Mundo pushed away from the boat, followed by Bowen, who had trouble catching his breath. They were now approaching the same windward channel in the barrier reef that they had sailed through earlier in the morning. The water doubled in depth, the bottom became more sand than coral. Bowen kicked harder to keep up with Mundo as the current increased. It tugged against him relentlessly and he began to tire. He halted and pressed himself out of the water as far as possible but could not see Mundo over the swell of the waves. He tried to move ahead again, grew discouraged and let the tide sweep him back to the boat.
Gabriel helped him aboard. Bowen saw that they were going out through the channel while Ezekiel’s boat was steering in a hundred and fifty feet or so in front of them off the port. Mundo was almost halfway between the two boats, still headed straight upcurrent.
“Dey on de trail,” Gabriel said. They watched Ezekiel take one hand off the waterglass and reach behind himself to grasp an iron-hooped net used to catch turtles. Ezekiel called back to Henry, urging him forward. He held the net over the bow, waiting for position. Mundo spun in the water. He looked quickly around and then back at his own boat. Bowen saw him, imagined he saw the calculating look in his enlarged eyes. He stood on the aft seat and waved his arms at the diver. Mundo put his head back down and charged across the channel, angling toward Ezekiel’s boat.
“Mundo!”
Bowen was not certain if Mundo realized Ezekiel’s boat was so close. He yelled again.
“Mundo!”
Ezekiel positioned the net and dropped it. Mundo was past the center of the channel and nearing the other boat. In an instant he was out of sight under the water. Perched in front of the boat, his face hidden by the wooden sides of the waterglass, Ezekiel became more and more animated until he had come to his feet, his head still stuck ostrichlike in the box. He took one hand off the glass to shake his fist.
“Mundo,” he shouted in a garbled voice, difficult to understand. “Mundo. Wha de fuck!”
“Oh, shit,” Gabriel said. “Look Ezekiel dere bein so voicetrous. Mahn, he cryin a lot of nonsense, you know.”
Mundo had been down for about two minutes and his limit was four. Bowen pulled on his mask and rolled over the side of the boat, biting down on the mouthpiece of his snorkel just as he hit the water. Son of a bitch, he said to himself, seeing what was happening below.
Suspended in deep water six or seven fathoms down, Mundo labored to free the turtle from Ezekiel’s net. One hind flipper was loose, pierced by the spear and sea-anchored by the gun which Mundo had let drop. The diver held the turtle by the stub of its penis-tail and used his free hand to untangle the netting from the other back flipper. Bent around the turtle so his feet were in front of him, he kicked himself backward to resist Ezekiel’s effort to raise the net. The turtle’s flipper finally pulled clear and flailed wildly about.
With one set of flippers extended, the turtle was easily Mundo’s length, the caramel and yellow carapace twice the man’s width. Its great size magnified by the thick lens of water, the turtle seemed unreal, like a comic-book monster, to Bowen. Mundo moved spiritedly, hovering now on the back of the turtle. He reached for a front flipper but the turtle fought him. Each time he worked the limb out of the net the turtle jerked and recaught itself. The diver sprung off the turtle as if he were a rider being dismounted into the sky. He exhaled as he ascended, silver spheres of air boiling from his mouth, forming a column which he appeared to climb hand over hand to the surface. Bowen heard the agonized suck of his inhalation—“Mundo!” this from Ezekiel—and then he was down again.
By the time Mundo was back to the turtle, Ezekiel had hauled the net up nearer to the surface. Bowen dived to help his partner but he had entered the water without his fins and could not make the depth. At the bottom of his descent, he saw Mundo bend the turtle’s left flipper back through the net and wrench it over the shell. As Bowen turned upward, he heard the crack of the turtle’s elbow joint dislocating.
Gabriel threw Bowen his fins. By the time he had them on, the turtle was out of the net, its two foreflippers dangling awkwardly, the third flipper weighted by the spear, the fourth performing its sad ballet. Mundo dipped below the turtle, retrieving the gun that hung from the spear by its line. He swam sluggishly toward the air with the turtle in tow by its impaled flipper. Bowen watched them rise. The sight of the black man and the turtle was like a dream-borne image floating in cool ether. The bright surface gleamed like the edge of sleep, the head of the leviathan turned from it toward the indigo mouth of the channel that sloped down and down and away.
They came up between the two boats. Ezekiel began his protest.
“Daht my hawksbill, Mundo. Wha hahppen, mahn? Wha hahppen?”
“Here now, Ezekiel,” Gabriel shouted back. “You makin a mess ah noise, boy. Stop dis ugliness.”
Mundo kept his back to Ezekiel’s boat and would not answer the charge. He dragged the spear line in, bringing the turtle between him and Bowen. Both men caught hold of opposite sides of the shell and waited for Gabriel to position himself. The turtle wagged its huge head back and forth out of the water.
“Wha hahppen, mahn?”
“Ezekiel,” Gabriel said across the negligible distance between the boats. “You shut up.”
“Wha hahppen, mahn?”
“Shut up now or come here ahnd take some licks.”
Mundo and Bowen faced each other over the mound of the carapace. Blood clotted on the side of Mundo’s face.
“Doan move up too high, Mistah Bone,” Mundo warned. “Keep in de middle or he snahp you.”
“You’re bleeding some.”
Mundo grinned. To Bowen his grin seemed to celebrate only mischievousness.
“Did you shoot him,” Bowen asked quietly, “before they netted him?”
“You have to guess, mahn?” The tone of Mundo’s voice didn’t answer Bowen but simply posed the question. Bowen suspected that the net had reached the turtle before Mundo had but there was no way to prove it. Only Mundo and Ezekiel knew for sure.
“This is a fucking big turtle,” he said.
It took them awhile to get the hawksbill into the boat. Ezekiel and Henry raised their mast and set sail for the camp on Southwest Cay. Gabriel restepped their own mast to give them more room in the bottom of the boat, but even so they had to remove the middle seat to fit the turtle in. Bowen straddled the shell. He subdued the flippers and tied them off with palm fronds. He was shivering unconsciously, a condition Gabriel called dog-leg. When Mundo joined them the boat sank low in the water. He took his seat in the stern and stared thoughtfully at the turtle as if he were preparing to interrogate it.
“Dis beast must weigh tree hundred pounds, Mundo,” Gabriel proclaimed.
“Daht’s good luck.”
All at once Bowen was throbbing, tired, hungry and thirsty. The oatmeal can and water bottle were buried in the chaos of fish and rope; he had no energy to look for them.
Gabriel unfurled the sail and changed places with Bowen on the turtle to work the sheet line. They began the long sail back. Because there were only a few inches of freeboard left to the boat Mundo would not let Gabriel trim the sail too tightly. The boat plugged languidly through the head seas. When they were on a direct course, Gabriel put the sheet line between his horny toes and stepped on it to keep it in place. He and Bowen scaled the fish and cleaned them, dropping the guts overboard into the water that was still clear but now colorless again, the blue gone out of it with the beginning of twilight. Come, shark, come, Gabriel said each time. Here’s a nice piece ah food. I treat you good, you know. Mundo sang country and western songs, throwing all the melodrama he could into them. The air became steely and dense with haze.
They entered the lagoon shortly after dark. For some time they had been seeing a flickering bright light coming from the camp; even from a mile off at sea it cast a wobbly, liquid thread of illumination that ran out from the cay to their boat. It was obvious now that someone had built a large bonfir
e on the shore, and as Mundo steered into the shallows and they prepared to beach, a man moved out of the darkness into the firelight, the flames curling above his head. To Bowen the silhouette was crippled—the shadow of a beggar.
“Mundo,” Gabriel said. “Ezekiel want to make a cry, mahn.”
Mundo thieved the hawksbill from him, Ezekiel shouted crazily. The other fishermen gathered around him now. Mundo teef de hawksbill. Wha hahppen, Mundo? Henry, come tell dem, mahn. But Henry would not come out of the darkness and speak. As they dragged the boat ashore, the fishermen moved down next to the water to help them and to have a look at the big turtle. Amid the crowd, the talking all at once, the three of them were solemn and efficient, anxious for an end to the work. Ezekiel pushed forward, keeping the boat between himself and Mundo.
“Wha hahppen, Mundo?” he said witlessly. “Wha hahppen, mahn? You fuck me.”
Mundo would not acknowledge him but spoke instead to the other men assembled around the boat. He looked predatory in the changing light of the fire, dangerous.
“I shoot de hawksbill,” Mundo said. “You see it dere in my boat. De hell wit daht bitch Ezekiel.” He wouldn’t say anything more. Together he and Bowen lifted the two big turtles out of the boat and placed them gently in the sand. The old man yelled a lot but Bowen could not understand what he was saying. Colbert, a fisherman from the same village as Ezekiel, called out boldly from the group.
“Gabriel, speak up, mahn.”
Gabriel talked softly as though to counterbalance Mundo’s bitter disdain for Ezekiel. Although he would not speculate about what happened in the water, he explained how on their way out in the morning Mundo had revealed his dream, and how the bird had flown into the boat. Immediately the excitement returned. The dream and the bird inflated the drama and the importance of the dispute, and this pleased the onlookers. Someone called for Bowen to tell what he knew. Most of the men stopped arguing to hear him. Bowen was reluctant to speak, aware of his difference and how it would distort what he said to them, how it would become a story that began, Ahnd den de white mahn say …
“It was like Gabriel said. Mundo told us he had a dream about fucking a man. He said this was a sign that meant he was to shoot a big male hawksbill. There’s the turtle right there.”
“Sci-ahnce mahn doan carry faith in dreams,” someone yelled at him. “Dreams is fah peoples like we.”
“That’s so, but this one came true, didn’t it,” Bowen said calmly.
Ezekiel shoved forward toward him. “No,” he shouted. “Dis dream a lie. Mundo teef de hawksbill. Wha hahppen, Mundo?”
“The dream is no lie,” Bowen said, unable to avoid his irritation. He hated the way the focus had been transformed entirely onto him. It seemed that everyone except Mundo was ready to grant him the full authority of his judgment because he was white and educated.
“Yes,” a voice agreed. “But you see Mundo shoot de hawksbill before de net reach?”
Gabriel spoke before anyone else could. “Mahn, what de fuck it mattah? De dream come true. Daht’s daht. Quit dis fuss.”
Bowen bent over into the boat to collect the spear guns, wary that Ezekiel would see only him, blame only him, and that if there was uncertainty on his face he must hide it from them, because he knew now what he had to say. On the sail back Mundo and the turtle wouldn’t leave his mind. There was the dream, as undeniable as it was incomprehensible, a coincidence announcing itself, a magic somehow conspired between man and beast.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw Mundo watching him. Bowen wished he could know what the black man was thinking, but he had no intuition for what was at stake between them. His only clear impulse was to protect the mystery of the dream.
“Mundo shot the turtle. The net wasn’t there yet.”
“You see it, mahn?”
“That’s how it happened.”
“You see it hahppen daht way?”
“I’m telling you what I know.”
Bowen’s proclamation put an end to it. Everyone agreed then that the hawksbill was Mundo’s. Ezekiel wouldn’t be quiet, but he walked away from them anyway, still shouting passionately, and others shouted back at him to shut up. The men went back to their cooking fires to have their suppers. The three of them were alone again. As they finished unloading the boat, Mundo whispered to Gabriel, “Mistah Bone find a mahn to fuck.”
“Oh ho,” said Gabriel, turning around to see if Bowen had heard. “Maybe next he get a sign, too. Mistah Bone—right?”
No guilt burned into him, or sympathy for Ezekiel. The dream was more important than what he had or had not seen. Mundo had come to the turtle first, through the dream, and that could not be changed, not by Bowen, not by Ezekiel’s net. It frightened him that something so intangible could become so absolute in his mind. He confronted Mundo.
“Was I wrong?”
“You must decide, mahn. But you doan has to lie fah me.”
“I did it because of the dream.”
“Maybe daht’s so,” Mundo said, watching Bowen carefully. “Maybe you find out someting.”
“I should have stayed out of it,” he said.
“No, mahn, you was right, so you must fuck Ezekiel so. De hawksbill was mine no mattah what you say to dem.”
They picked up their gear and hauled it to camp. While Gabriel prepared to cook their supper, Bowen found his tape measure, notebook and pencil and went with Mundo back to the boat. Together they carried the turtles down the beach and set them under the narrow thatched ramada built by the fishermen to shelter them from the sun. Bowen tallied the ones brought in today by all the boats, measured the length and width of their shells, counted the dorsal plates, recording the sex and species. As always, he checked for the milk-white markings of a malatta hawksbill. Mundo scratched his initials into the chests of his turtles with a diving knife.
“Damn,” Bowen said, finished with his notes. “No malatta.”
“Daht’s only luck, mahn. Have faith.”
The firelight rubbed weakly on the carapaces and spun small gold drops orbiting in the eyes of the turtles. Their flippers crooked front to back underneath the rows of shells, the palm fronds pinning them firmly together in a frozen clap, an endless prayer.
“I goin bahck.”
“All right. I’ll be there in a while.”
Bowen did not know why he wanted to stay with the turtles but he lay down in the broken coral, too tired to help with supper, and listened to the sea creatures take their air, the gasping litany that committed them to the surface and to men. He saw them in the sea again, male and female clasped together, hawksbill and green turtle, the plates of their shells flush. They would join each other in this embrace and mate, drifting in the shallows, pushing up together to breathe, the female encircled by the flippers of the male for a day and a night until the mythical pas de deux ended and a new form conceived from different bloods. Then they would unlock to spend a year alone in the sea. The images stopped there and he felt himself falling asleep. He did not want to sleep here in the ramada with the turtles so he rose and walked back to camp, to the men and to the pleasure of food. The sea pulled back off the reef, its tidal sucking audible, the air brought down through coral bones and exhaled again and again.
Easy in the Islands Page 22
