“Twenty-four threads spun together,” he said. “Maximum strength when it’s dry is about sixty-six pounds. But that won’t matter out here. We won’t be picking them up out the sea like some hangman. The idea is to hook them and then outguess them. Let them pull the line through the water until they wear out their hearts, but keep them from breaking free just the same.
“Oh, you’ll see, my friend. It’s a glorious thing.”
The captain sniggered behind them, not in derision of the words but in a shared recognition of another man’s addiction. Byrne himself was surprised by the old Mason’s excitement and by the fact that every minute closer to the fishing grounds seemed to peel another year off his aged face.
Captain Abbott yanked in a length of what Byrne had now learned was the mainsail sheet line and hollered out a word of advice: “Hold onto somethin’ fellas, the inlet’s a bit choppy today.”
Byrne saw a rise and fall of ocean swells he’d never witnessed before. Ditches and troughs, was his instant thought. Mounds and hollows to split any axle. He held fast to the edge of the gunwale and felt the bow rise on the first wave and then braced himself as it plunged down into the following trough. He expected impact. But the boat’s bow knifed through the water and the landing was not nearly what he’d expected. The next forward plunge sent a spray of sea out either side of the bow like sheets of snow from a plow blade. By the fourth such rise and fall Byrne was studying the angles the captain was taking, admiring his expertise at controlling the boat’s pitch and roll with the tiller. By the sixth swell, he was humbled.
Within minutes they were through the inlet and onto the smoother, rolling ocean. Captain Abbott let out the boom and took a more southerly course. Faustus stepped up onto the gunwale with a hand-hold on one of the mast stays and stared out onto open water. Byrne followed suit on his side of the cockpit, worried now that he would miss another new experience. The sky was cloudless and blue, and the sea borrowed its color and then bent it into greens and turquoise depending on the depths.
“Your employer loves these waters and this coastline as much as anyone with an appreciation of such beauty,” Faustus said without turning. The statement took Byrne by surprise, but since there didn’t seem to be a question invoked, he let it stand without comment. Captain Abbott, on the other hand, responded with a derisive snort.
“Did you know that Mr. Flagler’s first forays into this part of Florida were by sailboat? No one who rides this sea could not miss its Edenic pull.”
Byrne let the old man’s words stand alone. There will be a point in them, he thought. Faustus, he’d already determined, was not a man without a point.
“But I fear Flagler’s island is not just a single jewel to delight his friends and rejuvenate their spirits for the business of business in the north,” Faustus continued, finally turning to look Byrne in the eye. “There will be trouble in that paradise, young Pinkerton. And in your position, it will be trouble you won’t be able to avoid.”
“I appreciate your concern, sir,” Byrne said, deciding whether he should rise to what he was already perceiving to be bait. “And from what I’ve heard on the street, trouble is already there.”
Faustus stepped back down onto the cockpit deck.
“I’m glad I did not underestimate your abilities at intelligence gathering. Would you be speaking of the death of a white man in the Negro quarters on the island?”
“There was talk of it on the street,” Byrne said.
“And did the speakers have any idea who the unfortunate fellow was or what his business might have been there?” Faustus said, carefully watching for reaction.
“I don’t recall any talk of business, no. Did you understand him to be a businessman?” Byrne asked, playing the game, giving what he could to get what he might.
Faustus moved on, but Byrne had seen a twinge of pain in the old man’s eyes.
“At this point in this virgin land everyone is in business. There are people buying, people selling. Be it the labor of their hands, the guile of their intellect, the dreams they lust after or the lust itself.”
“And your business, Mr. Faustus? What exactly is it that you do?” Byrne kept his tone as innocent as possible although he perceived he’d made a fine move in their little chess game.
Faustus sat on the starboard gunwale and began the process of attaching the reel to the heavy end of one of the poles.
“I’ve been involved in a wide variety of enterprise in life, my friend. I’ve used my hands as a shipwright in Biloxi, my intellect as a student of medicine in New Orleans, my tongue as a merchant of everything from ladies’ plumed hats in Savanah to gunpowder in Charleston.
“I served as a field surgeon in the Civil War and afterward worked as a surveyor of the broken land of the South.”
Faustus turned his face up to the sun with a look that showed neither pride nor regret.
“I have been blessed and cursed in the activities of commerce and men for many years, my young fisherman,” he said, handing Byrne the completed pole. “And either way, it can be a befuddling thing to see.
“Presently, I admit I’m in search of good men. Men with honesty and moral fiber in their souls. Men who believe in the goodness of others and are adept at bringing that quality out. Men who, instead of taking advantage for their own gain, recognize that gain can and should be shared.”
Ah, the pitch, Byrne thought.
“And have you met such men, Mr. Faustus?” he said.
“Oh, yes,” Faustus said. “But I have also been fooled by those with the look and intelligence and talent for such things, only to be disappointed.”
The old Mason was now looking into Byrne’s face as if it was familiar to him, as if he were speaking to Byrne himself in this obviously heartfelt sense of disappointment. Such accusation had no basis as far as Byrne’s actions were concerned, still he had a nagging sense of responsibility. It was Faustus who broke the spell.
“For now, young Pinkerton, let us lure the beasts from the deep and see what challenge they may afford us.”
Byrne shook off his apprehension and watched while the man opened the hatch of a wooden barrel lashed into one corner of the cockpit and came out with a small silver-sided fish, which he proceeded to carefully skewer with the finger-sized hook he’d tied to the linen line.
“First we’ll do a little trolling on our way to the stream, eh Captain Abbott?” Faustus said.
Abbott was a man whose eyes seemed nearly colorless and thus able to reflect the intense shimmering light off the water rather than absorb it. His skin was dark and seamed. His lips formed a taut line and were the color and consistency of red onion skin. Perhaps they would split and bleed if he used them to excess, Byrne thought. Maybe that’s why he so rarely spoke.
“As you will, sir,” he said, and although Byrne saw the man’s Adam’s apple move, his lips did not. Byrne thought instantly of a ventriloquist he’d seen in the Bowery.
Faustus baited his own hook and showed Byrne how simple it was to cast the fish into the bubbling wake behind them and let the line spin off his reel. He’d put a canvas glove on one hand and used his thumb to occasionally slow down the rate of the linen leaving. In less than five minutes the old man suddenly jerked the tip of the rod up, like Byrne might have done with his own baton, and then began to turn the handle of the spinning reel. Without hesitation, Capt. Abbott turned the boat into the wind to slow it. The boom swung to the middle of the cockpit and almost smashed into Byrne’s head. He was captivated by the sudden tightening of Faustus’ line and the deft way the old man reeled and then stopped, apparently feeling the direction of the pull on the other end and then reeling again. There was a small sweat and an obvious joy on Faustus’ face.
“It appears we’ve got ourselves a nice dolphin,” Faustus yelled over the popping of canvas as the sail went loose in the wind. “Grab that gaff over there so you can hook him when I bring him along the starboard side!”
Byrne searched in the direction
Faustus had indicated but had no inkling what a “gaff” might be. Without taking his pale eyes off the battle, Captain Abbott reached out a leg, put his foot on a cork handled hook like Byrne had seen ice delivery men use to handle their blocks, and kicked it over to him. Byrne picked it up and thus armed stared back at the sea, following Faustus’ line into blue water. Minutes passed as Faustus coaxed and maneuvered, reeled and stopped. The flexible tip of the rod bent and swung like a willow in the wind. Finally Byrne saw a flash of silver light below, then the body of the fish, slowing in its struggle and soon he could see the dark circle of its eye.
“Alongside, son,” Faustus said, now pulling the defeated catch to starboard. “Hook her in the gills if you would.”
Byrne bent and reached overboard. He was talented with a piece of metal in his hand and gaffed the fish and pulled it up out of the water, surprised by its heft, forty pounds at least. He flopped it down into the foot of the cockpit and withdrew the gaff while Faustus pressed his polished shoe across its broad side.
“Comin’ about!” Capt. Abbott called out, and this time Byrne reacted to the words and ducked. He felt the jolt as wind filled the sail and the boat was again underway. Faustus bent to remove his hook from the fish’s mouth. “She’ll make a fine meal, this one,” he said.
Byrne continued watching the fish, its tail still waving as if it could propel itself to escape in the air as it had always done in water. But it was a different world up here and old defenses didn’t work. Finally Faustus grasped the dolphin and slid it into a shuttered bin filled with chopped ice.
“All right, Mr. Byrne. Time for your own lesson on the finest fishing grounds in the world.”
Faustus baited the hook on Byrne’s rod and tossed his line overboard. During the next hour the men pulled in a dozen fish: several pompano, two more dolphin of equal size to the first, three of what Faustus called redfish, and a four-foot-long shark the face of which Byrne openly compared to that of a Tamany police sergeant.
Byrne snapped only one line when a dolphin dove unexpectedly and he yanked back to stop it instead of letting it run. His observations of Faustus’ moves and technique were so thorough that several times Byrne would make the correction just before the words were out of the old man’s mouth.
“You’re a quick study,” Faustus said while removing the hook from yet another fish’s mouth. “As I knew you would be.
“But we’ve a much bigger challenge ahead and it’s in water you still have never imagined in your deepest dreams.”
The look in the old man’s eyes was disconcerting in its almost religious anticipation. Byrne found his skin tingling with the excitement to come after already being flabbergasted by the experience of fighting the running, instinctual muscle of big fish with a simple bending length of wood and a spool of linen thread. What could the old Mason now have up his sleeve?
“Into the stream, sir!” Capt. Abbott called out, and when Byrne followed Faustus’ gaze he had an answer.
“Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” he whispered, looking out and then down into an opaque blue water that was like no color he’d ever witnessed nor thought possible.
Byrne felt the shift of current below them, the boat being pushed against its will to the north. He looked first to Faustus, but the man’s face had taken on a look of one witnessing a deity. Even the craggy Abbott appeared to have a glint of smile on his slash of a mouth.
“It’s the Gulf Stream, son,” Faustus said. “She’s nothing less than a magical river that circles the Gulf of Mexico and then comes surging round the tip of Florida off Key West and runs like a fire hose northbound to New York and on to Nova Scotia.
“Ships have been using her muscle to take a free ride north for centuries. If you just sat on her in a rowboat you’d float your way to shores of Europe herself without taking a single stroke. There’s a whole troupe of Norwegians who pluck tiny sea hearts off their beaches that were once washed off the shores of the Caribbean and simply got lost in the stream and took the ride for thousands of miles.”
Byrne had no doubt of Faustus’ geography lesson, but it was the color of the water that hypnotized him. He laid his chest across the starboard gunwale and reached down to actually touch the water, convinced that if he scooped up a handful he would have a puddle of blue in his palm.
“This is where the finest of the breed work their own fishing grounds, Mr. Byrne. Where they can run as fast as lightening and strike at will then flash away into their own deep universe.”
Faustus was working again at the rigging. Byrne looked over and saw that he was attaching an odd-looking piece of metal to the end of his line. Oblong in shape, like a teardrop, the thin leaf of shiny tin had a hook protruding from the fat end, and unlike Faustus’ other lures, there was a strange barb at the very tip akin to whaling harpoons Byrne had seen at the city docks. It was obvious by its design that such a hook was not going to slip easily out once it speared through the mouth flesh of a fish.
“I had this spoon custom-made by a friend in Philadelphia name of Samuel H. Jones,” Faustus said, tying the pointed end of the teardrop to his line and clamping a series of split lead weights the size of peas to the line to pull it deep. “Sam claims he caught the most beautiful fish he’d ever seen in Florida on a spoon like this up on the Indian River inlet. A tarpon, he called it, as big as a man.”
The old man dropped the lure into the blue and Byrne watched it glitter in the deep light as it sunk deeper and deeper, maybe thirty yards, maybe forty before he could no longer track it. He looked up into Faustus’ eyes and saw a mixture of anticipation, lust and competition that unsettled him at first and then stirred a tingle in his own hands that he recognized as the energy that came only when he had his metal baton in his palm and the threat of violence in his veins.
“Let’s drag her south a bit, captain,” Faustus called out, and Abbott swung the boat about and set a wide sail. Since nothing was said about casting Byrne’s line, he settled a haunch on the gunwale and was content to stare into the water, the depths somehow haunting, as if calling him to fall in and glide down into its warmth. The sun was high now, the reflection causing Byrne to shade his eyes whenever he looked out to follow Faustus’ line into the sea. Despite the breeze he could feel a light sweat under his shirt and also the sting of sunburn on the back of his neck.
“She’ll take it if she wants to,” Faustus said once, though the statement seemed to be directed at no one in the boat. “That’s the power she holds, to do what she wants in a sea of possibilities.”
The words caused Byrne to conjure a glimpse of the white of fabric and green eyes of McAdams’ daughter, a recollection that despite his surroundings and the thrill of the day had not left him.
“Ever had a woman like that, young Pinkerton?” Faustus said, and Byrne looked up to see the old man looking at him instead of the water. “One with the power to snatch and hold you?”
If the old man was performing some Masonic magic trick, reading his mind, Byrne would not have been more taken aback.
“No, sir. Never.”
Faustus chuckled.
“Well if you do young man, hold on just as tight as she does and enjoy the hell out of the adventure.”
The pole in the old man’s hand yanked forward and the linen line started spinning off the reel like a strike of heat lightening. He instinctively pulled back on the rod. It bent in a U-shape, and Byrne was sure the laminate would splinter in Faustus’ hands. He could have sworn he heard the sound of cracking wood but it may have been line zinging off the sides of the cast metal.
“My god!” Faustus pointed the tip of the rod toward the water and let the line and the fish run. When he felt the beast turn, Faustus raised the rod, took in a few turns of the reel, and felt just a bit of the weight of muscle that was at its end. Now the surprise had left his face and been replaced by a startled joy.
“Oh, my, lad, what have we got?”
Byrne was staring after the line, watching it rip through the water li
ke a sharp knife through satin and creating a similar sound. Then before his eyes, it went slack.
Snapped, he thought. But Faustus didn’t move.
“Wait, wait, just you wait now,” he said.
The moment Faustus had hooked the fish, Capt. Abbott had again swung into the wind and even he could not keep his eyes from the sea where the linen line now lay like a string of spittle.
“Wait, wait.” The captain repeated Faustus’ words and Byrne felt the hairs on the back of his neck tingle.
The explosion erupted less than thirty yards off the starboard stern. Byrne swore he saw it coming, a sun glint in the depths, a flurry of silver bubbles rising. It then let loose like a fire hose just below the surface, a burst of water sprayed into the air, a fountain that contained in its middle the body of a silver fish like some scaled angel.
Byrne could not have been more stunned if he’d witnessed a rogue firework explode from a Lower East Side manhole cover.
In midair the beast bent its back to match the arc of Faustus’ fishing rod and then twisted its body in a violent shake and plunged back into the sea.
“Christ on a cross!” said Capt. Abbott, the first non-nautical utterance that had come out of the old sea dog during the entire trip. The boat had come to a standstill, rocking in the long waves. Byrne looked at Faustus for a clue. Both old men watched the water and the tip of the rod. Again like a rip of lightning through a cloud the fish burst the surface, flying higher still while shaking its huge body like a dog trying to dry itself with a shiver and twist.
“She’s a hundert an twenty if she’s a pound, sir,” Abbott said, still in reverence.
“And bound to run, captain.”
“Yes, sir. Coming about, sir.”
Abbott swung the boat by pumping the tiller until the sail could catch wind. Faustus made his way forward in the cockpit, keeping the fish on the port side. Again the line went taut as a guitar string and Faustus let it spool out.
The Styx Page 16
