barely hear it. “My mother told him to take me, not that I wanted to go. ‘Why don’t you do something with your daughter for once?’ she said. Just like that. Right in front of me. And Dad looked surprised, like he’d never even thought of such a thing. Like, Are you kidding? How do you think that made me feel?”

  Mikey thought before answering. “Kind of bad?”

  “You got that right, Ace.”

  “So . . . why’d you say you wanted to go?”

  “Because he asked me.”

  “But you didn’t want to.”

  “I know.”

  Mikey frowned.

  The girl smiled. It wasn’t an angry smile, or a cynical one. It seemed real.

  Mikey turned and gazed out over the sea.

  Where it was clear.

  Where it was simple.

  He went back down to look for something to do.

  Anything.

  CHAPTER 6

  AROUND TEN O’CLOCK they ran into an unbearable stench.

  It was so bad that one accidental deep breath nearly made Mikey gag. He put his T-shirt back on and pulled the neck up over his nose.

  “My God,” Ernie said, “what is that?”

  “Something’s dead,” Bill said.

  Holding a towel over his mouth and nose, Ernie looked out over the ocean. “I don’t see anything but water.”

  “It’s out there.”

  “Well, get us away from it.”

  “Mikey,” Bill said. “Go up on the flying bridge. See if you can spot where the stink’s coming from.”

  Mikey took a gulp of air from inside his T-shirt and ran out. He scrambled up the ladder to the flying bridge, then covered his face again. The stench made him want to barf.

  The girl was sitting cross-legged on the deck drawing in her sketchbook. The neck of her tank top was drawn up over her nose just as his was. She laughed when she saw him holding his shirt up, too.

  “Uh . . . ,” Mikey said, “I wanted to see if I could find where that smell was coming from.”

  The girl put her sketchbook down and stood up, still with the tank top over her face. “What is it?”

  “Something dead.”

  Mikey spotted it off the starboard beam, maybe two hundred yards away. A whale. Its oil was slicked out around it, making the surface of the water as smooth as a silky lagoon.

  “Yuck,” the girl said.

  Mikey grimaced. But the overwhelming repugnance captured him, drew him in. It was so powerful. So huge.

  “Be right back,” he said.

  He slid back down the ladder navy-style and went in and pointed out the dead whale to Bill. Bill immediately altered course. “Been a while since I’ve seen that,” he said.

  Cal and Ernie wandered out on deck to get a better look. They both covered their faces with towels.

  Mikey climbed back up to the flying bridge.

  The Crystal-C skirted the whale and got upwind of the stench, the boat moving easily in the calm sea. Bill tracked back to get a closer look.

  Mikey and the girl stood at the rail on the flying bridge, looking down on
a sight that made Mikey’s skin crawl.

  Just beneath the surface, the carcass was engulfed in a frenzied mass of oceanic white-tip sharks, their round eyes vacant. They twisted and writhed and opened their ghastly jaws, leaving whirlpools of blood-ink on the water where they’d fought with each other or ripped meat off the bloated whale, releasing the inner rot that fouled the air.

  Mikey stepped back.

  The girl gasped. “Are those . . .”

  “Deep-water sharks. You could throw the anchor overboard and they’d eat that, too. If you fell off this boat you wouldn’t last five seconds.”

  The girl backed away, too.

  “Sorry,” Mikey said. “I don’t mean to scare you.”

  “You don’t. They do.”

  Mikey shuddered. “I can’t think of a worse way to go.”

  The girl edged back to the rail. “Still,” she said. “I think they’re kind of . . . beautiful.”

  “Beautiful?”

  “They have nice lines, nice shapes.”

  “And nice appetites.”

  “Have you ever been in the water with one? I mean with a shark?”

  Mikey humphed. “Oh yeah.”

  “Where? What did it feel like?”

  “It was a while back,” he said, but didn’t go on. The memory still scared him. A little. Enough.

  It was when he lived in Lahaina, back before Bill. It wasn’t the deadly breed of shark that was savaging the whale in front of them, but it was bad enough. Mikey had decided months later that he’d probably never been in any real danger, but he could have been. With a shark, you just never know.

  “Well, what happened?” the girl said.

  Should he tell it straight, or maybe add a little extra to make it sound better?

  No, straight was good enough.

  “I used to live in Lahaina. On that island over there.” Mikey lifted his chin toward the faint blue outline of Maui off in the distance.

  “One day I went snorkeling, looking for shells. I was eight. I’d just gotten a new snorkel and face mask for my birthday.”

  “When’s your birthday?”

  “In April.”

  “Mine’s in August.”

  “Well, anyway, I took a screwdriver with me—in case I needed to pry a shell off a rock, or something. It was a really rough day. The whole coastline was nothing but white water. But there was a channel that I could get out through.”

  Mikey noticed how the girl listened. She seemed different up on the flying bridge, away from her father. More relaxed. She studied him intently, as if every word were of the greatest importance.

  Mikey spoke slowly, liking it. No one had listened to him like that before, not even Bill or his mother.

  “Well, anyway,” he went on, “I . . .”

  Mikey really liked the way her eyes never left him. She hardly even blinked. It made him want to . . . to puff up, or something. It made him feel really good.

  “Okay,” he said, “okay.”

  He took a breath.

  “I swam out beyond the waves. The water was all churned up with sand and bits of seaweed. It was murky near the reef. But farther out it was clear.”

  He remembered that he was scared of getting raked over the reef by the waves. The ocean was wild and tossed him around when he got too close to the coral.

  “Was your mom or dad on the beach? Watching you?”

  Mikey raised his eyebrows. “No. . . . Why would they be? Anyway, I didn’t have a dad then.”

  “But—”

  “Bill’s my stepdad. I still have my old last name, Donovan.”

  “Mikey Donovan. Nice. Well, anyway, it was dangerous and all. Wasn’t it?”

  “Nah. It was just kind of rough.”

  “So then what?”

  “I swam around looking for shells and one time when I came up, for some reason I turned around. And I saw a shark fin. Behind me. Ho, did I freeze up. It was so close, only about the length of this boat away. Then the fin went under.”

  “Yow!”

  He’d been scared, all right, but he wouldn’t tell her that. “My first thought was, I gotta get out of the water. But the only way was to go back through that small channel. If I tried to go in over the reef, I’d get sliced to shreds on the coral.”

  Mikey stopped, remembering how his heart had nearly hammered out of his chest. It was the most scared he’d ever been in his life, even to this day.

  “So what did you do?”

  “The only thing I could do—I headed for the channel. But first, I went under one more time to look for the shark. It was gone. That was the worst, not knowing where it was.”

  “You must have been scared to death.”

  “I was,” Mikey said, not caring now if she knew. “I nearly peed.” He winced. “Sorry.”

  The girl giggled. “Don’t stop now.”

  “Well . . . couple minutes later, the shark was there again. I don’t know where it came from, but there it was, right in front of me. Wasn’t that big, maybe five or six feet. But it was bigger than me.”

  “Get out of here.”

  “No, really, it was.”

  They’d gotten downwind of the whale stench again. They pulled up their shirts.

  “So then what?” she asked.

  “Well . . . like before, I froze up. But lucky for me, the shark turned and swam away, and I started swimming over to the channel. I tried to go slowly, so I wouldn’t splash a lot. They have bad eyesight, you know.”

  “They do?”

  “Yeah, I read that. I had five shark books when I was a kid. Anyway, I turned back and saw the fin coming toward me again. I went under to watch it, watch the whole shark, not just the fin.”

  The girl squirmed, grinning. “Go on, go on.”

  She’s loving this, Mikey thought.

  “Well, it came closer, then went away, then came back. It was smelling me. They can smell things like blood and the oils from your body. I didn’t know what to do, so I held the screwdriver out in front of me. Like a knife. Dumb, yeah?”

  “And?”

  “And the shark checked me out. Came closer, smelling. I backpedaled, pointing the screwdriver at it. Then for some reason, I screamed. Yaaaahhhh! Underwater, I screamed.”

  Mikey paused, remembering. He still didn’t know how he’d thought to do that.

  “When the bubbles cleared, the shark was gone.”

  The girl gaped at Mikey.

  “Scared it off.” He shook his head, adding, “I didn’t go in the water for a month after that.”

  “That’s a great story,” the girl said.

  “Bill said sharks don’t usually attack you when you’re close to shore like that. There’s lots of fish around for them to eat. But these deep-water sharks. . . .”

  Mikey winced.

  Suddenly out of things to say, he looked again toward the sharks feasting on the whale. He wondered what kinds of sounds you’d make if one of them ate you. Would you scream your head off? Or would you just let it eat you in silence, knowing it was over?

  After a few passes, Bill headed the Crystal-C away.

  The engines droned on.

  Relief settled back into Mikey as the whale shrank to a speck on the water. He thought of death, of dying, of how living things were here, then they weren’t. They came and went, came and went. And he thought about how everything—living or not—was just some arrangement of atoms and molecules, the same atoms and molecules, everything connected that way. All the same stuff. What makes up that whale makes up me. And the ocean. And the island.

  Weird, Mikey thought, the kinds of things you think about out on the sea.

  “How do you think it died?” the girl said.

  Mikey shrugged. “Age maybe. Or disease. Sometimes they wash up on the beach.”

  They were silent awhile, standing side by side watching the sea.

  “What’s your name, anyway?” Mikey said. “Is it Ali? I heard Cal call you that.”

  The girl grinned. �
��We never did get around to that, did we? It’s Alison. Dad calls me Ali. But I like Alison better.”

  Mikey nodded. “It’s a nice name.”

  “Thanks. Are you part Indian?” she asked.

  “Indian?”

  “You know, like Navajo or something.”

  “No. Why?”

  “You look . . . I don’t know . . . exotic?”

  Mikey scratched the back of his head. “Nope. Irish, English, Filipino, and French Polynesian.”

  Alison nodded, taking that in. “You about fifteen?”

  Mikey turned and grinned, liking that she’d thought he was older. “No, thirteen. How old are you?”

  “Sixteen. You got any brothers and sisters?”

  “A younger brother,” Mikey said. “Half brother. His name is Billy-Jay, for Bill junior, you know?”

  “Cute.”

  “He’s . . .”

  “What?” Alison said.

  “Nothing.”

  “Come on, what?”

  “Well, he’s . . . blind.”

  Alison’s jaw dropped, slightly. “That’s so sad.”

  “Not really,” Mikey said. “It’s just the way it is for him. He was born blind. He doesn’t know anything different.”

  “He’s lucky he has you for a brother.”

  “Me? Why?”

  “Well, you like him. I can see it on your face.”

  “You can?”

  “Easy.”

  “Huh.”

  Mikey crossed his arms and looked down at his feet. He wasn’t used to talking to anyone about anything, let alone about Billy-Jay.

  They were quiet.

  “You know, he can do things,” Mikey said suddenly.

  “Like he can tell who walks into a room just by the sounds they make. Sometimes I try to trick him by tiptoeing or crawling or something. He still knows it’s me.”

  “Wow,” Alison said, in a whisper.

  Maybe he’d said too much. But he liked talking about Billy-Jay. It made him kind of dreamy inside. He smiled. You little runt, Billy-Jay.

  “He’ll be at the pier when we come in,” Mikey said. “If you want to meet him.”

  “I’d like that.”

  Mikey nodded, studying his feet.

  “Can I draw you?” Alison said.

  “Huh?”

  “Stand over there. Look like a fisherman.”