Something Fishy

by Derek Hansen

  The next morning I collected the Professor and his bags and drove him out to the airstrip. While we were waiting for the plane I handed him the letter and told him what was in it. He stared at it for a few moments and then his eyes lit up, more brightly than I’d thought possible, and even seemed to dance.

  ‘I really appreciate this,’ he said. ‘The fact that you all signed it. That makes it really special. But it wasn’t necessary.’

  Wasn’t necessary?

  He reached into his bag and extracted a DVD. His magnified eyes watched me expectantly and lit up again when he saw comprehension dawn in mine. Suddenly it all came together. The video camera and the iMac. Doubtless the kid was a whiz on iMovie.

  ‘You take it,’ he said, handing the disc to me.

  ‘You sure?’ I said.

  ‘I don’t need it now,’ he said.‘Not now that I have this.’ He held up my letter as though it was a trophy, before carefully zipping it into a side pocket of his bag.

  ‘I’m sorry you have to go,’ I said.

  ‘I’m not,’ he said.‘Not any more.’

  Jenny rang Marvin and told him the Professor had given me a DVD of some of the footage he’d taken with his video camera and could we watch it on their iMac? She sweetened the pill by saying we’d bring a couple of bottles of Veuve Clicquot and some sushi. Marvin thought that was a great idea. Clearly he was just smart enough to know that a fifty-dollar-a-bottle Veuve might have the edge over a four-dollar-a-bottle Mitchell Lane. So we found ourselves back at their place, sipping and supping while we watched the sun go down in a blaze of glory. Fat Boy was moping around suspiciously.

  ‘He’s missing his little friend,’ said Marvin’s Barbie.

  ‘That reminds me,’ I said.‘The disc.’

  We all rose and wandered over to the iMac. I passed the DVD to Fat Boy.

  ‘Stick around,’ I said. ‘With any luck you might be in the movie.’

  I think that was the point when Fat Boy realised this was one movie he didn’t want to be in. He wasn’t wrong.

  The movie opened innocently enough on a close-up of a hibiscus bloom, but then slowly pulled back to reveal Fat Boy on tiptoe peering through the bush.

  ‘Isn’t that cute?’ said Marvin’s Barbie.

  ‘Hey, that’s our outside shower!’ said Cord’s Barbie. She obviously didn’t think it was cute at all.‘He’s peeping at us in the shower!’

  ‘No!’ said Marvin.

  Yes, said the footage.

  There were lots more scenes of Fat Boy peeping into showers and into the guest bedroom midafternoon, when Cord and his Barbie might just have been enjoying a bit of horizontal dancing. By the sharp intakes of breath alongside me, I guessed that thought had also crossed their minds. There was Fat Boy, albeit silhouetted, peeing into the fish tanks and Fat Boy dribbling spit into glasses of beer. I was both grateful and relieved that they’d offered us nothing but Mitchell Lane the previous visit. If Fat Boy had been my son I would have turned off the DVD there and then and dealt with its contents in private, one on one, with my hands around the evil little brat’s throat. But I think his parents were too stunned by the revelations to react. And there was something awfully compelling about watching. The Professor had done a good job of editing and kept scenes short. I couldn’t help wanting to know what other horrors would be revealed. But then the scenes changed to footage obviously taken while the camera was concealed in a bag. It showed Fat Boy slumped on his bed.

  ‘Why did you drive off in the dinghy and leave me?’ said the Professor off-camera.‘I could have drowned.’

  Fat Boy’s face curled in a smug grin. ‘But you didn’t drown.’

  ‘But I could have. Why did you leave me like that knowing I could drown?’

  ‘I told you to hurry up,’ snarled Fat Boy. ‘I warned you. I told you I was cold.’

  ‘But you didn’t give me a chance to swim back to the dinghy.’

  ‘I told you I was cold! If you wanted to come back with me you should have been quicker.’

  It was at this stage that I reached over and stopped the DVD.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.‘I had no idea.’

  ‘Revenge is a dish best served cold,’ said Damian on the way home.

  ‘He didn’t make the DVD for revenge,’ I said. ‘He made it for his mother. I think he knew all along that the holiday would end badly. It was only when I handed him the letter that he realised the opportunity for revenge and gave me the DVD. He knew I’d find a way to use it.’

  ‘Smart boy,’ said Pru.

  I thought of the Professor and the way his big blue eyes had lit up when he’d passed me the DVD. I couldn’t help looking up at the night sky as I got out of the Suzuki. Somewhere high above the Pacific the Professor was sitting in an aeroplane. I bet his eyes were still dancing.

  Second Best

  If you were a good darts player and you threw a dart at a map of the United States of America, there’s every chance your dart would land somewhere close to Salina, Kansas. Salina is about where the bulls-eye would be and about as far from the ocean as you can get in mainland USA.

  People from Nebraska and the Dakotas might point to the Gulf of Mexico and claim they are further from the ocean than Kansas, but these states are all within a day’s drive of the Great Lakes and, as far as Salina-born-and-bred businessman Karl B. Reinburger II was concerned, this invalidated their claim.

  His father had taken him to Racine, Wisconsin, on the shores of Lake Michigan when Karl II was just ten years old. He’d stood on the shore and gazed out, fully expecting to see the other side of the lake. When he didn’t, and saw only an endless expanse of water, he was convinced his father had made some kind of mistake and taken him to the shores of the Atlantic Ocean instead. It took a lot to persuade him otherwise. He went home convinced that lakes the size of an ocean should be called an ocean so young people from the Midwest plains didn’t get confused. He regarded the Great Lakes as oceans from that day forth.

  Karl B. Reinburger II was named after his father who thought it was neat to pass his name on to his first-born son and suggested his son did likewise. If he’d hoped to establish a family tradition he was destined to be disappointed. Karl had two sons among his four children, neither of whom he named Karl. It wasn’t that Karl II disliked his name, it was just that the appendage — ‘the second’ — seemed to set the tone for his life.

  Like everyone else, Karl II wanted to be a winner but his father’s whim took on the form of prophecy. Right through school, Karl always came second in his class to a girl called Gretchen, who was a straight-A student and universally regarded as the smartest kid Salina had ever produced. People thought they were doing the right thing by Karl when they clapped him on the back and told him he was the second-smartest kid Salina had ever produced, but that wasn’t what Karl wanted to hear.

  When he played little league baseball, his team was beaten in the final three years in a row.

  When he played little athletics, it was Karl’s bad luck to come up against a kid with wings on his feet. In any other year he might have been champion, but his father’s whim decreed that he run second.

  Karl thought about switching to basketball but he was too short. He thought about switching to gridiron but he was too thin. Not even being the second-fastest kid of his age could get him on the team.

  By the time he enrolled in the University of Kansas he was tired of coming second but soon discovered that coming second in Salina was a whole lot better than anything he could expect at college. While other kids played around and got drunk, Karl applied himself and worked as hard as he knew how. His application almost took him to the top.

  He became vice-president of the debating club, deputy editor of the college magazine and came runner-up in a competition to write a new song for the college gridiron team. He married the girl who came second in a poll to choose the leader of the cheer squad.

  Karl II left college with a business degree, which earned him the only job going
in his home town at the time: manager of the second-largest privately owned market in Salina. Calling the business a market flattered it. In reality it was just a general store that had got a bit above itself. The market was on the slide, but nothing Karl said or did could convince the ageing owner to change his outmoded methods of doing business.

  When the business began to fail, the owner tried to sell it but no one was interested in a business going nowhere in a town headed in the same direction. There was some talk of pulling the building down and putting in a gas station, but even that fell through. The owner was on the point of closing the door for ever when Karl offered to buy the business and pay for it over time. The owner thought Karl was on a hiding to nothing, but, faced with the possibility of an income stream over the probability of carrying an empty building, he accepted Karl’s proposal.

  That was the turning point for Karl and the business.

  People came to see if the newly named Karl’s Mart was any better than the old market and weren’t surprised to discover it was. They all knew Karl II was the second-smartest kid Salina had ever produced and that he was a worker. They expected nothing less of him. His business expanded into the building next door and became a real market, where customers could find pretty much everything they wanted at a reasonable price. Karl was lean and hungry and nothing in his lifestyle gave rise to suspicions that he was living high on the hog at their expense, so the people supported him. Midwest folks are like that.

  No one was surprised when Karl’s Marts started appearing in Junction City, Great Bend, Dodge City and Garden City. Karl knew what Midwest folks wanted and gave it to them. He expanded into Wichita, the second-biggest city in Kansas, and Lincoln, the second-biggest city in Nebraska.

  ‘The Wal-Marts and K-Marts have the biggest cities wrapped up,’ Karl liked to say.‘Best not to tangle with them.’

  No one was surprised when Karl’s Marts became the second-largest chain of privately owned stores in the Midwest, and no one was surprised when, at the age of sixty, Karl decided to hand over the day-to-day management of the business to his equally hard-working children.

  What surprised everyone who knew him was his decision to take up fishing. What really surprised them, more than they cared to admit, was his decision to take up ocean fishing, given Kansas’s geographic position and the fact the nearest Karl had ever been to any ocean was his one and only trip to Lake Michigan. But Karl had found a way to right the injustice that had blighted his life.

  His Salina store had once carried a complete collection of Zane Grey’s fishing stories, leather-bound editions from The Derrydale Press. Not surprisingly, they weren’t a hit in landlocked Kansas. When they didn’t sell he’d taken them home to read and they had opened his mind to a world as far removed from Salina as he imagined any place could be. More importantly, they opened up the possibility of shrugging off the curse that had shackled him all his life. Zane Grey showed Karl II how he could become Karl the Champion.

  Second to none.

  Numero uno.

  El toppo doggo.

  Until Karl II read Zane Grey’s fishing adventures, it had never occurred to him that it was possible for a Midwestern storeowner to be number one in anything, let alone a world record holder. But that was the wonderful thing about game fishing: ordinary people, as opposed to professional athletes, could win tournaments, ordinary people could become world record holders. Thin, short and unathletic, Karl was about as ordinary as anyone could be.

  Karl read and reread the six books in the Zane Grey series until the pages became dog-eared. He wanted to discuss his favourite books, Tales of Swordfish and Tuna and Tales of the Angler’s Eldorado, and talk about his ambitions but who was there to talk to? Saltwater game fishing wasn’t the sort of thing that got discussed in Salina and, besides, his customers might think he was getting a bit above himself. Midwestern folks didn’t take kindly to that and he had his stores to consider. So he kept his dreams to himself and read his books at night after he’d finished doing his accounts.

  Some time later his wife went on a trip to Kansas City and brought him home a copy of The Old Man and the Sea. He read it and reread it until he could almost recite every word. Yes, he sympathised with the old man and shared his pain and disappointment, but what encouraged him, what excited him beyond measure, was the fact that the old man, with the most meagre of resources, had caught such a magnificent fish — a trophy winner and a possible world record. If the old man could do it, so could he, and his resources would be anything but meagre. He’d made up his mind to fish the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico until his wife went on a second trip to Kansas City and brought home a copy of John Steinbeck’s The Log from the Sea of Cortez.

  Steinbeck’s descriptions of his boat, the Western Flyer, sitting in a sea surrounded by thousands of jumping swordfish, thousands of acrobatic porpoises, stampeding schools of dorado and lazy pods of grey whales, filled Karl’s imagination to bursting. This wasn’t fiction. This was real. These were observations made with scientific detachment. He used the internet and logged onto Amigos de Baja and made fishing friends on the web. Some backed up Steinbeck and claimed to have seen the waters off Buena Vista on the south-eastern coast of the Baja Peninsula boiling with leaping marlin. Karl closed his eyes and tried to imagine the wonder of it all.

  Everyone has something they want to see before they die. For some it’s something as simple as the Grand Canyon, for others it is earth from space. Karl just wanted to see what Steinbeck saw. He thought about the Sea of Cortez every day while he waited to turn sixty.

  Karl didn’t just race off and buy a boat. He did his homework with regard to the kind of conditions he was likely to experience, the kind of fish he wanted to catch and the kind of comforts he needed. Typically, he wanted to provide for the times his wife would accompany him and when he’d play host to each of his children and their families. He settled on a thirty-year-old Elliott Sportsfisher, an elegant, handcrafted cruiser fifty-nine feet in length. The flying bridge was well equipped and big enough to accommodate the permanent crew of two. Below, there was a well-equipped galley, a lounge/dining room/day area with glass doors that opened wide to the rear deck, a stateroom with a queen-sized bed and a cabin with four bunk beds. Below decks amidships there were a pair of freezers, generators, a battery of water purifiers and as much storage room as he could ever need. Beneath the stern deck there were twin generators and two mighty diesels. There was no question that the Elliott was luxurious but it was luxury without excess, and age had imbued it with a sense of efficiency and practicality. In many ways it was a reflection of its new owner.

  The Elliott was called Billfisher II when Karl bought it. Karl was happy with the Billfisher part but had the ship chandler paint out the II before he took delivery. Coming second or being second had no part in his new life. Billfisher was a lovely old lady with a top speed of seventeen knots stripped down and with near-empty tanks. In fishing trim with full tanks, thirteen knots was closer to the mark. It was painfully slow compared to the modern game boats with their planing hulls, but Karl was in no hurry to go anywhere. He had all the time in the world.

  Karl hired a crew out of San Diego to run Billfisher down the west coast of the Baja Peninsula to Cabo San Lucas. His friends on the internet had advised him to take on a Mexican crew and even lined up a skipper for him, twenty-four-year-old Gerardo, and a twenty-two-year-old deckhand called Jose. Both of them had grown up on game boats. Karl was suspicious of their youth and probable lack of experience. With his American crew looking on, he made Gerardo and Jose take Billfisher in and out of dock three times with a stiff sou-wester on their beam. They did so with ease and a sense of bewilderment. They couldn’t comprehend why Karl had even asked them to demonstrate their skill once, let alone three times. Game boats were all they’d ever known.

  ‘These kids are good,’ said his American skipper grudgingly. What he was really saying was that they were excellent.

  Satisfied that both boat and
crew were sound, Karl set about enjoying his semiretirement. He spent between two and three weeks of every month during the fishing season learning how to fish, flying back to Salina between trips to oversee the running of his chain of markets.

  It took Karl all of his first season to get the hang of fishing. Considering the pride they took in their ability to catch marlin, Gerardo and Jose were commendably patient in teaching their new patrón how to reel in, how to keep the fish’s head turned towards the boat, how to keep tension on the line and how to make the rod do the work. Karl wasn’t their first greenhorn gringo but they’d never had one quite so green before. Karl knew nothing. He’d never tied a hook on a line, never caught a fish. But he applied himself to learning as he’d done to everything else important in his life and worked hard at getting better.

  Gerardo thought he’d begin teaching Karl the ropes by trolling for skipjack. What could be easier? But Karl managed to make a hash of hauling in the two- and three-kilo fish that queued to impale themselves on his lures. He managed to break two nine-kilo rods, lose as many fish as he caught and hook-up his shirt, his trousers, his hat and, on one memorable occasion, a substantial portion of his backside. Gerardo and Jose looked on in despair. But Karl’s enthusiasm and determination grew with every fish he caught and every night he took to his bed as excited and as happy as a child.

  Meanwhile, Gerardo and Jose mournfully watched the sailfish, striped marlin and blue marlin glide by in easy casting distance and prayed for the day when their patrón would be capable of catching one.

  Karl gradually worked his way up from small skipjack to big skipjack and then to the hard-charging dorado. When he hooked his first dorado, Karl could not believe how ferociously it fought, or how fast it could run or how beautiful it looked when it tail-walked with all its colours aglow. He could not believe how a fish that barely topped eight kilos could leave him so exhausted. What would a marlin be like, he wondered. He thought of the two- and three-hundred-kilo blues that roamed the Sea of Cortez and found it hard to believe that anyone managed to catch them.