The Girl of the Sea of Cortez: A Novel

by Peter Benchley

  Again Jo gunned his engine in neutral, the way an airplane pilot does before takeoff to make sure the engine will give maximum power at the critical moment. Together, Jo and his boat seemed to be some strange monster pawing the sea, preparing to charge.

  Now, for the first time, Paloma felt genuine fear, for she knew she had badly miscalculated. She was no longer dealing with Jo, but with a mindless, violent creature who had surfaced only once before and whose single appearance had finally and irrevocably ruined Jo’s relationship with his father.

  The scars caused by Jo’s panic underwater had healed. Jobim had not only forgiven him but had even come to regard the episode as his own fault for having pushed Jo too hard. Jobim had taken Jo’s training back a few steps and had proceeded more slowly, more gently.

  They had still been a team.

  It was late summer, in a lull between the migratory cycles that mark the end of one fishing season and the beginning of another. Every year at this time, the islanders had a fiesta. It was an ancient festival that had been going on since well before Viejo’s memory, must have gone on even before the time of the Spaniards, for some of the masks that some of the children wore represented old gods (their names long since forgotten) that lived here before the Christian God.

  The centerpiece of the fiesta was a fishing tournament. Anyone could enter and could fish with anything he wanted—hooks, harpoons, spears—anything except nets. The winner was the fisherman who returned with the most weight of fish.

  Jobim had entered the tournament every year, and every year he came in last. He had no interest in prizes, no need for public approval, no fondness for catching masses of fish. What amused him about the tournament was the challenge of trying to catch fish in ingenious ways, ways that gave the fish a more-than-even chance.

  One year he fished without a boat and with barbless hooks. He swam out to the nearest shoal and fished with bent pins. He hooked several fish, most of which straightened out his homemade hooks and fled. With his last hook (a huge safety pin), he snagged a big grouper and, by playing it with infinite patience and care, brought it to the surface. Only then did it occur to him that he had no way of getting his fifty-pound prize to shore. So he removed the safety pin from the lip of the grouper and turned the exhausted fish around and pushed it back down into deep water.

  Another year he had used a boat but no fishing gear. He anchored his boat and surrounded it with chum—a savory blend of tiny baitfish and guts and blood. The chum attracted schools of jacks and legions of sergeant majors and a dozen groupers and a few sharks, all of which swarmed around his boat. Jobim’s challenge that year was to catch the fish barehanded, as a bear does in a stream. His trophies at the end of the day consisted of countless puncture wounds in his palms, caused by his grabbing fish by their sharp dorsal spines, and one mangled fingertip, souvenir of a grouper who had mistaken his finger for a bit of chum.

  This particular year he had entered the tournament with Jo as his partner. They were going to fish underwater, using spears Jobim had fabricated by copying a picture he had seen in a magazine. The spear was a steel rod, propelled by a rubber sling attached to a wooden sleeve.

  Perhaps with long hours of practice a fisherman could learn to be accurate with one of these spears, but Jobim had finished making them the afternoon before the tournament, so he and Jo had been able to practice for only an hour or two.

  The balance in the sling was precarious: Usually, the spear skewed away too soon and shot up or down or off to the side. Or the spear skidded and slipped on its way out of the sleeve, and plopped listlessly and harmlessly out and down. Or Jo held the sling wrong, and it slapped so hard against his wrist that it left an angry red welt.

  Though he had never dared say so to his father, Jo desperately wanted to win the tournament, for he felt he needed a badge of accomplishment to give him stature with his friends. He had hoped that by fishing underwater with his father’s invention, he would have an advantage over the competition. Now that he saw that the invention wasn’t so marvelous, however, he was distressed.

  “I’ll never hit anything with that,” he had said. “We don’t have a chance.”

  “Probably,” Jobim agreed, unaware of the significance that Jo was attaching to the tournament. “But we’ll have fun. Most people only use the sea; we enjoy the sea.”

  But Jo didn’t enjoy the sea; he wanted to get out of it what he could, and be done with it.

  By midday, he and Jobim had caught nothing. There were plenty of fish around, but neither of them could hit a thing. Every time Jobim missed, he would moan underwater and pretend to tear his hair and then would laugh and dive to retrieve his spear. Every time Jo missed, he cursed bitterly. Finally, he left his father alone in the water and returned to the boat.

  All around them, other fishermen were hauling fish aboard their boats. Nearby were some of his friends, with their fathers, and when they saw that he had caught nothing, they taunted him for being incompetent and for obeying a father so foolish as to try to catch fish by sticking them with a steel rod.

  Jo felt the blood rushing to his face and pounding in his neck, and before he knew what he was doing he had leaped to his feet and cocked his spear and unleashed it at the nearest boat. The spear had clanged harmlessly in the bow of the boat, but it had scared the fishermen enough to drive them away—shouting angry threats at Jo.

  And then Jo—frantic now beyond reason to prove that he was a winner, the best, that even if his father was strange, Jo himself knew how to get things done—pulled a small bag from a cubbyhole beneath a thwart. He had never thought he would have to use this bag, didn’t know what would happen if he did, but he was glad he had brought it along, for the situation called for extreme measures.

  The bag contained firecrackers—the big, canisterlike ones with the waterproof fuses—bought in La Paz for the fiesta and stolen by Jo from the common store.

  Now he would show them who could catch the most fish. The firecrackers would explode underwater, so no one would hear them. Stunned fish would float to the surface. He would gather them up, pile them in his boat and later stick them with his spear to make it seem that he had caught them. It didn’t occur to Jo that there was anything wrong with this stratagem: devious, yes; tricky, yes; clever, certainly. But wrong? The rules said only, no nets. Jobim might even admire his ingenuity.

  Jo lit one of the firecrackers and threw it overboard, from the side of the boat away from where he had last seen Jobim’s shadowy form underwater. As he watched it sink and waited for it to explode, he wondered just how much damage a little explosion like that would do to a fish.

  He never thought to wonder what it would do to a man—until, after he had heard the muffled WHUMP, he saw his father thrashing, struggling toward the surface and saw the clouds of blood streaming from his ears.

  When Jobim’s head had broken the surface, there had been a moment before his eyes rolled back and he fainted from shock and pain. In that moment his eyes had locked on Jo’s, and in his eyes were accusations of stupidity, recklessness, and cowardice.

  Jo had screamed, “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” over and over, but no one had heard him.

  Now, waiting for Jo to charge at her again, Paloma knew that the same kind of switch had been tripped again in Jo’s head. Whether a reservoir of restraint remained within him she could not tell, but, for the moment, she was faced with an irrational animal whose fury was being fueled by encouragement from his unthinking mates.

  With the engine in full throttle, Jo reached back and flipped the gear lever from neutral into forward. For a second or two, as the pitch of the propeller blades changed and they sought to grip the water, the boat moved not forward but down. The bow rose, then fell, and the boat was up on a plane, flat on the top of the water.

  He was determined to capsize her, and so intense was his obsession that until he succeeded he was prepared to hurt her or maim her or perhaps even kill her.

  She had resisted so far by counterbalan
cing. But if she could not use her knees and hands, if she were forced to lie on the bottom of the pirogue, a weight as immobile and unsecured as a sack of grain, when a wave struck the boat and lifted one side high out of the water, her weight would roll to the other side and destroy the boat’s natural balance and force the high side to keep rising until, finally, it passed the point of no return and pushed the boat upside down.

  What frightened her was not the thought of capsizing, but the knowledge of how Jo intended to compel her to lie on the bottom of the pirogue. At full speed, he would sweep the pirogue with his extended oar, from bow to stern. If Paloma stayed on her knees, balancing with her hands, the oar World strike her in the stomach. If she ducked down, it would strike her on the top of her head or her back, for the pirogue was so shallow that she could escape the oar completely only by lying flat.

  If she didn’t duck quite far enough, or if she lifted her head in an impulse of resistance to capsizing, the oar would hit her in the neck or the face. In this last second, as her eyes focused only on the oar and saw it as a scimitar, she thought of flinging herself overboard but decided against it because she knew it would deprive Jo of the satisfaction he craved. He had to do something to her.

  So she threw herself forward onto her face and covered the back of her head with the palms of her hands and braced her elbows against the sides of the pirogue.

  She never saw the oar, never heard it, but she felt the puff of pressure wave that it pushed before it as it swept the pirogue, and she felt the oar’s blade nick the pirogue’s wooden sides and bounce and nick again.

  Then the wake of the motorboat slammed into the pirogue and heaved it upward. Paloma was no longer on her face, but on her side, then over on her back, and then there was only grayness and a hollow slapping sound and she was under the boat. She stayed there, breathing the air trapped beneath the boat, trying to get control of herself and guess what, if anything, Jo planned to do next.

  The engine noise told her that the motorboat was moving away and that Jo had throttled back. She heard incoherent voices, talking calmly, and then the engine noise grew louder again. The boat was returning, but slowly this time.

  The engine noise dropped to the low mutter of idling speed, and she heard the wavelets lap at the motorboat’s hull as it wallowed.

  “Where is she?” Indio’s voice filtered into the chamber where Paloma’s head stuck out of water. He sounded worried.

  “You’ve drowned her!” said Manolo.

  “She’s not drowned,” Jo said. “I’ll show you where she is.”

  Suddenly Paloma’s ears were battered by a sharp, metallic clang that echoed from side to side of the wooden cavern. Jo had hammered something—what, she could not imagine—against the upturned bottom of the boat.

  “Hey!” he called. “Ready to take us to the seamount?”

  Paloma did not reply. Partly, she didn’t know what to say, didn’t know what another flat refusal would goad him into doing. But partly, too, she hoped that by remaining silent she might scare him—even briefly—into believing she had drowned.

  “I knew it!” came Manolo’s voice. “She’s dead!”

  “No,” said Jo, but there was a lilt of uncertainty in his voice, a hint of fear. Again the metal thing struck the bottom of the boat, but softer than before. “Paloma!” he called.

  “Paloma!” Indio shouted.

  “Leave it to me!” Jo snapped at him. And then Jo took a gamble: “Paloma, I know you can hear me. In my hand is a harpoon. If you don’t agree to take us to the seamount, I will punch a hole in the bottom of your boat with my harpoon. Your boat might not sink, but it won’t paddle, either, so you will stay here and float with it till kingdom come … or you will take us to the seamount in return for a ride home. Your choice.”

  The harpoon dart dug at the boat, and Paloma heard the steel point grind into the wood fibers. It might take him time to dig a hole through the bottom of the boat, but there was no doubt he could do it. And if the hole was big enough, the pirogue would behave exactly as he said: It would wallow awash and drift with the tide.

  She had to surrender; it was the only reasonable thing to do. But why should she apply reason to a situation that had so far been completely irrational? Jo hadn’t used reason in what he had done. Why should she? So she stayed beneath her overturned boat, listening to Jo’s labored breath as he gouged a hole in its bottom.

  First she saw a pinprick of light, and then a shaft the size of a coin, and wood splinters fell on the water before her. Then the head of the harpoon jammed through the hole and turned a couple of times and was withdrawn.

  “There!” Jo’s shadow crossed the hole and disappeared. “Good-bye, Paloma. You may think you’re being proud, but all you are is pigheaded.”

  Paloma heard Jo pull on the starter cord of the motor. The motor sputtered but did not start.

  “We can’t leave her,” she heard Indio say. “We have to make sure.”

  “Sure of what?” Jo said. As he talked, Paloma felt herself growing cold, not from the water but from the icy logic oozing from the mouth of this person who was her brother. “Make sure she’s under the boat? Make sure she’s all right? Why? Suppose she isn’t. What are you going to do about it? Nothing. When we get back to shore, we say we have no idea where she is, which is the truth because we don’t. You don’t talk about it to anyone because you know that if you do I’ll come for you. And you believe I mean what I say because I do.”

  Listening to Jo, Paloma realized that he had accomplished at least one of his goals: He had restored a certain stature to himself among his peers. He could not be different or special by being better or more skillful than the others, so he had set himself apart by being reckless, unpredictable, dangerous. If he could not make them respect him, the next best thing was that they should fear him.

  “But believe me,” Jo went on, “she is under the boat and she is all right. She will come back to shore and she won’t talk about what happened because she’ll be too embarrassed, and besides, no one can do anything about it and probably wouldn’t believe her anyway, and if she does talk a lot and complain to our mother I’ll get her sometime, and she’s like you—she knows I mean what I say and she better treat me better than she has.”

  Paloma heard the outboard wheeze and jump to life, and she could feel through the water that Jo had put the motor in gear and was driving away.

  Soon she could no longer feel the faint tapping in the soles of her feet, the sensation caused by the tiny shock waves emitted by the turning of the propeller. She guessed that the boat was already about a hundred yards away.

  She wondered whether she had been right or wrong, smart or foolish, principled (as she believed) or pigheaded (as Jo had said). At best, she had delayed Jo a few days. He would find the seamount eventually and do his damage, perhaps destroy it. And the delaying tactic had cost her … what? She couldn’t even guess yet. Here she was in the middle of the sea, with the end of the day approaching and no way to get home unless she could devise some way to patch the hole in her boat.

  But futile though her gesture might prove to be in the long run, it had been the right thing to do. Jobim would have approved. He would have told her that she had struck a blow for life. And she knew that to strike such a blow himself, he would have gone to almost any extreme.

  Once or twice, he had gone to extremes. She recalled now a story he had told her about an incident he described as one of the most important, and dangerous, of his life. He was telling her, he had said, to teach her that there were times when you had to take big risks over matters of principle. And he had sworn her to secrecy because if the truth were ever to surface, it could start a war between Santa Maria and some of the other islands in the Sea of Cortez.

  Late one summer, the fishermen of Santa Maria had discovered that one of their prime fishing grounds—a deep seamount in open water far from shore—was fast becoming barren. Every day it was more difficult to get a fish on the line, and what few fis
h there were looked scruffy and battered.

  Their first thought had been that one of their number was using nets, but it was pointed out that huge nets were impractical in such deep water. None of them had a boat equipped with the powerful electric winches, the wide cockpit, and the support structures necessary to handle the nets.

  Then they had concluded that some water-borne plague was killing all the fish. Every now and then, the depths of the sea would spawn and spew up clouds of poisonous microorganisms that contaminated hundreds of thousands of fish—either making their flesh toxic to human beings, or killing the fish themselves. But again, someone pointed out that if the fish were being killed, they would float to the surface and be seen, and if the fish were being made poisonous, surely by now people would be aware of someone falling sick or dying, either here or in La Paz.

  So it had to be something else, something new and strange and alarming. A few people insisted that it was God’s way of punishing the fishermen for being careless over the generations, for taking too much too indiscriminately.

  Jobim knew that it had nothing to do with God. As usual, people were turning to God because He was a quick answer for unanswerable things. The more Jobim saw and heard, the more he smelled the scent of man.

  Contributing to the fancies of the other fishermen was the fact that not one of them had ever seen the top of the seamount. None of them dived, none knew anything about what underwater terrain actually looked like. They assumed that fish lived somewhere down there, waiting, presumably, for the chance to bite a baited hook.

  But Jobim had seen seamounts, if not precisely this one, and he knew what to look for, and so one afternoon he had paddled out to sea and anchored. Even if he hadn’t already known why he had never dived on this seamount, his anchor line would have told him: The killick dropped straight down and shot past five fathoms, past ten fathoms, past fifteen and eighteen and twenty fathoms (the last marked spot on the anchor line) and stopped, at last, at twenty-two fathoms—132 feet.