At Kenyon I was distracted from my mother’s degradation by Beowulf and Lycidas. I was banking information about literature as though it would pay off for me in years like savings bonds; a decade later I would have to forget all the fine tenets of literary criticism to begin to write freely. But I was never a really devoted student. I was diverted by dance halls and townie girls. I played the bongos until dawn in the Kenyon church basement, missed classes fishing in the Kokosing River, while daydreaming about blue marlin rushing at my hula poppers and bloodworms.
On the phone Dad filled me in about the Boston business. He was gradually putting on more men and planning to expand the plant. Almost overnight recessed fluorescents had fallen into the past and Dad had transferred his remarkable selling passion to placing panel boxes and wiring troughs into the dark tangled recesses of factories, garages and sundry buildings. For additional pizzazz he produced specialty items for Alan Fischbach, including stainless steel boxes fashioned to withstand the intense heat of Nike missile launching pads.
Dad promised that someday we’d share the same office and make an unbeatable team selling the Lee Products line throughout New England. Sure I had reservations about the box business, but Dad washed them aside. After his pitch I could feel the splendor of the two of us seated across from one another in our office above the Lee shop, feet on our desks, beating back the competition.
On Martha’s Vineyard, the summer before my junior year, I met a girl with long dark hair who loved poetry and didn’t get seasick. On our first date Bonnie and I went broadbill swordfishing on the Ebb Tide. Easing through the foggy water I couldn’t take my eyes off her. I held the wheel and tried to affect the look of a weatherbeaten big game skipper. While I played the hero I ran the bow of the boat into a twelve-foot swordfish that was basking on the surface. We laughed as the fish swam off. Later that night on the tuna tower I kissed Bonnie for the first time and described to her the greatness of trolling big baits for marlin off Bimini. She was from Philadelphia’s Main Line and knew nothing about big game fishing, but I went on and on. I stressed how one must be patient dropping a big bonefish back to a blue marlin or else you can pull the bait from his mouth. She nodded earnestly. Such a beautiful girl. I wanted to kiss her forever. Bonnie went to Denison University, which was only fifty miles from Kenyon. It was a miracle.
In Ohio we moved into a little house in a cornfield and I stopped going to classes altogether. We dropped our lines in streams and lakes. We read from Eliot’s The Waste Land and The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Bonnie understood poems much better than I did but I tried to keep this from her. For some reason she was willing to accept my ideas about a lifetime of trolling. We both knew my plans were hilarious but forged ahead. After discussing all the options we decided after graduating we’d apply to the Peace Corps and ask for an assignment in Chile, where I had heard there was the best sword-fishing in the world.
Mother phoned me in Ohio after Tony Fruscella had robbed a church and brought her boxes of religious treasures. Tony was now completely out of control and she was afraid of what Bill would do to him. It is odd she imagined that I would be her ally. I was humiliated by Tony. That such a man would touch my mother. What if Dad found out about it in Boston? He wduld be appalled, and his rage would have no boundaries. Dad would hire detectives or he might even call the Commissioner.
As a twenty-year-old I never thought of Tony as an artist to be admired or a character Jack Kerouac might have written about in On the Road. I hated Tony for loving my mother. He was a bum.
I came home for Thanksgiving with Bonnie, determined to straighten things out. My brother and I spoke to Mom with our arms crossed. She smiled at us and didn’t make a fight. I believe she was charmed by our resolve and solid front.
Sometime after dark Tony came to the house carrying a big turkey he had bought with his welfare check. At the door he had a dumb smile and was wearing a new white shirt. Bill and I wouldn’t let him into the apartment. Mother stood behind us clutching her hands. Life is tough but we knew what we were doing.
I had learned about crime and punishment from my father. Bill had his own motivations. But did we actually believe we could stop his bleak solos from the street? Or that she would stop listening for him?
A Fish from My Brother’s Dreams
LATER THAT WINTER, BILL AND BONNIE AND I LEFT NEW YORK for Florida. I was surprised and delighted that my brother had actually agreed to go fishing with us. As I drove through the night I explained over and over to Bonnie the art of the dropback. I was afraid that she would strike too soon. For emphasis I gestured to the big marlin rod in Bill’s lap in the backseat, a couple of feet of which was sticking out the window. Eventually we settled into conversation about couples we knew from college, their infidelities, emotional breakups and fervent returns, and soon we were ardently exploring the rights and wrongs of our relationship, why we had said this or that last week or a month before. Each nuance of agreement or reservation was so important.
My brother found our intimacy cloying. The ongoing need to probe for honesty was insipid to him. It was my brother’s way to be mysterious, to reshape himself behind veils like Mother, to spend the light of day in a darkened bedroom. Bill yawned at my fishing pedantry and glee. I trolled on the surface. In his fishing life my brother was a time traveler, dropped his baits deep for ancient fish. I wanted to understand Bill, to talk. Nothing could interest him less.
Bill’s heavy silences didn’t matter so much. I was rushing south toward the blue water. I believed that my brother was posturing and would come around in time, become a regular guy. I believed this for years.
We arrived on Islamorada around midnight and pulled into a motel with its sign illuminated by a neon sailfish in full leaping curve. I listened to the ocean teeming with large game fish. Beyond the shadows of palm trees I could hear the flapping of their heavy tails. I could feel Dad behind me, nodding.
I was knotted up with anticipation. This was a rite of passage, game fishing without Dad and his captains or the Ebb Tide. I didn’t sleep more than an hour or two. In the morning my stomach hurt. What if I screwed up? What if I couldn’t find my way back in or we hit a storm or the engine stopped? What if, what if?
Down the road from the motel there was a tiny rundown fishing camp called Estes, built into the mangroves, a little operation with a half-dozen skiffs for rent. Old pelicans were sitting on broken pilings and the office was ramshackle and smelled of old bait. The morning sun was already searing and the flies and mosquitoes were thick and kept getting into our ears and mouths. Look how great this is, I said to Bonnie, pointing to yellowing photographs of big barracudas and tarpon pinned to the walls. On my mouth I could feel Abe Waitzkin’s shit-eating grin.
Estes Dock faced the gulf side of Islamorada, offering miles of shallow-water fishing alongside the mangroves and on the flats. There was a chance to catch snappers, ladyfish, bonefish, sea trout, redfish, cobia, possibly tarpon or permit. No marlin, tuna, dolphin or deep-water sharks. They were on the other side of the island in the Gulf Stream. The old-timer who ran the place, I assumed he was Mr. Estes, lectured me that these boats were for the bay only. They weren’t fit for the ocean. One of his customers had taken one offshore and it had capsized in a squall, his wife had drowned, he said with distaste. He didn’t care about her, only the boat. The man was soured from too many years renting to wannabe fishermen from New Jersey who tortured his old engines and busted propellers on conch beds. I sorely wanted to inform him about the Ebb Tide’s tuna tower and the Fin-Nor reels, about all the marlin we’d caught in big seas off the north end of Bimini, hauled them through the teak transom door; but instead I assured him that we would stay in the bay casting to redfish. He pointed to a fourteen-footer that had the classic lines of a large round-bottomed bathtub. Bonnie and I climbed on board and he tossed in two waterlogged life preservers that hit with a thud: Don’t go out in the ocean! Who was he talking to?
I headed the outboard north, running
in calm muddy water until the view from Estes was blocked by a bend in the island. After another half-mile I saw my brother waving from a little dock behind the Sailfish Motel. I nosed in and Bill stepped on wearing a white turban and holding Dad’s heavy marlin rod and also a lighter one. Then he reached over for some rigged mullets and a bucket he’d bought from a tackle shop. After securing these items he dragged on board the bloody carcass of a fifty-pound amberjack he’d found on the dock at Bud and Mary’s Marina, which was just down the road, on the ocean side of the island. Then we headed north for another few miles until we arrived at the Snake Creek Bridge that spanned Islamorada and Plantation Key. There were a dozen fishermen on the bridge dropping lines and not catching much. I waved at them, trying not to gloat as I headed her into the channel marked by stakes that led into the open ocean.
The sea was running about two feet, nothing to speak of, but the flimsy skiff pounded and skiddered uneasily off each wave. I slowed to a crawl when a forty-footer approached from offshore on her way back in. I smartly decided to take her wake on our quarter, rather than dead ahead, thinking we’d float over and stay dry; but the surge seemed to suck the bottom from the little tub, which went over sickly onto her side and teetered until Bill and I jumped for the high gunwale and the boat caught her balance. A very close call. It would have been humiliating to have capsized in the channel right in front of the snapper fishermen on the bridge.
I shrugged to Bonnie, no big deal. Things happen on big game fishing trips—saltwater dripping down your face, pounding, issues of seamanship come up. It’s all part of the game. She didn’t know anything about the boats I had sunk in the past. Bonnie, honey, you have to brace your back when we go over waves, I chided gently. And she trusted me, relaxed with her eyes closed, soaking up the sun. Yes, I was jittery. This boat wasn’t any more than the one Bill and I had capsized trolling for giant bluefin off Provincetown.
When the green water turned blue I slowed the skiff and we put out two of the smaller mullets on light rods. This settled me down. Even with the morning sun burning my eyes it was a pleasure to watch the baits skip and jiggle across the bubbling wake. Trolling was my favorite fishing. I liked to think about a big marlin or tuna way below slowly angling up in the green water, eyeing baits that were traveling across the immense brightness of the sky.
If we were lucky enough to catch a dolphin, we’d bring it to the chef at the Green Turtle Inn for our dinner that night. Bonnie’s hair blew in the wind. She looked at me and smiled.
We weren’t trolling twenty minutes when behind one of the mullets I spotted a short bill poking into the air. Then I saw its rapier tail. “Pick up the rod, Bonnie, get ready,” I said in a harsh whisper. But the spindly fish was coming much too fast. “What?” she asked, turning my way. The small sailfish was crashing the bait, devouring it.
“Don’t look at me, Bonnie. Pick up the rod, fast.” She turned toward the rod and looked at it.
“Pick it up,” I said more forcefully.
“What’s wrong?” she answered, thrown off by my tone of voice. She lifted the rod, which was bowed and heavy with the weight of the pulling sailfish.
“Drop back. Drop back.”
She looked at the reel for what to do, and then to me. “What’s happening?” she asked, alarmed by the jerky weight on her rod, which suddenly whipped to the right and then swung hard left over the outboard engine as the sailfish tailwalked back across the wake.
“Bonnie, look at the fish. Strike him. Strike him.”
With the fish yanking her arms, and a sense that she had forgotten something important, yes, dropping back, she was confused about striking.
“Strike, strike, strike,” I called.
Now Bonnie reached for the little lever on the reel, threw the drag into free spool, dropping back.
“No, no, no dropping back. Strike!”
Bonnie remembered to strike then, pulled the rod up in a mountainous strike, a colossal strike, but much too late. There was a cracking sound, like a small-caliber rifle shot. She had dropped back when the fish was already hooked and running and she had forgotten to thumb the reel. The line had bird-nested into a huge tangle at just the instant she reared back to deliver her strike, which had broken the line with a crack.
“I’ve got him,” she said. Now Bonnie was straining to reel, but the handle wouldn’t budge because it was stuck in place from the tangled line.
“Bonnie, stop cranking the reel,” I said in disgust.
“I’ve got him.”
“You’ve got nothing.” She looked at me with such a wounded expression.
After all of our work she had forgotten to drop back. “Honey, you forgot to drop back. The fish is gone.”
“I did drop back,” she insisted.
Bill was standing in the bow, laughing and pointing to the sailfish, which was free, jumping a hundred yards off, trying to get rid of the hook, which would lodge in its mouth for a couple of weeks before rusting out. Time after time it jumped, glistening in the late-morning sun.
What a thing it would have been to have landed it from this tiny boat. To have brought it in and shown Estes we were really good fishermen. If only she had struck the fish properly.
But things could have been worse. We were five miles off the island and still floating. A couple of miles ahead there were thirty or more boats fishing, all of them much larger than ours. I knew they were on Alligator Reef.
Now it was Bill’s show. We anchored up in about eighty feet of water and my brother began filleting the large amberjack. All around there were boats drift fishing for kingfish or anchored bottom fishing for snappers and groupers. A half-mile off the reef in deeper water the sportfishing fleet trolled ballyhoo and mullet for sailfish.
It was a lovely afternoon, with a few puffy clouds in the sky and a cooling breeze. Bonnie was smiling at nothing in particular, trying to look involved after her big mistake.
After Bill had twenty pounds of white amberjack meat in his chum bucket, he tied the tail of the carcass on a short line and tossed it over the side to scent the water. Then he began mincing the fillets and occasionally throwing a small handful of oily tidbits off the stern. We were rocking gently and birds were yabbering behind the boat. As usual when he chummed I fell into reveries. It might have been ten minutes or an hour. Mother was frying porgies in the galley of our twenty-seven-foot Richardson. I was hungry.
“Throw over the bait,” said Bill.
Later my brother would say that a huge shadow had passed beneath the skiff. It was the biggest fish he had ever seen. I tossed over a large rigged mullet that was connected to the marlin rod. Bill stood in the stern with a foot on the transom like a conquistador, the reel in free spool and his thumb on the spool. After a half-minute something picked up the mullet and began moving off. Bill let the line run for a long time, maybe twenty seconds. Then he threw the lever onto strike and hauled the rod into the air. When the line came taut my brother nearly went over the side. He saved himself by backing off on the drag. The marlin rod was much too heavy for stand-up fishing. It must have weighed forty pounds, and with the drag set and a large creature pulling away, it needed to be anchored into the gimbal of a fighting chair. Bill braced himself with a foot on the transom and pushed the drag up. Again he lurched toward the water and had to back off on the drag. Bonnie and I grabbed him by the belt and this time he was able to hold the rod with the drag in place.
With all of us in the stern the bow of the little boat rose in the air and the transom dipped until it was nearly level with the ocean. This was not good. If a wake came our way it would roll into the boat and swamp us. I tried to point this out to Bill but he wasn’t listening. I was worried. I could see the three of us in the water waving for help.
My brother was struggling to lift the rod. The fish was swimming very slowly, not really fighting. Maybe the big one hadn’t taken the mullet, he wondered aloud. Possibly a kingfish had grabbed the mullet. No, this was no forty-pounder. It wasn’t running
like a great game fish, but it had tremendous weight, as if we had snagged the bottom. Bill was bent up like a pretzel, trying to pull up against this weight. He had an anguished expression on his face.
When an angler is hooked up to a large fish other boats begin to come around like vultures. They edge closer without thinking they might cut your line in their props. The mystery of what is down there means everything. If they can get a close look, then they can go back to dropping their own lines.
Bill and Bonnie and I began waving for the boats to give us room to fight the fish, but no one backed off. Fishermen could not believe that such a small boat was out here fighting something tremendous. We cursed at them. There were about twenty boats circling us, including two head boats, each with thirty or thirty-five fishermen. From their higher perspective they pointed to the water and drank beer.
After an hour the big fish began to yield. It hadn’t really taxed itself yet but seemed disinterested in struggle. Maybe it was sick or old. Bill was cranking the skiff to the fish more than bringing the fish in. Just winding against its great weight was a large effort, and Bill’s blue shirt was drenched through. Now the boats were really packed close. One of the head boats was no more than fifty feet off. Islamorada had become Coney Island. Men cursed, threw bottles in the water. We gave them the finger.
If the fish made any kind of run at all it would cut off on one of the boats. But it never ran. Soon we could see the long shadow. And then the shark itself. It was a hammerhead, bigger than we were, much bigger. Perhaps it weighed a thousand pounds. We’d never seen such a fish. Nor had any of the fishermen in the boats.
I had the disquieting thought that this monster shark had caught us. Its ancient head was as broad as the transom of Estes’s skiff. Its dorsal was four feet above the surface and the tail was nearly as high. If the hammerhead had taken hold of the lower unit of the engine or rammed us, the boat would have gone over. It could have eaten one of our thrashing arms or legs in a single bite.
The Last Marlin Page 15