The Forty Fathom Bank and Other Stories Read online

  The Blue Fin pounded along with hardly a roll, though now and again the bow, catching a swell just right, flung a low spray that disappeared aft with a muffled splash. No shoreline was visible through the haze, but for the first time that morning I felt a faint breeze through the window that was not from the forward motion of the boat. Fortunately it had come just in time to blow the stench from the open hold away from the wheelhouse. Yet the breeze, though no more than a whisper, started me thinking of May’s prediction about the weather. Again, as in the cabin, a creepy feeling came over me and a kind of numbing cold spread through my chest. My stomach too began to give me trouble with little burning pains and rolling cramps down low. I turned and looked back at May, half expecting to see some awesome transfiguration or even, hopefully, to discover that he was not there at all and that the entire experience was nothing more than a frightful dream.

  But there was no change whatever. May was still standing by the roller balancing himself easily with one foot on the deck, the other resting lightly on the combing. Except for his gray slacks tucked loosely into his sea boots, and his quaint black skull cap with its bobbing tassel, he could have been the model for some Winslow Homer Portrait of a Fisherman. Despite my rampant fear and upset stomach, at the sight of his sturdy figure there, his discerning eyes concentrating on the rapidly descending shark line, I was aware of an immediate sense of calm.

  Feeling pleasantly sure of myself, I was about to return to the wheel when I noticed that something was wrong. Since I was heading south, the keg with its marker flag should have remained due north on the compass. Instead, it was moving slowly in an easterly direction which could only mean that it had broken loose from the buoy line. Though I knew we could manage with one float, for some reason the sight of the keg drifting off that way disturbed me. I left the wheelhouse, and shouting back to May, pointed toward the keg that was quite small by now but still bright red against the water. But apparently May was already aware of what had happened. He turned, and shrugging unconcernedly, said in his usual quiet voice that we could get along all right with the remaining keg and went back to tending the line.

  In spite of his reassurance, I could not rid myself of the uneasiness I felt at the loss of the buoy keg. For the remaining time until the last buoy went over, I kept thinking of the set stretched out two hundred and forty odd feet down in that vast silence and deep gloom with one of its lines cut and the buoy, indifferent and insensible, drifting away and out of sight over the ocean. Though it was not unusual for me to worry unnecessarily about things of little consequence, my concern for the lost keg was out of all proportion to its importance. It even occurred to me that some secret part of my mind might possibly be busy with things I knew nothing of. However, once the engine was stopped and May and I were sitting at the table drinking coffee and eating the last of the bread and some tough-edged Swiss cheese, my uneasiness left me.

  “The sharks might hit pretty well today,” May said when he had finished eating. He leaned back on the bunk and puffed on his pipe. “I think they know what goes on up here. They know when the weather will change and when feed will get scarce. Probably they have some kind of extra sense we don’t know about.”

  It was the longest single statement I had heard May make. His voice was unreservedly warm, almost chatty, as if he’d finally accepted me as his friend. Suddenly it occurred to me that, quite probably, he’d been as uncertain of me as I had been of him and, until he knew me better, had confined himself to pertinent observations, to the business at hand. He opened his old black suitcase, rummaged about for a moment, and came up with a tablet of writing paper and a new yellow pencil.

  “We have enough bait for one short set after this one,” he said. “Then we’d better get back before it blows.” He broke the cellophane wrapper on the tablet and, carefully squeezing it into a ball, tossed it into the paper bag he had set out for garbage.

  Somehow this change in May seemed to clear away the last vestige of mystery surrounding him, revealing, no more nor less, the simple fisherman his license had claimed him to be. With immense relief, I realized I was no longer afraid.

  I was reflecting on all this yet at the same time considering the prospect of still another set following the one still to come in. A thousand hooks and another half a thousand more. For the next five or six hours, I pictured myself working in a state of exhaustion hauling in these squirming tons of soupfin sharks. The hold would be full and they’d be all over the decks and probably down in the cabin too. They’d represent more money than most men ever saw in a lifetime. Yet when I was all through, I’d get nothing, absolutely nothing for all my labor. And there wouldn’t be another chance tomorrow or probably ever again. There was no doubt about it now, the weather was changing.

  Suddenly, like the cellophane wrapper in the garbage bag, I felt myself squeezed into a tight ball. With a rush of anger all my night thoughts returned. I lit a cigarette and flicked the still burning match on the deck.

  “This whole damn deal was no good to begin with.” My voice was tight and I could almost feel the pallor on my face. “I must have been nuts to have agreed to it.”

  Anger surged up into my throat. For the first time in my life I didn’t want words, but some kind of violence. Then suddenly I could feel the deep flush burning in my cheeks. I glanced at May. He had not even looked up. He opened his tablet on the table, adjusted the black lined paper under the top sheet and, with an expression of serious concentration in his pale green eyes, began printing something in large capital letters. When he had finished with his writing, which turned out to be only his name and address at some hotel on Bush Street, he carefully tore out the paper and, weighting it with a box of Kirby hooks, looked over at me with an expression of such ingenuousness and goodwill that I wondered if possibly my impulsive outburst of a moment before was just a figment of my imagination.

  One way or another, it was a disturbing little scene, and I was glad when the Blue Fin was under way again and we were heading toward the black flag that marked the set’s end and May was setting the tubs in a row alongside the power gurdy preparatory to bringing in the line.

  10

  The little breeze was strong enough now to dimple the tops of swells and to make the flag flutter on its bamboo pole. As we approached the keg, my head suddenly began to pound and my grip on the wheel got weak. It lasted only a moment and, I suppose, was caused by my thinking about the sharks that might already be on the line. Despite the fact that none of them would belong to me, once I got to thinking about them, my mind seemed to turn immediately into a regular calculating machine. A thousand hooks, I thought. One every fifth hook. Two hundred sharks times fifty pounds would be ten thousand pounds, divided by two came to five tons, multiplied by eighteen hundred would be nine thousand dollars. I went over all this several times, savoring the taste of the final figure which, because of other probabilities such as a shark on every fourth hook and then every third, increased progressively to something like thirty thousand dollars. Then I began to think about May again. I pictured the Blue Fin loaded. We were heading back to Princeton. I was at the wheel and May stood beside me smoking his pipe.

  “I’ve been thinking,” I imagined May saying in his quiet voice, “that maybe you’d want to sell the Blue Fin.”

  “I’d be willing to sell her,” I said. “I’d even be glad to. But it’s this way. I have a wife and two kids up in the City and there’s a third one coming. I’m not much of a fisherman, but if I didn’t have the boat I’d have no way of making a living.”

  May kept puffing away on his pipe. His familiar sympathy was almost palpable. Finally he said, “I’ll make you a deal. You let me have the boat and I’ll give you my share of the sharks.”

  “But that would be more than five times what she’s worth, and about fifty times more than I paid for her,” I said. “You wouldn’t be getting much of a deal.”

  But when he insisted, saying he had no need for the money, I agreed to let him have the B
lue Fin. By the time I’d gotten the check with its five perforated figures from the fish company and was heading back to San Francisco on the night bus, the keg was alongside and May was pulling it aboard with the boat hook. In an instant, my little fantasy vanished.

  I threw the engine out of gear and stood by the wheelhouse door watching the buoy line come up. The little breeze, steadier now and blowing from due south, felt warm on my face and a little moist. Probably a good wind was blowing high up for here and there big patches of blue came through the milky haze that had covered the ocean all morning. The line, snapping little sprays of water, sped upwards in a businesslike manner, silent and tight as a bow string, as May, with his ever-turned-down boots, widespread for balance, received it from off the power gurdy and coiled it in neat hard circles on the deck. When the small kedge anchor, its flukes and shank dark with slime-green mucky sand and exuding the repugnant smell of some strange decay, came over the side, the first shark could be seen turning slowly in the murky water.

  Once more, as on the night before, a dreamlike quality came over everything. The long gray snout of the hooked shark shot up from the water, the spatulate pectorals flapping like grotesque ears, the distended belly showed white in the translucent darkness and then, with no pause whatever in the relentless, beltline motion of the thick manila, the whole length of the slow-thrashing, muscular body was dragged out and, with the aid of May’s heavy steel gaff, slid through the two vertical guides of the starboard roller. Then May, in what seemed but a single, uninterrupted movement of his strong body, slit open the throat, disengaged the hook and kicked the squirming soupfin clear of the incoming line. I stepped back quickly into the wheelhouse, shoved the gear lever forward and brought the Blue Fin about so that the line came in on the lee side a few points off the starboard bow. I set the throttle at a slow idle and went back on deck to help May.

  No sooner was the first shark aboard than another was coming over the side. And then another. Without even noticing the rancid blast from below, I began throwing the big, twisting fish into the hold. I ran, dragging the sharks by their tails. I skidded, fell, leaped up and ran again. I counted, not to myself now, but aloud, shouting out the numbers in a chanted beat. And still they came, like from the magic salt mill, a steady, unending flow. In no time at all the hold was full. Sharks spilled out and covered the deck. Once I grabbed May’s gaff and, leaning far out, sunk the steel hook deep into live flesh. The thrashing weight unbalanced me and I was half over when May’s hand, like a vise on my arm, pulled me back. I fell against the wheelhouse biting air, then was up again and away. In the open hold heaped up sharks writhed, their tails slapping softly, blood sheathed bellies revolving, abrasive, sand-gray and violet backs arching and twisting, crescent, serrated mouths agape in their strange and silent dying. Across the deck dozens more rolled about. Blood-black, phlegmy slime clung to the gunn’ls and sideboards. In the scuppers the bodies of young sharks, disgorged from pregnant females, squirmed weakly like soft, blind tadpoles. Forward beyond the heavy sideboards, a big one twisted and snapped itself into the water. I snatched up the axe and in a frenzy danced about, battering in the heads of every shark that moved. And all the while my skinny body, incited by some demonic fire, darted this way and that, scraggy bearded, uncut hair flying, two days’ accreted filth on pants and shirt, leaping, squatting, smashing, killing and shouting out numbers in a shrill voice, all the while May’s apocalyptic figure, unperturbed, deliberate and infallible, stood bigger than life, by the grooved iron wheel of the power gurdy, all certitude, all rhythm, a procession of dependabilities like the diurnal tides or the equinoxes.

  The set was in and May was clearing away a space for the tubs when I finally began to look around and take notice of things. No less than a thousand soupfin sharks filled the hold, the forepeak and the entire deck from forward of the wheelhouse to the area May had cleared just aft of the hatch. I stumbled inside and threw the engine out of gear, then leaned against the wheelhouse and, with my arm dangling limply, gazed over the monstrous cargo that shortly would be hoisted, slingload by slingload, onto the pier at Princeton, weighed in and evaluated at some forty-five thousand dollars. Yet at the moment, I would have given up everything, my share of the catch and the remote possibility of any of May’s share too just to sleep, to sink down right where I stood and drift off into utter forgetfulness.

  “We still have time for one short set if you feel up to it,” May said, studying the water and the sky to the southwest. He had just finished sloshing his arms and face with seawater from the bucket. Now he shook the water off his hands and came over to the wheelhouse looking as clean and fresh as if he had just bathed. “It probably won’t blow much until around dark.” His voice was as quiet as ever. There was no sign of weariness either in his movements or expression, or, any sign of special satisfaction about the forty thousand or so he had made in less than two days. The fact that there were still some working hours left seemed, at the moment, to be his only concern.

  The thought of going through the ordeal of another set, even a short one, seemed more than I could take. Besides, I thought bitterly, I would still not get a cent more than my original amount. And then, and for the first time that day, a quick and terrifying image of the big white-breasted gull with its gray-white body twisting in the water passed like something cold across my brain. I flicked my cigarette over the side.

  “Well,” I said in a thin voice, “I guess we’d better get them while we can.”

  I did not look at May, but out over the ocean. Except for a few swiftly moving clouds, the sky had cleared. The water, for some reason, had changed to an inky black.

  May immediately began getting the set ready. First he separated five of the tubs and, after cutting the line, made the free end fast to the kedge anchor. Then he got out the last of the sardines and started to bait. There was nothing now for me to do, so I went below and put on a pot of coffee. While I waited for the water to boil, I sat down at the table and lit another cigarette. After a couple of drags I stumped it out, scraped off the burnt end, and lit it again. The smoke felt hot in my throat and besides, it was making me sick. But since I didn’t want to put it out again, I just sat there holding it and flicking off the ashes. From up forward came the soft thump of a wave against the hull. The Blue Fin lurched a little, then righted herself. I glanced up through the open scuttle. A small cloud bundle, crossing under the sun, turned the sky as dark as a winter twilight.

  May’s sheet of writing paper lay where he had left it on the table. I pushed aside the box of hooks and studied the big, carefully printed letters that filled the entire space between the guide lines. It looked like the efforts of a child learning to write, simple, diligent and unsuspecting. Yet at the same time I could feel there something ultimate, something just beyond my reach but in some way discernible. And looking at it, at the child’s simple efforts, I could see May’s strong fingers working away, his pale green eyes concentrated and serious, yet neither shadow nor flame. And then I saw him all at once, a composite of remembrances. And seeing him that way, with the mid-afternoon sun fading and brightening and the Blue Fin lifting and falling more and more sharply gave me such a quick and poignant feeling of sadness that I had to wipe my eyes with my blood stiffened sleeve to clear away the start of tears. In a moment, the whole feeling passed. Yet I continued to sit there, puzzled and at the same time embarrassed, still flicking the ashes off my unsmoked cigarette and I could only explain my strange melancholy away by the fact that I was probably getting a little hysterical.

  The coffee came to a boil, foamed over the sides of the blackened pot and, before I could reach it, put out the flame. I poured in some cold water to settle the grounds and was fumbling around cleaning up the mess when May came below. His face was as placid as ever. He had washed off his sea boots so that the black rubber glistened. Even the fabric lining of the rolled down tops had been well scrubbed.

  He took off his skull cap, folded it neatly and slipped it into his tr
ouser pocket before he sat down. There was nothing left in the locker but a half box of salted crackers and the remains of some peanut butter. I put these out on the table along with a couple of cups of the steaming, iodine-colored coffee, and sat down opposite him. But again, as at breakfast and on deck a little while before, I could not look up at him.

  By the time I got back in the wheelhouse and May had taken his position aft by the stern roller, the entire aspect of the water had changed. The sea had become the ocean with its cool smell of distance and its vast, curving emptiness. I swung the Blue Fin about as the little wind that had picked up came in off the starboard bow. Through the windows that had already caught some spray, I could see here and there along the crests of the dark hills rolling up from the southwest, white tongues snapping skyward with sibilant whisperings, eerie in that big silence, then falling off, making white foam patches down the lee slopes. Though it was still early afternoon, the sun seemed to have gotten smaller and the sky darker. And just above the horizon to the south and west, a low cloud bank, like a weld on the seam between the sky and the water, was now visible.

  The area May had cleared was so cluttered from gear that he was forced, in order to keep from stepping into the tubs, to stand with one foot on the gunn’l and the toe of his other foot in one of the scuppers. Since we had but one buoy keg left, he picked up the anchor that was made fast to the end of the set line and, motioning me ahead, tossed it out over the stern with no buoy line. The heavy iron stuck with a soft clunk, the line snapped taught, and then the big hooks, as though suddenly inflamed into fiendish action, leaped hissing from the rims of the tubs, whipped through the rollers and into the waves.

  I took a quick check on the compass, then looked out again to the southwest. The cloud bank was higher now, lead gray and flat on top. In the distance, the water looked lumpy, with a kind of confused turbulence as though something were going on below. Close by low, fast-running waves had begun to build. They came on erratically, veering this way and that, yet maintained a general course somewhat oblique to the direction of the big swells. The sun seemed to have drawn back deeper into the sky and to have shrunk to half its normal size. At that moment a wave struck up forward. The Blue Fin shuddered, lunged steeply and then the heavy spray crashed with the sound of a dropped barrel on the cabin deck. I pulled the wheel hard to starboard and then turned quickly to see how May had made out.