Skelton tried quite earnestly to think about Mr. and Mrs. Robert Rudleigh of Rumson, Connecticut. He imagined a brick house where Revolutionary War soldiers had fired at the British, a house with grapeshot in the lintels, covered with vines, and into whose front door Mr. Robert Rudleigh went each winter’s dusk, carrying an enormous newspaper and wearing a gray coat. “Darling,” he would have said to Mrs. Rudleigh, “it is time we had sport.” Then the Rudleighs go to the city of New York. They go to a great brown store where pictures of Theodore Roosevelt and stuffed heads of tigers adorn the walls. A well-mannered lesbian shows them “tropical outfits” which include mosquito netting, a bonefish rod, a pith helmet, and a prophylactic; all stapled to a large piece of cardboard upon which has been printed a “tropical scene,” the entire outfit protected by cellophane and displayed under a disinfecting ultraviolet light. Rudleigh’s motto is, “I pay, I take.” The city of New York and the town of Rumson know him for what he is: a marvel in a gray coat who sometimes walks chest deep through snowdrifts to get that enormous newspaper; and who only occasionally breaks a savage work pattern for sport in the tropics.
He pulled the bell on the gate, now locked, as it was not in his childhood; now barbed wire was stapled along the top of the wooden wall. As a child, he sat in the uncultivated end of the enclosed lot and listened to the chameleons rattling in the deep grass, crawled low in that grass and watched the lizards leap out green and tremulous into the streaked sunlight.
Lying on his back he had watched a spider let itself down forty feet from the Alexandria palm inch by inch over a period of hours; so that after watching until it had magnified to subsume the world, the sky itself seemed to radiate from its back. The spider, noxiously banana-shaped, landed on his face, walked away and thus vanished.
“Come in and leave that cigar in the driveway.”
“Can’t stop but a minute. I just wanted to say hi.”
He walked over to the gauze canopy.
“Evening, Dad.”
“Tom.”
“What are you doing?”
“Reading Shakespeare.”
Skelton had come to associate the higher arts with his father’s holing up in bed.
“I also have my violin in here,” he added.
Skelton could barely see inside; but after an instant’s rustling about, a phrase from Sibelius flowed out through the gauze; then, imperceptibly blurred into Hank Williams’s Lovesick Blues. Skelton listened to those abject hillbilly strains a long moment, remembering his father on the porch in his Cuban chair so many years ago now, playing for his pals, fishermen, idlers, and crazies. The music stopped.
* * *
“Ma’am, you want to hand me that lunch so I can stow it?” Skelton took the wicker basket from Mrs. Rudleigh; and then the thermos she handed him. “I’ve got plenty of water,” he said.
“That’s not water.”
“What is it?”
“Gibsons.”
“Let me put them in the cooler for you then—”
“We put them in the thermos,” said Rudleigh, “so we don’t have to put them in the cooler. We like them where we can get at them. In case we need them, you know, real snappy.”
Tom Skelton looked up at him. Most people when they smile expose a section of their upper teeth; when Rudleigh smiled, he exposed his lower teeth.
“Hold the thermos in your lap,” Skelton said. “If that starts rolling around the skiff while I’m running these banks, I’ll throw it overboard.”
“An ecologist,” said Mrs. Rudleigh.
“Are you sure Nichol cannot appeal his sentence, Captain?” asked Rudleigh.
“I’m sure,” said Skelton.
Mrs. Rudleigh reached out one hand and bent it backward so her fingernails were all in display; she was thinking of a killer line but it wouldn’t come; so she didn’t speak.
Skelton knew from other guides he could not let the clients run the boat for him; but he had never expected this; now all three of them were glancing past one another with metallic eyes.
Mrs. Rudleigh came and Skelton put her in the forward chair. Rudleigh followed in squeaking bright deck shoes and sat aft, swiveling about in the chair with an executive’s preoccupation.
“Captain,” Rudleigh began. Men like Rudleigh believed in giving credit to the qualified. If an eight-year-old were running the skiff, Rudleigh would call him “Captain” without irony; it was a credit to his class. “Captain, are we going to bonefish?” Mrs. Rudleigh was putting zinc oxide on her thin nose and on the actual edges of her precise cheekbones. She was a thin pretty woman of forty who you could see had a proclivity for hysterics, slow burns, and slapping.
“We have a good tide for bonefish.”
“Well, Missus Rudleigh and I have had a good deal of bonefishing in Yucatán and we were wondering if it mightn’t be an awfully long shot to fish for permit…”
Skelton knew it was being put to him; finding permit—big pompano—was a guide’s hallmark and he didn’t particularly have a permit tide. “I can find permit,” he said though, finishing a sequence Rudleigh started with the word “Captain.”
Carter strolled up. He knew the Rudleighs and they greeted each other. “You’re in good hands,” he said to them, tilting his head toward Skelton. “Boy’s a regular fish hawk.” He returned his head to the perpendicular.
“Where are your people, Cart?” Skelton asked to change the subject.
“They been partying, I guess. Man said he’d be late. Shortens my day.”
Skelton choked the engine and started it. He let it idle for a few minutes and then freed up his lines. The canal leading away from the dock wandered around lazily, a lead-green gloss like pavement.
“Ought to find some bonefish in the Snipes on this incoming water,” Carter said. Skelton looked at him a moment.
“We’re permit fishing, Cart.”
“Oh, really. Why, permit huh.”
“What do you think? Boca Chica beach?”
“Your guess is as good as mine. But yeah okay, Boca Chica.”
Skelton idled on the green tidal gloss of the canal until he cleared the entrance, then ran it up to 5,000 rpm and slacked off to an easy plane in the light chop. He leaned back over his shoulder to talk to Rudleigh. “We’re going to Boca Chica beach. I think it’s our best bet for permit on this tide.”
“Fine, fine.”
“I hate to take you there, a little bit, because it’s in the landing pattern.”
“I don’t mind if the fish don’t mind.”
Skelton swung in around by Cow Key channel, past the navy hospital, under the bridge where boys were getting in some snapper fishing before it would be time for the military hospitals; then out the channel along the mangroves with the great white wing of the drive-in theater to their left, with an unattended meadow of loudspeaker stanchions; and abruptly around the corner to an expanse of blue Atlantic. Skelton ran tight to the beach, inside the boat-wrecking niggerheads; he watched for sunken ice cans and made the run to Boca Chica, stopping short.
The day was clear and bright except for one squall to the west, black with etched rain lines connecting it to sea; the great reciprocating engine of earth, thought Skelton, looks like a jellyfish.
“Go ahead and get ready, Mr. Rudleigh, I’m going to pole us along the rocky edge and see what we can see.” Skelton pulled the pushpole out of its chocks and got up in the bow; Rudleigh was ready in the stern behind the tilted engine. It took two or three leaning thrusts to get the skiff underway; and then they were gliding over the sand, coral, sea fans, staghorn, and lawns of turtle grass. Small cowfish, sprats, and fry of one description or another scattered before them and vanished in the glare. Stone crabs backed away in bellicose, Pentagonian idiocy in the face of the boat’s progress. Skelton held the boat into the tide at the breaking edge of the flat and looked for moving fish.
A few small sharks came early on the flood and passed down light, yellow-eyed and sweeping back and forth schematically
for something in trouble. The first military aircraft came in overhead, terrifyingly low; a great delta-winged machine with howling, vulvate exhausts and nervous quick-moving control flaps; so close were they that the bright hydraulic shafts behind the flaps glittered; small rockets were laid up thickly under the wings like insect eggs. The plane approached, banked subtly, and the pilot glanced out at the skiff; his head looking no larger than a cocktail onion. A moment after the plane passed, its shock wave swept toward them and the crystal, perfect world of the flat paled and vanished; not reappearing until some minutes later and slowly. The draconic roar of the engines diminished and twin blossoms of flame shrank away toward the airfield.
“It must take a smart cookie,” said Mrs. Rudleigh, “to make one of those do what it is supposed to.”
“It takes balls for brains,” said Rudleigh.
“That’s even better,” she smiled.
“Only that’s what any mule has,” Rudleigh added.
Mrs. Rudleigh threw something at her husband, who remained in the stern, rigid as a gun carriage.
Skelton was so determined that this first day of his professional guiding be a success that he felt with some agony the ugliness of the aircraft that came in now at shorter and shorter intervals, thundering with their volatile mists drifting over the sea meadow.
The Rudleighs had opened the thermos and were consuming its contents exactly as the heat of the day began to spread. Skelton was now poling down light, flushing small fish; then two schools of bonefish, not tailing but pushing wakes in their hurry; Rudleigh saw them late and bungled the cast, looking significantly at Mrs. Rudleigh after each failure.
“You’ve got to bear down,” she said.
“I’m bearing down.”
“Bear down harder, honey.”
“I said: I’m bearing down.”
Now the wading birds that were on the flat in the early tide were flooded out and flew northwest to catch the Gulf of Mexico tide. Skelton knew they had about lost their water.
“It’s kind of slow, Captain,” said Rudleigh.
“I’ve been thinking the same thing,” Skelton said, his heart chilling within him. “I’m going to pole this out and make a move.”
A minute later, he was running to Saddlebunch and got there in time to catch the incoming water across the big sand spot; he hardly had a moment to stake the skiff when the bonefish started crossing the sand. Now Mrs. Rudleigh was casting, driving the fish away. Rudleigh snatched the rod from her after her second failure.
“Sit down!”
Rudleigh was rigidly prepared for the next fish. Skelton would have helped him but knew in advance it would make things worse. He felt all of his efforts pitted against the contents of the thermos.
“You hawse’s oss,” said Mrs. Rudleigh to her husband. He seemed not to have heard. He was in the vague crouch of lumbar distress.
“I can fish circles around you, queen bee,” he said after a bit. “Always could.”
“What about Peru? What about Cabo Blanco?”
“You’re always throwing Cabo Blanco in my face without ever, repeat, ever a word about Tierra del Fuego.”
“What about Piñas Bay, Panama.”
“Shut up.”
“Seems to me,” she said, “that Raúl commented that the señora had a way of making the señor look real bum.”
A small single bonefish passed the skiff. Rudleigh flushed it by casting right into its face. “Cocksucker.”
“That’s just the way you handled striped marlin. Right there is about what you did with those stripes at Rancho Buena Vista.”
Rudleigh whirled around and held the point of his rod under Mrs. Rudleigh’s throat. “I’m warning you.”
“He had a tantrum at the Pez Maya Club in Yucatán,” Mrs. Rudleigh told Skelton.
“Yes, ma’am. I see.”
“Uh, Captain—”
“I’m right here, Mr. Rudleigh.”
“I thought this was a permit deal.”
“I’m looking for permit on this tide. I told you they were a long shot.”
“Captain, I know about permit. I have seen permit in the Bahamas, Yucatán, Costa Rica, and at the great Belize camps in British Honduras. I know they are a long shot.”
Skelton said, “Maybe your terrific familiarity with places to fish will tell us where we ought to be right now.”
“Captain, I wouldn’t presume.”
A skiff was running just off the reef, making sheets of bright water against the sun.
“Do you know what today’s tides are?” Skelton asked.
“No.”
“Which way is the Gulf of Mexico?”
Rudleigh pointed all wrong. Skelton wanted to be home reading Proudhon, studying the winos, or copulating.
“Is that a permit?” Mrs. Rudleigh asked. The black fork of a large permit surfaced just out of casting range: beyond belief. Rudleigh stampeded back into position. Skelton slipped the pole out of the sand and began to ghost quietly toward the fish and stopped. Nothing visible. A long moment passed. Again, the black fork appeared.
“Cast.”
Rudleigh threw forty feet beyond the permit. There was no hope of retrieving and casting again. Then out of totally undeserved luck, the fish began to change course toward Rudleigh’s bait. Rudleigh and Mrs. Rudleigh exchanged glances.
“Please keep your eye on the fish.” Skelton was overwhelmed by the entirely undeserved nature of what was transpiring. In a moment, the big fish was tailing again.
“Strike him.”
Rudleigh lifted the rod and the fish was on. Skelton poled hard, following the fish, now streaking against the drag for deep water. The same skiff that passed earlier appeared, running the other direction; and Skelton wondered who it could be.
“God, Captain, will I be able to cope with this at all? I mean, I knew the fish was strong! But honest to God, this is a nigger with a hotfoot!”
“I’m still admiring your cast, darling.”
Skelton followed watching the drawn bow the rod had become, the line shearing water with precision.
“What a marvelously smooth drag this reel has! A hundred smackers seemed steep at the time; but when you’re in the breach, as I am now, a drag like this is the last nickel bargain in America!”
Skelton was poling after the fish with precisely everything he had. And it was difficult on the packed bottom with the pole inclining to slip out from under him.
His feeling of hope for a successful first-day guiding was considerably modified by Rudleigh’s largely undeserved hooking of the fish. And now the nobility of the fish’s fight was further eroding Skelton’s pleasure.
When they crossed the edge of the flat, the permit raced down the reef line in sharp powerful curves, dragging the line across the coral. “Gawd, gawd, gawd,” Rudleigh said. “This cookie is stronger than I am!” Skelton poled harder and at one point overtook the fish as it desperately rubbed the hook on the coral bottom; seeing the boat, it flushed once more in terror, making a single long howl pour from the reel. A fish that was exactly noble, thought Skelton, who began to imagine the permit coming out of a deep-water wreck by the pull of moon and tide, riding the invisible crest of the incoming water, feeding and moving by force of blood; only to run afoul of an asshole from Connecticut.
The fight continued without much change for another hour, mainly outside the reef line in the green water over a sand bottom: a safe place to fight the fish. Rudleigh had soaked through his khaki safari clothes; and from time to time Mrs. Rudleigh advised him to “bear down.” When Mrs. Rudleigh told him this, he would turn to look at her, his neck muscles standing out like cords and his eyes acquiring broad white perimeters. Skelton ached from pursuing the fish with the pole; he might have started the engine outside the reef line, but he feared Rudleigh getting his line in the propeller and he had found that a large fish was held away from the boat by the sound of a running engine.
As soon as the fish began to show signs of tiring, Skelt
on asked Mrs. Rudleigh to take a seat; then he brought the big net up on the deck beside him. He hoped he would be able to get Rudleigh to release this hugely undeserved fish, not only because it was undeserved but because the fish had fought so very bravely. No, he admitted to himself, Rudleigh would never let the fish go.
By now the fish should have been on its side. It began another long and accelerating run, the pale sheet of water traveling higher up the line, the fish swerving somewhat inshore again; and to his terror, Skelton found himself poling after the fish through the shallows, now and then leaning over to free the line from a sea fan. They glided among the little hammocks and mangrove keys of Saddlebunch in increasing vegetated congestion, in a narrowing tidal creek that closed around and over them with guano-covered mangroves and finally prevented the boat from following another foot. Nevertheless, line continued to pour off the reel.
“Captain, consider it absolutely necessary that I kill the fish. This one doubles the Honduran average.”
Skelton did not reply, he watched the line slow its passage from the reel, winding out into the shadowy creek; then stop. He knew there was a good chance the desperate animal had reached a dead end.
“Stay here.”
Skelton climbed out of the boat and, running the line through his fingers lightly, began to wade the tidal creek. The mosquitoes found him quickly and held in a pale globe around his head. He waded steadily, flushing herons out of the mangroves over his head. At one point, he passed a tiny side channel, blocking the exit of a heron that raised its stiff wings very slightly away from its body and glared at him. In the green shadows, the heron was a radiant, perfect white.
He stopped a moment to look at the bird. All he could hear was the slow musical passage of tide in the mangrove roots and the low pattern of bird sounds more liquid than the sea itself in these shallows. He moved away from the side channel, still following the line. Occasionally, he felt some small movement of life in it; but he was certain now the permit could go no farther. He had another thirty yards to go, if he had guessed right looking at Rudleigh’s partially emptied spool.
Wading along, he felt he was descending into the permit’s world; in knee-deep water, the small mangrove snappers, angelfish, and baby barracudas scattered before him, precise, contained creatures of perfect mobility. The brilliant blue sky was reduced to a narrow ragged band quite high overhead now and the light wavered more with the color of the sea and of estuarine shadow than that of vulgar sky. Skelton stopped and his eye followed the line back in the direction he had come. The Rudleighs were at its other end, infinitely far away.
Ninety-Two in the Shade Page 4