A Dolphins Dream (21 page)

“That was invigorating,” he said sprawling across the beach. “Everybody should ride across the Tasman Strait during a rain squall once in their life.”

 Moses removed his shirt that was soaked and shook his legs of water. “But only once, eh. The next time you jes’ get wet.”

Compton gave Moses dry clothes and then fried a fish for them while Moses broke open a coconut.

They ate ravenously.

“That was a wild ride,” said Compton referring again to the boat trip.

“That was tame to the rides I had in Suva,” declared Moses, shaking his fork at Compton.

“I assume you’re referring to women,” coaxed Compton.

“The women and the bottle. Together they are the worst rides a man can have. When he falls off, he is bound to get hurt.” Moses continued to shake his fork at Compton as a teacher might admonish a child.

“How did you get enough money to travel to Suva in the first place?” inquired Compton, wanting more of the story.

Moses put down the fork and looked at his hands. “I worked in the copra fields until there was nothing left of my hands. I had thirty-five dollars. That amount would last two months on Taveuni, four months on Qamea. In Suva it lasted two days.”

Moses pulled his attention away from his hands and picked up the fork. “When I first got to Suva it seemed like the place of perfection that every man seeks, eh. The wharves were straight and strong and the roads were flat and smooth. There were bridges and cars. Everything was made of wood and plastic and steel. There were factories with big machines that did the work of a hundred men. So much progress, I thought, could only bring comfort and lift the burden of work, eh, make life easier. They were using different kinds of steel and fiberglass, everything was put together perfectly. All neat and smooth, it was amazing. It was there for everyone, eh, to use and have the benefit. I was in the land of miracles, I was ready to receive the perfect life.

I lived with a relation and got a job carrying tools and oil for the big freighters that come in. Very soon I saw that the people lived small lives. They were like herds of goats, all following the lead goat who followed the shepherd who was invisible to the rest of us. All those machines to do the work and the people could not find joy in the jobs left over. It was the same work over and over. Very boring, eh. It stole away the surprise of living. They knew what to expect everyday and it made them slow and stupid. But not me, I was making money and spending it on drink and women. I came to work late, full of fuck and drink, and one day the boss say my laughing is a bad influence and I have too much fun on the job, so they run me off. Okay, I thought, I’ll call my cousin who works at a club and get the job as bartender. Then I would not have to go look for a place to drink and whore up. I wasted nothing. I drank away my wages and fucked every girl that would talk to me. When I was broke I cheated the club at the cash register. I was a terrible man, terrible. Then at my worst, my very worst, I met a beautiful girl who was half Chinese and I fell in love with her. I told her that I drank. I wished to be honest. I was in love. Our second time together I got drunk. That should have finished it but she loved me. I don’t know why. She tried to stop me from drinking but I couldn’t. I was losing her but the drink was stronger than the love. She left me and said that I did not love myself, so how could she love me. She was right, I was a miserable human being. When Esther came and said that my father had died and there was no one to look after the farm, I decided then to become a man. I did not wish to be a drunk and waste my life. My father’s death was more important than the Chinese girl’s love, eh?”

Compton appraised Moses with eyes of enviousness. “I covet your experiences,” he said. “They have given you a wisdom that has escaped me.”

“If I have wisdom it is because I always listen to the old ones. They have the wisdom. They have the experience. The young ones are full of ideas and the old ones are full of experience. They have so much wisdom they don’t even know it. They mumble it out and you must get it the first time. They say, ‘You don’t sharpen a knife, you make it thin.’ See, a thin blade stays sharp longer, you have to sharpen it low otherwise you blunt the knife after one cutting. I listened to the old ones and learned how to bait the hook and the proper trolling speed and the trick of getting the mackerel by using the extra lead. I stopped going to school because I had no ambition. I went and listened to the old ones and began to fish because it was what I loved to do. Then I went to Suva and forgot everything. I had to come back to remember it again, eh.”

“My ambition was my undoing,” conceded Compton.

Moses, not missing a beat, finished off his thought. “A man must follow the thing he loves or he is lost in this life. The living becomes a waste.”

The sun was setting behind breaking cloud cover. Moses found a miracle in the silver/gray clouds that muted the sky to a pale orange over Taveuni. “Will you look at that! See how the colors change from one moment to the next. Sunsets change faster than the eye can catch. We never see the changes right away but see how different it already is!”

As tropical sunsets go, thought Compton, it was not particularly impressive.

“You know, Keli, a man changes as sure as the sunset. Very soft sometimes, you can barely see it. But he is changing all the time. See how different you are already. It is an amazing thing, eh.”  

As promised, Moses arrived before daybreak and picked up Compton to hunt the deep reef. While Compton loaded his gear in determined focus, Moses caught his arm and nodded to the sunrise as if he were committing a sacrilege by way of ignoring the event. They both quietly watched it break free of its aquatic bonds and slide like a golden yolk across the water towards them. When blinded by its first light Compton turned and finished his task, then boarded the boat.  

A light breeze stirred the water and a swell rose out of the east as if rippled by the sun’s emergence. Compton was geared up and ready to jump when Moses dropped him on the north edge of the reef. The water had the same breathless clarity as before and Compton cocked the spear gun and made a dive to thirty feet where he suspended in the still water. From out of the blue edge slid a sliver torpedo. It glistened from afar in the low light and he waited as the mackerel moved directly towards him. Even at that distance there was something strange about the fish but nothing he could immediately discern. The fish was magnificent and the ever-moving sea life on the reef seemed stilled in its presence. Forty feet away it turned broadside so that it might better observe Compton. Above the pectoral fin, mid-way to the dorsal fin, hung a large chuck of alabaster flesh. And there, just above it, a hole two inches in diameter where the spear had struck. The mackerel suddenly veered off its line of flight and descended back into the blue infinity to be quickly absorbed by the depths. Compton felt certain it had recognized him. Suspended in the water, he watched the fish go, strangely detached from it as if seeing it really for the first time. He now guessed its weight to be well over a hundred pounds. A world’s record if ever there was one. There’s no hurry, Compton reassured himself with uncharacteristic patience. This reef is its territory. Spearing it will just be a matter of time.

He worked the north end of the reef for an hour without a sighting and was of a mind to return to the boat when a pair of glowing shards of light came coasting across the reef. Two mackerel, which he judged to be twenty-five pounds apiece, came towards him steady as time He waited until they appeared to be an arm’s length away and he no longer saw them at all, only the solitary spot that rested on the lateral line behind the gill plate. When the spear was aligned, the body pulled the trigger. It struck the fish near the gill plate but missed the lateral line by half an inch and the fish hurtled down toward the pearly bottom. He attempted to turn it by pulling on the gun as the fish towed him down and managed through enormous effort to raise the fish’s head ever so slightly. Once this was accomplished, the fish actually began swimming towards the ceiling, enabling Compton to gain the surface and a much-needed breath. Kicking hard with air blasting from his snorkel, using his buoyancy, he slowly pulled the wild fish up toward him. When it was nearly in his hand, crystallizing like blue/gray thunderbolts hurled by Zeus, three white tip sharks converged on the frantic fish with every intention of relieving Compton of his prize. Seeing the sharks, he hesitated for a moment and the fish, feeling the slack, bolted, and he lost all that he had gained on the twelve foot shooting line thus bringing the sharks closer to a state of frenzy than they all ready were. He hauled up on the line again, inch by inch, and the sharks followed, rushing in and out, working up a feed on the blood spoor. Ten feet from the surface they were crossing in front of him in lightning snaps with fearful surges of speed that completely unnerved him. Ready to give up on the fish and let the sharks have it, he was suddenly struck in the back.  Thrashing at the water, he wheeled wildly striking the hull of Moses’ boat, which bobbed gently at his shoulder. He lifted his head out of the water and tore the snorkel loose from his mouth. “Sharks.” 

“What kind?” asked Moses. “White tips?”

Compton had already put his head back in the water and nodded yes. Moses picked up the floating gun and began to haul in the line. Compton felt the tension and let him have it, quickly ducking under the boat and coming up on the opposite side, where he cleared the freeboard in a single lunge over the top.

Moses brought the fish up and into the boat as Compton leaned over the side for a glimpse of the sharks, seeing nothing but blue water and the indistinct distortion of the reef. When he looked up again Moses was holding the fish that appeared to weigh close to forty pounds, nearly twice as large as he had estimated. The power of the Silver Fish was suddenly understood.

“Don’t worry about the white tips,” said Moses, putting the fish in the bow. “The white tips are our friends. They don’t harm the Fiji divers.”

“They followed the fish right up,” replied Compton, a bit chagrined now. “They got awfully close. I was ready to give it to them.”

“No, no. When they see whose fish it is they go back. They don’t see you yet.”

“That’s exactly the way I wanted it.”
“They must see you, then they let you have it. It is very bad to give ’em a fish.”

“Yeah, Aprosa said the same thing.”

“The Fiji divers be very mad at that. If you give the shark a fish then it will want one every time, eh. You must show who is boss. Jes’ like a woman, or they take your fish, walk all over you.” He burst into laughter. “Jes’ like a woman.”

“Easy for you to say.” Compton spoke with a tinge of annoyance, “Sitting here nice and dry in the boat.”

Moses stopped laughing, though he maintained a curious smile.  “I was a diver once. I see sharks, like every Fiji boy. They jes’ doin’ their job. All Fiji divers treat sharks the same. Next time you pull up a fish they give it to you, no problem.” 

“Good fish, brother,” proclaimed Moses nodding to the fish lying in the bottom of the boat. “See the big ones?”

  “Yeah, I saw the same fish I lost the other day. Alive and strong with my wound on it but it took off when it saw me. Based on the size of this fish, I would say it was denitely well over a hundred pounds.”

Moses nodded but said nothing. Then smiled, “I have another spot, a good one. I get the big hookups there.” He hauled up the brake drum and they sped off to the west.

“This is jes’ the same reef that go on for miles. I’ve never been to the end of it.”

Compton examined the fish that lay at his feet. He put his finger in the spear hole and felt around. “There it is,” he muttered, feeling the backbone. “I just nicked it. Missed the spot. The shot went low by half an inch.“

“Next time you won’t be so lucky, eh. Another bus ride to Somosomo.”

“Incentive enough. I wonder if the gun shoots a tad low?”

“It shoots where you point it but you must be very close, eh.”

“Yeah,” said Compton, still feeling the backbone. “I probably wasn’t close enough.”

They traveled at top speed for twenty minutes before slowing to a drift. “This is it, right off the edge.”

As Compton prepared to enter the water Moses added, “These sharks take my fish off the hook. Big sharks here.”

Compton slid off the boat in an awkward, almost unwilling motion and his first sighting directly below, swimming atop the reef like a dog gone berserk, was the largest white tip shark he had seen since arriving in Fiji. It was doing figure eight patterns over and over in the same spot. Compton kept one hand on the gunwales until he was confident that the shark was orbiting a galaxy of its own creation, then tentatively moved off down the reef.

The reef was deep and dark and had an ominous feel to it as if the shark were Cerberus guarding the gates of hell. There were areas of fish activity and then stretches of reef barren of all life. Movement came from deep off the far edge and he dropped down to investigate.  Swimming in the bouncing pattern common to tuna was a single dogtooth. Too deep to intercept, he pushed back to the surface for a breath. There was something foreboding in the water. If it had been air, he could have smelled it and he began to repeatedly look over his shoulder, expecting a shark to be cruising up behind him. Fear oozed from him like a lanced boil and he recognized this as something, once started, could not easily be stopped. He headed back for the boat, questioning the validity of his feelings, suspecting his fear had jump-started his imagination. In this state of confusion he arrived at the boat where the same shark still swam maniacally in the same spot as though it were looking for its mind. The symbolism resonated far too closely and Compton quickly jumped into the boat and shook off the water with an involuntary shiver.

“See anything?” asked Moses.

“A small tuna and about the biggest white tip in the world was waiting for me when I got into the water.”

Moses laughed, shaking his head in mild disbelief at the seemingly endless array of erroneous perceptions that Compton churned out. “It wasn’t waiting for you. Sharks are stupid. Their brains are in their stomachs. Jes’ like a man’s brain is in his cock.”