When the song ends she pushes away from me slowly and dries my lips with her thumb and smiles with those eyes, and all I can do is stand dazed in the aisle between the bunk and the table, and I can’t speak or move or think or breathe, and anyway I don’t even want to.
“Izzy?”
Tina waits for me to come back, to say something.
But I can’t.
She says, “I know I’m not like . . . you know, like the most beautiful type of girl in the—”
I start to tell her how wrong she is, but she puts her finger on my lips. “Shhh. I know you and your friends call me an Amazon. It’s okay. I don’t mind it.”
“I never called you that.”
She cocks her head and says, “Really?”
“Okay, that one time. But that was way back and I was mad, and that doesn’t count.”
Her eyes flood, and tears spill out.
“Did I say something wrong?”
She shakes her head, then smiles and swipes a palm over her cheek. “No. I’m just . . . happy, you know?”
And I do know, I do. If I’ve ever known anything in my whole life, I know that.
We sleep side by side in our sleeping bags on the roof of the
Angel-Baby II
under the Milky Way and a billion blinking stars, because the storm is little more than a distant memory now, and the sky is as clear and deep as fresh water, and you can see into every corner of the inkiest, blackest, most mind-boggling, most impossible universe you could ever even imagine.
The next morning we get up at dawn and set out for Honolulu. As the
Angel-Baby II
hums past the breakwater onto the flat glassy sea, the sun peeks up over the saddle of land between the mountains. Color springs into the water, reflecting the cloudless sky.
I stand out on the stern deck looking back at the island, not thinking anymore, because thinking only messes me up. Forget thinking. The only thing inside me now is a feeling of freedom, as if I were some small perfect part of a much larger perfect whole.
I turn and peer in at Tina, sitting at the wheel.
She must feel me looking, because she glances over her shoulder and smiles at me, as if our being there is the most natural thing in the world.
I study her for a long moment, then smile back, then shake my head.
Angel-Baby.
She’s as perfect as perfect can be.
See my problem?
Man oh man oh man.
Hat of Clouds
My brother Randy
got two things when he graduated from high school: a full day as skipper and supreme commander of Dad’s deep-sea charter fishing boat,
Iwalani
—and an invitation from his draft board to come on down and join up with the U.S. Army.
It was 1966.
Randy had been working on the boat with Dad since he was twelve, so he knew it every bit as well as Dad did. I knew the boat, too, but not in the same way. To me a boat was something that crawled around on the ocean while you watched the clock tick. To them it was a reason to live.
Like Dad, Randy was a fisherman. It was what he was going to do with his life. There’d never even been the slightest question about that. All he had to do now was do his time in the army.
But I had no idea what I was going to do with my life. “Jake’s still in his cocoon,” Dad joked whenever somebody looked worried about me. “He’ll find his wings one of these days.”
I was two years younger than Randy and still had time to figure it out, according to Dad. Mama wanted me to go to college, which would keep me out of the draft, and, of course, I could study veterinary medicine, something she thought I’d be good at. I did like animals. But vets sometimes had to put animals to sleep, too, so I wasn’t sure if it would work for me.
Anyway, a man named Chad Lewis chartered the boat the day Randy got his chance at the wheel. Dad gave Mr. Lewis a discount since he wouldn’t be getting Dad’s expertise, which is usually what you’re paying for on a deep-sea charter fishing boat.
Another man came along, too, a guy named Steve. Dad picked them up at their hotel and brought them down to the harbor. Randy and I had the boat ready and waiting at the pier.
“Mr. Lewis,” Dad said, “I can assure you that my son knows the ocean as well as I do, maybe better. He knows what he’s doing out there.”
“I don’t doubt that at all, Cal,” Mr. Lewis said.
He shook Dad’s hand, then climbed down onto the deck. Steve followed, grinning like a horse.
I untied the lines and pushed the boat away from the truck-tire bumpers on the pier, then jumped aboard. Randy throttled up and walked the
Iwalani
out of the harbor, the new morning sun glowing behind the mountain.
Dad stood with his arms crossed, watching us go. When I waved, he lifted his chin. I don’t think there was anything he could have done to give Randy a better graduation gift.
A couple hours later
we were trolling off the Captain Cook monument, heading south. Other boats had seen a decent amount of action back up along the northern coast, but Randy had his secret spots, places on the ocean he could pinpoint from markers he’d picked out on the island.
He sat at the wheel, looking as right there as Dad ever did. It was kind of amazing, really, the way he had just grown into his skin like that. One day he was a kid in school and the next a seasoned fisherman.
He’d asked me to go along as his deckhand. “You green as bad money, bro, but I need the help. Think you can do the job?”
“As good as you, any day.”
He laughed. “You prob’ly right.”
Mr. Lewis turned out to be a pretty decent guy. He was from Denver, and wanted us to call him Chad. He and Steve were about the same age, thirty-five or so, and were both on vacation with their wives, who’d gone on a tour of the coffee farms up on the mountain.
Chad and Steve spent the whole morning sitting out in the sun, talking about places to put their money and watch it grow.
I wandered the forty-foot boat, trying to keep my mind from zoning out. I don’t know how Randy and Dad could do this day in and day out for their entire lives. It was mind-numbing.
We were running five rigs, three fifty-pound flat lines, and two one-twenties pullied up on the outriggers to keep the lines from tangling.
We had one strike early on but lost the fish after fighting it for only twelve minutes. Chad took the reel for that one and was pretty cool about having the fish break free.
The big hit came later. At 2:48 to be exact.
I was lounging on the gunnel half-asleep when the rubber band on the starboard outrigger snapped. The rod leaped to life, the reel screaming as line raced into the sea. The rig jumped and jerked and bowed out over the water.
“Yeeaah!” Steve shouted.
The
Iwalani
sprang ahead, Randy gunning it to strike the hook deeper. Smoke poured out the exhaust. The wail of the engine was deafening.
Chad and Steve staggered aft.
Randy throttled down. The stern rose in the rush of backwater.
Chad grabbed the fighting chair to keep his balance. “This one’s yours, Steve.”
“You sure?”
Steve stumbled to the transom and yanked the rod out of the chrome holder, hauling back on it, striking the fish in an attempt to sink the hook even deeper—once, twice, three good solid pulls.
I unhooked the safety cable, and Steve struggled back with the rod and fell into the fighting chair. “Woo-haw!” he shouted.
“Jake, come take the wheel!” Randy called, running aft.
I hurried forward and slid into the skipper’s seat, remembering how the last time I’d taken the wheel the boat hadn’t responded as quickly as I’d expected it to. You had to anticipate, be ready.
I turned and looked back over my shoulder.
Out in the stern cockpit Steve was leaning forward, hanging on to the rod with both hands, line still whirring off the reel a mile a minute. He tried to pull back and stop the run, but the fish was too hot, too strong, too angry.
Randy and Chad madly reeled in the other lines, both of them hunched over, heads bobbing, pumping as fast as they could. I couldn’t see Steve’s face, only the tension in his back.
When all the lines were in, Randy got the kidney harness and slipped it around Steve’s lower back, then attached it to the reel just as the fish showed—a blue marlin, a big one.
It leaped full out of the water, shaking its head, sword wagging in the sun. “Ho!” Steve shouted.
The marlin went under, line ripping off the reel. Steve pulled, trying to slow the run. But it was impossible.
Randy scooped a bucket of seawater out of the ocean and set it next to the fighting chair. He got a large sponge and watered down the reel, which was hot from the tension.
The fish finally slowed and held.
Steve pulled back, gaining nothing. Not even a half inch. “Good God, did I get snagged on a submarine?”
“Prob’ly over six hundred pounds, my guess. Just keep the pressure on, make him work, tire him out.” Randy sounded so much like an old pro it would have made Dad swell up with pride.
Just as Steve started making a few small gains, the marlin renewed its anger and burst away. Steve bent forward, shaking his head and fake-weeping at the great gulping yards wailing off the reel. From the angle of the line it looked like the fish was going deeper, down where the pressure was so great it made it twice as hard to pull a fish back.
Chad slapped Steve’s back. “Hang on, pal. You can do ’er.”
Randy stood nearby, frowning, probably worrying that the marlin would go straight to the bottom.
The back of Steve’s shirt was stained from sweat pouring down from his neck and hair.
“Cool him off with some of that seawater,” Randy said.
Chad soaked up a spongeful from the bucket and squeezed it over Steve’s head, then water-cooled the reel.
Randy got the gaff ready.
And the fish club and knife.
I kept my eyes on the line, keeping it behind the boat. I wondered if we’d even see the marlin again, let alone bring it aboard, the way things were going. Sooner or later Randy would have to give Steve his best advice. But, like Dad, Randy would let the angler test his own skill first. It was his charter, after all. It’s what he was paying for.
An hour passed.
For all the progress he was making, Steve may have been trying to pull up a fire hydrant. He swore every now and then, but that was about all the action happening on the back end of that boat.
Randy wandered into the cabin. Checked the horizon, looked at the clock. “You doing okay, little bro?” he said.
“Piece of cake.”
He humphed. “If that fish goes any deeper, he’s a goner.”
“What do you mean?”
“Pressure. Be like sitting under a steamroller if he goes down deep enough.”
“Well, what do we do?”
“I’m thinking about that.”
We both looked back out at Chad and Steve.
The line moved toward the stern, the fish going down, down. Randy reached over me and throttled the boat forward. Did it real easy, so smooth it didn’t even begin to bother me that he overstepped my part of the job. I was lucky. As brothers go, I got one of the best. We’d never in our lives been at each other’s throats like some brothers I knew.
Thirty minutes went by. Forty.
At times Steve rested, taking one hand off the rod, then the other, flexing his fingers. And my neck was killing me from looking back over my shoulder.
Six o’clock came and went. The sun was low on the horizon, turning the
Iwalani
a brilliant gold in its light. I envied all the other skippers and deckhands already back at the harbor chugging cold beers and swapping lies. Randy went out on deck, then paced back in.
The angle of the line told us that the fish was straight down under the boat. “Damn,” Randy whispered, then went back out on deck. I left the boat in neutral and followed him.
“Feels like a sunken barge,” Steve said, now about done in.
Randy nodded, trying his best to keep the discouraging comments I knew were in his head to himself. “Feel any movement?”
“Just my guts working their way up my throat.”
Randy waited a second, then said finally, “I hate to say this, guys, but we’re prob’ly dealing with a dead fish here. Or if it’s not, it soon will be.”
No one said a word to that. It was a sobering thought, after all the work Steve had put into it.
“So what do we do?” Chad finally asked.
“We could try to vector him up. But that could take hours, especially if it’s dead.”
“I’ll bring this thing up if it kills me,” Steve said. “Let’s do it.”
“All right,” Randy said. “You got it.”
Randy and I went back into the cabin. He radioed Dad and told him we’d be out a while longer.
“Got something hooked up?” Dad said.
“Yessir, we do. Problem is, he’s sounded. But we’ll get him. Take us a while longer, is all. Over.”
“We’ll be waiting. Over and out.”
Randy replaced the transmitter, smirking. “Kind of bent the truth a little, didn’t I?”
“Did you?”
“Well, sure. This ain’t going anywhere.”
I slipped out of the pilot’s seat, grateful to escape that job for a while.
Randy eased the boat ahead. The angle of the line opened and fell back. Moving slowly forward, he let the boat pull the fish up awhile, then brought the throttle down, reversed the engines, and started backing down on the line.
“Start reeling,” he said.
I went aft and stood by the fighting chair. Chad looked at me and winked. I think he was having fun watching Steve sweat.
Steve reeled madly, taking in all the line he could. When he felt the dead weight return, he signaled for Randy to pull ahead again.
Forward and back, forward and back. It was crazy, I thought. All this for a fish.
We did this vectoring thing until it seemed to stop working. Night had fallen and the ocean was black. Lights on shore winked out at us, a long line of them along the shore and a sprinkling up on the flank of the mountain above.
“It’s alive!” Steve shouted.
“He’s right,” Chad said. “Look at the rod!”
Randy left the wheel and came aft.
The tip of the rod jerked, almost delicately, as if a fish were nibbling on the bait.
“Wee-hah,” Steve said. “He’s still alive.”
Randy touched the taut line with his fingertips, feeling the movement, frowning. “No he’s not. That jerking is sharks eating your fish.”
Mercifully, at 8:35
Steve got the marlin up to the boat. It was a gruesome sight.
Stringy red tendrils of meat flopped off the back end, just beyond the gills. Looked like huge worms as Randy gaffed the whole mess out of the ocean and flopped it down onto the floorboards.
“Good Lord almighty,” Steve whispered.
All of us stood gaping down on the giant fish head at our feet, its big round eye stunned in death, lifeless sword stabbing out. It was about the size of a fifty-pound bag of rice. Very little blood leaked from it, most of it sucked out by the sharks and sea.
After we’d seen enough, Randy tossed it overboard. It was too dark to see anything in the black water, but you could sure hear the sucking sounds of sharks ripping it back under.
Randy nodded for me to go in and throttle up. “Let’s take her home, bro.”
On the way back Randy radioed Dad and told him about the bad-luck marlin, then told Chad and Steve stories of how sharks are half-blind, and how if they surprise you by showing up while you’re diving somewhere, you can sometimes scare them away by screaming at them under water. Or by punching them in the nose.
There were two things wrong with that advice as far as I was concerned: One is, how can you throw a punch at anything under water? And two, could I even imagine myself punching a shark? What a joke.
Funny thing is, Randy would do it.
It was peaceful
coming in late like that. The harbor, the boats asleep at their moorings. The taste of the sea on your tongue, the smell of cooking steaks in the air. It was the part of boats I liked best.
I stood on the bow with the rope in my hands, ready to jump off as Randy eased up to the pier. Chad and Steve were back on the stern deck, drinking beer, feeling pretty good.
Dad, Mama, and Chad’s and Steve’s wives were sitting in the bed of Dad’s truck. He’d backed up and parked it right where we’d be coming in, the bed facing the water. They looked like a bunch of my friends, having a good time sitting around talking story.
A couple of feet from the pier, Randy reversed the engine to slow the
Iwalani.