The Girl of the Sea of Cortez: A Novel

by Peter Benchley

  Jo and the others would never discover Paloma’s seamount on their own, for, like almost all the islanders, they adhered strictly to the ancient habits and traditions. They fished the shoals that had always been fished. They did not seek new grounds, and seldom changed their locations by more than a few hundred yards.

  One reason they had always confined themselves to the old grounds was that they had never had a need to move: The fishing was always fine, the grounds still yielded well. True, some species—especially the territorial ones, such as groupers—were growing scarce. But if you had a big enough boat, you could balance the marketability of your catch, making up in volume what you lost in quality.

  A more compelling reason for staying on the familiar grounds was that Jo and the others had no way of finding new places. He had no depth-finder that could locate a seamount, no electronic fish-finder that would allow him to chase the big schools of jacks. And it would never have occurred to any of them to let themselves be towed behind a boat in the open sea, wearing a face mask so they could spot a seamount from the surface.

  They spent their time on the sea, never under it; none of the island fishermen stuck his face underwater if he could avoid it. They claimed to know how to swim, but most disliked swimming and weren’t good at it and went into the water only by accident.

  Jo had tried, when Jobim was alive, but he had hated it. From the time when he was eighteen months old and Jobim had pitched him in the water off the dock and told him to swim, he had hated it. It was alien to him, and frightening. He believed there were creatures that wanted to eat him, and that if he was not continually vigilant, the sea itself would consume him. Jobim explained things to him, taught him, cajoled him, bellowed at him—hoping that his son would be different from all the other sons, hoping that through conditioning he could overcome this strange aversion to the place where man was born. But, finally, Jobim had despaired of him, and had turned to Paloma, who did not have to try. For swimming was as natural to her as breathing, and the more he taught her the more she begged to learn.

  Of course, the others considered Paloma strange, because no matter where or as what man may have originated, he was a land animal now and there was no practical purpose in putting anything into the sea except a hook or a net.

  Paloma did not understand how they could live on the edge of an undiscovered world and have no curiosity about exploring it. Beneath their feet were wonders too exotic for them even to dream of. Secretly, she was glad that they left it all to her.

  This morning, Paloma had tried to be more helpful than usual, to send Jo a message of truce. She did not enjoy hurting him. Besides, his foul humors made their mother tense, and when Miranda was tense, the whole house was, too.

  But Jo wanted no part of a truce today. He rejected all Paloma’s offers of help. When his gear and his mates were aboard, he yanked sharply on the cord of the outboard motor. The cord came off in his hand. Paloma did not laugh, but stood by and tried to appear sympathetic as Jo, for once, restrained himself, rewound the cord, pulled it, and started the motor. Paloma cast off the bow line; Jo pointed the boat toward the rising sun and, squinting, set out for the fishing grounds.

  In the old days, the fishermen had fished exclusively for sharks, for one or two sharks could bring the same revenue as hundreds of other fish. The sharks’ fins were sold for soup, the meat for food, the liver for vitamins, the hide for leather and abrasives.

  But synthetics had cut down the value of a shark by more than three quarters. Now the massive liver was useless because synthetic vitamins had replaced liver oil. The hides brought practically no money; man-made abrasives were cheaper and just as effective and other leathers were easier to cut and process. The fins could still be sold in the Orient, and tourists bought an occasional shark jaw, and a few people would eat shark steaks or shark hash if they couldn’t afford something else. But, in general, shark fishing was no longer worthwhile.

  So most sharks were taken by accident, when they bit a hook intended to attract something else or wound themselves up in a net, and the fishermen concentrated on the more readily marketable food fish.

  Jo and Indio and Manolo would start the day fishing with hand lines. Periodically, they would look through a glass-bottom bucket to see if any big schools were in the neighborhood. If the school fish were there, they would set their net and wait and then gather it, spilling masses of fish into their boat.

  If the big boat from La Paz was due that night or the next morning, the fish would be kept cool until they could be dumped into the boat’s ice-hold. If the boat was not due for a few days, the fish would have to be gutted and put on ice on the island, or they would spoil before the boat arrived.

  The islanders were at the mercy of the captain of the boat. He told them the price fish would bring in La Paz and the price he would pay them per pound, and they had no choice but to accept his price. But he was not an overly greedy man, and in some rare times when the market was glutted he was known to have paid the islanders too high a price, so they could continue to buy fuel and fruit and vegetables and clothing, and thus there were few serious complaints about him.

  Since Paloma was not a fisherman, and not a man, and had no official status in the community, she was not permitted to take up dock space for her little boat. She kept it beneath the dock, where it was out of the way.

  When she judged that Jo’s boat had traveled a safe distance, she lay on the dock and reached beneath it and pulled out her pirogue. It was eight feet long and two feet wide and, basically, nothing more than a hollow log. It was Paloma’s dearest possession.

  Her father had made it for her thirteenth birthday. He had ordered the log from La Paz, for there were no trees on Santa Maria, and it had arrived on the boat that came to take away the fish. Then he had built a fire on the log and burned a cavity in it, then attacked it with a chisel and a wooden mallet. Finally, he used coarse dried sharkskin to smooth the wood and erase the splinters.

  And all the while he had worked on it, he had never told Paloma who it was for. She had assumed it was for Jo, and she envied him the fun he would have, the places he would go, the things he would learn.

  She underestimated her father. When he gave her the pirogue, he said only, “This will give you good times.”

  This morning, she had tossed a broad-brim hat into the pirogue; later, around midday, when the sun was highest and the temperature over a hundred degrees, to spend more than a few minutes on the water without a hat was to invite a pounding headache and nausea. She had checked her mesh bag to make sure she had all her equipment: her face mask and flippers, a snorkel tube for breathing, her knife—a razor-sharp, double-edged blade of stainless steel with a rubber hilt—and a mango for her lunch.

  She carried the knife not to defend herself against an animal—before yesterday’s encounter with the testy sailfish she had never felt menaced by anything under the water, and she reasoned that if a shark was going to bite her it would move so fast that a knife wouldn’t do any good.

  The knife was more a tool than a weapon. Its primary use was to pry oysters free from the rocks on the seamount and to open them in her pirogue. Its less common but more important use was precautionary. Over the years, fishermen had lost a lot of monofilament fishing line. Made of nylon, the line did not degrade in water; colorless, it was almost impossible to see underwater. The skeins of line gathered in and around the rocks. Invisible, very strong, anchored to boulders, monofilament line was a trap that could kill a person in a few minutes. If a hand or a foot became entangled, she could not hold her breath long enough to strip away every thread and wiggle free. She would have to slash her way out.

  Paloma untied the pirogue from the dock and stepped in. Immediately she dropped to her knees, to keep the boat steady. She dipped the double-bladed kayak paddle into the still water, back-paddled away from the dock and turned west.

  Now, as the last of the dolphins leaped away out of sight toward the horizon, Paloma looked around to reorient
herself in the open sea, then dug her paddle into the water and continued toward the seamount.

  The highest point on the seamount was not in shallow water—nowhere did it come closer to the surface than forty-five or fifty feet—so she could not see it from her boat. Nor could she hope to find it by timing her journey from the dock, for each day the winds and currents varied a bit from the day before. If the tide was with her, the trip would take less time; if against her, more time; if the tide was with her but the wind was against her, the sea would be rough and hard to paddle into. A difference of five or ten minutes could mean that she would miss the seamount entirely, for its summit was less than an acre around. So Jobim had taught her to locate the seamount by using landmarks.

  A few miles to the west there was an island, and on the island grew giant cactus plants. From a distance it appeared that at the very highest point of the island was a particularly tall, thick cactus. But as Paloma paddled closer to the island, her perspective on the cactus would change, and soon she would see that it was not one but two cacti. When she could barely discern a sliver of sky between the two plants, she knew she was on target.

  Still, the cactus plants told her only that she had come far enough westward. The wind or the current might have taken her too far north or south. The top of the seamount was a rough oblong that faced east and west, so that its north-south contour was narrower and easy to miss. She had to locate a second landmark that would tell her her north-south position.

  As soon as she saw blue sky between the cactus plants, she shifted her gaze to a fisherman’s shack at the end of a point of land on a neighboring island. If she was too far north, the shack appeared to be far inland; too far south, it seemed to be floating on the water, disconnected from the land. When the shack was precisely on the point, she knew she was directly over the seamount.

  She tossed her anchor overboard and let the rope slip through her fingers. Her “anchor” was nothing but an old rusty piece of iron, called a killick, but it held the small boat as well as a proper anchor would have. And it was expendable. Anchors tended to get caught in the deep crevices in the rocks of the seamount—often in water far too deep for a swimmer to reach them—and then they had to be cut away. Paloma could not have afforded to replace a steel anchor, but there was always another piece of rusted metal to be scavenged.

  When the killick had set and Paloma had tied the rope to a cleat on the bow of the pirogue, she dipped her face mask in the water, then spat in it and rubbed the spittle around with her fingertips to keep the glass from fogging (not even her father had been able to explain to her why spit kept glass from fogging, but it worked); then she rinsed it again in salt water. She fit her knife down the back of her rope belt, slipped her feet into her flippers, adjusted the snorkel tube in the mask strap and, with as little splash as possible, slid over the side.

  She kicked gently along the side of the boat until she reached the anchor line. There she paused, looking down through a blue haze streaked with butter-yellow shafts of sunlight, eager for the surprise that always came with the day’s first glimpse of life on the seamount.

  Sometimes she thought of herself as a sudden, welcome arrival at a big party, where the hundreds of regulars would silently accept her into their midst. Certainly she felt more kinship with the animals of the seamount than with most of the people on Santa Maria, for here all relationships were direct, uncomplicated, trusting.

  Usually, though, such fancies embarrassed her, and she swept them from her mind, for Jobim had told her time and again not to think of animals as human beings, not to attribute to them impossible human characteristics, but to regard and respect them as entirely different creatures. Still, once in a while she indulged herself in childish fantasies.

  Some days she would see a sailfish, some days a shark, some days a porpoise or a pilot whale. Some days, like today, she saw nothing but haze, for the water was not clear, made dim and murky by vast clouds of plankton and other microscopic animals driven up from the deep. She could see the top of the seamount, a rough plain of rocks and corals, and she could make out the shadowy movement of large animals. But it was all vague and misty.

  If nothing would come to the surface, and if she couldn’t see well enough from the surface, she had only one choice: She would go down to the bottom.

  Most of the islanders, knowing little about swimming, knew even less about diving and virtually nothing about preparing for a long breath-hold descent into the sea. Paloma’s training had come from Jobim, who had taken her down in stages of five feet, teaching her how to prepare for each depth, how each depth felt different in her lungs, how to avoid panic. And her training had come as well from four years of practice, and from instinct. She did not think of herself as a good diver, or a not-good diver. She knew only that she could hold her breath long enough to dive to the top of the seamount and spend enough time underwater to have fun—and return to the surface to dive again.

  Lying on the water, face down, with her snorkel poking up behind her head, she took half a dozen deep breaths, each one expanding her lungs farther than the one before. After the last breath, she inhaled until she felt she was about to burst, clamped her mouth shut and dived for the bottom. She pulled herself hand over hand down the anchor line and pushed herself with powerful, smooth strokes of her flippers. As she plunged downward, she let little spurts of bubble escape from her mouth, until the feeling in her lungs was comfortable.

  She reached the bottom in a few seconds and, to keep herself from floating upward, wrapped her knees around a rock. She felt good, relaxed, her lungs pleasantly full. Time had a way of expanding underwater. She might be able to stay down for only a minute and a half, perhaps two minutes, but because every one of her senses was alert, every sound and sight and feeling registered sharply on her brain. On the surface, two minutes could pass without her noticing anything; down here, everything was an experience, so two minutes could seem as full as an hour.

  For the first seconds after her descent, the animals of the seamount retreated, wary of any disturbance in the water and quick to distance themselves from it. Now they began to return, as if accepting Paloma as part of life.

  Something slammed her from behind, knocking her forward. She clutched at her rock perch and spun around, one arm up by her face. For a split second, she couldn’t see through the cloud of bubbles. If a shark had bumped her, as sometimes they did to test for prey, it would strike again and she would be dead. Whatever it was had not been an accident; accidental collisions underwater were as rare as straight lines in nature.

  Arm up, squinting through her bubbles, fighting to suppress panic, Paloma found herself face to face with her assailant. And she laughed into her snorkel.

  It was a big grouper—three or four feet long, thirty or thirty-five pounds—and it hovered a foot from her face, its lower jaw pouting out from under the upper, its round eyes staring straight at her, waiting impatiently for her to do what it assumed she had come to do—feed it.

  She had fed it often before. There was no mistaking this grouper: It was the only one of its size on this seamount, and it had prominent scars behind one of its gills, mementos of long-ago narrow escapes from larger predators. Sometimes she brought it bread, which it ate contemptuously, as if doing her a favor; sometimes bits of meat or fish scraps from the dock, which it gobbled up. And sometimes she forgot to bring it anything.

  She had resisted giving it a human name, but she could not resist thinking of it in human terms, so she thought of it as Bully, which was apt.

  If she had food, she would hold up her fingertips with the food dangling in them; the grouper would charge and she would drop the food into its mouth. It had no desire to bite her fingers, but it was a clumsy eater, consuming anything in its path, and though its teeth were small its jaws were extremely powerful, and a minor slip could result in crushed or shredded fingertips.

  Today she had nothing for the grouper, so she held up a closed fist. The animal seemed to understand the
gesture, for it made a halfhearted grab for her fist, then turned, flapped its tail in her face and moved off a few yards, there to hover in case she should, after all, produce something edible.

  A shadow above crossed one of the chutes of yellow light, and Paloma looked up. One behind another, a procession of hammerhead sharks passed overhead in parade. Their silver-gray bodies were as sleek as bullets, and the sunlight touched the ripples of moving muscle and made them sparkle.

  Paloma loved the hammerheads, for they seemed somehow to focus her inchoate thoughts about God and nature. They were a weird and implausible-looking animal—sinuous sledgehammers, with an eye on each end of the hammer’s head and a mouthful of teeth beneath—and since once in a great while they had attacked a human and otherwise accomplished absolutely nothing good for man or beast, they must definitely be bad: That, at least, was how Viejo had rated them as living creatures.

  And yet, if ever there was an animal that seemed to Paloma peculiarly blessed, it was the hammerhead. Sharks had for so long been so critical to the island’s survival that over the generations facts about them—salted here and there with myths—had been assimilated by most islanders. It was common knowledge, for example, that hammerheads like these had survived, unchanged, for about thirty million years. Except when they were injured or ill, they had no enemies on earth, save man. They had ample food, complete freedom, and sufficient company and kin for whatever their needs might be.

  It was Jobim, however, who had given Paloma perspective to add to the facts, who had shown her how perfectly the hammerheads were suited to their lives. They were simple and speedy and efficient, and, he reminded her, unlike man they made neither waste nor war.

  So to Paloma, the hammerheads were perfect, and she saw nothing in them but beauty. She wished Viejo could see them from down here, from where they lived in nature. From where he saw them—writhing in agony in a boat or clubbed to death and stinking on a broiling beach—they could only appear grotesque.