“Sun hot,” Gabriel said. He always said this before he set to work.
“Daht’s right.”
“Watah too cool,” he said, cupping his hand into the sea and splashing his face. Bowen stood up to negotiate a piss with the churning of the boat but remained there for some minutes prick in hand, unable to relax.
“Mahn, jump in de sea if you want a piss.”
He removed his shirt and sat down with his legs over the gunnel. Mundo and Gabriel leaned to the opposite hull to counterbalance the canoelike boat and then quickly leaned back after Bowen hefted himself over the side. He let himself sink a few feet below the keel, felt the temperature subtly change, cooler and cooler until it was all the same, the blue pressure bearing against him completely. He opened his eyes briefly, welcoming the rough bite of the salt that took away his drowsiness. He kicked back to the surface, spinning in slow circles for the pleasure of it, relieved himself and struggled back into the boat. Without a diving mask to clearly see what else was there with him, he did not like to stay in the water long. No matter how casual Mundo and Gabriel could be around sharks, Bowen couldn’t muster the same aloofness. They chided him about this, but still, Mundo wore a cummerbund of old sheet around his waist for bandaging in case of trouble. And Gabriel’s left arm was arced with purple scars across his bicep. Ahn eel do daht. Shark doan molest mahn. It’s true.
Bowen dried his face and hands on his shirt and put it back on as protection against the sun. Underneath the bow seat he kept an oatmeal tin. He stretched and found it, unscrewing the lid. Inside, wrapped in a plastic bag to keep out moisture, were a pack of Pielrojas, a box of matches, the precious spear points, and a sack of hard candy labeled simply Dulces which he had bought at Alvaro’s right before the fishermen had set sail on the Orion from Providence eight days ago. The candy had turned gummy in the sea air. He took a red piece and bit into its waxy surface, chewing vigorously and swallowing the whole lump without determining its flavor. The sweetness took the salty, sour heat out of his mouth. Mundo asked for a Pielroja and Bowen lit one for him, smoking it down a bit before he passed it along with the point for Mundo’s spear. Bowen switched places with Gabriel and began to row, bringing the boat around into the current, pulling against the tide just enough to stay where they were.
The black men silently outfitted themselves and to Bowen they already had the grim look of hunters on them. The cigarette jutted straight out like a weapon in Mundo’s tight lips. He propped his long metal gun between his legs and unclasped its spear, screwing on the point, securing the catch line, and then set the gun aside while he pulled black flippers snug on his white-soled feet. Bowen watched him; each piece of equipment he added on seemed to alter his humanness, and now, more so than with the dream business, Mundo was becoming inaccessible, the friendship between them a triviality. From under his seat the fisherman took his diving mask and spit on the inside of the glass, spreading the tobacco-flecked phlegm with his fingers to prevent the glass from fogging. He washed the mask out in the sea and adjusted it to rest on his forehead, pressing into the short curls of his hair, not kinky hair like Gabriel’s but more Latin, straighter and oily. He sucked the ash of the cigarette down next to his lips, knocking the butt off into the water with his tongue before it burned him. He exhaled deeply, and then inhaled, and then exhaled normally. Turtles made that same noise when they sounded for air, thought Bowen, that sudden, single gasp of inhalation bobbing out of the sea from nowhere. Mundo’s eyes were featureless, without pupils, the irises dark, without color. Go fuck your big turtle, Bowen said to himself. He began to see that the prophecy was an easy one—like a handsome man boasting he would seduce an available woman—because there were plenty of turtles in the water. This was their mating season, the end of the hurricanes. They had come from all over the ocean to return here to breed.
“Ahll right,” Mundo said softly, and pulled his mask down over his eyes and nose. He was out of the boat promptly, disappearing below the surface.
Gabriel procrastinated, sharpening the point of his spear on the block of limestone they carried in the boat. Bowen heard Mundo purge his snorkel. Looking over his shoulder to check the diver’s position, he began to row.
“Wait a minute, Mistah Bone,” Gabriel said. He slung his legs over the side and crossed himself vaguely, lifting the crucifix from his chest to kiss. He fitted the mouthpiece of the snorkel behind his lips and they bulged apishly. Splashing into the water, face down, the gun ready, he turned a spiral to examine what was there below him.
Bowen pulled ahead six times and then paused, unable to locate Mundo. Gabriel was to Bowen’s left, kicking mechanically into the two-knot current, his gun cradled from elbow to elbow. Mundo surfaced ten yards ahead, going down again like a porpoise. Bowen went after him, quickly over the glossy boil that marked Mundo’s dive.
He leaned out of the boat and looked down. Below him in about eight fathoms of water he could see Mundo in pieces, distorted fragments of motion rising and coalescing into human shape, the curve of his dark back floating up to him, the red faded trunks looking like raw skin under the water.
His back broke the surface first, a long brown bubble, smooth and headless. The snorkel poked up, gargled and wheezed. There was a moment’s calm before the water in front of the diver was flying apart, twisting and scattering and white. Blood swelled olive-green from the center of it all. Mundo fought for control over something Bowen had not yet fully seen. Again there was quiet. And then this: Mundo’s torso suddenly out of the water, pendulous beside the boat, his arm dipping the spear down inside and letting a slab of great, furious life slide off it at Bowen’s feet. The fish was as long as the arm that had released it, violently thrashing, the fan of its dorsal spines sharp enough to cut through leather. Bowen fell back off his seat, drawing his legs out of the way.
“Jesus.”
He found the ironwood mallet and bent over, striking at the fish, unable to hit it effectively. Blood and bits of rubbery tissue sprayed on his chest. Finally its movements slowed and he was able to direct a clean blow to the broad, bull-like slope of its head.
“Goddammit.”
The shot had not been clean. The spear had struck behind the head but too low to hit the spinal cord. It had entered through the huge gills—thus the excess of blood now in the boat—and come out on the other side below the pectoral fin. The blood all over Bowen made him feel filthy. He was stone-eyed now, full of his job. Mundo’s head popped over the gunnel. He was amused.
“You like daht one, mahn?”
“Shoot better,” Bowen said.
Mundo laughed wickedly and sank out of sight. Bowen could hear the click of the spear sliding into the latch of the trigger as Mundo reloaded the spring-action gun against the hull of the boat. Gabriel was calling. He held his spear in the air, a lobster skewered on the end of it. Bowen was there in a minute, screwing off the flanged spear point to take the catch into the boat.
He set the oars and stood up to rearrange the gear under his seat. Mundo’s fish was a grouper, by Bowen’s estimate twenty-five to thirty pounds. To shield it from the sun he tugged it into the cleared space below the seat. The lobster was thrown into the stern behind a coil of rope. He used to put the lobsters with the fish, but if they weren’t dead they kept crawling out from beneath him and he would stab his feet on the thorns of their shells. Before he could sit down again Gabriel was beside the boat with another lobster.
“Four more in de hole, boy. I tellin you, de bird was good luck.”
Bowen hovered over Gabriel until the diver had brought up the remaining lot. It took some time and only then did Bowen search for Mundo. He spotted him far off, impatiently waving the boat forward. The muscles in Bowen’s arms cramped from the fast rowing. By the time he reached him, Mundo had his face back down in the water, staying afloat with his fins. Bowen had to shout to get his attention. Mundo raised his head, a glare in his eyes exaggerated by the mask. He lifted a fish up and hurled it into the boat.
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br /> “What’s the matter?” Bowen asked defensively. “Sharks?”
“Keep up, mahn. Keep up.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Bowen shrugged off Mundo’s admonishment. It was impossible to stay with both divers unless both divers stayed together. He took his own mask and held it on top of the water, providing a small round view of the scene below. There were no dark, darting shadows, nothing ominous at all.
Mundo swam crosscurrent into deeper water, his flippers continuously paddling the surface. In pursuit of something beneath him he doubled back and sped past the boat headed in the opposite direction. He vanished as Bowen put all his effort into turning the boat around, determined to keep on top of the action. He heard the rasp then, a sound like a vacuum filling with air. Off the starboard he saw the green, pale-throated head of the turtle bouncing in the swell and he understood Mundo’s urgency, because two or three turtles would double the value of a day’s work. He couldn’t see Mundo, but he knew the man was carefully ascending beneath the creature, taking slow aim. The turtle lurched forward and tried to submerge as the spear shot through one of its hind flippers. Mundo surfaced, hauling the spear line in until the turtle was beside him, hopelessly struggling to shake the iron rod from its leg. Bowen was right there.
“Nice work,” Bowen said. “You did it.”
Mundo handed the gun to Bowen. While Bowen held the turtle by the rim of its shell, Mundo wrestled to extract the spear. Once he had succeeded in unscrewing the point, it slid out easily from the thin flesh of the flipper.
“He’s a big one.”
“Not so big.”
“He’s a male and pretty big. That was your sign.”
“Nah,” Mundo grunted.
“Close enough.”
“Dis no hawksbill. Lift him up now.”
The green turtle weighed close to a hundred pounds. Bowen almost fell out of the boat pulling him in. The turtle banged down the curve of the hull, its flippers clawing for water that wasn’t there, a dull calloused scrape across the wood, its mouth gasping, the lower mandible unlocked like an old man’s jaw. I’ll be damned, thought Bowen, this was the biggest turtle their boat had brought in here on the banks. Only two loggerheads netted by the boat with the old men were bigger.
He turned the heavy green on its back. The yellow plates of its belly glowed like pinewood. He set his feet on them, feeling the turtle’s cold-bloodedness. Its sea-smell was clean, without mucus or secretion. From inside a wooden toolbox Bowen took the small bundle of palm fronds that every Providence fishing boat carried. He pulled two short strands from it. Grabbing one of the turtle’s anterior flippers, he placed it against the hull and with the tip of his diving knife punched a small hole through the glazed flesh that formed the shape of a man’s hand with the fingers fused together. He did the same to the flipper behind it and then threaded the cuts with a frond, tying the ends off in a square knot. With its fore and hind legs thus bound, the turtle was immobile.
Prayin from both ends, the fishermen called this.
“Why don’t you use fishing line?” Bowen had asked when he first saw Gabriel bind a turtle.
“Palm leaf nice,” Gabriel told him. “Turtle ahpreciate daht.”
Bowen rowed on, occasionally pausing to fill the calabash bailer with seawater and cool the turtle that now suffered the sun. The first time he did this the turtle curled its head and appeared to look at him. Bowen turned away. It made him feel foolish but he did not like to see a sea turtle’s eyes. The eyes were too mammalian and expressive, a more vivid brown than the eyes of a human being, lugubrious. They teared out of water, salty silk tears beading down the reptilian scales, and he did not like to see it. In the ocean there was no movement with more grace, no ballet more perfect, than the turtle’s.
The men worked for several more hours before switching. Mundo shot another turtle, an average-size hawksbill which Bowen tied and was able to fit under the seat. There was a long period with no luck. Then, like a magic returning, the divers found fish again. The boat began to fill up.
Bowen tended to the divers, the citric tang of sweat in his nostrils, his eyes closed now and then to soothe them from the glare. His blue trunks and white T-shirt were smeared with blood and the gray slime that came off the fish. Trailing the swimmers, his back to them as he rowed forward, he counted the strokes of the oars, an empty meditation broken by the need to cool the turtles or take another fish into the boat. Alone again he would look up, his thoughts not yet refocused on his labor, and be startled by the uncut geography of the sea, the desolate beauty, the isolation.
The sun was straight up and fierce. Patches of wind blew off the glassy veneer of the surface. The waves lumped high enough to conceal the divers if they weren’t close to the boat. Mundo and Gabriel trod water together, talking in bursts, their snorkels jutting out from under their chins. Bowen came over to them. Hours in the sea had made Mundo look younger, Gabriel older. They clung to the side of the boat.
“Mistah Bone, dis Jewfish Hole a pretty spot. Come give Gabriel a rest.”
Bowen stowed the oars and went to the bow for his diving gear, anxious to leave the confinement of the boat, the blind sense of being denied something others took for granted. They would not always let him fish. They had spent their lives on the water; for all his effort, Bowen could not begin to match their skill. On a good day, though, he would take over for Gabriel. Mundo had an appetite for the reef and knew that Bowen, more than Gabriel ever would, felt the same way. There were times when he would come and hurry Bowen out of the boat if there was something extraordinary he wanted the white man to see. They swam together like two farm boys at a carnival, exploring everywhere, the joy of it all and the mystery running between them like an electric ribbon.
Bowen lowered himself into the water after Gabriel was settled in the boat. His ears filled with the steady fizzing static of the ocean moving against its cup of earth. The reef seemed scooped out here, forming a wide horseshoe-shaped arena, ten fathoms deep in the middle where they were, the bottom tiering up in shaggy clusters of coral until the perimeter shallowed in a dense thicket of staghorn branches. A school of fry, a long cloud of flashing arrows, passed with the current toward them herded by watchful barracuda. It parted and reclosed around the divers, obscuring them from each other’s sight for several moments.
The sandy paths of the surge channels wove through the swaying flora on the bottom, continuing up like white banners from the open end of the pool where the water gathered more dimension and the channels disappeared into a fog of infinite blue. Here the current pushed in from outside the reef.
They started to swim. Bowen followed Mundo’s lead. Gabriel stopped them with a shout.
“Mundo, me see a boat.”
Mundo swam like a dog with his head up and coughed out his snorkel: “Who?”
“Cahn’t see. He way up, mahn.”
Mundo stuck his head back in the water, uninterested in this news. He led them closer to the coral walls, turning again into the current when the water reached about forty feet, the depth at which Bowen managed best. They swam toward the wide mouth of the canyon which kept expanding as they kicked onward. Beyond, the visibility closed and faded, a chiaroscuro lanced by drifting shafts of sunlight. The blank distance shadowed and materialized into shapes, accumulating more and more detail as they moved ahead.
Bowen swam with his gun out in front of him like a soldier on patrol. Surveying an isolated button of brain coral, Mundo pointed to the antennae of a spiny lobster. Bowen jackknifed and dove, missed the first shot. On the second shot he took aim more carefully. There was a screeching sound of old armor when he yanked the lobster from its den. He ascended quickly, fighting for the sterling surface as he ran out of air. Gabriel came alongside.
“I see two guys,” he reported, taking the spear from Bowen and removing the point. “Maybe daht’s Ezekiel.” Bowen didn’t respond. It wasn’t so unusual to see another of the boats off in the distance during the course of the day. The fac
t that the boat was close enough for Gabriel to see the men in it didn’t mean anything to Bowen. He reloaded his gun and swam away to catch up with Mundo.
Together they continued ahead, frequently descending to inspect a cave or niche in the polychromatic reef. Fish were everywhere but they sought only those that appealed to the restaurants of the mainland. Cutting in and out of a gray forest of gorgonian coral, a mako shark rose toward them curiously but then stopped halfway and returned to its prowling. The shark was too small and too preoccupied to worry Bowen; still, he had tensed upon first seeing it, and adrenaline drove into his heart. Mundo plummeted down, found the shark interested in a red snapper nosing in the silt for food, and shot the fish. The shark skirted away when Mundo jabbed at it with his empty gun. The boat was there when he surfaced.
“It’s Ezekiel,” Gabriel told the two of them. He slipped a hand into the gills of the fish and took it from Mundo. “Ahnd Henry Billings. Dey driftin on de current from down de outside.”
“Turtlin,” Mundo said. He handed his spear to Bowen while he defogged his mask.
Ezekiel and Henry were too old to dive anymore—divin squeeze up a mahn’s insides—but they came along on expeditions to the banks to line fish, net turtles, and collect conchs from the shallows. They did not mingle much with the other fishermen who were mostly young and scorned the insipidness of fishing with a hand line and hook. Gaunt and unhealthy, Ezekiel looked like a wrinkled black puppet, simian with lackluster eyes. He suffered the bitter condescension of the islanders because he was too much a drunkard. Most people treated Henry Billings, round and smooth-faced, as though he were a moron. Bowen had never heard him speak a word, and neither had anybody else for more than twenty years.
“Dey lookin excited, boy,” Gabriel said, standing up to get a better view. Bowen and Mundo could not see the other boat from the water. “Ezekiel buryin he head in de glahss, ahnd Henry rowin hahd hahd like he racin home fah pussy.”
Easy in the Islands Page 21