by Steve Alten
Choppy waves lapped over the gunwales. So much like a woman, thought Fontaine, staring at his hands, shell-like with calluses from the lines. Such a guise, to behave so human, and he wondered the same of his wife and children and of their unimaginable alien depths, his madness burning deep in the nastiest parts of his guts.
They caught no fish. He followed birds and currents and the sun but no menacing fins broke water. Once he glimpsed a right whale, black and ugly, lolling about like a slow child in the street. And he spotted the floppy, unstable fin of a sunfish, often confused with sharks, though the fish can hardly stay upright, so large and disc-like that it flops like a poorly thrown Frisbee in the waves. Fontaine went through the motions anyway, hacking, cutting, tying, rinsing spill from the chum off the deck. Any idiot can catch a shark, he thought. Drop blood and guts into the water and let them follow the scent. Wait for them to snap up one of the hooks. Drag them along with the boat until they get tired enough to stop caring if they live. Stick a gaff in their neck when they come up. It all came down to chance, really. Fontaine just had bad chances. He’d fallen into Tolliver’s trap unaware. Even if he were, he wouldn’t care.
At three in the afternoon Caldwell emerged from the cabin, rosy cheeked and stiff-legged, stretching, rings glittering on his fingers. He retired silently to a chair on the deck for a couple of hours, presumably sleeping beneath his mirrored glasses, but when he spoke it was sudden.
“What’ve we got?”
“Nothing,” Fontaine responded, hacking bait methodically. He shrugged. “They eat their own, you know. Sometimes they’ll even take chunks out of themselves when they’re in a frenzy. Don’t even know the difference. They don’t chew. Just tear and swallow, all gone.”
“That’s some shit,” Caldwell clapped Fontaine on the back, rings clattering. “You got yourself a trophy room?”
“No,” Fontaine answered, “I don’t think that’s quite natural.”
“What’s your favorite part then, if it ain’t to show everyone else up at the sport?”
Madness is a strange, beguiling thing. It lurks, it sleeps, it stalks beneath everyday life, its ridged back humping lackadaisically out of reality’s surface every so often, shocking and bizarre.
Fontaine grasped Caldwell’s hand and pinned it tightly to the board with a grip hardened by years of holding whizzing steel lines against the blood and bone of his palm. He raised the knife high above his head. It whistled on the way down.
Clink!
A twisted, broken ring clinked to the deck. Caldwell stood silent, gazing at his naked finger in disbelief.
“Bone knife,” Fontaine remarked placidly. He kept hacking at frozen scup. “I’m real precise with it,” he said. Caldwell watched, still stunned, as he cut the fish into exact, even chunks, perfect ovals until they became flaky messes under the water. For Fontaine, in his madness, this was a completely appropriate response to Caldwell’s question.
“That was my wedding ring,” he said calmly, regaining his wits but leery.
“Looks to me you got ones to spare,” Fontaine replied jovially.
“My trophy room,” Caldwell said calmly, flashing them again in the sun. Fontaine stopped hacking to get beers. They rested together on a bench and opened canned Coronas, the sky now the magical color of a lonely stripper.
“These rings,” he said, wiggling his fingers. “All married women, one sort or another. I know what you’re thinking,” he said quickly, “I’m some con man taking advantage of rich old ladies, bringing them down to Panama or Brussels and then plucking their withered little prune-hearts out with an ice pick.” Caldwell slurped his beer in his usual voracious chug.
“No sir, I don’t discriminate young from old, rich from poor, white from black,” Caldwell crushed his beer can and dragged another one out from beneath the melting ice in the cooler. “Say something nice to them the first time you see them, say, on the street, or in a restaurant. Make a few clandestine phone calls, arrange a trip somewhere exciting, fuck their brains out, say goodbye. No false promises from me.” He was already half done with his second beer.
“The rings?” Fontaine asked, eyes blanketing the horizon.
“Husbands,” Caldwell said coldly. “Sad bastards, those guys. Bottom feeders, senators, garbage-men. Suckers, all of ‘em. Take your pick.”
Fontaine’s shirt rippled in the breeze.
“They give them to me. That’s my price. Tell her she’ll be the next ring on this finger, she’s going to take it right off hubby in the middle of the night just because I asked her to, sneak it over to me. They do it. You know why they do it?”
Fontaine shook his head no.
“Want to prove to themselves they won’t. Like a challenge. Show them how many others couldn’t keep away. I tell them right off.”
“Bait,” Fontaine uttered.
“Yeah you get it,” Caldwell said. “Long time ago something happened to me with a woman, almost ruined me. I’m doing these fellows a favor “That’s why I make them take the rings, see? Kills the promise. I’m setting them free.”
He held up the chunk of metal. “Nicked up a nice one here. Worth seeing you chop like that, though.”
I found a ring once,” Fontaine said blandly. “Down in a tuna’s guts. It was a great old ring, huge, green with rot from the acid in its belly. Could have been straight off Poseidon’s finger, all I knew about it.”
“You got it now?”
“Threw it back in the ocean,” Fontaine half lied. He’d showed it to Galadriel on their final anniversary. The ring was too big to replace her wedding band, like he wanted. He wrapped it in a scallop shell with a bow of seaweed and told her that he would wear it. She threw it back in the ocean, said that was where it belonged. Fontaine marked the spot with unrivaled precision and paid some teenager with a scuba tank fifty bucks to retrieve it. The ring lay swaddled in an old bandana at the bottom of his pocket.
It was Caldwell’s turn now to remain silent and he complied, maintaining that vacant reverence some people with money bestow on those with less. Generous in their importance, they pass it like a joint and let its aura fill the room.
“Wouldn’t believe what they find in a shark’s guts,” Fontaine ventured, spurred by Caldwell’s graciousness. “All types of jewelry. Chains and torpedoes and erector sets, suits of armor. And that’s just the stuff that sticks around.”
“Eating machines,” Caldwell said.
“Eat anything on earth.”
A gull cawed here or there. Caldwell could not find it on the open water, but Fontaine knew it was due east.
“Let me take the wheel a while,” Caldwell said, thumping Fontaine on the shoulder, without the slightest hint the Captain was fantasizing about hacking him to pieces with the bone knife.
“C’mon, you damned tiger.”
He grabbed some lines and hooks and set to work.
“Better watch it, I’m a wild one,” Fontaine joked.
Caldwell chuckled and pounded the side of the boat again, pulling a beer from nowhere. He climbed into the cockpit and goosed the throttle, scaring away whatever fish might be around.
“Run us south for a bit. We’ll get close to Nantucket Sound for tomorrow.
We can sleep right out here.” To his surprise Caldwell obeyed wordlessly, as though he were nothing more than a young mate. Now and then he barked out navigational questions in a tone so serious it was almost caricature. But Fontaine could tell his rapt attention was genuine.
The Captain laid back in the fighting chair setting a line with his agile fingers. He reached out for a chunk of mackerel and saw, clearly, his brown fingers stretched against the clear blue of the ocean, their hardy grace broken with a white line where he used to wear the ring. Galadriel and the children floated to the top of his mind like a poisonous jellyfish he wanted to hold in his arms. He thought of Caldwell’s shining fingers clutched tight against the wheel. The bone knife lay on the deck next to him.
In that moment Captain Fo
ntaine could have easily sunk the blade into the thick meat between Caldwell’s neck and shoulder blade. He did not. Captain Fontaine unfolded the old bandana, which smelled of engine grease, and set the old, huge, green ring at the end of the line instead of the mackerel. Then he pitched it into the foamy wake.
“Bait,” he said aloud, thinking of Caldwell’s rings. He kicked the bone knife away.
Caldwell insisted on sleeping in the open air of the deck until he was slimed over with the night mist of the ocean. He retreated grouchily to the cabin. He’d wanted to be close to the lines in case of a hit. Fontaine slept in the cockpit, rocked to sleep by the familiar listing of the boat from starboard to port, fingers draped loosely across the wheel. He was awakened by an unfamiliar sound, soft but sharp, like the whisper of an old friend thought long dead.
Under the gentle lapping of the waves, Fontaine woke to the sound of a line hissing.
The captain raced to the chair, grabbing the rod with a sweeping motion and buckling himself in all at once. Overexcited, he hit the fish immediately and the line went slack. He sat for a heart wrenching moment of doubt, but the line went out again and he let it go, waiting, hitting infrequently and with caution, reeling in greatly when he could. He screamed for Caldwell to get up and start the boat so they could tire the bastard out, but Caldwell didn’t answer. There was only Fontaine and the first fish he’d been hooked to in over a decade.
For what felt like hours he struggled with the fish. Each time he was sure it was nearly dawn he’d look up at the stars overhead, marveling, but quickly forget as the line pulled taut and he tugged mightily against it. He felt the slack lengthening and pulling out in spite of the reel. Fontaine gritted his teeth and lunged backward, heaving the handle of the rod upward like an executioner readying a blow with his axe, breaking all the rules he’d ever been taught. The fish thumped against the stern.
He rose, clutching the gaff with his elbow. Below, the fish thrashed on the surface, unrecognizable.
“Caldwell!” he shrieked. No answer.
Fontaine locked the reel. He held the rod over his shoulder and sprinted for the cockpit, dragging the fish up the stern and over the stern with a final crash.
Eyes closed, hot and cool with sweat, Fontaine drank the moment like a glass of expensive wine. Like he was the Mongol horde and it were the blood of his enemies. He was too vindicated to question the stark silence in place of the thrashing and gasping the fish should be doing.
Fontaine turned.
A naked woman lay rumpled at the stern of the boat. At first he thought her dead, but then he saw her head upturned, a slight, narrow face curtained with waves of reddish brown hair cascading around her shoulders. Her skin seemed tanned and pale all at once, as though its color were only a sheen that changed with the quality of the moonlight.
She beckoned with a finger at Fontaine. He saw her hand glitter with rings, hundreds of them, as though she wore silver gloves. His eyes fell to her left hand, splayed on the deck. His ring was around her finger, still rigged up to the line he’d cast.
When he reached her, Fontaine knelt to the ground. He felt a slow pressure on his groin. The woman straddled him and he let it go without argument. It would have felt unnatural if she had not straddled him.
“Men,” she said with what sounded to Fontaine like scornful worship, unbuckling his belt. She moved back and forth and he watched Galadriel’s face rise out of her, leer down at him, kiss him softly. He tried to talk, but she made no sign of hearing him over her own screams and groans and wails, superficial and piercing, undulating like the cries of whales and dolphins. Her smooth skin slid over him, her face shimmered the way the sun looked from a fathom below the ocean’s surface.
“The rings,” he said drowsily, clasping his hands around the small of her back.
She whispered things in his ear he couldn’t understand that calmed him anyway.
Her voice cooed soft and melodic, but on the verge of the sound a scream would make trapped in a bubble underwater. She slipped her tongue into his mouth and he could still hear her cries inside his head. Suddenly all he could think of were sea slugs. He tried to pull away, but she felt like a heavy sack of water on top of him. Fontaine tore his face from hers and thrust out from underneath her.
She was dripping, gleaming naked, crawling forward on all fours. Only now, her hair was mounds of kelp, her breasts shells of abalone, her eyes the reflections of the moon on the ocean. Her form shimmered, dark sand from the bottom of the world sifting from her makeshift limbs. The rings he’d seen on her hands were green and prehistoric with algae. A suckered tentacle slipped in and out from between her pulsing lips.
He lifted the bone knife from where it lay. His arm dropped. Blood spurted across his cheek, onto his forearms, growing darker, nearly black, and thicker, not running down in rivulets but clutching to him. Scales sparkled in the air like fairy dust, flying everywhere, along with flecks of bone or shells, he didn’t know which. Sand gritted between his teeth and he wrapped his hands around the thing’s neck as it cried out in both agony and ecstasy. The face became Galadriel’s and he didn’t care at all, he hacked and hacked and hacked as he felt dawn warming his back. He tore the things eyes out, and along with it his own madness, ripping it away and tossing it to float out into the sky toward the sun, which had just started to shine the orange of burnt clay.
When it was all over the deck was strewn with ooze and ragged limbs. Something glimmered. Fontaine picked up the hand, still attached to the line, and twisted it in the moonlight. He thought he saw a starfish but couldn’t be sure.
Captain Fontaine tossed whatever it was back into the ocean. Only then did he finally run for the tequila.
He woke alone, covered in blackish blood and hung over in his chair, his pants unbuckled and his hat on the floor. Before his passenger woke he put down the ladder and bathed warily in the salt water. Then he hosed off the deck.
Caldwell had a serious ill humor when he finally rose. “You know how I make all my money?” he asked quietly, the sun barely up over the water, hanging as if it were about to drop back in.
“I’m a seafood distributor. I buy fish that suckers catch and I sell them to other suckers in restaurants and supermarkets, and somehow, somewhere along the line, I get all the money, I get all the fringe benefits.”
Caldwell continued to relate the specific history of his money all through the morning, the thousands of things he’d bought with it, and, subtly, how it made him superior to Fontaine in every way imaginable.
“It’s not like I’m better than people who don’t have money,” he said plaintively, palms upturned, “I’m just different. I can’t help that. It’s the world.” Caldwell fingered the space on his finger where the ring Fontaine had chopped off once had been.
“Last night . . .” Caldwell began.
“What?”
“Nothing,” he said. “It isn’t that important.”
One by one Fontaine checked the lines, scooping the fetid chum into the water. He came to the last one and skipped it deliberately, not wanting to know what was on the other end.
Caldwell had heard Fontaine on the deck last night, chopping and screaming like a lunatic. In the morning he woke to the smell of rotten fish and found the deck covered in pools of blood and fish meat, all stewing in the sun. The captain was hung over in the cockpit, soaked in it as well. Caldwell shuddered, thought of Fontaine’s handiness with the bone knife.
Compared to the last few days, the calm was disturbing. The sea and the sky were nearly one, the horizon blurring the ocean and the atmosphere into one gaping blue hole in the fabric of the universe. The boat seemed to float in a void, save the light ripple of the wake.
Fontaine grew uneasy and impatient with the calm. He gunned the engine. As the boat accelerated he strode back to the chum bucket, lifted it, and emptied a steady stream of meat and bone and gristle and oil into the ocean behind them. Caldwell watched, entranced and frightened for one of the few times in hi
s life. Though he’d bathed, Fontaine was still covered in scales and glittered in the sun as he climbed the tower and perched there, content.
The boat beat away at the flat ocean, running toward the sun, then beneath it, then toward it again in the evening as the deadline approached and they headed back to port, shark-less after all. Other ships were now visible, so many white flecks in the distance that they seemed like constellations and asteroids amid the deep blue.
“Some idiot caught one over there,” Fontaine said. They were the first words spoken between the men since morning. “That’s why they—”
Suddenly the bow heaved out of the water and the stern dipped. One of the lines hissed, the reel spinning so fast the motion barely registered. Fontaine did not need to look to know which line it was. Caldwell forgot how scared he’d become of Fontaine and cracked a beer and whooped.
“You going to take care of that?” he screamed down to Caldwell from the tower, his cap blowing off behind him into the waves, which whispered over the motor in a language that could be spoken but never understood.
In Oak Bluffs, onlookers lined the docks for the weigh-in. They wore fins on their heads or shark teeth around their neck. Small children bobbed on their fathers’ shoulders, craning to see the boats march in. The water was a vivid greenish-blue, the shadows long against the pink and yellow gingerbread cottages.
For each shark that was raised the crowd sighed deeply with disbelief. A man would bark out the weight and everyone would cheer and then the process repeated itself. This went on for a long while, until the line of boats had dwindled to a small queue. Some of the older men watched the line of ships and thought of the Swatch, and how, despite being old men, they too had tacked and jigged behind Fontaine around the dangerous rocks and sandbars. And they slowly remembered that he was fishing the tourney, Tolliver had told them, with some obscenely rich person. The old men scratched their heads and wondered where Fontaine was, time was nearly up and he hadn’t shown with his nothing yet.
