The Forty Fathom Bank and Other Stories Read online

  The Forty Fathom Bank

  AND OTHER STORIES

  Les Galloway

  Afterword by Jerome Gold

  Contents

  The Forty Fathom Bank

  Where No Flowers Bloom

  Last Passenger North, or The Doppleganger

  The Caspar

  The Albacore Fisherman

  Death of a Hero

  Afterword by Jerome Gold

  The Forty Fathom Bank

  And when he finds that the sum of his transgressions is great he will many a time like a child start up in his sleep, and he is filled with dark forebodings.

  ~ PLATO, The Republic

  1

  For the first few months I felt nothing, really, except now and then a vague feeling of uneasiness like the after-effect of a dream whose full meaning has escaped in the dark fragments of its own confused scenes. Beyond that, it seldom crossed my mind, and when it did I would tell myself that it was an accident, an accident at sea. I would say it over and over again, like an incantation, and try not to think of anything but the words. That way, I was able to keep it locked up inside me, concealed, so to speak, from my conscious thoughts. And too, I managed to keep myself quite busy, much busier than I needed to be, so that I had little time for reflection.

  But one night after all my business was done, when everything was in perfect order, I woke up out of a sound sleep. I just opened my eyes and was wide awake in the middle of the night. After that, nothing did any good.

  Now all this was a long time ago, so it would seem only natural that the whole experience, as terrible as it was, should eventually have faded from my mind. But nothing has changed. The old feelings of uneasiness have settled in permanently. Though I have tried a thousand devices to keep them at bay, they slip in without any warning, anywhere, anytime at all, but especially when I happen to be around the docks or small boats or whenever the dank low water smell of the Bay or the ocean catch me off guard—feelings that have gathered a kind of cloudy horror about them as the years go by. And every now and then the memory of Ethan May, faceless as in a dream, slips like a shadow across my mind.

  We were living in San Francisco at the time. We still live here. In spite of everything, it is a difficult city to leave. Yet sometimes I think I should have taken the family and moved inland, away from the coast and the water and all the associations: the unpredictable reminders that unleash the hordes of silent apprehensions hidden away in the deepest recesses of my consciousness.

  But decisions have always come hard, mainly I suppose because I’ve never been sure of things. Nor of myself. I was twenty-eight then, nervous, thin, tired all the time and suffering from a kind of hopelessness of spirit I firmly believe came from having been reared by a godfearing grandmother. Her countless tales of fire and damnation, along with a very realistic and abiding fear of poverty had, since my earliest childhood, filled me with gloom and confusion. I learned very young to be afraid of both God and his inscrutable wrath, and of the struggle to survive without money. Goaded by threats of punishment, I recited my prayers, but always with the hope they’d be answered not with guidance or forgiveness, but with money, which even as a child I found more effective in exorcising the evils of this world than the whispered appeals for divine approval.

  My grandmother died at eighty-two, sustained to the last by fantasies of eternal bliss in the Four Square City of Gold and a life-long confidence in the Second Coming, but leaving me with nothing but a legacy of self-doubt and confusion to face the worst years of the Depression.

  I had nothing, and as I look back it seems that I must have accepted this fact as my way of life, though resentfully and with considerable fear. And being afraid, I took few chances. I clung to things, to the status quo, to my wife, my jobs, and I avoided changes.

  Yet sometime before the war, I did something quite unusual for me. I acquired an old fishing boat. I say acquired because no one in those days, or certainly no one I knew, could afford to buy anything but essentials. It was a big boat, nearly sixty feet long and quite seaworthy despite its weathered look, with a fifteen-ton hold and deck space for a good many tons more. The capacity of the boat, however, had little bearing on its value, for fish at that time brought such a low price that it hardly paid to go out after them.

  The boat, called the Blue Fin, was part of an estate, and since no one wanted it, I came by it for something like five hundred dollars, to be paid over an indefinite period of time. My intention was to put a railing around it and take out fishing parties on weekends to augment my twenty-five dollars a week income in a real estate office which was always about to go out of business.

  Of course, I had another idea in buying the Blue Fin, and that was to move aboard with my family on that inevitable day when I couldn’t pay the rent on the tiny apartment we were squeezed into, that little prison with its dark, unventilated rooms, its lines of damp clothes in the kitchen and where my two kids woke up to life playing on the bare floors, or outside on the dirty street beneath the endless gray of our San Francisco summers.

  As it turned out, the real estate office did not go out of business, but for some reason I was let go anyway. However, by the time I received my last check I had managed, with energy born of desperate necessity, since I knew nothing about boats then, to get the Blue Fin in shape and was already running a few fishing parties to partially compensate for the loss of my job.

  And this was my life for more than three years, shivering on the dock at two and three o’clock in the fog-wet mornings waiting for a party of firemen or policemen or office workers who sometimes showed up and sometimes didn’t. And on the days, and there were more than enough of them, when the boat lay idle I would clean or paint or work on the engine or go around to the bait shops drumming up business.

  It was on those no income days as I used to call them, depressed and tired, I would often watch the husky, leathery-skinned Sicilians returning—laughing that good, high-pitched, prolonged laughter that came up from their guts, shouting and cajoling each other from their little blue and white clipper-bowed crab boats—those crafty, warm, loud, strong people who could eke a living from the sea and prosper because they were born to it, because their blood and bones and muscles and stomachs and temperaments were adapted for centuries to it. And comparing myself to them I began to believe that my physical frailness—I was five eleven and not much over one hundred and forty pounds—was bound up with our continued poverty.

  This thought obsessed me so much I began to have fantasies of doing something wild and dangerous like running Chinamen in from Mexico at five hundred dollars a head or smuggling jewels or even heroin.

  Probably I’d still be at it, or something equally profitless, had it not been for the strange and fortuitous business of the sharks that struck the California coast in the fall of 1940 and that, in little more than a year, found me richer than I’d ever dreamed possible.

  2

  I said it began in 1940. Actually, that whole dreamlike affair that changed the lives of so many of us, had been building up for some time, ever since the Nazis had invaded Scandinavia and cut off the exportation of North Sea fish and especially of fish liver oil—a vital source of Vitamin A which, at the time, could not be made synthetically. With the threat of a global war hanging over us, neither the cod fisheries in New England nor the halibut catch off the North Pacific coast could begin to fill the demand.

  Now all this, it might seem, would have had little bearing on the fishing industry along the California coast where cod are not plentiful and halibut even less so. And since there were no other known fishes which could supply the needed vitamin, it should follow that a windfall from the
sea would be highly unlikely.

  But one day in the late fall, a small boat pulled up to the Acme Fish Company dock at Fisherman’s Wharf. The fishermen had been set-lining for rock fish, but, unfortunately, had run into a school of small gray nurse sharks locally called soupfins because the Chinese use the fins for soup. Aside from that small market, the fish were worthless and considered a pest. And it was only out of sympathy for the fisherman that the buyer contributed five dollars a ton for the catch. His intention, no doubt, was to recoup his loss by selling the carcasses for chicken feed. Two days later that same buyer called the fisherman and offered him fifteen dollars a ton for all he could bring in.

  Of course, the news of such generosity spread quickly and it was soon discovered that the buyer for Acme had, and for no other reason than pure curiosity, sent samples of shark liver to the government laboratory for analysis. The results showed the Vitamin A concentrate to be sixteen times greater than that of a prime cod. Furthermore, a report from the State Bureau of Fisheries disclosed that the soupfin’s liver averaged something like fifteen percent of the fish’s entire body weight! Overnight the price shot up to fifty dollars. By the end of November when the sharks disappeared for the winter, they were bringing seventy-five dollars per ton.

  Naturally, the big question in everyone’s mind was whether or not they were going to stay at seventy-five. There was much talk around the Wharf. Some speculated it might go up to one hundred; others were convinced it was a result of war hysteria and that by spring when the sharks showed up again, they’d be down to their original nothing. But even the most pessimistic, I noticed, were laying in coils of quarter-inch manila line. And there was a sudden shortage of shark hooks in all the supply houses.

  Here was my chance, I thought. With spring over four months away, I’d have plenty of time to get ready. I talked to my wife.

  “Isn’t it dangerous?” she asked.

  “No more so than taking out parties,” I replied, though at the time, I had almost no idea of what was involved.

  “We sure could use the money,” she said, plaintively.

  There was no doubt about that, I thought, and began immediately to make plans for converting the Blue Fin to shark fishing. I checked the other boats, talked to fishermen, made sketches of the Blue Fin’s deck and hold. I even sent away to the National Bureau of Fisheries for all the available literature on sharks, their breeding and migratory habits.

  It turned out to be a bigger job than I had thought. The equipment was expensive. The power gurdy that was needed to pull in the fish would have cost more than three hundred dollars. There were coils of manila line to be bought, several thousand hooks plus anchors and floats and hard twist cotton for leaders or ganions as they’re called. Any one of a dozen fish buyers would have financed me, I knew. But what if the price of sharks went down to nothing again, I wondered anxiously. What if the boat were impounded for debt?

  Winter came on with its week-long rains interspersed with southwest gales that whipped the ocean to a foaming frenzy. Except for some net mending between storms and the usual fleet of intrepid little crab boats that went chunking out in the two A.M. blackness, the Wharf was deserted. Beneath the enervating cover of cold gray skies, the autumn vision of sudden riches from shark livers and Vitamin A soon faded.

  The first boat to catch any sharks the following spring was the Viking with two men aboard, Karl Hansen and his brother Jon. They had been fishing on Cordell Bank, which is about fifty miles northwest of the Gate. After just two days they returned with ten tons in their hold. News of the catch created a quick resurgence of excitement. When the Viking tied up at the Union Fish Company’s dock most everyone around hurried down to see what kind of price the sharks would bring.

  “I’ll bet they don’t get over twenty dollars,” I remember Joe La Rocca saying.

  “Hell they might not even buy ’em,” someone else said.

  Secretly I hoped he was right. For, though I desperately needed the money, I still could not face the risks involved, the uncertainties and complications. I felt safe with things the way they were. But I’m sure no one in that crowd of hungry fishermen shared my feelings. A ruddy glow diffused their heavy Sicilian cheeks: their clear, dark, predatory eyes looked on with hawklike alertness. In that atmosphere of greedy expectancy, where the smell of fish entrails mingled with the tang of creosoted pilings and the heavy garlic breath of the fishermen, only one man, a shadowy observer, appeared detached from the whole tense scene. I do not remember what he looked like, only that a feeling of quiescence seemed to emanate from where he was standing, alone, in a far corner of the shed.

  Nothing happened until late in the afternoon when half a dozen of the biggest fish buyers in town showed up. With them was a man in a gray business suit whom no one had ever seen before. The twenty or more fishermen who gathered stayed together talking quietly in Italian. Then Karl Hansen, the Viking’s owner, climbed up on a box and asked for bids.

  “Holy Christ,” Joe shouted, “they’re going to auction them off.”

  Tarantino started the bidding at twenty dollars.

  “That’s about what I figured,” someone said, gloomily, “the whole thing was too damned good to be true.”

  But just then the man in the gray suit said he’d go one hundred.

  “He must be off his rocker,” Joe said, “or else there’s something going on we don’t know about.”

  After that we just stood there with our mouths open, staring, as the bids jumped from two hundred to five hundred to seven hundred.

  “Anybody go eight?” Karl Hansen asked tensely.

  The man in the gray suit raised his hand then immediately took out his check book and those of us who were close enough saw him hurriedly write out a check for eight thousand dollars. Printed on the check was the name of one of the biggest pharmaceutical houses in the country.

  The next minute every fisherman in the place was running for his boat, that is, everyone but me. I was too sick at heart, too filled with despair to care about anything.

  After a time I walked down to the Blue Fin and sat, disconsolately, in the wheelhouse. Where would it all end, I wondered, close to tears. Why was it that I alone was always singled out for failure? I looked out at the Blue Fin’s big afterdeck, at the stout sideboards and the heavy planked hatch cover and thought of the big empty fish hold below. Suddenly my despair turned to anger.

  “If you’d get off your dead ass and do something,” I said to myself, “you could pull out of this mess in no time. Borrow the money, outfit the boat and get the hell out there before you blow it again.”

  It was the same kind of thinking that had jolted me into buying the boat in the first place and then into taking out parties. Now, as if I had been brutally slapped into consciousness, the prospects loomed, not only enormous, but easily attainable. Then, as if this wasn’t enough to stimulate me to action, just as I was leaving the Wharf I met Joe La Rocca unloading his pick-up.

  “You heard the latest?” he asked, excitedly and, without waiting for a reply, “Some nut up in Eureka is paying eighteen hundred dollars a ton,” he shouted, jubilantly, “so they’ve pegged the price at eighteen hundred all along the coast. Think of it,” he cried, pounding me on the back, “That’s damned near a dollar a pound for them stinkin’ sharks.”

  Perhaps all this was too much for me. Perhaps I didn’t really believe it. One way or the other I did nothing. And the weeks passed. I made plans to borrow the money and convert the Blue Fin. I talked to fishermen, learned where they’d caught their sharks, studied their fishing gear. I became an expert without ever catching a fish. Yet in my own mind I felt at ease, as if all my financial troubles were over, as if at any time I liked I could just run out the Gate and make my fortune. All that spring I continued to haul fishing parties.

  Meanwhile just about everything that could float had put to sea. Purse seiners from Monterey; halibut boats out of Puget Sound with names like Helga, Leif Erikson, Gjoa; crab boats and traw
lers from Eureka; and salmon trollers from San Francisco, all were fishing sharks. Even rowboats with outboards could be seen far out on the ocean. Many fortunes were made and there were many reports of drownings.

  In midsummer, Joe La Rocca bought a new boat, a fifty-foot diesel fully equipped that must have cost ten thousand dollars.

  “Take the gear off my old boat,” he said expansively, “and get out there before it’s too late.”

  But still I did nothing.

  Then two misfortunes befell me almost at once. An amendment to a law regarding party boat licensing had been passed. Through some oversight on my part, I’d failed to comply with the new regulations and my license was revoked. That very night when I got home, my wife announced she was pregnant again.

  It was already late in October. The shark fishing season, I knew, would soon be over. Yet, once again, with the energy born of desperate necessity, I installed the power gurdy from Joe La Rocca’s old boat, got together the necessary fishing gear and, although I had wasted the best of the spring and summer months, I finally took off for Half Moon Bay some twenty miles down the coast where the shark fishing at that time of the year was best. I went alone, figuring to pick up someone there who knew the water. I anchored off the little town of Princeton on the first of November. It was on the second day of that month I first saw Ethan May.

  3

  The fish buyer at Princeton told me about him.

  “If you want somebody that will get you fish,” he said, “get this guy May. He’s a weird one but he’s honest,” the buyer went on. “He’ll probably make you some kind of damn fool deal, but if he does, take him up. You won’t lose. Only you’d better get out there quick because once we get a south blow, you can figure that’ll be the end of the shark fishing for this year. And next year they’ll probably be making Vitamin A out of seawater or garbage and sharks won’t be worth nothin’.”