The Last Marlin

by Waitzkin, Fred;

  I’ll Be Seeing You

  MY BROTHER BILL DIED AT THIRTY-SIX. SOON AFTER THAT, STELLA left New York and moved into a small house on Martha’s Vineyard. She rarely saw people. On cold winter days my mother would bring a small folding chair to South Beach, where she had spread Bill’s ashes. She mourned for ten years. I didn’t think that she would survive.

  Today she lives alone in her house on Music Street in West Tisbury. She spends her days painting and sculpting, and much of the time she won’t tolerate visitors. But when I’m on the island and she is in the mood for company, we have wonderful evenings—both of us greedy for conversation and good jazz. She even lets me kiss her cheek and give her a big hug when I’m leaving—she finds these moments amusing. Occasionally we still argue about Abe, and Mother says to me, “But you know, you turned out more like me than him.”

  Sometimes when I ask her about events that have gone hazy involving my father or Bill, Stella can’t remember. She draws a blank. This alarms me. Who is left to remember? The greatest are forgotten in a minute, it seems, salesmen and artists alike. My whole life I’ve had trouble with this.

  There are a few guys who play jazz on the island, and Stella keeps track of where they are appearing and on what nights. These fellows are always touched when we show up to hear them play Horace Silver, Coltrane and Thelonious Monk selections. More than once Mom and I have been the only diners in the restaurant.

  One winter evening there were a half-dozen of us in Louis’s Italian restaurant, across from the supermarket in Vineyard Haven, eating spaghetti and tapping to the music of pianist John Alaimo, and bass player Jimmy B. They got big hands for “Mysterioso” and “Song for My Father,” and then John had us standing and cheering for his rollicking version of Herbie Hancock’s “Watermelon Man.” What a great night of music—an evening that flies in the face of mutability.

  Jimmy B., a big burly guy, a mover by day, came over to our table and we started talking about jazz and somehow got on to comparing favorite trumpet players. I mentioned Chet Baker and that both of my children are crazy about Miles Davis, and Jimmy, very opinionated about his music, shook his head as if to say, Nice, but surely not the greatest. After a pause he said, “The best I’ve ever heard on the trumpet was Tony Fruscella.” Mother and I flashed our biggest I’ve-seen-a-ghost expressions. To us, Tony was an icon of loss, a trumpet player long covered over by time. “Come on. I’ll show you,” said Jimmy B.

  We walked outside. It was snowing and icing, frigid, absolutely the worst weather. I was afraid my mother would fall and break her hip. Jimmy B. hustled his bass into the back of his tiny station wagon. It didn’t fit all the way in, so he traveled to gigs around the island with the rear window open, even in blizzard conditions. It felt like a deep freeze in the car. Mother’s old coat had no buttons and I tried to hold it closed for her. Jimmy fiddled in his glove compartment for the tape he wanted. “Here it is. I want you to hear this cut,” he said. The little speakers crackled and then played clearly for Tony Fruscella’s version of “I’ll Be Seeing You” with Red Mitchell’s vocal laid on top describing Tony’s rough life. We were shaking in the cold and listening to Tony’s sad trumpet refrain. It was the first time that Mother and I had ever heard the recording—we didn’t know it even existed or that anyone listened anymore to Tony Fruscella’s music. Mother, almost eighty, was nodding like a hipster. “No one plays the horn better than that,” said Jimmy B. “That’s as good as it gets.”

  Pushing South

  DURING THE NINETIES THERE HAS BEEN MUCH ATTENTION GIVEN to the devastation of worldwide populations of both pelagic and bottom-feeding fish. Marine scientists have predicted a Ashless ocean unless commercial harvesting is severely limited. And yet during this crisis time sportsmen have witnessed miracles of abundance that are almost without precedent. For example, in 1993, it was discovered that numerous marlin over a thousand pounds were in residence in front of the small island of Madeira in the eastern Atlantic. Boats and crews flocked to the island at considerable expense, and hooking “granders,” thousand-pound marlin, became commonplace. World records were shattered. No one had ever heard of so many huge marlin gathering in just a few acres of ocean, and fishermen wanted to believe that this surfeit was evidence of a great revival of the world’s marlin population. However, two years later the big marlin vanished from Madeira.

  Similarly, in the winter of 1993 off Hatteras, North Carolina, there was an astonishing and inexplicable profusion of medium-sized bluefin tuna—three- to-five-hundred-pounders—as if the earth had been tilted and most of the endangered tuna stock had poured into this small stretch of ocean. Fishermen traveled to Hatteras with the expectation of battling thirty or even forty giant bluefins in a single day—such feats had never taken place in all of game fishing history. This sudden wealth of hefty tuna incited contentious political debate between commercial fishermen and sportsmen about the quantities of tuna each group should be allowed to keep each season, as though passion and legislation conferred permanence; but soon enough most of the tuna were gone from Hatteras.

  These ephemeral pockets of abundance have had a powerful effect upon sport fishermen. The wealthiest have built larger and more expensive boats than ever before—virtual ships—that can sustain fishing expeditions on distant oceans. When there is word that big fish have been discovered off the Canary Islands, Costa Rica or in the Coral Sea, boats with cruising range to make the trip cast off. Trolling in this twilight is uniquely compelling; there is still time.

  In August 1998, we are pulling lures twenty miles east of Eleuthera Island, headed south. There is no land in sight but a mile or two ahead of the Hatteras there are a few birds on the horizon or at least I think so. I squint my eyes trying to bring the birds into focus. I’m nervous and excited. We haven’t caught a good fish all summer, but I like this oily calm stretch of gray water between Eleuthera and Little San Salvador. There is current running and I have that feeling, my skin tingling, a kind of whole body intuition—I’m feeling big fish, tuna or marlin. But as I stare ahead I begin to feel less confident. More and more I’ve been predicting big strikes and then nothing comes up behind the baits. I’m not sure about the birds, dammit.

  For the last few years I have been seeing birds in my head whenever I stare at the horizon, as if a mural of working seabirds has become imprinted in my brain. It is something more perverse than deteriorating eyesight; I never see working birds in front of office buildings or even when I’m walking along the Hudson River in the evening. And it’s even worse. When the birds are real I don’t notice them. My twenty-one-year-old son, Josh, bounds up the ladder in two athletic steps, and says impatiently, “Dad, you see the birds over there to the port, a couple of hundred yards off? Look, will you!” And I nod to him, got ’em, and turn the wheel squinting to see the birds. “Not there, Dad,” Josh says, grabbing the wheel and turning sharply until the bow comes around another thirty degrees and he asks again, “Can you see the birds?” I nod yes. But I still can’t see the damn birds. “Okay, keep steering this way. You’ll see them. There’s a lot of birds in front of you.”

  I am looking at these birds, or whatever, way ahead of the Ebb Tide, as we troll toward Little San Salvador. At this speed it will take the old Hatteras three more hours to reach the uninhabited island, one of my favorite places. Little San Salvador is tiny, with a white, perfectly made half-moon beach, no litter, no buildings, no people, good holding for the anchor, lovely reefs for snorkeling, and the island affords a natural lee for the prevailing southeast wind this time of year. Usually when we pull into the lagoon there are no other boats anchored. It is way off the beaten track. Sleeping in this anchorage is exquisitely restful. I dream about this place.

  The birds are still fluttering in the distance, no change to speak of, and by now I’m pretty sure they are my own wispy flock. Oddly enough, this takes the pressure off. The fishing has been slow all summer, but trolling is its own reward, peaceful and prescient. As long as we are covering g
round with the lures, we could raise anything. Hooking up can be anticlimatic, even boring. But I should add that this eastern trolling spirit makes my son impatient and he sometimes accuses me of steering away from fish.

  Josh is seated below on the bait freezer watching the lures in the wake, as I did, religiously, on my dad’s boat. Josh is our deckhand, fast and savvy. He has great eyes and is the only one on the Ebb Tide strong enough to wire a big fish and wrestle it aboard. He could make a career of being a mate except that he is a professional chess player, needs to study a lot and often travels abroad to play. Josh loves to fish but worries that the time he gives us on the boat in the summer is costing him.

  Katya, my thirteen-year-old daughter, is in the salon painting her nails black, tapping her foot, listening to Fiona Apple through her earphones and sometimes singing along, her voice husky with decadence. She is in another world. I often wonder what Katya is thinking about. She won’t tell me. She scribbles in her journal and snaps it closed when I walk past. Josh used to tell me everything, but with Katya it’s a guessing game. She has wandered into adolescence with the most lovely musing smile, and I already miss her terribly.

  Even with reservations about killing fish, Katya has become a good angler. In fact, on our crack fishing team, Katya is the angler. Josh is the deckhand. Bonnie navigates. I steer the boat and use my wisdom and guile to guide us to fish—the big game captain fantasy persists against the logic of the time.

  There has been a change. The flock has thickened and turned black, swung in our direction, so many goddamn birds a quarter-mile ahead that I am suddenly sapped of confidence. I keep squinting and trying to clear my head.

  “Bonnie, would you please take a look ahead and tell me if you see what I see?”

  “Not now.” Bonnie is seated beside me on the bridge, her head in a thick novel. I nudge her, but she won’t look up. At fifty-four Bonnie will only come on the boat if I’m willing to accept her terms. She is semiretired from fishing and refuses to stare at the baits behind the boat—considers it a waste of her time and rarely picks up a rod. She doesn’t reminisce about the long frenetic days in the cockpit when she won the Bimini Native Tournament an unheard-of three times in four years. And I know she could still fish with the old zest if she wanted to. This tension exists between us—that she doesn’t want to anymore. But Bonnie has trained me to take what I can get.

  “Honey, are those birds? You just wouldn’t believe how many birds I see.”

  “Ah huh.” She won’t look up from the book.

  “Hey Dad, way to go!” Josh calls from below with a tremendous grin. He is standing on the gunwale and pointing ahead of the boat where the sky is congested with diving, hovering, yapping birds.

  I smirk back at Josh and nod as if I knew it all along. I spotted the birds miles away and have been stalking for twenty minutes like the great Ansil Saunders. It actually feels cold when we enter this dark aviary. I see a big tuna come out of the water, then more and more tuna, hundred-pounders bounding along, hundreds of hundred-pounders. Such beautiful big fish with black backs traced with golden yellow. We haven’t been able to find one all summer. They are all here off the southern tip of Eleuthera, in gray water, the sky stormy with birds.

  Now the tuna are ripping through schools of bait fish and the birds are diving into the mix, racing off with tidbits. Brown boobies with broad wings are wheeling only inches from the surface. I suspect that there are marlin here as well, feeding below the tuna, and certainly big sharks and probably wahoo. Bonnie is standing now, looking over this great opulence, shaking her head. You could walk across the broad backs of tuna, acres of tuna.

  “Katya, Katya,” Josh is bellowing like a foghorn for his sister. “Kaatyaaaa.” He smacks the bulkhead with his fist.

  Katya comes bolting through the door, earphones dangling from her neck, trying to keep her wet black nails off the varnish.

  “Look at the birds!” he shrieks.

  Katya rolls her eyes, you called me outside for birds. Give me a break. I’m busy, don’t you know. She tosses her head and goes back below, her teenaged musings much larger than some birds or the unassailable purpose of our trip to this remote patch of ocean with no land in sight, no friends, no social life. Birds! Please.

  I see the fish come up behind the flatline bait. It looks like an ox, big, dark and broad, big black tuna, as my friend James Rolle says, it’s coming hard at the lure, grabs the plastic and heads for New York.

  “Katya, Kaaatyaaaaa!!!” Josh is screaming so loud the air is shaking and again she charges through the door, blowing on her nails, the fifty-pound-test rod in the holder bent nearly in half, line pouring off.

  “Get in the goddamned chair. What’s wrong with you? I told you to get out here. First time we’ve seen fish—”

  “What’s your problem, Josh,” she says, facing off with her brother while line empties from the reel.

  “Katya, I fuckin’ told you—”

  “You told me to look at the birds, Josh.”

  “Katya, look at what you’re doing,” he says, laughing in disbelief. We’re losing this fish and Katya’s asserting herself. It’s now a quarter mile behind the boat and steaming. The rod between Katya’s legs is bucking with big fish power.

  “Don’t talk to me in that voice, Mr. Big Shot.”

  “Jesus Christ, reel, Katya.”

  “How can I reel?”

  She’s right. Line is still running off. What a fish. Katya is holding the rod with both of her hands while Josh puts the kidney harness around her back. There is too much line off the reel to turn the boat around. We’d probably lose the rest of the line from the spool if I tried this maneuver. I start to back down on the tuna. One engine in reverse, and then the other, to keep the line right behind the transom—I hope the transmission stays together. The fish is no longer running and Katya is pushing hard against the footrest, leaning back against the fish and then swinging down and taking up slack line, rocking and reeling, while I back the boat and water splashes over the transom onto my daughter’s shapely brown legs.

  There’s a lot of line out. I hope we don’t get cut off by sharks. There must be dozens of big sharks here with all of these tuna. Fishing lust has taken over and we don’t want to lose it. Bonnie, Josh and I are thinking about the sharks. Katya is working very hard. Sweating and hauling back. If the sharks hit, all she’ll bring up will be lips and gills. It is amazing how fast they devour a big tuna.

  The birds are everywhere. Yapping, flapping around the outriggers, diving into the water on both sides of the boat. Katya is pulling. The physicality intrigues her and she just goes for it, hauls back against the fish, her legs straining, reels down with both hands. She flat out brings it. Josh grouses a little but he is proud of his sister. The tuna are jumping on all sides of us, big fish, hundred-pounders. After a thousand miles of empty ocean you could dive in and grab one.

  Bonnie is standing in the stern holding a long gaff. She’s hooked also, pagan, wants big tuna in the boat. I’m backing down. Josh is standing hip to hip with his mother, getting set to grab the leader wire. A big tuna like this pulls hard, twice as hard as a marlin the same size. I know he’s a little nervous. He’s been playing chess, not taking double wraps on big tuna. Katya has the double line on the reel and pushes the drag up all the way. Don’t break the line, I say to myself. Katya is pulling with all of her strength, not letting line slip off the reel. And then I see the sharks. Big sharks. Three of them, each about twelve feet long. They are closing on the tuna.

  “We got to take it now, guys. They are coming. Right now.”

  I am sick about the sharks. Josh reaches out as far as he can and grabs the wire. I ease the boat ahead so we don’t lose the fish in the props. Josh is pulling on the wire with both arms, his legs flexed and straining and the sharks are coming hard, maybe twenty feet behind the tuna, which has its head down, pulling for the bottom against Josh’s strength. An arm wrestle is what it is.

  “Take him now, Jo
sh, or break him off.”

  Josh pulls with all his strength and the tuna yields, rises into the wash, right alongside. I can’t see the sharks in the white water, but they are right below, a few feet away.

  Bonnie strikes with the gaff—no cork on the end of this one. She’s got the tuna—or it has her. She can’t lift it an inch and grabs for the gunwale with one hand to stay in the boat. Josh grabs his mother’s wrist and then reaches for the gaff and hauls the tuna half out. Then he lifts with everything he’s got, gets the head over the transom and then Bonnie and Josh pull once together and it falls into the boat. It’s a big yellowfin tuna, a hundred fifty pounds or more, the largest we have ever caught.

  From the bridge I can see the sharks lingering behind the transom. No more menace, just big creatures. The tuna is beating on the white fiberglass deck, blood splattering everywhere, all over Katya’s legs and Bonnie’s white shirt. Josh tackles the tuna and covers its eyes with his hands, leans against it. Almost immediately the fish is quiet and Josh holds this pose until the little yellow dorsal fins stop quivering.

  We are drifting in a soft, oily swell and all around the boat the birds are wheeling and flying through the riggers, the tuna are jumping. A few years ago we would have put the lines right out and caught another fish or trolled around the edge of the school for a marlin; but this isn’t even an issue. One tuna is enough. The rules have changed.