by David Giblin
Vop struggled to stay awake. He was, after all, a highly paid professional; sleeping really wasn’t an option. He took great gulps of the warm air and tried to concentrate on keeping his eyes open. He got up and paced around in the stern of the boat. As soon as he sat back down his eyes began to close again. His eyelids were so heavy he had to close them for a moment just to let them rest. His head nodded forward. He jerked it back. His head lolled back. He jerked it forward. He thought he would close his eyes for a minute—a minute, that was all—all he needed to feel better. Vop closed his eyes and promptly fell asleep.
The little trolling motor chugged along tirelessly. They trolled on up the inlet. The boat stayed on a straight and true course while the sleeping trio twitched and snored. They stirred, found a more comfortable position, and slumbered on. One of them waved away an offending fly. The boat might have puttered on for the rest of the afternoon if it wasn’t for a point of land that curved toward them.
With the lines trailing out behind them they glided through the kelp bed in front of the gently sloping gravel beach. The little lurch as the boat stopped its forward motion was enough to rouse Vop. He looked around him: the boat on the beach and the lines strung out into the kelp bed behind him. His guests started to stir. It was obvious to Vop he had been asleep for some time. There was only one way to hide this fact from his customers. Vop acted immediately.
“You guys better reel up,” he announced with confident authority as he stood. “We’re going to stop here a moment. I’ve got to take a leak.”
forty IF IT’S NOT ON TV, IT DIDN’T HAPPEN
THE YACHT WITH Morris and the others on board had just pulled away from the dock. I was washing down the fish-cleaning table when Herbert took me aside. He was excited about a new rod and reel he’d bought the day before. He wanted to show them off. The rod was a nine-foot-long Fenwick ultralight graphite for casting, the reel an Ambassadeur, special commemorative edition. The rod was light yet extremely powerful, a very expensive mix of high technology and fine workmanship. I had seen the reel before, locked away in a glass-fronted case in one of the Campbell River sporting goods stores. It was gold plated, with a jewelled movement to reduce friction and let the line run out faster and smoother. It was put together with the precision of a Swiss watch, and cost about the same. It had waited in the case, for about forty-five years, for Herbert to walk in the front door. After he left the store the owners must have closed up and gone out to celebrate.
“What are you going to do with these?” I asked him.
I was thinking about Herbert’s history with expensive equipment.
“See, that’s what I want to talk to you about.”
Herbert wanted to see how I hooked up my cut-plugs to catch coho. He seemed to think I was doing something special when I’d caught the ones for Morris. Herbert wanted to try out his new equipment and thought it would work well on the smaller but hard-fighting coho.
I took him over to my boat and showed him a few things. Coho tend to like faster, more active bait. By setting the hooks a certain way the cut-plug can be made to spin in tight, fast spirals. I showed Herbert how to cut the head off at the right angle and where to place the hooks. I suggested he try his luck along the Sonora Island shore, just above Church House, a place we called the Wall. There was talk among the guides of a good coho bite there first thing in the morning.
This insider information made Herbert feel like one of the guides, and he planned to get down there by first light the next morning. Now I knew where he was going fishing, I planned to go in exactly the opposite direction.
I was back at Nelson’s resort at lunchtime the next day. I told myself I’d come to check the mail and drop off my bill for guiding Morris, but really I was curious about Herbert.
I found him standing with a small group on the dock. They were listening to his tale of fishing the morning tide at the Wall. He turned around as I approached, and he looked like he’d been in a fight. He was sporting a black eye and a couple of Band-Aids on his chin.
“What the hell happened to you?” I asked him.
“I was just telling these guys about it. It was Dave here that told me to go down to that Wall place,” he said to the others.
“Sounds to me like you should have taken Dave with you for protection,” one of them said. It was a sly dig at Herbert; his refusal to use guides was well known.
Herbert had gone out early that morning, flags flying, his antennae glinting in the morning sun. He had done everything I had told him. He had cut the heads off the herring at just the right angle, set the hooks just so, and trolled the bait close to the surface in a way that would entice the coho. He had caught and released two small ones right away and was feeling very pleased with himself. He was thinking about coming home for some breakfast but decided to try one last herring on the chance he might catch a coho big enough to brag about.
Ernest Hemingway has been responsible for instilling some terrible myths in the American male psyche. Killing an animal is no longer about putting food on the table, but a test of one’s manhood.
The next bite on his line had set the reel to screaming. The line shot off across the surface of the water and then circled round and headed back toward the boat. The fish dove and came up on the other side. Herbert had to hold the rod in one hand and lower the obstacles he had sticking up in the air with the other. He passed the rod from one hand to the other as he navigated the aerials, flagpoles, and searchlight during his struggle from one side of the centre console to the other.
But the fish kept circling the boat, and Herbert had to follow, kicking over his tackle box and tripping on the ice chest in the process.
The fish sounded and headed out into the middle of the channel. Herbert had to start the big motor to catch up with the fish before it stripped all the line off his reel.
“I tell you,” said Herbert, “it was hard to do all that and still keep the video camera on the fish.”
Herbert was an endless source of surprises.
“You were videotaping the whole time?”
“Oh yeah, there’s some great stuff. You guys want to see it?”
Herbert and I were the only ones that went over to his cabin. We sat down in front of the big TV he’d installed and he played the tape for me. It was a curious artifact and more than a little confusing. It started off normally enough. There were the usual shots of trees, rocks, and water. Herbert’s narration called attention to the eagle in one of the trees. If you got real close to the screen and squinted, you could just make out a tiny white head among the branches. Herbert also immortalized the coho he had released so people would take his word about catching them. Then the normal flow of images changed abruptly.
The camera jerked and swung around. There was a long out-of-focus shot of the floor of the boat. Herbert could be heard swearing and there was the clatter of the rod hitting the aerials and the antennae. The scream of the reel as the line peeled off was clearly audible, and then came the unmistakable sound of the tackle box being kicked over. There was another clatter as the contents were scattered and what looked like a fishing lure rolled into the range of the camera’s lens.
The camera was picked up and there was a long sweeping shot of nothing but water. Herbert’s narration picked up again, but his voice was excited and he was a little out of breath. He was trying to follow the line as it slashed through the water. His hand was unsteady; the lurching and wobbling pictures of water continued until I began to feel seasick. An antenna flew past the lens before the interminable shot of water was obscured by the camera getting wrapped in a flag.
The outboard could be heard as Herbert chased down the fish. He put the camera down to reel in the slack line as he chased the fish. All I could see was the back of his jacket. The fight settled down for a time, the fish on the bottom sulking and Herbert straining to lift it. There was a long, steady shot of a fishing line disappearing into the water. Herbert had caught his breath and the voiceover was calmer now, mor
e what you might hear on an outdoor-sportsman TV program. Herbert tried to guess the weight of the fish. He thought it might be close to twenty-five pounds.
The fish finally decided to surface and the camera was put down once again. I could see Herbert in profile working the rod. The line was coming in faster and the narration was forgotten. Herbert got the fish to the surface and his face on the screen changed. His eyes opened wide and his jaw dropped; his lips were moving, but no sound was coming out. He went out of range and returned holding the net. His face was set with a look of grim determination. He was holding the rod as high as he could with one arm and it shook with the strain.
He poked around in the water with the net held in the other hand. A look of huge surprise spread across his face. There was a brief shot of him dropping his rod and grabbing for the net with both hands, and then the camera was knocked off its perch. There followed the sounds of a physical struggle, as though a fight had broken out on board the boat. The auto-focus on the camera zoomed in and out, trying to pick an image.
Then the large eye of a very angry fish filled the whole screen. I’ve seen really large salmon from time to time, the ones over fifty pounds. They have a look to them—a fierceness in their eyes, and their teeth could rip a man’s arm off. This was one of those fish. There was no doubt that Herbert had caught more salmon than he knew what to do with.
The TV screen went dark and there was a horrible noise. The camera had been knocked to the floor and was being slammed by the fish as it thrashed among whatever else was on the floor of the boat.
“Where are you at this point, Herbert?” I had to ask.
“Well, the fish was on top of me there for a moment, but you see here? I get the camera back and get to my feet.”
As Herbert rescued the video camera, the auto-focus picked up on something as it flew out of the boat. It landed in the water before the lens could quite resolve it.
“What was that?” I asked.
“Uhhh . . . that was when the fish got its tail under the rod and flipped the whole rig out of the boat.”
“You lost your new rod and reel?”
On the screen, meanwhile, Herbert appeared with a fish club in his hand and began flailing at the floor of the boat. This only managed to make the fish madder. As Herbert swung at it, he slipped on a fishing lure underfoot and fell under the fish once again. This must have been when he got the cuts to his chin and the black eye. There was a tangle of fins and legs all wrapped up in one of his flags (the American one), and then the screen went blank as the tape ran out.
“That was something all right, Herbert. That’s a hell of a fish you caught. How much did it weigh? Was it over fifty pounds? Let’s go down to the cooler and have a look at it.”
“It’s not in the cooler.”
“Did you fly it in to be trophy mounted already or—”
“It got away. Just after the tape ended. I tried to grab it but it was all wrapped up in the flag and it kind of spurted out of the boat and swam away. At least I got the whole thing on tape.”
“It got away? Herbert, you let it get away? Let me get this straight. The fish gets in the boat, flips your new rod into the water, destroys your video camera, gives you a black eye and slimes your flag, and then jumps back into the water. Herbert, you weren’t out fishing.”
“What would you call it then?
“I’d call it a mugging.”
forty-one HAVE YOU SEEN THIS FISH?
IT WAS ALL getting to be too much for the FBI agent. He and the man from the SEC had been interviewing an endless stream of guides at the Carringtons’ resort. In his line of work he had interviewed terrorists, mafioso, hijackers, and bank robbers, but they had never made him feel as uncomfortable as these guides.
He couldn’t put his finger on what it was. For some reason, they all kept looking at his shoes. They would come into the cabin and the first thing they would do was look down at the shoes he was wearing. One by one they would look down and then a faint grin—more like a smirk—would cross their face. It was making him feel oddly self-conscious. He felt like he was sitting there wearing ruby slippers. He had taken to hiding his feet under the table when they came in. It was irrational, but he couldn’t help himself. He was fond of his highly polished, neatly tied wingtips, and some of these guides . . . well, some of them weren’t even wearing shoes.
He found them a scruffy lot. With wild and wind-blown hair, most of them were younger than his son. Some of them wore jewellery and beads. They were all articulate, almost overly polite, but their politeness was beginning to get to him. And they were just too damn healthy. He was getting irritated by their tans and sun-bleached hair. He was getting sick of the faint smell of fish that was always around them. Then there were the damn herring scales. He was finding them everywhere! On the rug, the chairs—he’d even found them in his clothing and stuck to his reading glasses!
He was beginning to get really tired of this place. From the very beginning it was as if the guides already knew why he was at Stuart Island. How they knew was a puzzle. It was one more thing that added to his irritation. And it was one thing to be on stakeout in some sleazy inner city, but to be constantly surrounded by people enjoying themselves out fishing . . . He’d never caught a salmon in his life.
That was another thing. The guests and the people on these yachts had looked familiar to him, so he had done a little research. When the SEC guy confirmed his research he had the shock of his life. It was no wonder the con men had run their scam up here! These guys wandering around in jeans and check shirts were some of the richest men in North America. Hell—these were some of the richest men on the planet! Just on the dock that morning were eight members of the Forbes 400. He thought he had seen Morris Goldfarb on the yacht that came in for diesel. The man had just been on the covers of Time and Newsweek, and the details of a speech he’d given had been reviewed in the Financial Post.
He was intimidated by the power of these men. He couldn’t believe he was in their company, as superficial as that sentiment was. But the guides . . . just the other day he’d passed one of them chewing out one of America’s most important investment bankers, calling him a “complete spud.” Apparently the man had lost a couple of fish that morning, so they’d come in empty handed. And the man had stood there with his head down and taken it!
That was the unbelievable part of it. He even apologized. He’d asked the guide for another chance! The most powerful men on the planet and they were sucking up to these guides—these kids—so they’d take them fishing.
He couldn’t believe what he was seeing.
He felt adrift: a man lost on an unknown sea. The warmth and comfort of the land he’d left behind were just a dim and distant memory. All the things he’d once taken for granted—power, position, rank—had no meaning here.
Here you were only as important as the last fish you caught.
When it came to the investigation, the FBI man and the guy from the SEC weren’t having a much happier time. They had slowly worked through their list of guides, and the response to their questions and photographs remained the same. They would trundle out their hard won photos but without any spark or pleasure in the job. They were becoming lethargic.
Carol began to notice that the sheets on their beds weren’t as taut; she wasn’t able to get as much height out of a quarter as she once did. They no longer offered cake.
Wet Lenny was one of the last to be ushered into the cabin. They explained to him what they wanted to do. The words were uttered by rote, and the FBI man’s voice betrayed his boredom. He laid out his pictures again one by one. The black-and-white photos of men in suits meant nothing to Lenny, just as they had meant nothing to the others. The FBI man stared off into space. The man from the SEC sighed audibly.
Wet Lenny was moved by their obvious dejection. He appreciated the scientific thoroughness of their methods. He could sympathize with their inability to land the Big One. He really wanted to help them. Almost as a reflex action,
a force of habit, a fish out of water moving its gills, the SEC man brought out the Polaroid of the men on the dock displaying their fish. He was a thorough man, a stickler for details; he had to conduct each interview the same way, no matter how futile.
Lenny took the photo from him. He looked at it for a long time. He held it up close, as so many had done before. The SEC man knew it was hopeless. All he needed was a tie-in, a way of proving when these guys had been here. The timeline was the important thing—who knew what, when.
He was about to thank Lenny and usher him out the door when Wet Lenny cleared his throat. “The people in this picture I’m not so sure about,” he said, “but I recognize this fish.”
The man from the SEC wasn’t sure he had heard correctly. The guide was mumbling in a most annoying way. The SEC man strained to hear him. “You what?” he asked.
“I recognize this fish,” Lenny repeated and pointed to one of the fish in the photo.
“Uhhh . . . you recognize a fish?”
The FBI agent’s mouth gaped open. The man didn’t want to believe what he was hearing. He had spent two weeks inside a tiny cabin interviewing guides who seemed to be mocking his wingtips. He was wasting his life taking useless photographs and showing them to smirking civilians, and now this guy was telling them he recognized a fish. What kind of a weird, twisted sense of humour did these people have anyway?
“See here,” Lenny continued, “this fish is missing its adipose fin, which means it’s a hatchery fish. That’s the way they mark them. It’s also missing part of its tail fin, probably from a seal attack. You see these scratch marks on the skin? That’s where the claws of the seal scraped the salmon as it got away.”
The two government agents found themselves perking up a little; at least this wasn’t the usual response. They failed, however to see the relevance.