“Permission to come aboard,” I called out, a good fellow.
Champ clomped up to midships, brandishing a wrench which he pointed at my stomach. We were several feet above him on the dock. “You like to fish?” he said, examining my pole with an unconcealed lack of esteem.
“You like to breathe?” I answered back.
“I don’t give a damn about breathing,” Champ said, squaring his shoulders. “I like to fish.”
We gathered in the wheelhouse and stowed the gear and provisions. The short-wave radio buzzed nonstop, spoke to us in tongues. Champ rammed a tape, an untalented imitation of fifties rock and roll, into a cassette player mounted above the chart table. The music was so loud I couldn’t see. Lindy plopped down on the bare blue-striped mattress in the lower bunk, her feet bouncing to the concussive rhythm. We were a party that had not yet found its mood though anticipation waxed second by second toward the exhilarated moment of leave-taking. A speedboat passed in the channel beyond our berth, transmitting a pattern of waves toward us that nudged and tickled Sea-Bop-A-Baby. My blood paced quickly in a happier heart, heated by rum Champ had harvested from an unpainted plywood cupboard in the narrow galley. I turned the music down so I could speak.
“I hear this is a seagoing vessel,” I said to Champ.
“Those who say she is are not wrong.”
“Well,” I piped, “let’s plow the dreadful deeps. Toot out around the yonder.”
“Aye,” he answered. “Prepare to blow port.”
Lindy heard the two of us jawing this way and seemed pleased, I suppose, though I make no claim to reading her right. For all her transformations, she didn’t act the way she looked, at least in my presence, and didn’t look the way I thought of her.
Champ opened the single door inside the pilothouse and descended the stairs to the engine room. Out on deck Lindy helped me replace the heavy hatchcovers which we then tarped to keep any maverick sea from bathing the hold. Below deck the big diesel cranked like a helicopter. A black cloud puffed out of the stack that impaled the wheelhouse, followed at intervals by a steady emission of round balls of smoke. The steel deck vibrated under our feet. Champ’s head appeared out the port window, ordering me to cast off the lines. We fell away from the dock in slow motion, opalescent mud churned in the blue space widening between us and land. Then we were in deeper water, clear of pilings and other craft, tracing the channel with vigilance out through the calm flats.
Lindy and I took position in the bow, shoulder to shoulder, our arms resting on the flaked surface of the bulwarks, the water below us divided with a gliding hiss. Off starboard we passed the port of Miami, the wharves crammed with big tankers and cruise liners like captured factories. Behind us the skyline of the city radiated in the sun, a fantast’s vision, a hummock where bears once pawed the sand for turtle eggs. We entered Government Cut. On the north side of the breakwater spray exploded skyward, its white fingers suspended and then crashing down, setting pelicans to flight. I saw the last channel marker ahead of us, the clang of its bell intensifying as we approached—bong bong do you know what you’re doing? Bong Bong you’re on your own BONG BONG have faith have faith. The water was darker but no less translucent, the mouth of the cut bleached with whitecaps. We passed from shelter into the fluid gleaming hill country of the seas, the bow where we stood a bastion above the almighty sweep of the Atlantic, rising and falling as the ship cantered onward, an old sow lunging again and again for the trough.
“Wonderful,” I shouted. I turned to Lindy with a wide grin. “Do you have a better word? I want a better word.”
“Yes,” she said. “Reckless.” She watched me for a time behind her sunglasses before she drew them down an inch and allowed her eyes to linger with mine. “What do we do now?”
I didn’t like her attitude, I didn’t like the slate-green reproach on her face. “We jig atop the pilothouse,” I said with an exasperated flourish of my hand, “while your Champ Ransome chauffeurs us to New Guinea. We get drunk and fall overboard, never to be seen again. What do you mean, what do we do? Isn’t this enough?”
As I finished my lecture Sea-Bop-A-Baby dipped with a force that bent our knees. A fan of water spread at eye level, held utterly still for a second, close enough to touch, broken glass in unreal suspension. Then it swashed down onto our heads, draining through Lindy’s baseball cap.
“Oh, ugh! God,” Lindy complained, flapping her arms uselessly. “I’m all wet. I’m going back and sit with Champ out of the glare.”
She walked the lifeline aft to the wheelhouse. Straight on, its construction resembled an old-fashioned gunner’s turret, the corners beveled off octagonally, ringed with windows tinted green like Coke bottles. Champ Ransome was a half shadow behind the glass, mastering the wheel, a beer in one hand. Strung between the staff and boom of the cargo crane was a hammock. I stretched open its edges and climbed into it, elementally secure in its hug, a friend to the world. I dozed off and awoke with Lindy standing watch over me, a sad and tender smile on her lips. I smiled back, in love. The wave had washed out her spikes. She was Peter Pan. A jungle version in a one-piece, one strap, leopardskin bathing suit.
“You look pretty,” I said, swaying with the roll of the ship.
“That’s the first nice thing you’ve said to me in ages.”
“Is that right. I’m sorry.”
“That’s right,” she sulked. “And you ought to be.”
I dragged her down into the hammock and kissed her. “Why aren’t you having fun?” I asked.
Her teeth nipped into the flesh of my shoulder. The shell earrings she wore scratched my neck. “Oh, I am,” she said quietly. “Really.”
“It will be better on our own boat,” I assured her. “Much much better. Sea-Bop-A-Baby is like taking a gymnasium out on the ocean.”
She pushed herself up off my chest. “Hey,” she said. “Champ wants you back there. I think something’s wrong.”
We lurched and yawed, skating over a sequence of hard knolls that were in opposition to the easy cadence the ship had settled into, renegade thoughts bombarding the flow of meditation. Champ was spread-eagled at the helm, throwing the wheel left and right like a test driver. His bandanna was soaked in perspiration but he seemed well placed to the task. He had a brave start on a collection of empty beer cans along the window ledges.
“What’s wrong?” I said, stepping through the doorway.
“Nothing.” He grunted as he adjusted the wheel to the buck of a wave. I went to the cooler and opened a beer. On the radar screen the fading shore was an outline of foxfire. “I’m going below to have a look-see,” he reported. “Take the wheel.”
Had I taken some long beast by the horns and tried to push it backward through an imaginary gate, the job would have been no different. The bow overswung to the north, overswung to the south, overswung to the north again as I steered twenty degrees past our heading in each direction until I got used to the slack in the linkage. This was Champ’s idea of funny.
“Told you,” he laughed hoarsely. “She’s a straying bitch.”
I steered for an hour while Champ played below and, let me tell you, it’s a fine feeling to captain a ship, a liberation to power it over the depths, surely a magic, like flight. The horizon writhes. You go on and on. The horizon writhes, now brassed with daybreak, now colorless and baleful with the coming of night, and the distance irons out in your wake.
I followed the compass due east. Lindy, a slender pod, hung in the hammock in possession of a magazine. There was a change in the water ahead, a friction, like the line where a meadow ends and the scrub takes over. This was the Gulf Stream pouring northward through the Florida Straits, a wilder current than the one we hitched. Out there beyond the stream, unseen, were the islands, some as fragrant as cardamom, some with histories hidden like fat beneath a girdle, some as crummy as headaches, some with treasure so abundant it had no value, some only phantasms, some with the power to close on you like Ahab’s whale. I wanted to disc
over each of them, to drive Lindy there on the wind. I never imagined such places, she’d say.
For its greeting the Gulf Stream echoed thunder into us. The old sow dug her snout into the ocean and shook, tossing blue water over the deck that flooded under Lindy and out the scuppers. Champ emerged from the belly of the ship, a man at home with grime and knuckle-busting. He clomped on deck and perched over the rail, his nose inches away from the highest rising swells. He clomped back in.
“Stay out of the stream,” he said in passing. The machinery roared when he reopened the engine room door.
“What’s up?” I yelled out.
“Not much,” he said before disappearing again. “Bilge pump.” He pointed toward Cuba. “Fall off to the south. Take it easy.”
I jacked the wheel just as Lindy timed her dash back to the cabin. The change of direction threw her across the room in a stagger.
“What is going on?” she inquired breathlessly, grabbing my waist for support. “I’m getting sick.”
“We’re leveling off for the cocktail hour,” I explained. “Eat one of those sandwiches. It’ll settle your stomach.”
She chewed a few bites and threw up out the lowered port window.
“Feel better now?”
“No.”
“You will,” I promised. I dropped the throttle one-third.
She crawled into the bottom bunk and lay on her stomach, moaning piteously, her arms draped over her head. Champ came up wiping his hands on a dirty rag, every crease in his skin penciled black.
“What’s wrong with her?” he said.
“She feels bad.”
“Hunh. Can’t have that.” But Champ did not come to Lindy’s aid. He forgot about her immediately and opened another beer, wolfed down one of the sandwiches.
“How’s that bilge pump?”
“What?” he said, distracted. He peered out the windows in each direction. “Where are we? You know?”
I tapped the chart in front of me. “About three miles northeast of Eliot Key.”
“Yeah?” he said, not willing to commit himself to this information. He squinted at the water, tipped his beer can out toward the port bow. “Nice weed line out there.”
“I’ve been looking at it,” I said. “Why don’t you take the helm back?”
“All right,” he said, instinctively stepping forward, wiping mayonnaise on his shorts.
I took a direct path to my tackle box and pole. “I’m going to fish,” I said.
Champ’s eyes bulged. “Fish?” he grumbled as if I had tricked him. “Why, damn you.”
“Take me right to them, pal,” I said, and walked back to the stern. Our wake was a tail of smoky suds, the water we had passed over subdued, as if a gloved hand had smoothed it out. Champ must have fixed the bilge because I could hear it over the side, a mushed, sputtery th-th-th ending in a gurgle each time the ship dug in her heel. The waterline was about four feet down, adding or subtracting two feet with each change in gravity. I tied on a five-inch spoon with a yellow feather and sent it arcing into the air, the line dragging out fifty yards until it dropped the lure under golden patches of sargasso weed shrugged off by the stream, a gleaming irresistible whisk through the shade where dolphin schooled.
The line wasn’t out five minutes before it jerked taut, a false strike that left a faint resistance. I reeled in twenty feet and a clump of grass levitated up, scooning across the surface. I brought it in so I could pick the spoon clean again. Our wake had taken on the aspect of doodling. This was Ransome’s spite, I assumed, a maneuvering that would compel me frequently to adjust the tension on the line. Champ came running back to disprove this theory, swiping the air with his own pole. He saw me reeling in and glared.
“Whatcha got there?” he demanded to know.
“Nothing,” I said. “Weed.”
My poor luck cheered him. “Now we’ll see what’s what. You step back when I start hauling them in.”
“We’ll see about that,” I said. Even square-fingered he could tie a leader with dexterity. He scoffed at my spoon and chose for himself a black and white jitterbug plug that was out in the water before I realized it.
“You won’t catch anything with that,” I said, but I didn’t care to improve on his judgment.
“You ever fished before?” he said. “In the ocean, I mean.” He feigned a rabid concentration as if that would make a difference.
If I took one step backward I could send Champ Ransome overboard with my foot. These impulses are better ignored, the sting of hormones suffered, or you throw yourself into nothing less than war. “Who’s at the helm?” I asked, although I already had the picture.
“Why, who do you think?”
“She’s sick,” I said.
“No, she ain’t. I gave her a pill.”
Champ scouted the vista of sea, rubbing his unshaven cheeks, an angry, underfed osprey. Good-bye, crow. He whipped his pole impetuously on the spur of wishful thinking. He whipped his pole again and spit at his lack of success, looking over at me, his eyes squeezed in an outlaw version of a smile. “She wanted that wheel. I told her she could turn the tub around and head for port.”
“It’s early,” I said.
“It won’t be.” Champ nodded at our crazy wake. “She wants land but she’s running a slalom to get there.”
We both knew that wheel was a lot of trouble. I suppose if I had another minute to think about it I would have reeled in my line and gone to help her. Maybe it was cruel of us to leave her up there by herself. Maybe it wasn’t, since self-sufficiency is a virtue that must be tested. But as soon as Champ shut his mouth, my rod bent double, the drag whirring like a hand-cranked siren. I was occupied thereafter.
“Goddammit,” Champ howled, wounded by my good fortune.
“Slow her down,” I shouted back. The drag continued to burn out and the core of the spool began to appear through the wrap. “I’m out of line. Slow her down.”
“Aw, goddamn,” Champ muttered, gravely disappointed. “All right. Hold on.” He took in his line with great reluctance. I battled the fish against its dive. Champ moseyed forward and I reeled frantically when the engine cut to a purr and the line slackened. Champ jogged right back.
“What is it?” he asked suspiciously. I tugged and reeled, tugged and reeled. Champ answered himself. “I’ll bet it’s a damn barracuda.”
The water broke about a hundred feet out, a metallic flash as sudden as lightning and gone. The energy discharged, the fish spent itself momentarily in a last plunge that brought it straight under the stern. Champ mounted the bulwarks, watching the water like a tomcat. He had outfitted himself on his visit to the wheelhouse, a leather glove on his left hand, an oak billy club clutched in his right. I brought the fish alongside the hull and let it exhaust its fight with a final thrashing.
“That’s a big blue,” Champ announced. His body twitched. “A big chopper blue. Damn.” He tottered over the side and caught the wire leader in his leather paw. “I’ve got her,” he said. “I’ve got her. Look out now.” He yanked the fish with such force that it sailed above our heads and smacked down on the decking behind us. “Look out now,” Champ said with high excitement and fell on the fish, beating it repeatedly on its fat nose with the club. The tailfin quivered violently and then relaxed.
“That’s enough, Champ,” I said. “Let’s get the hook out.” He had battered an eye from its socket and exposed the brain with his hard strokes.
“Jesus,” he said, inhaling deeply. “That’s a nice one.”
“One good rap between the eyes will do it,” I said. Big fish are dangerous once you haul them aboard and must be subdued in short order. The common style though is not to pulverize or mutilate beyond recognition.
“Let’s get moving,” Champ said, “I want mine.”
I hoisted the blue under the beautiful span of its tail and trotted to the wheelhouse door. Lindy was crucified to the wheel, in loose control. I held the fish out for her approval.
“W
e’re going back,” she said between clenched teeth, an overzealous fire in her eyes.
“Look,” I said beaming. “I caught the first fish.”
“Get it out of here, man. It’s dripping blood all over.”
In the galley I exchanged the fish for the bottle of rum. I was shamelessly pleased with myself. “Push her back up to trolling speed, honey,” I said. Immediately the engine rumbled and throbbed. “Ho ho,” I said. “Old Champ’s pissed.”
“Hey, can you give me a hand here, Sims?” Lindy said, trying to wrestle the wheel. “My arms are going to break off.”
“Yeah, in a minute,” I said, and took off for the stern, leaving her alone again. Champ’s line threaded out into the water. I noticed the black and white plug resting on top of his tackle box. “What are you using now?” I asked him, nudging the lure with my toe.
“You’ll see before you want to,” he said, “when you remove it from the jaw of a big yellowfin tuna.” No sooner had he said that than he obliged himself with a Rebel yell. I didn’t even bother to pick up my pole.
“Oh yes,” he proclaimed with lust. “Oh yes oh yes.” When his rod went U-shaped he reclined away from it, employing muscle and weight against the strike. I was sure the line would snap but it held. No one had to tell me what to do next. I sprinted to the wheelhouse and stuck my face in the doorway.
“Slow her down, honey.”
Lindy turned at me and snarled. “No.”
Champ and I were aroused now and such talk was mutinous. “What do you mean, no?” I said, charging forward. I cuffed the throttle back. “Slow her down.”
I quickly retreated to the stern. Champ collected his line inch by inch, grinding it in. In our wake I spotted a gray torpedo in tow.
“It’s a barracuda,” I said.
“The hell it is,” Champ insisted. “It’s a big king mackerel.”
Easy in the Islands Page 10