After dinner I brought out two Heinekens. He barely nodded when I handed one to him. He was a kingly man but dirt poor. His house on the hill was falling down around his bed. No job, no refrigerator to keep the fish and a big family to feed. Sometimes his wife Minnie joined us for night fishing. She had a voice like a lullaby. She was as smart as Dick, had borne eleven children and was still foxy, would lift her skirt to show off her shapely legs, and such a smile.
Minnie remained cheerful against the fall. When Dick’s boat had been stolen two years earlier, their lives had changed. He had used the sloop to sail out of the harbor for conch and lobster, to get away from the island for a few hours—the boat had been his freedom. After absorbing this blow, Dick wouldn’t lift a hammer or take an odd job. He sat on the porch reading or looking out to sea until it was time to amble across the baseball field to the bay with his handline. Sometimes Dick would say to Minnie, “Dear, I am living in another world.” She would answer him, “No, you are not. You are living right here.”
Our Porgy Bay dock was a rare fishing spot at night. Dick tossed his line into the current and made memorable catches of big snappers, five- and six-pounders; sometimes a bonefish would grab his bait. He knew just when to lean back and pull on the line with his long arms until the stretch was out of the mono and the hook was set. Occasionally a shark would pull the monofilament line deep into the flesh of Dick’s hand. He wouldn’t let go, didn’t want to give up his line and hook.
When the action grew slack Dick might mention his favorite stories by Poe, Faulkner and Tolstoy. Sometimes he recited Shakespeare in thick, night-crawling Bahamian. I couldn’t make out the words and soon grew impatient. I suppose that I was influenced by his blackness and torn shorts and the smell of sweat and conch slop on his skinny arms. I would try to nudge the conversation back to marlin but Dick played to his own drummer. If I didn’t care to listen, he recited passages to the evening breeze.
In such a place a colonial mentality settles in peacefully like the sweet east wind off the mangroves or the smell of Bimini bread in the morning when smiling little girls bring the warm loaves. I decided that Dick needed to shape up and be more enterprising. I loaned him a cooler and told him if he filled it with mangrove snappers there would be enough to feed his family and also some left to sell. Dick didn’t get the point or he didn’t care. He liked fishing, but keeping them was a problem he didn’t want to take on. The Davis family had no refrigerator and it wasn’t in his character to ask favors of neighbors. Also, late at night Dick had no interest in cleaning fish. After catching a bunch he might gut one or two for the morning, maybe. He just wanted to go to bed and to hell with the fish. Many times he left plump snappers for the dogs. Around Porgy Bay, Dick was dismissed as the fool on the hill.
One evening a couple miles in front of the harbor mouth I came across a school of dolphin taking shade beneath a long floating board. We trolled up fourteen of them. Running back to the island at dusk I couldn’t wait to show our catch to Dick, our best yet on Bimini. Bonnie and I would keep one or two and the rest would feed the Davis family for a couple of weeks or Dick could sell some to his neighbors. I was swept up by my own largesse. By the time we got tied up, it was after dark and I felt let down that Dick wasn’t fishing on the dock with his handline.
I tossed the dolphin up on the planks and hosed her down. Then I ambled up the hill, slapping mosquitoes. The Davis house was a wreck, its porch buckled, window frames falling apart. I called from outside for Dick to come down to the dock to help with the fish, he could have most of them for Minnie and the kids.
Dick had already taken a bath and was lying on his clean sheets. Even if they didn’t have a dollar, Minnie always had clean sheets on the beds. Dick muttered something that I couldn’t make out. I was hungry and impatient to give Dick the fish. I knew Minnie could hear that in my voice and she spoke to him sharply and eventually pushed him out the door.
Dick walked behind me, oozing blackness, and by the time we got to the dock, he was muttering but not to me. But it was about me and I didn’t like the sound of it. I kept turning around to see if he had something in his hand.
The dolphin were laid out on the dock pretty as a picture, the smallest one maybe five pounds, the largest about ten or twelve. Dick ambled up to the fish, muttering and nodding his head righteously. Then with a skinny leg he kicked all fourteen dolphin off the dock. I was too stunned to say a word. Underneath the shallow water the fish glowed iridescent. I thought about getting a gaff, but the tide was running too fast and in a minute they were all gone, tumbling back out toward the harbor mouth.
Except for Dick Davis the several dozen souls in Porgy Bay seemed at peace with their rustic lives, wedged between the blue ocean and the mangroves. A few young men occupied themselves casting from the shore for small bonefish to sell for bait and rustled the bushes at night for land crabs to fatten up in crawls. Crabs and rice was a Porgy Bay specialty. Charlie Rolle manufactured sandy cinder blocks with his strong boys who listened to his every autocratic word; they didn’t desire separate lives and would apparently haul blocks into their old age. Reverend Ellis employed local children to collect fiddler crabs, paid them a nickel or a dime depending on the size of the crab, and sent crates of them to Miami for research. Minnie washed our clothes and sang sweet songs while she steamed our groupers.
Porgy Bay was pristine, a world away from Bayley Town and Alicetown down the road where natives longed for the bright lights and bourgeois homes of Miami and the young men coveted gold jewelry and speedboats and mimicked the strut and slang of rich adolescents who visited the island on yachts tied up at Brown’s Marina or the Game Club.
Thirty yards north of us on the end of a tiny dock there was a beat-up thirty-two-foot Pacemaker, a top-heavy white whale with weary engines. She was too big for Porgy Bay; there wasn’t even room to turn her around in the channel. Craig Tenant lived on the Pacemaker, reading books, sometimes trading books with Dick Davis and taking Judy Hammond fishing when she visited the island every few weeks with her six-year-old daughter. She owned the rundown boat and rented a little cottage only a few yards from ours. On the walls of her living room were photos of her father and mother in the late forties, when they had been members of the exclusive Cat Cay Club. In the photos, her mother, once the winner of a beauty pageant, seemed regal by comparison with Judy. Her parents had owned a fancy fishing boat, and Judy had watched as a kid as they landed marlin and bluefins in the sumptuous company of Vanderbilts and Rockefellers, who were fellow members of the private island resort just down the Turtle Rocks from Bimini. On a shoestring budget, Judy was trying to re-create this romantic earlier time with skinny, snaggletoothed Craig as her captain in Porgy Bay.
Craig was the antimarlin captain. He loved the sea but didn’t care how the baits were riding. He rarely looked astern and wouldn’t have noticed if his ballyhoos were cleaned off the hooks by barracudas. Craig would have been happy trolling without hooks; the absurdity would have appealed to him much more than catching fish. In the year and a half that Judy fished with Craig, they never caught one marlin. I don’t think they even hooked one. They got drunk on the boat and fucked, and Judy, middle-aged and unhappy in marriage, found some romance in her life with Craig.
When Judy was off the island Craig made a few bucks as an engine mechanic. He worked on the rusted, oil-seeping engines of conch fishermen, engines that were far beyond saving. He got them going again, pirating parts from abandoned engine blocks he found on the beach and with leader wire and hooks. He snickered at the idea of ordering new parts, no challenge. One time my new Johnson was running rough and I asked him to take a look at it. When I came back a few hours later, he had taken the entire engine apart to the last washer and had thrown all of its cylinders, screws and gaskets into a bucket of black oil. I was dismayed and asked him if he could put it back together without a handbook, which I didn’t have, and he answered, “I don’t know.” Craig loved to torment me.
Many nights h
e would go to the Compleat Angler to drink with his best friend, Ozzie Brown. Before leaving for the bar Craig sat in a corner of our place drinking while Bonnie and I tried to coax him to have dinner. He didn’t like to ruin a good drinking night with food.
Craig had come to Bimini from a little town on the Gulf Coast of Florida where he had been running a small marina, but he had grown bored and restless. Life had gone flat for Craig ever since the war. He had flown missions over North Vietnam listening on the radio and cracking enemy codes. He claimed that he was never afraid flying these missions, rather the work had made him feel alive and needed. He had made his way to Porgy Bay, of all places, hoping to find a niche and something that might excite him. He would find it soon enough.
Some nights Bonnie and Craig would agree that my passion for trolling was off the wall. They were uneasy allies—both of them tweaking me, but at the same time, I think, envying my conviction. Bonnie was absorbing this new Fred—night terrors suddenly traded for the all-consuming sea hunt. She wasn’t sure how she felt about fishing. She feared the ocean, but every afternoon when we left the dock in Porgy Bay she fell into the pleasant rhythms of the boat. Despite herself she became excited when fish were striking the baits. She would always fish this way, her passion pushing aside reticence.
Toward the end of the summer Bonnie and I were fishing to the north so far out that Bimini was only a small dab on the horizon. There were no other boats. It was overcast and hard to tell where the gray ocean ended and the sky began. In late August the water was nearly always hot and flat and I trolled farther offshore hoping to find fish in a cool current. We were talking about plans for the fall when Bonnie’s jaw dropped.
When I looked astern the fish was on top of us, not twenty feet from the transom and right behind the big mackerel on the flat line. It was a huge marlin, shoulders lifted out of the water and coming right at us with a long spear shaking in the air, showing neon blue along its whole surging length, lighting the dead ocean with color. Then an explosion of water when it grabbed the bait and turned. I hadn’t noticed that Bonnie had already taken the rod. No need for any dropback. The marlin had hooked itself. Bonnie was attached, her bent legs braced against the drag while the big fish raced for Bimini like a galloping horse. Bonnie tossed me a look: What now?
We had a flimsy fighting chair mounted in the bow on top of the fish box. We struggled up there with my arm around her waist and when she was seated I got back to the controls and spun the twenty-footer around and began chasing the line through the water. The marlin was jumping so far away, maybe a thousand feet off, hard to believe it was the same fish. I urged her to wind the slack. Wind, Bonnie, wind, wind. It is hard to wind a thousand feet of line with a five-hundred-pound fish on the end. Bonnie was sweating and her arm hurt. She reached across herself and cranked with her left arm. She kept winding and I followed the line but with its big belly dragging through the water we were headed in a different direction from where the marlin was jumping; I worried that our fish had broken off.
After twenty-five minutes the fish was about a hundred feet ahead of us, swimming on the surface with its dorsal and tail out. It wasn’t pulling hard, just swimming along. I kept running up the line and Bonnie took in the slack. With the long belly out of the water it wasn’t so hard to crank. We were closing the distance. The fish was coming easy. Too easy, I thought, recalling how difficult it had been to take a foot of line in the past when I was on the rod. I felt for my cloth gloves on a little shelf below the steering wheel. We were no more than fifty feet away. The marlin weighed more than five hundred pounds and was maybe twelve feet long. It wasn’t struggling. I hadn’t realized before but coming bow first at the fish, instead of backing down as we did on the big Ebb Tide, the white water and vibration of the propeller didn’t agitate the marlin and it swam toward the bow without fight. Bonnie wasn’t pulling on the marlin so much as reeling in slack. The leader wire was no more than ten or twelve feet away. This was our first fish and I wanted to put it in the boat. I never stopped to consider how Bonnie and I would ever get such a heavy fish into the boat. I slipped on my gloves and threw the engine into neutral. I slid up toward Bonnie and reached for the leader to wire the fish as Dick Davis had shown me on the dock using his handline.
Then I began to think a little: I’d never wired a big fish before. What if it started to sprint off? Dick had told me to wrap the wire around my hands three times. But maybe Dick wasn’t the greatest authority. Looking at that marlin I felt timid and decided only to take a single wrap on the wire, even if it meant that the leader would slip a little through my hands and I couldn’t pull with my full strength.
But with our boat still in the water, it wasn’t necessary to pull hard. The marlin came toward me like a grazing animal. It nestled along the white fiberglass. Its whole length was lying alongside the boat like the shark off Islamorada, but this was not a sick or old creature. The marlin was livid with radiant colors, “green,” as captains refer to a fish that hasn’t yet played itself out. I was holding a tiger by the tail.
I told Bonnie to set her rod on the deck and pick up the flying gaff. While she struggled to pull the heavy gaff off its bracket, I couldn’t decide if the rope from its detachable stainless head should be secured to a stern cleat or if Bonnie should hold the rope in her hand. One time I had heard of a flying gaff head tearing loose from a fish and coming back at the deckhands like a lethal boomerang, so I decided against the cleat. Bonnie would have to hold on to the rope. Then I told her to gaff the marlin.
Dad’s gaff must have weighed thirty pounds and it was hard for her to lift. Bonnie looked fierce straining to hold the gaff above her head as if she were splitting logs with an ax, but her swipe missed the marlin completely, though it was only an arm’s length away. She wasn’t used to the weight and also she wasn’t sure how to put it in. We’d never practiced with the flying gaff. Now the fish was beginning to pull on the wire and I told her to try again, quickly, and at that very moment, as she plunged the gaff into the water, I noticed that the big point at the end of the gaff was buried in a large round cork. Dad had put it there so we wouldn’t impale ourselves walking around the little boat. That cork may have saved our lives. As I called out for her to take the cork off, Bonnie pulled the sheathed gaff into the underside of the marlin’s shoulder.
Then from a near standstill the marlin came out of the water right in front of our faces. I could have touched the whole rising length with my hand and I looked straight at his eye as it passed my own. He fell back, tail slapping the edge of the gunwale, just missing the cockpit by inches. His head came out again a couple of feet away, huge. The marlin fell onto its side, gathered momentum and came out greyhounding toward the island. The single wrapped leader slipped off my hands unnoticed. The eighty-pound-test line snapped like thread.
We sat there looking at one another. We shouldn’t have tried to handle the marlin from a still boat. We would soon learn that to control a hot fish on the wire you need forward movement from the boat. If Bonnie had gaffed the marlin, it could have yanked her over or come back at us while we were dead in the water with little freeboard, only a couple of feet between the ocean and the Ebb Tide’s gunwale, nowhere to hide.
During our summers fishing out of Porgy Bay, Bonnie was never afraid during tense moments on the boat. Hurricanes and big fish whetted her appetite for adventure. Only in New York, when I began making plans for our next fishing trip, would she express her fears about the ocean. I would remind her how beautiful it had been and how much she had enjoyed our days out on the boat. I would reassure her that I was gradually learning more about being a skipper and that we wouldn’t die at sea. She would look at me suspiciously while I kept persuading until eventually I could feel her relax. Gulf Stream trepidations and gentle persuading became our pre-summertime ritual.
New Journalism
AFTER DAD HAD ACCEPTED MY CAREER CHOICE, A TACIT ARRANGEMENT had settled between us that while he prospered on the business front
in Boston, I would smartly move ahead with my writing in New York. Then when we got together at some swanky restaurant, we would compare notes over cold shrimps and bottles of beer. But I worried about holding up my end. In the rush of my young adulthood I felt as though I must be a great writer, but I didn’t know how. I didn’t seem to have any plots. I sweated over my pages for a story line but nothing came besides dark vignettes about my family that were torture to put on the page and had subjunctives and past participles sticking every which way like wobbly elbows. How can you write stories without plots? Where was the fiction I had always wanted to write? Mother said to me, Freddy, you just lack imagination, as if this held the ready answer. She plied me with the offbeat writing of her friends Jonas Mekas, R. J. Arden and Gregory Corso, but then suddenly switched gears and suggested, instead of avant-garde stories, I should write with Tolstoy’s sweeping vision—thanks, Mom—and then she insisted that I was blocked because I did not pay proper attention to the movement of the stars and the key numbers that guide our lives. She kept me abreast of the days of the month to stay indoors working and the days when I should venture out into the world. There were other hellish days that were not suited for either writing or going out of the apartment. When I became annoyed with her magical thinking, Mother would sigh, I was no visionary.
While Mother yawned over my stories, my father had become the proud champion of my literary success, bragging to electrical contractors, beefy union guys, favorite cigarette girls, nurses at the Clinic, wholesale bait proprietors who sold us chum, and Diran. I couldn’t mention my failures to Dad. I couldn’t think of a goddamned plot, but I needed writing to maintain my independence. Even while I continued to admire his wheeling and dealing and brave push for the summit, I worried that if I gave myself to him on more than occasional weekends, our partnership would cease and I would fall into the black bilge of his rage and scorn.
The Last Marlin Page 19