Cayos in the Stream

by Harry Turtledove

  Aboard the Pilar, you haul out your charts. Cayo Bernardo turns out to be a flyspeck on the map. It is not far from Cayo Santa Maria, a bigger flyspeck. Cayo Santa Maria, in turn, lies not far west of Cayo Cocos. Cayo Cocos gets close to being a real island.

  Cayo means island in Spanish. On the far side of the Florida Strait, it has turned into key. You lived on Key West for a while. You first met Martha there, before Spain. Key West used to be Cayo Hueso-Bone Island. Language takes crazy hops sometimes.

  “Heading off to chase wild geese again?” Martha asks you when you go from the boat to the house.

  “It could be.” You try not to get angry. When you do in spite of trying, you try not to show it. She is after your goat. You do not want to let her know she has got it. You go on, “Men in boats and men in ships are chasing wild geese across all the oceans of the world. It’s part of the war. Wild geese by the hundreds, men chasing them by the tens of thousands. Sometimes they catch them. Sometimes, by Christ, they do.”

  “Yes? How often?” she jeers.

  “Often enough to make the chasing worthwhile,” you say.

  “Ha!” A single syllable of scorn.

  “Often enough to make the chase needful, then. There. Are you happier?” You know she is not happier. But you have been jabbed. You counterpunch, the way you do in the ring. And, jabbed once, you hit back twice. “These wild geese chase on their own, remember. If they catch you, you won’t see your home port again.”

  “Ernest. .” She shakes her elegant head. Whatever she swallows is bound to be better left unsaid. She contents herself with-no, she suffices herself with, for she is plainly not content-“What are the odds?”

  “If I do go out, I have a chance of finding something. If I don’t, I have no chance at all. That makes the odds worth playing.”

  She rolls her eyes. “How long have you wanted to be a hero?”

  You do not answer that. The only true answer is always. The ambulance driving in the last war, the writing, the hunting, the drinking, the fighting, the womanizing. . You have chased that one thing your whole life. Hero is a four-letter word, too. Sweet Jesus, though, what a four-letter word!

  On the Pilar, if you find your wild goose, you will also find that one thing. “Odds worth playing,” you repeat.

  “Playing.” Martha freights the word with more doubt than it should be able to bear. “But don’t you see, dammit, the Germans won’t be playing even if you catch up with them? They’ll kill you, they’ll log it-if they bother-and they’ll go on about their business.”

  They may. For some men, war is only a business. They do not get excited about it, any more than other men get excited about selling shoes or changing spark plugs. Men like that also are often uncommonly good at their trade.

  As for you, your log book is a joke. Any Navy officer with a log book half as vague and sloppy would have to commit hara-kiri like a Jap to atone for the disgrace. But you are obscenitied if you want to be like a Navy officer. All you want is to find a U-boat. No. All you want is to find a U-boat and to sink the son of a bitch.

  You do not want much, do you?

  “Oh, go on!” Martha throws her hands in the air. She is lefthanded, in her body and in the way she thinks. “Go play. You will anyhow.”

  You give her the last word. How can you help it, when she is so right?

  When you go play, your pilot is a sour-faced Catalan named Josep. Not Jose. Josep. He is touchy about that. He has lived in Cuba for many years, but he still speaks Spanish with the accent you hear in Barcelona. Any Spaniard will tell you Catalan is only Spanish spelled badly. Josep will punch any Spaniard in the teeth if he starts coming out with that mierda.

  Josep used to be a fisherman in the Mediterranean. He has fished these waters since he crossed the Atlantic. He fished from other men’s boats when he first came. As soon as he could afford to, he bought his own. That did not take long. He has always worked hard. And he is as cheap as Jews are supposed to be.

  He pilots for you now because he hates Fascists even more than you do. You are damn glad to have him aboard, too. What he does not know about the cayos and the channels spiderwebbing between them is not to be known. He knows those islands and the waters that wash them the way you know the hair and the scars on your leg.

  “Cayo Bernardo?” he says when you tell him where you want to go. His eyebrows do not rise. The come down and pull together instead. They are black and thick and bushy. You wonder if he has Basque blood in him. Then his tanned, seamed face clears. “I can take you there. But why do you want to go? Nothing has happened on Cayo Bernardo since the beginning of time.”

  “Something may have,” you answer. You do not want to contradict a man like Josep straight out. That is worse luck than taking a hammer and smashing every mirror you own.

  He snorts. “Not likely!”

  “The bar talk-”

  “Bar talk? Bar talk is piss coming out the wrong end, nothing else but.” Josep pauses. Those heavy eyebrows lower and pull together again. “The bar talk about Cayo Bernardo is funny lately, isn’t it? A fisherman missing around there, it could be.”

  You nod. “I’ve heard the same thing.”

  If he does not take the Pilar to Cayo Bernardo, you will not pay him. This carries weight. And he will not be able to hunt Fascists there, if any Fascists are there to hunt. This also carries weight. You fiddle with your pipe. You give him time. You honor his pride. He is a man. You do not try to rush him into anything.

  You get the pipe going. Josep lights a Cuban stogie that might be made from shoe blacking. The two smokes, sweet and harsh, war in the air. “We can see what the bar talk is worth. We can see if it is worth anything,” he grudges at last.

  “Bueno. That’s all I want to do,” you say. “If it has no value, I’ll write Cayo Bernardo off the list and look for German U-boats in other places. If something is going on there, we’ll do what seems best when we see what that something is.”

  Josep nods. He smokes without hurrying. He nods again. “Well said.” You nod back gruffly. Your heart sings inside you, though you would sooner die than show it. From a man like him, a man who is a man and who knows he is a man, such praise is more precious than rubies.

  Two days later, the Pilar chugs east, toward the Archipelago de Sabana. You eye the chart. Cayo Bernardo lies near the eastern end of the archipelago. Only a speck on the map, as you have seen. A speck with a name, though. Some nearby specks have none. Does that make them more insignificant than Cayo Bernardo? Can an island be more insignificant than Cayo Bernardo and still be an island?

  It is a question like How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? But it is not quite like that. It is more like How many Nazis can dance on the sands of a cayo?

  The smaller engine, the Lycoming, pushes the fishing boat along. The Pilar does not run fast, but she does not use much gas, either. You never get all you want in this world. Take what you can get and do not worry about what you cannot get and you will be happy enough. How often will you have to tell yourself that before you start to believe it? You want everything, and you want it right away. You always have. You always will.

  You look down into the clear blue water from the flying bridge. The water is so shallow, you can easily see the bottom. You see sand and rocks and seaweed and starfish and spiny urchins and a turtle sculling along above its own shadow. It is like looking through blue stained glass from an old church window. Ripples in the sea could be flaws in the glass.

  Then Josep takes the boat farther out to sea. The bottom falls away. Flying fish spring from the water. Mackerel leap after them. Terns and frigatebirds circle overhead. Sometimes one will fold its wings and arrow into the ocean. Maybe it will come up with nothing. Maybe a fish will thrash in its beak.

  If a fish thrashes in a tern’s beak, as often as not a frigatebird will try to take it away. Frigatebirds are big and strong and mean and lazy. They would rather steal than work. Stealing is easier. Put a frigatebird in a uniform coat and
give him a chest full of medals and he will make you a fine Fascist.

  Seeing the small fish and the bigger fish chasing them makes you think of bigger fish yet. Sailfish. Swordfish. Marlin. A great marlin can go better than a thousand pounds. What you would not give to pit your strength against a grander like that! You have caught many big fish, but never one so big.

  When you are up on the flying bridge, you are supposed to be watching for U-boats. Your eyes should not stray to the fighting chair at the stern. The stern is lowered. You have put in a roller there to help you bring aboard large fish. You are hunting Germans now. You should not remember you bought the Pilar to go after fish.

  But you can watch up here only so long. After a couple of hours, you will not pay close heed the way you should. Then it will be time for someone else to come up and watch. You can bait a stout hook with half a bonito. You can sit down in the fighting chair and see how your luck runs. The day is warm and muggy. You can have someone fetch you a bottle of beer from an ice chest.

  The American ambassador and the FBI man in Havana will not like to hear you are fishing for marlin while you are patrolling for U-boats. Well, obscenity on what they will not like. If you catch one, you and your crewmates will eat like kings. Nothing tastes better than a fish you have just pulled out of the sea yourself. Nothing. Obscenity on all the cans in the galley, too.

  You do hook one, not half an hour after you take your place in the chair. He is not the monster you dream of. Life has a nasty way of not living up to your dreams, or why are you on your third wife and squabbling with her? But he is longer than a man is tall. He has to weigh as much as you do. And he fights for his life like the free, wild thing he is.

  Line smokes off the reel. The marlin is furious and strong, so strong. You have a thick chest and muscled arms, but it is not the same after you pass forty. You shout and roar so you do not have to look at that, but it is not the same whether you look at it or not. You have the rod and the reel and the line and the hook. You have the fighting chair to brace against.

  What does the fish have? Only himself. Yet you soon feel like an old man on the sea. But the marlin also feels it. Let him dive. Let him jump. Hook and line and rod still link him to your arms. You work the reel as you can. Sometimes the line pays out when he runs. More often, now, it comes in. You gain. Little by little, you gain.

  “Come on, God,” someone behind you says. “Keep the stinking sharks away. Give us a whole marlin, not one all chewed to hell and gone.”

  You are so wrapped up in the fight, you did not know someone stood in back of the chair. Neither do you know about God. If He is inclined to answer prayers, though, you hope He answers that one. You hate sharks. And a hooked, exhausted marlin is a feast at Maxim’s for them.

  You keep on reeling in the fish. What else can you do? If a shark comes, he comes. That is the long and short of it. After most of an hour, you have beaten the marlin. He lies by the stern, spent but beautiful. No shark has torn that blued-gunmetal hide.

  A gaff goes into the marlin. Eager hands pull him up over the roller. His mouth gapes wide. He cannot breathe air, but he does not know that, poor thing. “Watch the bill!” you say sharply. The marlin may spear someone even with his dying thrashes.

  An iron pry bar comes down on his head, hard. Once, twice, three times. Eyes and skin dull. It is over.

  You draw a knife from a sheath on your belt. You feel the soft yet firm resistance of flesh as the blade goes in. When you yank the knife from the gills down toward the vent, offal spills on the deck. You and your crewmates push the guts into the water.

  Sharks now! The ocean behind the Pilar boils as they tear into the gift. A small stretch of sea briefly goes from blue to red.

  “Holy cow!” one of the men says. “A big bastard just swallowed one of the little guys.”

  “They might as well be people,” you say. “Give them shirts with collars and neckties and they will be running for Congress in the next election.” Your crewmates laugh. You are kidding, but kidding on the square.

  You hack big, thick steaks from the marlin’s flank. The meat has almost the texture of beef. Grilled and seasoned with lime juice and salt and cayenne, it will be fine. The Japs eat their fish raw. You like it fresh, but not that fresh.

  You haggle off another steak. Plenty of people want to stick knives into politicians after they lead them astray. They do not get the chance often enough. That they do not is another of the world’s sorrows.

  Now you are well into the Archipelago de Sabana. Sometimes Josep takes the Pilar between two cayos through a channel so narrow you can piss on the beach to port, then go to the starboard rail and piss on the mangroves there. The seaweed under the boat’s keep sways in the water like grass in the breeze.

  Josep never runs her aground. A good thing, too. She has gone aground before, more often than you wish she would have. It is hard on her. It is particularly hard on her motors and screws. And it is hard on your temper. When things go well, you always want everyone within buying range to share your good luck. But when things go wrong, chances are you will blame anyone else close by ahead of yourself. You are not proud of that, but you cannot seem to help it.

  Then the warm sea opens out. It darkens ahead, which means it grows deeper. Josep smiles a thin smile at the wheel. His hands ease their hold a bit. Making a passage seem effortless is not the same as getting through it without effort. That is as true on the water as at the typewriter.

  “Will we make Cayo Bernardo today?” you ask.

  Josep considers. “We can, if you want me to fire up the Chrysler,” he replies in his peculiar Spanish. “Otherwise, tomorrow morning.”

  “Save the gas,” you say after a little thought of your own. “Tomorrow morning will do. If there are Nazis on the cayo, better to have a whole day to find them and plenty of light to see them by.”

  “Plenty of light for them to see us, too.” The stinking, twisted stogie jerks in his mouth.

  “We can’t pull off these little tricks without taking a chance here and there.” You make your tone light. Once more, seeming effortlessness not gained without effort.

  “Si, Senor,” Josep says. It might mean anything. It might mean nothing, only Josep is not a man in the habit of saying things that mean nothing. He adds, “The ninos will be ready.”

  “The babies and the frags,” you agree. The ninos-the babies-are the Tommy guns. You swaddle them in goatskins against sea air and salt water. You carry them in the skins, too, like little children. Someone who sees them in your arms may take them for botas: leather wine flasks. And the frags will settle anyone the ninos do not. If you meet a U-boat before you make Cayo Bernardo, you have the bomb that looks like an extinguisher.

  You have almost given up on meeting a U-boat. The ocean is wide. The Pilar is small. Even from the flying bridge, you cannot see far. Nor is a U-boat large, not as vessels made for war go. The top of a conning tower does not rise high above the sea. U-boats are made to be hard to spot while surfaced. When they dive, they vanish.

  But a periscope does not let a U-boat under the water see far or see well. And a submerged U-boat moves slowly. It soon uses up its battery power. So U-boats hunt on the surface when they can. They go under to kill or to get away.

  You can see all the way to the bottom here. The sea is as clear as a full bathtub before you get in. It is not much deeper than a bathtub, either. If the Pilar passes right over a U-boat lurking in the bath-warm water, you will see it. You will see it, yes, but you will not be able to do anything about what you see.

  With its periscope, a U-boat can see you even if you do not pass right over it. The skipper in his white-crowned cap-the white crown is the only way to know he is the skipper-can take his time deciding what to do about you. If he chooses to sink you out of hand, your tale will be one of those that have not a happy ending.

  Yet why should he squander a torpedo on the Pilar? Why should he spend even a few deck-gun shells? The Pilar is no destroyer. No navy
yard spawned her to slay submarines. She looks like-she is-a pleasure craft, a fishing boat.

  A U-boat skipper will not know you have aboard what is left of that fighting marlin. But a canny U-boat skipper will suppose you carry something worth eating. If you have had some luck, it will be marlin or swordfish or tuna. If your luck is out, you will still have cans of roast-beef hash. You will have beer or whiskey or rum. You will likely have beer and whiskey and rum. You may have orange juice.

  When did German U-boat sailors last taste orange juice? Before the war started, chances are. Or maybe when they plundered some other fishing boat.

  Up on the flying bridge, your field glasses sweep the sea. They also sweep the cayos scattered across the sea at random. Cayos with beaches. Cayos with jungle. Cayos with goats that have chewed the jungle down to nubs. Cayo Bernardo was where the Nazis were-where you think they were-when word of them got to you. Nothing says they have to stay there. Your glasses sweep all the cayos.

  They say a watchstander on a U-boat conning tower cannot go longer than two hours at a stretch. After that, the strain starts to tell on him. He sees things that are not there. Worse, he misses things that are.

  This is the Hooligan Navy. It does not run by the clock. Your time up here is not rationed to the minute. Still, you have been up here a while. You feel it in your neck, and in your back. Pretty soon, you will go down to the deck and hand off the glasses so someone else can sweep the sea.

  Handoff. Sweep. It sounds like a football game. Newspapermen write about football as if it were war. It is not war. It is a game, a kids’ game. If it were war, the players would carry knives and.45s. A halfback would score a touchdown only after the defenders went down wounded or dead.

  Blood would run in the stands, too. Football stays on the gridiron, where it belongs. War has a nasty way of slopping over.