The Forty Fathom Bank and Other Stories Page 2

  That afternoon I had passed at least fifty boats working along the twenty fathom bank off Montara and Pillar Point. I had pulled alongside several and they told me they had been averaging better than a half ton per boat per day, and that a few of the bigger boats had gone over a ton. Eighteen-hundred dollars in a single day, I had thought, and had been dizzy with the excitement of it all the way in to the anchorage.

  “Get hold of him for me,” I said. So the buyer got on the phone and called somewhere and in a few minutes was talking to Ethan May.

  “Yeah, sure,” I heard the buyer say, “a big boat. Maybe good for twenty tons.” I couldn’t hear May’s voice. “OK, I’ll tell him,” the buyer said. He hung up and laughed.

  “You got yourself a deal,” he said. “I told you the guy’s weird. He says he’ll go out for two days with you and you can have the first three tons if he can have all over that. I figure you’ll be damned lucky to get a ton this late in the year, so I said OK.”

  Three tons, I thought. Fifty-four hundred dollars. I lit a cigarette and tried to appear calm.

  “A share for each fisherman and one for the boat is the usual thing.” I said, trying to appear professional. “How come he makes an offer like that?”

  “Who knows?” the buyer said, a little irritably. “He lives alone. He’s got nobody. Probably he gets a kick out of playing his hunches. You got yourself a deal so I wouldn’t worry if I was you.” He concluded abruptly. “He’ll be in on the seven A.M. bus which stops in front of the hotel.”

  Still in a daze, I left the buyer’s office and in the short November twilight, walked out on the pier to watch the boats unload. A long line of them, mostly crab boats, waited in a big half-circle extending a quarter of a mile down the bay. One by one, they came forward and tied up between the mooring floats at the end of the pier so the swells could not smash them against the pilings. The boom from the loading hoist swung out over the fish holds. The men on the boats put slings around the tails of the sharks and the hoist lifted them up in dripping clusters onto the scales on the dock. They were deep water fish, bottom feeding from their sand gills and, as they swung head downward, their air bladders hung like fat red tongues out of their big crescent mouths and their heavy guts pushed forward, swelling out their white, blood-streaked bellies between their big flapping pectoral fins. Hanging that way with their bellies bloated made their long tails look even longer and thinner while their wide set eyes stared sullenly out of their flat, long-snouted, gray-green heads. A man with a broom pushed the blood and disgorged slime into the water while the gulls, darkly white in the evening air, swooped down in screaming clouds upon the reeking refuse.

  As I stood there on the pier’s end with the dark ammonia-like stench peculiar to sharks—a smell I was soon to know more intimately—permeating the darkening air, I gazed at the clusters of blood dripping flesh that by some freak of circumstances were worth some five hundred dollars a sling load. My revulsion and possibly pity for those disfigured brutes jerked so brutally out of their homes in the sea’s depths was overcome by thoughts of the load I would be bringing in myself; of the four or perhaps even better than five thousand dollar check I would get from the fish buyer. I thought of how my wife who at that moment was probably feeding my two undernourished children with leftovers from the previous meal’s leftovers would react to such unbelievable good fortune.

  And then I thought of Ethan May and the strange proposition he’d offered over the telephone. Suddenly the possibility of three tons of sharks seemed very doubtful, in fact impossible, particularly in view of what the boats were presently bringing in. Looking at it practically, I thought a ton, or at most two, would be almost too good to be true. And if we were lucky enough to catch that much, or even after two days the full three, this Ethan May, whoever he was, would get nothing for his work. The fish buyer had said he was honest. But he had also said he was weird. Weird and honest. A strange combination. Yet, whatever, I’d have to take my chances. And at that moment, I had to admit, they looked good.

  The following morning I was awake at two A.M. The Blue Fin was rolling slowly on the long swells that moved in from the ocean. The anchor chain rasped and grumbled in its iron chock. There was no sound of surf, and I judged it must have been a minus tide because of the strong odor of kelp and exposed rocks along the reef. A November chill was in the still ocean air. There was no point in turning out at that hour, so I lay in the bunk watching the cones of pale moonlight through the starboard ports making erratic circles along the opposite bulkhead. A picture had formed in my mind of what Ethan May looked like, a hulking, brutish man with heavy dark hair and a low forehead, probably of southern European origin, who had changed his name. No matter, I thought—and again a feeling of giddiness came over me—I would take the money, however much it was, and buy some property in the City, a house, or better yet a few good units in a decent district. At least with property we’d have a permanent roof over our heads and with the war scare going on, I was sure to get an excellent buy somewhere.

  I got up about four thirty, fried a couple of eggs on the Primus stove in the galley and, after three cups of bitter coffee left from the night before, I rowed over to the pier in the skiff. A cold, clear light suffused the cloudless morning sky above the round black hills to the southeast. The water in the bay was black as was the wide sweep of ocean beyond the reef. A flock of silent gulls, high up and lighted by the sun, flapped seaward. As I walked down the heavy splintered planks on the pier and up over the hard wet sandy beach, the fetid smell of sharks, of sea wrack, of rotted pilings and the high water residue of crude oil was overpowering.

  There were some free postcards in the hotel’s lobby with a photograph of the hotel, retouched to make it look large and elegant. I addressed one of the cards to my wife and two to the children, wrote a short note to each and left the cards with three cents at the desk to be posted.

  I was standing on the hotel porch when Ethan May stepped off the bus at seven o’clock.

  The first thing I noticed was the pair of shiny new rubber sea boots he carried tied together and slung over his shoulder. In one hand he held an old black leather suitcase with a piece of cotton clothesline tied around the middle. His other hand was thrust into the pocket of the old flannel slacks he was wearing. He walked over to the foot of the hotel steps and looked up at the porch. The sleeves of his faded blue sport shirt were rolled up tight above his elbows. He had on worn white sneakers, and he did not wear a hat. His head, which was completely bald, seemed unnaturally white in the early morning light. The paleness of his lashes and eyebrows and the unblinking eyes gave his face a simple, childlike look.

  “Are you Ethan May?” I asked, surprised and a little disturbed by his appearance.

  Without answering, he took a new cellophaned card from his shirt pocket and handed it up to me. It was his commercial fishing license. Ethan May. Address, general delivery, San Francisco, Age, thirty. Five feet seven. Weight, one hundred seventy-five. No hair. Green eyes. American. Single.

  He put his suitcase down, took a small black skull cap with a little tassel on it from his trouser pocket, and put it over his bald head. I walked down the steps and handed him back the license. As he picked up the suitcase again, I could see his wide corded wrist and the heavy muscles under the tanned skin on his forearm. And when he looked up I saw that his eyes were pale green, about the color of seawater under a breaking wave.

  From the quiet look on his face and the direct, almost innocent look in his pale green eyes, I could get neither an impression of intelligence nor the lack of it. And so far, either from shyness or possibly because there was nothing to be said, he had not opened his mouth.

  We crossed the highway and started down the beach toward the pier where the skiff was tied. The sun was up. I could feel it burn into the ring of sunburned skin around the collar of my hickory shirt. Back up under the hills, the shadows were still black. The water in the bay and also the ocean beyond had changed to a deep, inky blu
e. From across the bay, for the first time that morning, I could hear the low moan of ground swells tumbling over the reef and I could see the green and white water rushing in between the black barnacle covered rocks.

  May kept slightly ahead of me, walking with long solid steps, his stout legs driving his sturdy body forward, his white sneakers leaving deep prints in the hard wet sand. The big suitcase swung lightly in one hand and the boots bounced against his calves. With each step, the little tassel on his skull cap bounced about like a small rubber ball. From time to time he looked about with a kind of absentminded interest, down at the wave-washed sand, at the sky above the rocky headland at Pillar Point, out over the dark blue water. He sniffed the air and squinted toward the sun.

  “The weather should be good for a couple of days,” he said in a slow, quiet voice, paused, cleared his throat and added, “then it’ll probably blow from the south.”

  Now there was nothing to say to a statement like this. I did not even wonder how he had come to the conclusion there would be a south wind in a couple of days. Ever since I had seen him get off the bus my hopes had been dwindling. The buyer had assured me May was a good fisherman. At the time there was no reason to doubt him. Now I recalled the buyer had been quite abrupt with me. Probably he had sized me up as some young greenhorn and, rather than ignore me entirely, had brushed me off with this fellow Ethan May. As May and I walked down the beach toward the pier, it struck me there was nothing about him except possibly the license he had shown me that had indicated he knew anything at all about fishing. The white sneakers he wore, the worn-out sports clothes, the old suitcase tied with clothesline, the shiny boots, which were obviously new, and now this preposterous prediction about the weather all seemed to point to but one conclusion. He was no fisherman and probably knew nothing at all about boats or the water.

  Suddenly I remembered the crazy deal he had made that the first three tons were to be mine, and the thought struck me that I might even be stuck with some kind of a crackpot. A feeling of misgiving came over me, and by the time we had climbed up on the pier and were heading out toward the end where the skiff was tied, I felt that I had just lost my one and only chance to escape the misery my family and I had been forced to endure for so long.

  The buyer was standing by the loading hoist when we came up. He was talking to the skipper of a big halibut boat from Seattle that was taking on provisions. Above the mewing of the hungry gulls that arced and crossed in a winged maze above the boat, I heard the skipper saying:

  “I think the season is pretty near done.” He was a ruddy-faced Swede with fine ash blond hair. “We’re going up north to Bodega. If there’s nothing there, we try it off Fort Bragg. Then we go home.”

  Whether or not May had heard what the skipper had said, I couldn’t tell. He was looking at a couple of small soupfins that had come off the halibut boat and were lying stiff as dry leather in the bottom of a big fish box. The buyer had glanced up as we approached, but gave no sign that he remembered either May or me.

  “I’m going up north myself tonight,” the buyer said. “One of the big drug outfits bought out the fish company here. They’ve been doing it all along the coast. My guess is that next summer they’ll get together and knock the price down so low on shark liver it’ll hardly pay to go out.”

  4

  It was almost eight o’clock when we climbed aboard the Blue Fin. Ethan May took his suitcase below and came up in a few minutes wearing a thick cotton sweatshirt, and he had put on his shiny new sea boots. He did not wear the boots with his belt through the loops, but folded down so that the folds came just above his knees. In a leather sheath at his waist he carried a short bladed knife. I went below and started up the big heavy-duty engine, and when I came back on deck, he had already made the skiff fast to the mooring and was standing by to let go the line.

  As I headed the Blue Fin along the reef toward the harbor entrance, May got up a box of bait from the hold and, sitting on the edge of the hatch, his wide shoulders slightly hunched, his powerful fingers moving with quick precision, he began to work the sardines onto the big shark hooks and set them in neat rows around the rims of the tubs. The sun was well up and beginning to warm the air. The sky was clear and what little breeze there was seemed to come from no particular direction. A dozen or more gulls, some gray and white, some speckled brown, hovered over the stern or swooped down close to the deck, screaming and flapping their wings. High above those squabbling by the stern, one big gray-backed bird with a brilliant white breast glided silently through the clear morning air.

  The easy familiarity with which May had handled the boat’s gear and the way he was getting the hooks baited and the lines in order began to cheer me up. By the time we had cleared the black spar buoy at the end of the reef and the Blue Fin lifted her sharp bow into the long swells moving obliquely in from the ocean, I was whistling a little tune softly above the deep heavy beat of the engine. In fact, I remember exactly what I was whistling—Josephine. It had been popular when I had first met my wife; and as I whistled, pictures flashed through my mind, of our wedding at the little church in Sausalito, of the birth of our boy at the county hospital and of our little girl at the University medical clinic. Now there’d be a private room on the maternity floor of St. Francis hospital with big bunches of roses from Podesta and Baldocchi for the new one’s arrival.

  I swung the wheel over and headed the Blue Fin due west in the direction of some boats a mile or so off shore and stepped out of the wheelhouse to see how May was doing.

  Except for the one statement about the weather, May had said absolutely nothing. Now he looked at me with his pale green eyes and, in the same quiet, slow voice as before: “This time of year,” he said, “the sharks usually feed along the forty fathom bank.” Then he cleared his throat again and added, “Probably they will be on green sand bottom.”

  My hope that had been running from hot to cold and back, now disappeared altogether. The best fishermen in the area had been knocking themselves out for months getting sharks. They had probably explored every foot of water as far out as they could get lines to the bottom. If there were any sharks on the forty fathom bank, they would be working out there and not close in as they obviously were. I looked down at the tubs. There were nine of them with a hundred hooks in each and all set in neat rows ready to be put down. A fish on every hook, I reflected, would bring in enough money to feed a family of four for ten years. Unbelievable! At the moment I would have been happy to make enough to cover expenses.

  May still sat on the hatch baiting the hooks in the last tub, his deft fingers slipping the barbed points of the big galvanized hooks under the gills and down along the backbones of the fat, silver-bellied sardines that were just beginning to thaw from the crushed ice in the bait box. The intent concentration of his pale eyes on his work and the way his black skull cap with its little bobbing tassel was perched right in the middle of his head reinforced my earlier impression of a childlike simplicity. And as I watched him working steadily at his baiting, I got the feeling that he was not as much interested in the money he might make from the trip as he was in just being there doing something. Even if he were weird and dogmatic with his predictions about the weather and the fish, he certainly knew what he was about.

  I went back to the wheel, not quite sure what to do. If I’d had any experience at all with sharks, or for that matter with any kind of offshore fishing besides salmon trolling with sport fishermen, I could have made my own decision about where we would put down the lines. As it was, I was pretty much dependent upon him. By now we were far enough out so that I could get a good look around. But I could see no more than a half dozen boats. They were scattered over several miles of a roughly north to south line. Beyond, in deep water, I could see nothing. I leaned over and shouted through the wheelhouse door.

  “We’ll try the first set along here,” I said with as much authority as I could get into my voice, “anywhere in between these boats. It’s probably pretty close to
twenty fathoms now.” I had no idea how deep it was and felt immediately that May knew I hadn’t either.

  May did not answer, but went on methodically baiting the remaining tubs. Then he got up, and after washing his hands in a bucket of seawater he had pulled over the side and sluicing down the deck, he went aft with one of the red buoy kegs, a bamboo pole with a flag for a marker, and stood quietly by the stern roller waiting for me to cut the speed. The squealing of the gulls was like a net of shrill sound overhead. Only the big gray-backed bird with the brilliant white breast stayed aloft, passing now and then across the wake, or without the slightest movement of his wings, glided serenely ahead, high above the bow.

  When May had dropped the keg, and the bamboo pole had snapped up straight with its little black pennant waving in the light breeze, the new manila line began to pay out smoothly over the stern roller. May made fast a light anchor at the end of the buoy line, and then the main line from the first of the tubs started slowly to uncoil. I stood with my hand on the throttle, watching anxiously as the big baited hooks slipped, one by one, from off the tub’s rim and slid across the deck and over the roller. May had taken his knife from its sheath and was standing by to cut the stout three-foot ganions that attached the hooks to the line in case one should foul. Just then he motioned to me for more speed. With a kind of nervous uncertainty, I turned up the throttle. As the Blue Fin jumped forward, the line snapped taut and the hooks began to whip from the tub with an ominous whishing sound and a sharp crack as the sardines hit the water. From the wheelhouse I could see the pale yellow manila line descending in a long flat arc, and hanging below it, the chain of silver flashing sardines, magnified and distorted in the clear, dark water. When the first tub was empty, May, with one quick movement slipped it aside, and the line in the second tub began to uncoil. The engine pounded steadily, the hooks whipped ominously from the tubs. The gulls, screaming in a blurred frenzy, plunged at the sardines on the hooks or made wild sweeps at the bait box.