The Turquoise Lament (3 page)

We had a dozen twenty-foot lengths of highimpact plastic pipe two inches in diameter, open at one end, closed and pointed at the other. The procedure was to clamp the hose nozzle to the pointed end of the pipe, then jet the pipe down through the sand and ooze until about a foot was left above the surface. Signal to stop pump. Call for electronib probe. Then slowly lower it down inside the pipe, down through the ancient shifting strata of sand and silt, while topside somebody monitored the dial, ready to give a tug on the signal cord if the needle swung in any significant way.

We kept as close as we could to a square pattern, sinking the holes thirty feet apart. And we tried to keep from thinking about the simple mathematical fact that the three-square-mile search area would need a hundred and twenty thousand holes to complete it. Five men were the minimum possible. Meyer and I were more handicap than help until we learned how to handle the high-pressure hose. Then, after a week, we got to the point where we could stop thinking about every move, and production climbed up to the prior level, before the other two men had quit. – Rotating the topside and seabottom jobs, the crew-allowing for mechanical delays-could average five holes an hour, but we could not push ourselves past eight hours, so it came out to forty a day. Meyer remarked that on a seven-day-week basis, that was only eight years of work ahead.

We switched jobs every hour or every five holes, which ever came first. The weather held. It was such brutal labor, there was a tendency to forget why we were doing it. Just before dusk we'd buoy the location of the last hole, and then we'd read and mark the bearings of a shale cliff north of us, a giant boulder offshore to the south, and the entrance to the cove where the Trepid was at anchor, just in case something happened to the buoy. We took a lot of pains about that, and we argued a lot about it. One hundred and twenty thousand holes is enough without sinking a single one of them twice. And then we would go droning back to the cove, shower the salt off, build a big drink, eat like ravenous monsters, and sit in a stuporous yawning daze for a half hour before tottering to a bunk, feeling as if all the strings and tendons and wires and muscles had come unfastened from the joints and sockets.

We tried not to think about what would happen if we got a reading. We would buoy the spat and bring the Trepid out and use four hooks to fasten her over the spot, and then go to work with the monster pump mounted in the bilge. It was, in effect, a small dredge, with a four-inch cutting head that would suck up the goop and then spill it over the side of the Trepid into a catch basin of heavy steel mesh.

The sharks came around. Shallow-water types. Nurse, sand, hammerhead. I would have felt uncomfortable if we'd had to work in murky water. But there was a good tide current across the work area at all times except right on the changes, and you could work upstream from the hole you were sinking and be in clear water. I wouldn't want to spend too much time in the same water with the tiger sharks and leopard sharks, because the averages might catch up with you. But they work a lot further offshore than we were in those waters.

The sharks were cruising their range, as is their habit. They would come upon us, put on the brakes, turn and make a big circle, watching us all the while, and then take off again. No wild creature, except perhaps the cockroach, is an experimental gourmet. Unless the food supply has disappeared, wild things want to eat what they have always eaten. Something that does not look, sound or move like anything that has ever been on their menu is not about to be tasted. It might taste incredibly nasty. Why take the risk?

Barracuda would come in quiet groups and hang almost without motion in the clear water, giving us the big eye for an hour at a time. Curiosity, not hunger. All wild creatures especially well adapted to their environment have free time they do not have to use in search for food and shelter, or in fleeing from their enemies. This free time develops the sense of curiosity and the sense of play. Porpoises play. Monkeys play. Otters play. Seals play. Young mammals play. Barracuda stand around and watch, like old men at a construction site, until a pang of hunger sends them darting off about their business.

The eerie savage predators of the deep have gotten a very bad press. I met a man who used to don an old-fashioned diving costume and go down into a tank in Hollywood and be pursued by a horrid, deadly octopus with arms about nine feet long. Octopi are timid and gentle. Hank would sort of lean way back on his heels and put his hands up in front of him as if to ward off untidy death, and then would walk slowly toward the octopus and it would retreat just as slowly. Then they would run the film backwards.

When the good weather broke and began to make up in too threatening a way for us to risk the scow in offshore waters, even though they were semiprotected waters, we took a day off. There were provisions to pick up. Professor Ted, Joe Delladio and I were eager for a break in the routine. Meyer and Frank Hayes stayed aboard to nourish a chess feud. Meyer had discovered, to his dismay, that when Hayes played the black, he had worked out a variation of the Yugoslav sacrifice in the King's Indian defense which Meyer had not successfully countered in three tough tries.

We broke out the little Whaler, clamped the outboard onto it, and kept to the sheltered side of the cove and the bay, oddly eager to see strange faces and hear unfamiliar voices.

Joe Delladio knew the area. So we went to a place where he was known, a little fishing resort and hotel called Club de Pescadores. At the Club (pronounced Cloob) Joe was given a warm Mexican abrazo by most of the staff. It was a little before noon. He borrowed a pink Jeep with a canopy to go into town and get the supplies, saying that if we were along, they'd cost more. We set ourselves up, Ted Lewellen on my left, at a table near a little outdoor pavilion bar with a thatched roof, with canvas laced between the posts on two sides as a wind screen. There were wire chairs and a tin table, like in the faded photos of old drugstores. Gray scud went past at express speed, and the wind was hot and wet.

I drank tall ones with fruit juice and a local gin called Oso Negro, black bear. It is guaranteed to let you know you have been drinking. Touch a fingertip to the top of your skull the next morning and your head will fall open like a cleavered melon.

It was all very nice after having been prunewrinkled by long immersion in the sea, then barbecued in the sun glare aboard our work boat. I enjoyed the bar, the drink and even the company, though Ted was not one to use three words when one would be enough.

I could not understand why I felt so very damned good and said so. It was a different kind of good feeling from what I get when I am in good shape. I wondered aloud.

"Heart," Professor Ted said, and then explained that a man's heart shares to a certain extent that " trait of the whale heart and porpoise heart of slowing when they dive deeply, to give a maximum use of the oxygen in the blood, to make it last. "You develop a bigger, slower beat, Travis, so that topside you're getting more nourishment to the cells of muscles and brain and gut."

It made sense. I was wondering how to ask about our chances of getting rich when a small herd of sports fishermen from the States came trooping in. They were noisy. They were clad in the Real Thing big game garments from Abercrombie, L. L. Bean, Herter's, all properly sun-faded, salt-crusted, spotted with oil and fish blood. As there was absolutely no chance of any of the boats going out in that blow, the outfits looked too contrived.

They clotted around the bar and ordered booze in broken Mexican and tried to all talk at once about old Charlie trying to harpoon that big sonofabitchofa leopard ray, and how that idiot boy Pedro, had gaffed the striped marlin when it was too green and got a sprained wrist and some loosened teeth from the gaff handle, and how poor old Tom lost a three-hundred-dollar outfit to some big billfish nobody ever even got a good look at. And they whined and moaned and bitched about the weather that was taking a good hunk out of their expensive fishing trip.

They were aware of us sitting there and made their loud brags for our benefit, with the sidelong looks that tried to estimate us and figure out who we were, sitting so sedately in clean khaki slacks, boat shoes, T-shirts, wondering no doubt if we were of the great billfish brotherhood.

Finally, as could be expected, one of them came wandering over, smiling, glass in hand, and said, "Hi, you guys. Just get in? You must have come by boat. Nobody gets color like that except on the water. Come down from California?"

Professor Ted looked at him for a slow five-count and said, "No."

Nine out of ten would have wandered off. I wish he had. But he was like a friendly dog in a friendly neighborhood. He smiled and sat in one of the vacant chairs at our table and said, "Mind? Honest to God, I'm the jinx of all time, and you better believe it. I've been counting on this for years. What is today? Thursday? I left Florida last Sunday, and we got out there bright and early Tuesday and in two full days you know what I got? Three strikes and flubbed every one of them. Bunny Mills over there he's my boss-in charge of the southeastern district out of Atlanta-he got a blue that went two hundred and thirty. I'm the only one skunked so far, and I got to leave Saturday, and Manuel tells us this is a twoor three-day blow. How about that? Say, my name is Don Benjamin."

He held his hand out to me. What can you do? He was about thirty, slender, dark-haired, with a reddened and peeling nose and forehead. I took his hand and said, "McGee. And Lewellen."

"Glad to meet you. You been doing any good?"

I mentioned the fake survey and the fake foundation. Ted yawned. He signaled the bartender for a pair of refills. Don Benjamin sighed wistfully and said, "You know sitting here like this, it doesn't seem possible that come Monday morning I'll be right back there in Suncrest, right back in the old routine, peddling insurance."

He looked expectant. One of the afflictions of a transient society is the do-you-know disease. I knew a few people in Suncrest. But I didn't want to play. "Too bad," I said.

So Bunny Mills came sauntering over. Don's boss. Don introduced him. Beef and belly, and a broad and meaningless grin. A type. The nasal, slurred, high-pitched back-country Southern whine of one of the "good old boys." I could guess that he moved his insurance business in political directions, had a piece of this and a piece of that, tiptoed on the outer edge of tax fraud, whacked judges on the back, and leaned hard on the serfs who worked for him. He came over to punish flagrant disloyalty. Don Benjamin had taken unauthorized leave of absence from his role as junior ass kisser to consort with strangers-without permission.

Bunny Mills beamed at Professor Ted and at me and said, "This little ol' boy here come so close to winning this here trip on the company, I tooken pity and sprang for it outen my own pocket, and never did I see a boy so plain dumb fumble-handed around a boat and tackle. He's just plain in the way. He even damn near lost me my blue, right, Donnie?"

Don Benjamin was staring up at him, his expression strained. "Mr. Mills, the premiums and renewals and the new business put me in the upper-"

"Argue that with the home office, boy." The grin was still there, with the small mean eyes looking out from behind it.

"But the printed list had me-"

"You got a sorry way of rubbing me wrong, Donnie boy. Best you shut your mouth and come back over to the bar."

We hadn't wanted Don moving in on us in the first place. But I've never enjoyed watching the abuse of power. So, slumped deeply into the chair, I grinned up into Mill's grin and said, "Soon as we finish our private conversation, Fats, I'll ship him back over to you."

There are men whose passports should be stamped NOT VALID OUTSIDE THE CONTINENTAL LIMITS OF THE USA. The further they get from home, the louder, cheaper, and tougher they get. And the more careless. They rove the world in honky style.

If I'd been wearing the right clothes for bill fishing, I would have been a good old boy too. I made a serious mistake. I underestimated his capacity for violence, and I had not seen the weapon.

I didn't see it until he pulled it free. It was a fish billy, with a thong through the hardwood handle, the thong having been suspended from one of those brass belt hooks sold to men who like to plod about jangling with the tools of play. Fourteen inches of club with a wide bracelet of metal encircling the fat end, said bracelet studded all the way around with little pyramids of steel about a half inch high and a half inch apart.

His face had clenched instantly into a red something that looked more like a fat boiled fist than a face. He planted his feet, snatched the club free, and made his whistling, grunting, earnest effort to cave in the whole middle of my face. Maybe he had never made a serious attempt to kill anyone before. God only knows what angers and frustrations had built him into this abrupt deadliness. He was ready, and I was there. And he was far from home.

My reflexes were in fine shape. There was no time for any conscious thought. I caught a glimpse of the club flickering toward me, shoved hard with both feet and went over backward in the chair, not certain it would miss me until it had. I wanted to tuck and roll and come up onto my feet, but I gave my head a solid ringing crack against the flagstones, and in the roll I caught my feet over the arm of a chair at the table behind me. It was a very sorry performance. People were roaring and I was moving in slow, slow motion. Comedy routine. Mommy, watch the man with the red face crush the skull of the man on the floor!

He was tippy-toe quick the way some beefy men are. I did manage to roll just enough so that the second blow clanked the stones close to my ear. But I saw that he was definitely going to get me with his third try. Very definitely.