Bobby ordered the barge captain to get off his dock.
“I thought this was Dennis’s dock,” the captain answered.
“Dennis’s dock? Since when? Get that shit out of here.”
The two men argued for a few more minutes until the island’s only police officer drove up. When Bobby refused to back off, the officer rested a hand on his pistol grip and told Bobby he was going to take him in.
“Take me in for what? This is my fucking place!”
Bobby was led to the police car and driven to the one-room jail in town where he was locked up.
~
“Why Bobby let Dennis in here?” asked Biggy later that night while the two friends sat on the old dock bench slapping mosquitoes.
“Bobby, he figure out the money Dennis have,” Rasta answered ruefully. “That’s the big thing for Bobby. He always lookin for easy money … He figure he can handle Dennis … But Bobby movin too fast to see … Bobby go away four months and Dennis do favors for guys. He ask police sergeant, you need money to send your wife off island, no problem; you need a vehicle or a new engine for the skiff? Dennis take care of it. Fellas think Dennis a generous man. But come a time he call on you, you do what he say … you better do what he say cause Dennis own you … Dennis an aggressive person and he obsess with the marina. He can’t think about nothin else. He’ll lose his own family to get what he want … When he want something, he’ll die to get it done.”
Part IV
It occurs to me, I’ve become another old fella sitting in a chair reflecting on the glory years. I enjoy replaying trolling days with my dad on his forty-foot fishing boat and years later, pulling baits and lures with my wife and kids on boats I’ve owned. I can still feel the sting of big fish that got away—how it seemed life changing to lose that bluefish or striped bass or tuna right beside the boat—except I’m not doing my elegiac reflecting on a bench in the park. I’m sitting in a creaky swivel chair on the weathered bridge of my forty-year-old boat steering south from Conception Island into rough, remote waters.
Jimmy is sitting with me on the bridge, lost in thought. He’s put on weight in the past year and now walks with a limp. If we hook a marlin in this choppy sea, he’ll have trouble making it down the ladder into the cockpit to help out. While I focus on the lures behind us, Jim looks ahead of the boat so we don’t smack into another vessel, though we haven’t seen another boat in two days. Jim doesn’t want to talk about whatever’s wrong, which is OK with me. I don’t want to talk either.
But that’s not exactly true. I want Jim the way I knew him. I’m annoyed by this new reticence and dour expression. I try to stare at the lures.
John and Doron are down below resting or chatting or eating—I don’t know what they’re doing. Although most likely, John is making a drawing of Doron. He’s usually drawing one of us. Even in heavy seas, with the boat slamming and pitching, he works on his drawings with a steady hand. John always goes for something he feels inside his subject—some festering secret that informs the picture. That’s more important to him than an exact physical likeness. I always want to steal a look. I wonder what he’ll find in Doron, who keeps painful stories locked deep inside.
Yesterday, John was drawing me on the bridge. We were about an hour out from Columbus Point when he suddenly bolted from his chair, hustled down the ladder, and started puking over the side. He couldn’t stop vomiting. John had never been to sea before this trip. What was I going to do with him out here? But after twenty minutes, he’d washed his face and he was back on the bridge working on his picture of me at the helm.
Eventually, I stop thinking about this and that and concentrate on my four lures following the boat. Three of them are skipping and diving like lovely little tunas. But one of the lures has sucked down beneath the surface. I try to will it back up on top to join the others. No luck. I try to focus my attention on the three lures that are properly rolling up and down the white-water wake, but the one stuck below is annoying the hell out of me.
I call down to Doron. “Hey, Doron!” He doesn’t hear me. I call again. Finally I stomp on the deck of the bridge until he looks up. I tell Doron to pull in the lure and take a look at it. He winds the lure to the boat at record speed. He’s so excited to catch fish. The lure has a braid of seaweed trailing from the hook. He clears the lure and puts it back out. Doron looks up at me and I nod, to say, Yeah, it’s riding better now. When he sees that I look satisfied, Doron looks satisfied. I am the lord of answers out here.
In recent years, I’ve fallen in love with watching the lures. Soon after putting them in the water, I stop daydreaming about old fishing adventures or problems back in the city. I love the dance of baits and lures across the surface. I can watch them for hours on end without feeling bored.
I enjoy this trance state so much that when a small tuna or mahi-mahi comes up behind one of the lures, and gets hooked, it feels like a bother. I quickly want to get my lure back out and following the boat. It is hard to explain this manifestation of eccentricity, even to myself. One of the embarrassing secrets of my fishing life is that I sometimes steer away from schools of fish lest the imposition of hooked fish will disturb the tranquility of the search and troll.
Meanwhile, these two friends of mine, Doron and John Mitchell are on fire with wanting to catch a big blue marlin. They don’t know how. Doron knows a little—he’s caught a small one—but neither of them truly understands the strength and speed of these great animals, the dangers involved with catching one. They are counting on me to find one and show them how to do it.
I was steering for the north end of Long Island, a desolate patch of ocean where I’d caught large yellowfin tuna in the past. For hours the wind had been falling off. The ocean looked gray and cold as if we were fishing up north on a cloudy day. Then the weather turned weird, very weird. The wind came quickly and the seas turned white and sharp. A shower of water on the bridge jolted me from reveries.
In several minutes, waves built to four feet, then six- and eight-footers were bunched tight together. In minutes, we were in a full-on gale though there were no storm clouds in any direction. Why all this wind? What were we headed into? Green water began spilling across the bow. I needed to push the throttles ahead, so I wouldn’t bury the bow. But with the increased speed, we were slamming into head seas and the anchor on the bow was smacking down onto the pulpit. Damn it. I’d forgotten to check that the anchor was properly secured. It was too rough to send anyone up there to do it now.
Doron looked up at me from below with a concerned expression, We OK, Cap? I nodded, no sweat, though I was sweating. My boat was falling off waves and skittering sideways. I was wrestling with the wheel to keep her bow into it, so she wouldn’t broach. I’d been sitting at my desk in the city for the last seven months working on a screenplay about two mismatched lovers. Suddenly I was a captain in a big sea in the middle of nowhere with a crew of greenhorns.
She’s a tough old boat. Made it through a lot of bad weather and always got us home. But I was hoping we didn’t get a big strike out here. I thought about pulling in the lines. It would be impossible to handle a big fish in this rolling white mess—not with this crew. But also, I wanted my guys seated and holding on—I didn’t want a painter or cabinetmaker lost over the side. It was too rough to bring in the lures. So the lures stayed out there, jumping from wave to wave.
After about an hour, the mystery wind slackened a little, still rough but waves weren’t so close together, manageable conditions. The Ebb Tide became easier to steer. I relaxed a little.
About the same time I spotted the rocky windward side of Long Island I heard line click off one of the reels. Unless I imagined it. Then I heard it again, but I couldn’t see anything in the white water.
Then I saw it, glimpsed it … Really? Really?
When a big marlin rises from the sea to snatch a lure, it is so odd and majestic and fast as a scream of
iridescent colors in the air, one is tempted to call it a fantasy. When such moments happen, with a skeleton, inexperienced crew, there is a lot of confusion about what’s taking place. People look at one another frozen in place.
And I’m screaming, “MARLIN, MARLIN!”
But in our boat, there was no one in the cockpit. Line was now spilling off the reel while I called for Doron and John. Where were they? Probably down below, making a drawing.
“Come on, John.” I began stomping on the deck. “COME ON, JOHN. WHAT THE FUCK!”
The marlin swam across our wake, and I could see the full heft of it. More than four hundred pounds, maybe five hundred.
Then the line seemed to go slack. Shit. It broke off. No one even saw the damn fish but me.
But no, no, there it was again, all twelve feet of it jumping behind the boat. Shaking its head, my lure in its beaked mouth.
The marlin was now sprinting right at the boat, the bill aimed dead center of the transom. I slammed the throttles ahead trying to get away from the fish—so it wouldn’t jump into the cockpit.
“Where’s John?” I screamed, pounding on the deck with my shoe.
The marlin barely missed the boat, shot ahead of us. I spun the boat around so the stern was again facing the fish. Began to back down.
Finally John poked his head out from down below.
“Where you been?”
“Making lunch … Now it’s all over the floor. A whole jar of raspberry jelly all over the floor.”
“Look behind the boat. A blue marlin—look at it jump!”
The hooked marlin was jumping two hundred yards astern of us.
John looked, but he didn’t know what he was looking for or where. John was looking high in the sky as if searching for rare birds.
Finally, with Doron’s help, John climbed into the fighting chair and started cranking the big reel with his considerable strength.
John is a marathon runner. He’s lean, wiry, and powerful—but he didn’t know the first thing about angling. The marlin was sprinting away from us, line spinning off the reel, and John was cranking away.
“Don’t reel, John,” I called down into the wind. “The fish is running.”
“What,” he called back. “What?”
“Stop reeling,” I yelled trying to be heard above the wind and diesels. “When the fish stops running, then pull the rod up with your left arm and reel in slack on the down swing.”
John turned around and screamed back, “What, what Fred?” Then he went back to cranking the big reel as though life depended on it.
“Stop reeling!” I screamed.
“What? What?” John kept cranking harder, faster.
Each time I called down a direction, John or Doron screamed back, “What Fred? Speak up!” I guess I have a small voice. My beginner crew was operating in the blind with only fragmentary wind tossed advice from Fred.
After five or seven minutes of this fruitless winding, John’s arm froze like a plank of wood. He couldn’t wind anymore. By now the fish had stopped running, was ready to come to the boat, but John was breathing heavily and couldn’t move his arm. He turned back and looked up at me with a helpless expression.
“Wind, John. Wind, wind, wind.”
“I can’t, Fred,” he said, looking stricken.
I considered climbing off the bridge to help. But if I came down from the controls and the fish sprinted at the boat, we could have a tragedy.
Doron coaxed John to wind the reel with his other arm. John now began cranking with two hands on the reel, and the fish was getting close. The marlin jumped a couple of times right behind the boat glowing a brilliant blue and silver. Doron so excited, as if witnessing a birth.
Then I noticed Jim climbing down the ladder. I called to him to get back up here. What if he fell in that heaving sea and broke a leg. Who would run the grocery store? Who would lift cases of Coke and beer for his old wife?
But Jim didn’t listen and was soon standing against the transom with his big hand poised to grab the heavy monofilament leader.
I was slowly backing the boat toward the fish, Jim reaching out to grab the leader, and in that moment, he stopped being my creaky, overweight, elderly friend Jim. He was spry and strong, the powerhouse Jimmy he’d been fifty years earlier when he’d had a reputation as the best big game wire man in the Bahamas.
Jim grabbed the leader, with one hand, then the next and after three sweeping pulls toward him, the twelve-foot fish was swimming alongside the boat. John got out of the chair, stood beside Jim, and looked at his fish. Then he turned back to me, his face all red and sweaty from effort and thrill.
Jim snatched out the hook and we all watched the tired marlin head back down into the deep blue.
Around dusk we anchored on the leeward side of a small atoll off the north end of Long Island. I was hoping for a calm night on the hook, but around midnight dishes fell out of the cabinets and the timbers of the old boat began to creak. The southeast wind had clocked around to the west, and the boat was rolling badly in the surge. We all had to hold on to stay in our bunks and no one slept very much.
One more day at sea and we’d arrive at Rum Cay.
Part V
After two nights in the small rotting town jail, Bobby was released with a stern warning to leave Dennis alone.
“Or you’ll be right back in here, or worse,” the police sergeant warned.
“What do you mean, worse?”
Bobby slowly ambled back a half mile along the dirt road to the marina, trying to make sense of what had happened to his life. He walked past the little shack where he’d made sculpture most evenings, but that ardent work now seemed remote and unappealing. Bobby was distracted by thoughts of his young bride and their great passion. It was hard to pull himself back. He didn’t feel like the man who had dived into feeding sharks to save drowning Haitian youngsters.
Dennis was standing beside his pickup truck speaking to one of his men. He looked up at Bobby, smiled with squinting pig eyes. He looked back at his plans for a fourth new guesthouse on the beach.
It occurred to Bobby one of them was lost in a dream.
“Hey, man, come on,” he said to Dennis, reaching for the past, when Dennis had followed him around the marina like a puppy.
Standing on the path just below his empty dining room, Bobby felt a surge of the old Bobby. He knew how to make promises. He knew how to charm. He could handle Dennis.
Dennis’s building manager walked over, asked a question.
Bobby grinned at Dennis as he had in the dining room crammed with high rollers. Dennis had reached for Bobby then, tried to gain his eye. Dennis had had to wait his turn. Bobby was probing for the right way to work his way back inside.
Bobby smacked Dennis on the shoulder. “We never discussed any of this. You can’t build a city in my marina.”
Bobby started to laugh. It was funny. It really was funny. Like a clichéd old Western when the rich bad guy comes into town, makes threats, and drives honest settlers away, takes over all the land. Dennis laughed as well—two buddies sharing a joke.
“Really, man? What were you thinking?”
“I don’t think so much,” Dennis answered without irritation or surprise. It was true. He didn’t think too much. Dennis heeded needs and instincts above all else. And Bobby’s return to the island had freed him in a way he couldn’t yet define. Dennis felt bolstered, energized.
“You can’t do this, man.”
Dennis nodded once, walked a few paces to his pickup, reached inside, and showed Bobby a stack of building permits with official seals from the Ministry of Works and Utilities in Nassau. Everything looked in order.
“You see?” Dennis said, putting the papers away. And he shrugged, to say, Yes, I can. What will you do about it?
~
Meanwhile, in the ruined
sailboat, Mike wrote feverishly on his laptop. Locals coming by the marina saw less and less of him, and by the time Dennis erected his hamburger bar, Mike had virtually disappeared. It’s a mystery how he lived, where he got food and fresh drinking water, how he washed himself, how he survived the onslaught of mosquitoes and sand fleas after a rain. He might have died and rotted below, although on sleepless nights Biggy occasionally walked down to the marina, and he told Rasta that a couple of times he spotted a skinny white man pacing the docks at two in the morning.
For years Mike listened to traces of the world carried on the wind and fashioned them into a vision he was continually revising. He worked away in the hot cramped boat as if looking up at the island, the marina, and lagoon from beneath the earth, reporting on a limbo world inhabited by dreamlike characters. He revised endlessly, became fed up and began again. But when Bobby returned to the transformed marina, Mike felt empowered with new confidence. He listened to Bobby talking with Dennis, almost begging and he was stunned and delighted. This new Bobby, needy, a little pathetic, was much more appealing to Mike. He wanted to capture every twitch of Bobby’s shedding skin as if he’d been waiting all this time to witness it. What would happen to this new Bobby? As Dennis built his fancy cottages and did finishing work on his massive hamburger bar, Mike’s fictive marina grew more and more shadowy and diaphanous. The high rollers and their trophy girls were still there but they were ghostly now—one could walk right through them. In a later draft, sharks and tarpon swam through folks on the dock as if the ghost marina was now inhabiting the bottom of the lagoon. Mike began to love Bobby whom he had previously loathed. Finally, in Mike’s later chapters, the marina disappeared entirely—the whole thing was swept away by some apocalypse he didn’t yet understand. Where did it go? What happened to Bobby? He tried to figure this out as he refined his pages. He knew the ending must relate to the doomed Haitian boat and the lingering ghosts of drowning children. Through his porthole, Mike watched them at night chanting, dancing, shaking rattles on the ruined dock, their skin falling off in sheets while the boat owners and their naked girls looked on in disgust. And what about the final chapter? Could he fashion a surprise, a happy ending without seeming banal? Mike struggled with his novel that grew and grew as he withered to little more than bones. His book was fifteen hundred pages long when Mike suffered his own tragedy—but that came later.
Deep Water Blues Page 5