Three to Be Read

by Philip Wylie

  After an hour, Crunch asked him if he’d like some beer or water.

  “Neither, thanks, old boy. Fun, isn’t it?”

  He sounded, Crunch decided, as if he meant it. Not a thing had happened. Not a rise, a swirl or a strike—not a fin sighted or even a turtle seen. But the doctor was—for some reason—getting a kick out of it.

  So another hour passed.

  Crunch hated to mar a proper attitude, but he began to feel that his advice was being taken a little too earnestly. “Look,” he said. “When I told you to watch the baits, I didn’t mean you had to concentrate like a man—” Crunch was going to say, “watching the clock on his execution day.” But he broke off, instead, “After all, Des, up on the canopy, is helping you look. And I am—most of the time.”

  Binney seemed disappointed, almost hurt. “But I enjoy it! Used to spear crabs when I was a boy. Sharpen a stick—raise it—and wait for hours for one of the nippers to get in range.”

  “Well—if it doesn’t tire you …”

  They had lunch. Other boats were flying sailfish flags. Crunch saw the Clara take a big dolphin and he saw Jake Westover, on the Tulu, miss gaffing a big ‘cuda. But the Poseidon was finding nothing whatever. Dr. Binney, eating sandwiches, drinking a Coke, consuming four bananas, did not budge from the chair or bend his eyes from the baits. It was inhuman. And the lack of fish was abnormal. And yet—it happened.

  Every day, with some exceptions, at least one boat came in skunked. And occasionally-although less often than in the case of most—the Poseidon was the unlucky vessel. This was such a day.

  Des yielded the controls to his skipper. Crunch tried trolling past likely weed “edges.” He tried the inshore water. He took a long cruise into the deep indigo of the Gulf Stream. He. even circled around the Pirate Hussy when she hung three sailfish at the same time, hoping to hit a school. No luck. He trolled slowly—and he trolled fast. When the sun slanted low, he gave up. Des reeled in the lines and Dr. Binney at last rose and stretched himself.

  Crunch was crestfallen when they reached the dock. “No explanation—no alibi,” he said. “I suppose you won’t be interested in giving us another chance. But—”

  The doctor was beaming. “Why—it was magnificent! Haven’t had so much fun for years! Enjoyed every second—and I’ll be at the dock at eight tomorrow—if you’re free.”

  When he had gone, Des said, “Whaddaya think of that?”

  Crunch didn’t know quite what he thought. “Seems patient.” ”

  Patient! One of his ancestors must have been a statue!”

  “Good sailor.”

  “I kind of think he’s been at sea before. We’ll ask him, tomorrow.”

  When they asked him, he laughed a little and shrugged. “Well—never in a ship of this sort. Outrigger canoes in Poaki is all. With the natives. You can imagine how it is out there. What they did, I did.”

  He had left the red parasol at his hotel on the second day—but he still wore the helmet. The second day, moreover, was different from the first. In fact, the Poseidon had hardly rounded the turning buoy at the edge of deep water, where ocean-going vessels sail, when Des yelled from the canopy, “There’s about a nine-foot hammerhead off to starboard. Shall we try for it?”

  The doctor spun around. His eyes glittered. “Egad,” he said. “Shark.”

  A hammerhead shark, Crunch thought, would be ideal. A strong and lunging beast which, however, lacks great speed and does not jump. Perfect for the novice. He waved his mate to advance upon the shark. He took down one outrigger line and wound it in. He advised the doctor to reel in the strip bait. He handed to the doctor the rod which carried the whole mullet and seated the butt in the gimbal. “If he rises, we’ll see him. If he takes the bait, the line will fall from the outrigger. When it comes tight, hit him.”

  Presently, behind the mullet, which danced whitely in the azure sea, a yellowish-brown shape showed vaguely.

  “He’s coming,” Crunch said. “He smells it!”

  Dr. Binney braced himself quiveringly. There was a large splash in the vicinity of the mullet and it vanished. The line sifted down from the outrigger, lay on the sparkling chop, and slowly straightened out. “Now,” Crunch said quietly.

  Binney struck. He struck hard enough, Des later said, to set a hook in concrete.

  And he kept on striking.

  Crunch thought the rod would snap—or the line would break. Neither disaster occurred. The shark began to run, hard and steadily. The reel buzzed. Binney was in a nervous transport.

  “He’s getting away from me, captain!”

  “Sit tight. When the run stops, you can get him back.”

  The run finally did stop, and the skipper showed his passenger how to heave back slowly and reel quickly thereafter, as he lowered the rod. This procedure, known as “horsing,” is standard. Binney worked the shark to within thirty yards of the boat. Then it went away again—at a tangent. He fumbled anxiously with the star-drag—turning it the wrong way. The shark, thus relieved of tension, ran much faster.

  “Something’s gone wrong!” Binney shouted.

  Crunch explained. The angler flushed, and tightened the drag. Again, he stopped his quarry and heaved him back toward the boat. The struggle continued in this fashion for some half hour, at the end of which Binney brought his fish so close that they had a good look at it—snaggle of teeth, gruesome eyes on the ends of long stalks, floundering tail. This spectacle so stimulated Binney that, before Crunch could take measures, he stood up, carried the rod to the stern, threw it on deck, seized the line in one hand, whipped his knife out, put it in his teeth, and began pulling on the line. “Egad!” he bellowed through knife and clenched teeth.

  The hammerhead had by no means abandoned the battle. Perhaps the sight of Binney had upon the shark as electrical an effect as it had on the fisherman. At any rate, the shark lunged around and away, splashing mightily. Line sizzled hotly through Binney’s hands. He hung on—while Crunch grabbed the rod and tried to make him take it.

  “Never used anything but handline in Poaki!” Binney yelled. He took a turn of line around his arm. Inevitably, it snapped. “Never had on anything that big, either,” Binney said quietly, as he sat down. “Sorry, skipper. Boner—wasn’t it?”

  “Well,” Crunch said slowly, “it was only a shark. And your first fish. What the heck!”

  Up on the canopy, Des was staring straight ahead, battling with an unborn chortle.

  “Egad!” he murmured to himself—and suddenly bent double. Crunch caught sight of him even as he began attaching a new leader to the broken line. “Allergy’s bothering my mate again, poor chap.”

  Dr. Binney presently hung a big bonita on the center line. Big—as bonitas go, Crunch thought. It bored straight down at a tremendous rate, directly astern of the boat.

  Des speeded up to give the doctor an angle on his fish. But Binney, who had already mentioned his lack of co-ordination, now exhibited that lack. As the fish sounded, his rod-tip fell lower and lower. He responded to a series of jerks with a further lowering of the rod. Crunch warned him—but he mistook the advice not to drop his rod as a command to do so. When the tip, as a result, lay across the gunwale, it broke, and so did the line.

  “Huh!” said the doctor. “Live and learn, eh? Put the rod on my bill, skipper, and the next time, I’ll hold it high.”

  Another man might have been enraged at his bad luck or—if he had character—at his own stupidity. Binney took this last as a matter of course. “Never was good at such things,” he smiled. And he began to whistle a hymn.

  It was the sailfish which authenticated Binney as the problem angler of all time. If they had not seen the performance, Crunch and Des would have believed an account of it from very few persons. Sailfish were hitting well in spite of the previous day’s ill fortune.

  This one was a small specimen—a thirty-pounder, perhaps. As far as it was concerned, it did nothing unusual or unconventional.

  Around four in the after
noon it swam up behind the starboard bait, followed a while, and hit. Binney saw it first—he was fishing, still, with endless concentration—and called out. Des was at the topside controls. Crunch had gone below to obtain cokes. There was a breeze blowing. The outrigger line dropped and the breeze wafted its lazy slack toward the cockpit. Des bellowed, “Don’t get tangled in that line!” Crunch heard, and dropped the bottle opener to rush on deck. He was too late.

  The line had fallen across the doctor’s sola topee. In trying to brush it away, he had managed to wrap it around the hat. It came tight. The leather strap caught on it. The hat was jerked ferociously from the doctor’s head and hurtled overboard, casting its contents of small, green leaves on the deck, the gunwale, and the sea—into which it vanished, drawn by the rushing fish. The entrance of the hat into the sea added pressure on the fish, for the topee was firmly entangled in the line. It became a sort of sea anchor.

  The fish leaped. It leaped several times.

  Staring with excitement and awe, murmuring, “Golly! My lord!” Binney thoughtlessly eased his rod-butt up out of its gimbal. The sailfish now ran—and the rod turned round in his hands. This circumstance drew Binney’s attention and he struggled gamely. He seemed to need three hands to get the rod—now under great strain—turned around again. He tried to make up the deficit by contorting himself oddly in the fighting chair and using his foot to help support the rod. Meanwhile, the sailfish raged around toward the port side of the boat. This brought the rod-already upside down-around sidewise. Binney’s toe slid between the line and the rod. His sandal was whisked away.

  The racing line burned against his foot. He stood up and pulled on the rod. It came up along his leg and he lifted until, in a split second, he had the thing above his knee. His khaki shorts now protected him from further line-burn. The line raced along one side of his leg and the rod bent upon the other and he scrabbled about, trying to reach behind himself to get hold of the reel handle.

  Crunch grabbed him at approximately that point, sat him down, and removed the busy rod from his abraded limb. He reset the rod in its socket and bade Binney to continue fishing.

  That should have been all there was to it. The sailfish was obviously firmly hooked. The sola topee had acted as a drag when Binney’s gyrations had prevented him from applying suitable tension. The sail jumped a few more times, fought stubbornly for some twenty-five minutes, and Crunch boated it. He socked it on the head, disengaged the hook, and stretched it on the stern for Binney to admire. Binney spread its huge, polka-dotted dorsal and tested its rough bill. In so doing, he knocked it overboard. It eddied bluely in the foaming wake—and sank.

  Crunch looked up wildly. No Des was in sight. For a terrible instant, Crunch thought his mate had fallen overboard in some paroxysm. He jumped up on the gunwale.

  Des was lying flat on the canopy. His abdomen heaved. Tears ran down his cheeks. No sound came from him.

  Crunch went back to the side of his passenger. “Well—” he said, “we darned near got one, anyhow. Technically, we did.”

  Binney seemed slightly stunned. He rubbed the various chafings on his leg. “I’m sorry.”

  “Forget it, doc. We’ll try to find another.”

  The doctor seemed to meditate. Presently he chuckled. “That was about the most ludicrous thing I’ve ever done yet.”

  “You’re unfamiliar with the gear, after all… .”

  “Hopping around,” Binney amused, “with my leg trapped between rod and line—fumbling for the reel… .”

  He began to laugh. At first, he just laughed a little. Then more. Soon, his mirth—hearty and unrestrained—sounded across the Gulf Stream. And Crunch laughed, also.

  When he saw that his customer didn’t mind, he gave full expression to feelings he had contained all day long. Des, getting up on his knees, was astonished to observe the two men rocking with laughter and slapping each other on the back. Des joined them. He felt that, for years to come, in any truly somber hour, he would be able to relieve his depression by recalling the spectacle of the dancing Binney. Egg Jones’s Golden Loon passed near-by—her lines trailing in the sea. All hands turned to watch the Poseidon and listen to the hilarious din which rose from her canopy and cockpit.

  “Any guy,” Crunch said to Des that evening, “who can laugh so hard at himself is okay.”

  “Don’t start me in again. My sides hurt.”

  “I’m serious. He may be eccentric. The fact that he looks like a movie actor is odd. But I like him.”

  “How you going to teach him to fish?”

  Crunch snorted—and checked himself. “We started him in too big a league.

  Tomorrow, we’ll take him out bottom-fishing. He says he’s done some handline fishing in outrigger canoes. He’ll be okay at that. We’ll work up gradually—from handline to rod and reel on grunts. Then groupers. Then amberjack. Then we’ll risk sailfishing again.”

  Des said soberly, “I’d just as soon sailfish with him, any day. Maybe he can dream up another.”

  They were laughing again when a female voice said, “Hey!”

  “Marylin,” Crunch called through the warm gloom. “Come aboard. We’ve been getting set for tomorrow again.”

  She came aboard. She was wearing something that hissed like silk—something dark and simple and expensive—along with a perfume that was charged with a mixture of heartache and what’s good for it. Her arms gleamed and her gold hair glittered like Christmas tinsel in a half-dark room. “I’m looking for Ramsay. Thought he might be down here. He didn’t come over this evening.”

  “We sent him home in good condition—more or less.”

  “Meaning what?” she asked quickly. “How did he do today? Is he going to turn into an angler?”

  “It’s a little early to tell—” Des ventured.

  “—but,” Crunch added, “he is certainly trying.”

  She sat down. They gave her a cigarette. “He would be. He’s stubborn as a mule.

  He won’t marry me.”

  “No?” Crunch said that.

  “Not—yet.” She sounded as if it were merely a matter of time.

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I asked him last night—point blank. We were in the garden—the little formal one—necking—”

  “Ye gods!” Des exclaimed. “Does he neck?”

  Perhaps her lips were smiling. They couldn’t see in the murky cockpit. At any rate, her voice was light. “Neck? Oh, yes. Ramsay necks. Maybe he learned at Harvard. I sort of think though—from the way he does it—that it’s one of those things he picked up from the natives.” She seemed to nod. “No Harvard man I ever knew… .” Her tone changed. “However. He said he absolutely wouldn’t marry me at this point. He said I wasn’t docile.” She sounded annoyed. “Is that what a man wants in a woman? Docility?”

  “Maybe,” Des suggested vaguely, “that’s a native idea, too.”

  She thought it over. “Phooie! Look. Has he caught anything?”

  “In a sense,” Crunch said.

  “What do you mean—in a sense?”

  They explained—in some detail.

  Marylin listened grimly. She was not amused even by the episode of the entangled sailfish and the sea-going sola topee.

  “Why I have to be so crazy about a stumblebum … !” She shrugged it off. “What charters have you two got in the next ten days?”

  “September,” Des said, “things are slack. People don’t plan to fish. Afraid of hurricanes. Usually—the weather stays swell and the wind fails to blow.”

  “Meaning none?”

  “Meaning,” Des replied, “that your Ramsay was a godsend. The night he showed up, I was phoning a guy I know who runs a brick yard to see if I could get a temporary job there. Lot of construction going on—”

  “Dad has got one of those merciless ideas of his.”

  “What?” Crunch asked.

  “To charter two boats and take Dodson and Pierce and Mother and a girl they know and Ramsay a
nd me, of course—and make a trip down to Key West. Fishing.”

  “Our Ramsay,” Des said firmly, “isn’t ready for it.”

  “That’s just the point. They think if I’m cooped up with him—where the boys will shine and he won’t—I’ll get over it.”

  “Did it ever occur to you that you might?” Crunch asked.

  “No!” She said it sharply.

  “Tell Ramsay not to go.”

  “He’d go,” the girl answered. “That’s the hell of it. He’s getting to loathe my family. But he’d go just because he won’t give up on anything—ever.”

  “Yeah.” Crunch smoked. “Your Ramsay, Marylin, in his very peculiar way, is a whole lot of fellow.”

  To Crunch’s surprise, he found himself kissed. “That,” she said, “is the only nice word I’ve heard about him in months!” She sat down again. “You boys really like him, don’t you?”

  Des said, “Yeah. We like him. We like him enough to hate to see him take a beating. No kidding, Marylin. That guy ought to stay in his laboratory-or wherever he works. On a boat—he’s—”

  “Out of this world.” She nodded and her hair twinkled. “Poor lamb. The whole idea of the trip makes me sick. I can just see Ramsay falling overboard and Dodson or Pierce diving in and saving him. Or Dodson catching a marlin—and Ramsay incessantly missing even snappers.”

  “We might put a few—difficulties—in the way of your brothers,” Des suggested.

  “No, sir!” She said that with firmness. “My brothers are all right. I love my brothers. It’s just—how to get them to see that Ramsay’s all right, too. They’re every bit as serious minded as Ramsay. Dad’s trained them all to run the business and to run the Foundation. So they’re going to have to work hard all their lives, too. It’s just that Ramsay never had their opportunities—and he has no aptitude, the way they do… .”

  “Very little,” Des agreed.

  “Go on,” she said, “be funny.”

  Crunch snapped a cigarette, watched it ride its red trajectory to the water, heard it hiss, and heard, after that, the swirl of a fish that was sure to find paper and tobacco a great disappointment. “Listen, Marylin,” he said. “Get up the trip. Ask your guy. We’ll do something to help him out, if we have to train a sailfish to jump aboard.”