The Girl of the Sea of Cortez: A Novel

by Peter Benchley

  Now that she did understand, she could say only, “But why?”

  “Why what?”

  “You don’t eat that fish. Nobody eats triggerfish.”

  “Cats do.”

  “What?”

  “Grind it up, make pet food out of it. Very nourishing.” Manolo held up the twitching triggerfish and whinnied, “Here, kitty … here, kitty.” Then he dropped the fish back into the bottom of the boat.

  “But … but … that beautiful thing,” Paloma sputtered. “You’d waste its life for …”

  “What waste? Get a lot of ’em, they pay for ’em.” Manolo reached for another piece of bait on his hook.

  Paloma knew better than to argue; it would be a waste of time—not only her time, but the fish’s time. Every second she spent trying to save it, it was dying.

  “Throw it back!” she screamed.

  Manolo gazed at her, and there was no expression in his eyes. “Okay,” he said. “You’ve convinced me.”

  He reached into the bottom of the boat and picked up the triggerfish by its tail. He pretended to examine it for a moment, then said, “Looks a little faint. Better wake it up.” He swung the fish high and slammed it down on the gunwale of the boat. The sleek body, once purple and gold, now mustard and dull gray, shivered once and was still.

  Manolo looked to Indio, who was grinning, and said, “That didn’t work. I don’t get it.” Then he turned to Paloma. “You know so much about fish. Here. You try.” And he threw the fish across the water.

  It landed in front of Paloma and splashed water in her face. The flat body floated on its side. The fins did not flutter, the gills did not pulse. The eye, which in life was a black so vivid that somehow it manifested fear and fury, calm and curiosity, was now as flat and dead as a porthole into an empty room.

  Paloma held the corpse, to keep it from drifting away in the tide. She said nothing, for there was nothing she could say that would make any difference—certainly nothing that could change what had already happened, and probably nothing that would change what was going to happen.

  She looked at Manolo, who was baiting his hook and glancing furtively at Indio for approval, and at Jo, who had been looking at her but quickly shifted his eyes away as soon as he saw her looking at him. Now he pretended to be deeply concerned about a knot in his fishing line.

  Jo is trying not to look embarrassed, Paloma thought, but he is embarrassed because he has no real control over these others. Even he wouldn’t be stupid enough to pull a stunt like Manolo’s so soon after trying to appear reasonable. But he could not stop Manolo—would not have tried to stop him, for Manolo would have told him to stick a fish hook up his nose and pull out his brains, and Jo’s self-image as commander-in-chief would be exposed for what it was: basically a fraud, tolerated by the others for only two reasons—the boat (which had been Jobim’s) belonged to him, and he had engineered the deception that found Paloma’s seamount.

  In a way, Manolo had done Paloma a favor. Like a deft surgeon with a sharp knife, he had excised from Paloma a tumor of softness, of gullibility, of desire to be liked, of willingness to trust. Like one of the ancient pirates who used to sneak up on his victims flying a friendly flag and then, at the last moment, break out his pirate banner, Manolo had shown their true colors.

  Without a word, Paloma reached behind her for her knife. Swiftly, she cut the triggerfish in half, then in quarters. As soon as blood began to billow in the water, the tiny sergeant majors materialized and searched in frenzy for the meal that must be there.

  Paloma let the pieces of triggerfish fall one by one, and through her mask she watched each one as it was consumed by the swarming sergeant majors.

  She felt numb doing this, as if somehow she was compensating for the evil that Manolo had done, restoring a natural balance that had been upset by his brutality. He had killed an animal and would have let it rot in the sun until it could be ground into powder—an end that denied the animal’s life any dignity. She had at least achieved a disposition that was cleaner, quicker, and more natural. Forget that the triggerfish had died at the hands of a pig. Its body was now being returned to its home, serving to nourish the other creatures of the seamount, and prolonging the life of the community.

  The blood dispersed and became part of the sea; the pieces of fish descended into the mists, shrunk to nothing by the frantic nibbling of the little fish that, from here, looked like clustered bees. Only the bones would reach the bottom.

  Paloma climbed into her boat and removed her mask and flippers. In the other boat, all three were now fishing, and they did not notice her as she went forward and tugged at her anchor line to shake the killick loose from the rocks below. The killick was well caught, and Paloma had to bounce the rope several times, pulling it this way and that, hauling it tight and giving it slack, to force the iron to shift position and work loose. At last, she felt an easing of the strain on the rope, and when she pulled now, it came up at a steady pace.

  Free of the rocks, Paloma’s boat drifted off the seamount. Moored to Paloma’s boat, Jo’s boat drifted with it.

  Jo was the first to sense that something was wrong. The others’ lines were already down; they had been hanging within a couple of feet of the bottom. When the tide carried the boat, it carried their lines as well, so they felt no difference. But Jo was just letting his line down when the boat came adrift. He waited for his hook and sinker to strike bottom, but they kept falling, for by now the boats were away from the seamount and over a bottom that was four thousand feet away. Jo’s line fell and fell, and the deeper it went the faster it fell, until his entire spool of line was all but empty.

  He turned and looked at Paloma’s boat in time to see her pull her killick aboard and cast his boat away from hers. He shouted, “Hey!”

  “I have to go home,” Paloma said calmly. “Put down your own anchor.” Then she knelt in the pirogue and raised her paddle.

  “But where’s the bottom?”

  “Right there,” Paloma said, pointing vaguely to a spot in the sea a couple of hundred yards away. “You can’t miss it. Not a fine navigator like you.”

  The others were already hauling in their lines, and Jo rushed to bring his aboard. He shaded his eyes and squinted at the shore, hoping to recall landmarks barely noted when he had approached the seamount. He started the outboard motor and put it in forward gear at half throttle and aimed it against the tidal flow, reasoning that to recapture the seamount all he would have to do was reverse the direction of his drift.

  “Put the bucket over,” he ordered Indio. “Tell me when we’re there.” They had not been drifting long, so he assumed he would be directly over the seamount within a few minutes.

  Indio put the glass-bottom bucket over the side, then gripped it tightly with both hands, for the movement of the boat against the strong tide tended to tear the bucket from him. All he saw below was blue.

  “Well?” Jo said impatiently.

  “Nothing.”

  “You got to be wrong.”

  Indio looked up from the bucket. “Kiss a goat. Look for yourself.” Indio snickered and added, “Mister fine navigator.”

  Jo put the motor in neutral and took the bucket from Indio. The tide caught the bow of the boat and swung it wide to the left and pushed it half a circle around, then struck the stern and pushed it after the bow: Slowly, the boat was drifting in circles. Jo paid no attention. He stared through the glass-bottom bucket at the endless carpet of blue beneath him.

  “Impossible!” he said.

  Manolo smiled. “A miracle!”

  “God’s will!” chimed Indio.

  “Shut up!” Jo said. He brought the bucket aboard and put the motor in gear and gave it full throttle. The boat lurched forward, rose to a plane, and traveled several hundred yards before Jo got his bearings and turned the bow against the flow of the tide. He continued up-tide until he judged he had compensated for his movement sideways, then stopped and told Indio to look again.

  “Noth
ing.”

  Manolo said, “I think you’re way off to the side.”

  “I can’t be,” Jo insisted.

  “You could be above it,” Indio suggested. “You traveled long enough.”

  “No. Did you see how far we drifted?”

  Manolo said to Indio, “There’s only one thing for sure: He doesn’t know his butt from his bucket about where he is.”

  Jo said, “You could do better?”

  “I couldn’t do worse.”

  Manolo looked at Indio, who looked at Jo and shook his head and murmured, “What an ass.”

  Jo was confused. His command was unraveling, and he could not deal with sniping from two people at once. And so he focused on one, on Indio, and said, “Get out.”

  “Get out of what?”

  “The boat.” Standing in the stern, Jo pointed at the sea.

  “Get out of my boat.”

  “And what?” Indio said, laughing. “Walk home?”

  “I don’t care. It’s my boat, and I say get out!”

  “And I say”—Indio mocked his imperious tone—“go suck a lemon!”

  Jo took a step toward Indio, Indio grabbed the bulwarks on either side of the boat, the boat yawed dramatically, Jo lost his footing and started to fall overboard. To save himself, he twisted in mid-air and fell across the motor. The motor was hot, and Jo yowled like a scorched cat and pulled his hands away from the motor and lost his balance and rolled into the water. He hit head-first and went under for a second and came up sputtering and clawing for a hand-hold.

  Indio guided his hand to the side of the boat and said, feigning concern, “What’d you do that for? You always tell me you don’t like swimming.”

  Jo gurgled and sputtered and tried to utter a threat, but all that came out was drool.

  “If I were you,” Manolo said, “I’d get back in the boat.”

  Jo struggled to haul himself aboard and then lay panting across the after thwart. He scowled at the other two, and hated them for forming an alliance against him, hated them for seeing through him, hated them for making fun of him, hated everything because there was nothing he could do about anything. Except …

  Jo shaded his eyes and stood up and looked across the water. Far away and moving still farther, appearing from this distance no bigger than a piece of driftwood, was Paloma’s pirogue.

  If she hadn’t cast them loose, none of this would have happened. They would not have lost the seamount, and, in trying to find it, Jo would not have suffered the collapse of his authority. All he had left to give him superiority over Indio and Manolo was his boat, and that was not enough. They could always find someone else with a boat.

  What he hated most about the collapse of his façade was that he had been so careful, so meticulous in erecting it. By being extracautious on the sea, he had assured that his seamanship had never been tested; by staying in the same fishing spots, he had never had to try his nonexistent navigational skills; by announcing that he wanted to learn to dive, he had scored points for courage, while knowing full well that once he had stolen from Paloma the secret of her seamount she would never agree to teach him anything.

  He didn’t care about the respect of others except insofar as it encouraged them to help him reach his goal—the acquisition of enough money to leave this island and get away from this wretched sea and into a city, where life depended on the function of mechanical things that he could create and care for and repair.

  Here he was a misfit, and he knew it, but he had survived. Until now. With a single thoughtless gesture, Paloma had destroyed his credibility with Indio and Manolo. The only way to restore that credibility was to destroy its destroyer, to prove once and for all that he was stronger, more worthy, than Paloma. And such a proof would settle more than the matter of the moment: It would avenge the humiliation he had felt when his father had replaced him with a girl.

  He would bring her to her knees before him. She would acknowledge his superiority, beg for his mercy, promise to obey him, and … He would think of other things when the time came.

  Jo turned and yanked on the motor’s starter cord. The motor caught at once, which he took as a good omen, and he pushed the throttle open and spun the boat around.

  “Where are we going?” Manolo asked. Pounded by the thumping bow, he half stood, letting the muscles in his legs absorb the strain.

  “She’s gonna put us back on that seamount,” Jo shouted above the noise of the engine.

  Indio said, “I bet we could find it ourselves.”

  “If we had a week,” Jo replied. He poked a finger at Indio’s chest. “Every minute we’re not fishing that seamount, she’s costing us money. She’s costing you money. You want to go to La Paz and fly on an airplane and see things and meet people?”

  “Yeah. You know that.”

  “Then blame her that you’re stuck here.” Now he pointed at Paloma’s pirogue, which was growing larger and closer every moment. “She’s the one got you chained to the island; she’s taking the money from your pocket.”

  “I never thought of that.”

  “Well, think of it. Because we’re gonna stop it right now.”

  Paloma was more than halfway home when she heard the outboard bearing down on her. Immediately she sensed Jo’s mood—if not his precise intention—because the engine noise broadcast an unmistakable message: Only someone ignorant of boats or out of control would run an engine at full speed in the open sea. It was dangerous to the sailors and damaging to the engine. Jo knew boats. The engine pitch was at peak hysteria, and so too, Paloma sensed, was Jo.

  It had probably been a mistake to cast Jo’s boat loose, for she had known he would soon be lost. He had never learned how to interpret tides and currents, couldn’t differentiate the subtle shades of blue and green that would tell him how deep the water was and what kind of bottom was below. What she could not have known was how vulnerable he was, and how quickly his embarrassment would change to rage.

  Paloma stopped paddling and waited, for there was no point in trying to outdistance him. She wondered if there was anything she could say that would defuse him. The engine noise came closer, a shrill and painful scream. She looked up and saw the white hull rise out of the water and slam down, spewing rooster tails of spray from both sides of the bow. The boat was aimed directly at her.

  Still she waited, now shaken by a new possibility: Might he actually ram her pirogue? Could he be so stupid? He might sink the pirogue, true, but he would certainly damage his own boat as well. She wondered if she should jump overboard and go underwater and wait for him to pass. But then he might take her boat. Besides, it was a cardinal rule that you never abandoned your boat unless it became absolutely …

  They were upon her.

  The white bow rose over her and came straight at her, and for a split second she thought she would be crushed. Then, suddenly and violently, the bow skewed off to the left and she had a flashing glimpse of Jo’s face and the shrieking motor before a mount of water struck the pirogue and lifted it nearly vertical. Paloma threw herself against the far bulwark, against the lean of the boat, and it righted itself and settled into a trough. Quickly she steadied herself and stood up to see where Jo’s boat had gone. She had to know where he was so she could see him if he came at her again.

  The boat was thirty or forty yards away, turning in a tight circle, running over its own wake, caught in crisscross patterns of swells and chop, the motor spewing smoke and screeching as the propeller bit through pockets of air instead of water. Manolo stood in the bow, bracing himself with the anchor rope, his head thrown back, laughing. Indio sat amidships, steadied by an arm pressed against each bulwark. And Jo knelt in the stern, turning the boat and aiming it once again at Paloma.

  This time he turned away a second sooner—Paloma was able to keep the pirogue from capsizing simply by shifting the weight in her knees and balancing with her hands—and then he stopped. His boat wallowed a couple of feet away.

  “Get aboard,” he said,
indicating his boat.

  “Why?”

  “You’re going to take us back to that seamount.”

  “Find it yourself.”

  “I’m not asking you; I’m telling you. Get aboard!”

  Without thinking, Paloma raised a hand and ticked the thumbnail off her front teeth at Jo. As soon as she had done it, she knew it had been a mistake, for the rude gesture compounded the effect of her refusal: It showed not only defiance but contempt. Jo blushed, and Manolo and Indio exchanged snorts of amazement, for neither of them had ever seen a female make that gesture to a male. It was beyond insolence; it was unthinkable.

  Jo put his boat in gear and turned away, and Paloma could see the veins in his neck protruding thickly. He drove the boat perhaps thirty yards, then turned again toward her.

  “One last time,” he called to her. “Will you take us back to the seamount?”

  Silently she shook her head.

  “Yes you will. I gave you a chance to do it the easy way, but if you want to go the hard way, that’s okay with me.”

  She heard his engine yowl as he revved it in neutral, and she knew what he intended to do. He wanted to capsize her, to separate her from her pirogue so that she would have to beg him for a ride, and he would pick her out of the sea only if she would take him to the seamount.

  But she would not give in, would not surrender the seamount, would not betray herself and her promise to her father just for the sake of putting money in Jo’s pocket. If he wanted the seamount, he would have to find it himself and take it himself. She knew that eventually he would find it, but it would not be with her cooperation. Meanwhile, for as long as he wanted to upset her pirogue, she could keep it upright by balancing with her hands and knees. Soon enough he would get bored, or decide that he had made his point, and he would go away.

  Then she saw the oar.

  His boat was directly in front of her, his bow facing hers. He always carried two oars, in case his motor died and he had to row home, and now he had fit one into an oarlock and had directed Indio to hold it horizontal, so that most of the hardwood shaft stuck straight out from the side of the boat and the oar blade was turned so its sharp edge faced straight ahead, straight at Paloma.