The Forty Fathom Bank and Other Stories (4 page)

“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.

Suddenly from high above, the big white breasted gull folded his wings and, dropping like a bullet through the cloud of smaller gulls, snapped up a fat sardine that had just swung over the roller. He shook his head and started to take off when I saw he was hooked. As the line went down he flapped his powerful wings and, for an instant, rose into the air, his hooked beak dragging the ganion up with him, and in that instant two small speckled gulls fell screaming upon him, pecking and tearing at his widespread wings until he disappeared in a swirling gray and white bundle beneath the water.

Whether or not May had seen the gull I could not tell. About the middle of the set, he put on another anchor and a third one when the end buoy line went over with its bamboo pole and the flag for a marker. Then he motioned for me to cut the engine.

I was still thinking about the big gull getting hooked and dragged below. However, there was no more reason, I told myself, for getting sentimental over the death of a bird than for the sardine he had attempted to eat. But for the chance turn that got it into the purse seine net, the sardine would now be breeding in the sea or feeding upon some lesser unfortunate who, in its turn should, by like analysis, have my sympathy also.

I switched off the engine and, still standing in the wheelhouse, looked out on the deck. May, who was washing his hands in the bucket of seawater, seemed to have completely forgotten the big set we had just put down. His unlined face, with its clean tanned skin and quiet green eyes, looked relaxed and peaceful. The unconscious rhythm with which he moved seemed in perfect harmony with the
sky, the water and the slow rolling deck upon which he stood. And as I watched him, it occurred to me that never in my life had I known anyone who appeared so free of worry and so serenely detached from the harassments of life.

Yet, whether at the time I admired May's complacence or merely envied it, I do not know; but the quiet pleasure he took, not only in his work but in just the simple business of washing his hands, was having a strangely salutary effect on me. The tension in my muscles and stomach that, until then I'd never quite realized was there, slowly ebbed away and a kind of airy lightness began to flow through my body. The curtain of anxiety that as far back as I could remember had obscured and distorted my vision lifted, and a new and surprisingly beautiful world appeared almost magically before me. The late morning sun that normally would have been nothing more than a disturbing reminder of time wasted made a broad silvery track southward, a liquid pathway over which I could easily imagine myself a child again, skipping excitedly toward some divine kingdom in the sky, while all around me the slow, inbound swells flashed and twinkled as from countless bright trinkets in the blue darkness of the water.

With a feeling of unaccustomed delight, I stepped out on deck. The air was warm and soft, and in the silence of the stopped engine I made a surprising discovery. I could feel the
Blue Fin
floating. I say floating because when the heavy hull, vibrating to the pounding pistons, was moving forward at seven or eight knots, there was no feeling of floating, only a persistent and distracting clamor that numbed the senses. Now as we lay buoyantly lifting and falling on the long swells, the lapping of waves at the waterline, the woody thumping of the rudder post and the muted creaking of planks and timbers, all combined
to bring my senses into perfect harmony with the easy motion of the sea around me.

At the time, however, I did not question this curious transition in myself, whether May's influence had wrought the change or if something else, perhaps some natural safety valve, was responsible. The unusual experience of feeling myself fully alive and the unbelievable joy it brought left no room for reflection. With new awareness I gazed out over the water. Close by I could see the buoy keg, bright red and strangely out of place on the wide expanse of blue on which it bobbed, and above it the black flag fluttering languidly on its bamboo pole. Far away and looking no bigger than a period, appearing and disappearing against the pale sky, I could make out the first flag that marked the far end of the line. Between those two flags and stretching over two miles of ocean floor, I knew lay some thousand baited hooks. But the thought of sharks down there, of tonnage, of liver, of Vitamin A, of the war in Europe, of work, of money, seemed to vanish altogether in the cool blue stillness of the day. Even my family, though no more than twenty-odd miles from where I stood, seemed remote as if they were living in another life.

Suddenly I had a deep desire to talk to Ethan May, or possibly not to talk at all, but just sit and eat or maybe smoke a cigarette. I was still standing by the open door of the wheelhouse and May had just gone below. He had taken off his skull cap and put it in his trouser pocket. I followed him down, got the Primus stove going and cooked up some canned stew and made a pot of coffee.

We ate in what I seemed to feel was a kind of friendly silence, with the
Blue Fin
rolling just a little, the portable table open between us, he sitting on the starboard bunk, I opposite and the soft sunlight through the open ports
making slow patterns on the white painted bulkheads. May's black suitcase was open beside him and when we had finished our coffee, he brought out a big almond chocolate bar, broke it, and handed me, I think, the larger half. I still remember, after twenty years, how it tasted, of the pleasant, homely feeling I had while eating it, and of the cigarette I smoked and of May's pipe, that short stemmed, heavy bowled, comfortable pipe he filled and tamped with his thick strong fingers and the way he leaned back on the narrow bunk and puffed contentedly until we went up on deck again to bring in the shark line I'd almost forgotten and that had probably soaked too long or had lost its bait to the big red ocean crabs.

Yet once the engine was going and the
Blue Fin
's big wheel began to churn up a mound of white water astern and a wide ribbon of wake streamed out of the dark, sparkling water, the troubles, fears and complex uncertainties were back in an instant. It was as if they had never left me. I headed toward the first buoy line, and when the flag was alongside, I slowed down while May brought in the keg with the boat hook. So far he made no indication, either by gesture or expression, of what we might expect to catch. He worked with the same quick efficiency as before, a kind of buoyant cheerfulness in his strong, coordinated body. Now, as the buoy line came in over the starboard roller and around the flat, grooved wheel of the power gurdy, my anxiety was such that I could feel my heart beating heavily in my chest. When the anchor was up, I swung the wheel over and put the bow a few points off the direction of the set and then, with one hand on the wheel and my head through the open window, I gazed down at the mainline that was coming in slowly from off the ocean bottom. But as far as I could see down into the wavering depths, the
hooks hung clean and empty on their long ganions. As the last of the set came in, I caught myself, despite my disappointment, watching tensely for the body of the big gull. But by the empty hooks it was evident the crabs had gotten him. When all was aboard, one small male soupfin lay on the deck along with a few red cod, a couple of worthless leopard sharks and some odds and ends of sticklebacks, smoothhounds and a skate or two. May threw everything back except the cod which we could sell, and, of course, the one soupfin which, when I weighed it on a small spring scale, though it was less than thirty pounds was worth more than twenty-five dollars. A whole week's wages at the real estate office! I looked around for the boats I had seen that morning. All were gone. A thin trail of smoke lay low and quite still on the horizon far off to the west. Beyond that, the ocean was empty. And, except for the soundless passage of the long shimmering swells, there was no movement anywhere. Even the gulls that had been with us all morning had disappeared. And standing there on the
Blue Fin
's slow rolling deck in the middle of that immense blue emptiness with the sun slanting, as it seemed, by the minute toward the sea, I was aware of such an overwhelming sense of hopelessness that had it not been for Ethan May, who with his same imperturbability was coiling up the last of the buoy lines, I would have turned north and headed back to the Gate.

As soon as the gear was in order May began once more the long job of baiting the hooks. Somehow I think he must have suspected how I felt, for I sensed a subtle change in his movements and, though I may have been wrong, a suggestion of concern on his face that seemed, in some particular way, to indicate tacit sympathy. Of course all this was a long time ago, and my thoughts since then may well have colored the accuracy of my memory. I stepped back into the wheelhouse and turned up the throttle.

“Where to now,” I shouted back as cheerfully as I could. May put down his work and came in beside me.

“I think we'll have better luck on the forty fathom bank, off Año Nuevo Island,” he said in his soft, slow voice. There was not the slightest trace of resentment in his manner, nothing at all to reflect my failure of the morning. “We can try one set today and then set out again early in the morning.” He paused to draw a little circle on the chart and then went back to his baiting.

The white conical tower of the light station at Pigeon Point was visible above the water a point or two to the east of south. A few miles beyond, I could see on the chart, was Año Nuevo. Using my homemade parallel rule I drew a line from our present position to the circle May had drawn and set the
Blue Fin
on her course. The distance I figured to be about eighteen miles, which would take some two and a half hours. I studied the area around the circle May had drawn. The chart showed the dark, sinuous line at the edge of the forty fathom bank. The legend indicated a green sand
bottom, and close by, mud, green mud, brown mud, and occasionally shell. Westward, the ocean floor dropped abruptly and farther out configurations of pale blue lines showed depths to nineteen hundred fathoms. Here and there names appeared like Pioneer Sea Valley or Guide Seamount; names that told of some sinister terrain far below the depths of light penetration, peaks and valleys in silent blackness and vast deserts of slimy ooze. I lit a cigarette and waited for the hours to pass. Whatever dreams I had had that morning of making a windfall in the shark business had vanished completely by now. My only hope was that we might catch one or two more to pay expenses. But even that looked improbable.

When May finished baiting, he lined up the tubs, got the keg and bamboo pole ready on the after deck, then washed his hands, folded his skull cap and put it into his trouser pocket and went below. He returned in a few minutes, however, with two big navel oranges, handed one to me and sat down on the deck of the wheelhouse. After peeling his orange and flicking the skins expertly through the doorway and over the side, he parted the segments and ate them slowly, one by one. Then, with his back resting comfortably against the bulkhead, he lit his pipe and began to puff away quietly as if he had no care in the world. After a while he put the pipe away, let his bald head droop forward, and the next moment, despite the pounding of the engine directly below him, was fast asleep.