Beast (4 page)

That was the last Griffin knew, save for pain.

WHIP DARLING TOOK his cup of coffee out on the veranda, to have a look at the day.

The sun was about to come up; already there was a pink glow in the eastern sky, and the last of the stars had faded. Soon, a slice of orange would appear on the horizon, and the sky would pale and the wind would make up its mind what it was going to do.

Then he’d make up his mind, too. He should put to sea, try to raise something worth a few dollars. On the other hand, if he stayed ashore, there was always work to do on the boat.

The wind had gone around during the night. When he had come up from the dock at twilight, the boats anchored in the bay had been facing south. Now their bows were a phalanx arrayed to the northwest. But there were no teeth to the wind; it was little more than a gentle breeze. Any less, and the boats would have lain scatterways and swung with the tide.

He saw a splash in the bay, then another, and heard a fluttering sound: baitfish, a school of fry running for their lives and skittering over the glassy surface.

Mackerel? Jacks? Little puppy sharks finishing their dawn patrol before returning to the reefs?

Mackerel, he decided, from the vigor of the swirls and the relentlessness of the chase.

He loved this time of day, before the din of traffic began across in Somerset, and the growl of sightseeing boats in the bay and all the other noises of humanity. It was a time of peace and promise, when he could gaze at the water and let his memory dwell on what had been, and his imagination on what might yet be.

The screen door swung open behind him, and his wife, Charlotte—barefoot and wearing the summer cotton nightgown that showed the shadow of her body— came out with her cup of tea and, as she did every morning, stood beside him so close that he could smell the spice of sleep in her hair. He put an arm around her shoulder.

“Mackerel in the bay,” he said.

“Good. First time in … what?”

“Six weeks or more.”

“You going out?”

“I expect so. Chasing rainbows is more entertaining than chipping paint.”

“You never can tell.”

“No.” He smiled. “And there’s always hope. Anyway, I want to retrieve the aquarium’s lines.”

He finished his coffee, poured the dregs onto the grass, and as he turned to go inside, the first rays of the sun flashed over the water and bounced off the white-washed house. He looked at the dark blue shutters, paint flaking, slats cracked and sagging.

“Lord, this house is a mess.”

“They want two hundred apiece to do the shutters,” said Charlotte, “three thousand for the lot.”

“Thieves,” he said, and he held the door for her.

“I suppose we could ask Dana. …” She paused.

“Not a chance, Charlie. No more. She’s done enough.”

“She wants to help. It’s not like—”

“We’re not there yet,” he said. “Things aren’t that bad.”

“Maybe not yet, William.” She went into the house. “But almost.”

” ‘William’ now, is it?” he said. “It’s pretty early in the day for your heavy artillery.”

William Somers Darling was named after the Somers who settled Bermuda by shipwreck in 1609. Sir George Somers had been on his way to Virginia when his Sea Venture struck Bermuda, which Darling regarded as a triumph of seamanship, since to hit Bermuda in the middle of a billion square miles of Atlantic Ocean was akin, he felt, to breaking one’s leg by tripping over a paper clip on a football field. Still, Somers wasn’t the first or the last: It was a safe guess that the twenty-two square miles of Bermuda were ringed by more than three hundred shipwrecks.

Most Bermudians, black and white, were named after one or another of the early settlers—Somers, Darling, Trimingham, Outerbridge, Tucker and a dozen more. The names harkened to history, rang with tradition. And yet, as if in rebellion against mother-country pretension, most Bermudians, black and white, soon cast off one or two of their names and assumed a nickname that had to do with something they looked like or something they’d done or some affliction.

Darling’s nickname was “Buggywhip,” in commemoration of the weapon with which his father had regularly thrashed him.

His friends called him Whip, and so did Charlotte, except when they argued or discussed something she considered too serious for levity. Then she called him William.

He was a fisherman, or, rather, he had been; now he was an ex-fisherman, for being a fisherman in Bermuda had become about as practical a profession as trying to be a ski instructor in the Congo. It was hard to make a living catching something that wasn’t there.

They could live comfortably if not lavishly on twenty or twenty-five thousand dollars a year. They owned the house—it had been in his family, free and clear, since before the American Revolution. Upkeep, including cooking gas and insurance and electricity, cost five or six thousand dollars a year. Boat maintenance, which he and his mate, Mike Newstead, did themselves, cost another six or seven thousand dollars. Food and clothing and all the other magical incidentals that appeared from nowhere and ate money, consumed the rest.

But twenty thousand dollars might as well have been a million, because he wasn’t making it. This year was half gone, and so far he’d made less than seven thousand dollars.

His daughter, Dana, was working downtown in an accounting firm, making good money instead of going to college, and she tried to help. Darling had refused, more brusquely than he meant to but unable to articulate the confusion of love and shame that his child’s offer had triggered in him.

For a while, Dana had succeeded in stealing some of their bills from their mailbox and paying them herself. When, inevitably, she had been discovered and confronted, she had advanced the matter-of-fact defense that since the house was going to be hers one day, she saw no reason why she shouldn’t contribute to its maintenance, especially since the alternative was for them to go to the bank for mortgage money, which would only burden her with payments later on.

The argument had slipped away from reason into dark regions of trust and mistrust and had ended in hurt and anger.

Maybe Charlotte was right. Maybe things were that bad. Darling had seen a folder from the bank in a pile of mail on the kitchen table, but before he could ask about it, it had vanished, and he had put it out of his mind. But now he forced himself to wonder: Was she already talking about mortgages or loans? Would they have to let the bank get its hooks into them?

No. He wouldn’t let it happen. There had to be ways. The Newport-Bermuda race was coming up in ten days, and a friend in the dive business was overbooked for charters during the layover and had asked Darling to pick up a few for him. They’d be good for a thousand dollars apiece, maybe five thousand in all.

Then there was the aquarium retainer, which paid his fuel costs in exchange for his bringing them exotic animals he fished up from the deep. At four dollars a gallon he burned up thirty-two dollars’ worth of fuel every hour he was away from the dock. The aquarium also paid a bonus if he caught something spectacular. He never knew what he’d catch. There were common things down there, like little toothless sharks with catlike eyes, and rare things, like anglerfish, which lured their prey with bioluminescent dorsal stalks and ate it with needle teeth that seemed to be made of crystal. He knew that in the abyss there were unknown critters, too, animals no one had ever seen. Those were the challenge.

Finally, there was always the chance—about as long as winning the Irish Sweepstakes, but never mind, a chance—that he’d find a shipwreck with some goodies on it.

In the kitchen, he ate a banana while he warmed up some of last night’s barracuda. There were two barometers on the wall, and he consulted both. One was a standard aneroid instrument with two pointers, one of which you set by hand, the other responding to atmospheric pressure. He tapped the glass. No change.

The other barometer was a tube of shark-liver oil. In good weather the oil was clear, a light amber color. In times of change or dropping pressure, the oil clouded. His faith was in the shark-oil barometer, for it wasn’t a machine, and he distrusted machines. Machines were made by man, and man was a chronic screwup. Nature rarely made mistakes.

The oil was clear.

He decided to go to sea. Maybe there was a robust grouper out there waiting to be caught, a wanderer from times gone by. A hundred-pound fish could net him four or five hundred dollars. Maybe he’d run into a school of tuna.

Maybe …

Darling’s mate, Mike Newstead, showed up a little after seven. Darling liked to joke that a geneticist would have prized Mike as the ultimate Bermudian, for he contained every ethnic strain ever represented in the colony. He had the short, curly hair of a black, the dark red skin of an Indian—a memento of eighteenth-century Tories bringing Mohawk Indians to the island as slaves—the bright blue eyes of an Englishman (but almond-shaped like an Asian’s), and the taciturn resignation of a Portuguese. He was thirty-six, five years younger than Darling, but he looked ageless. His face had always been sharp-featured and deeply furrowed, as if hacked from some mountain stone. A stranger might have guessed his age at anything from thirty to fifty.

Some people still referred to him, behind his back, as Tutti-Frutti, but nobody called him that to his face anymore, for he stood six foot four and weighed well over 220 pounds, not a gram of which was fat. Though Mike was slow to anger, he was said to possess an explosive temper that was kept in check by his diminutive Portuguese wife, and by Darling, whom he loved.

Darling considered him the perfect mate. Mike didn’t like to make decisions, but rather preferred to be told what to do. He responded instantly and unquestioningly to commands—as long as he respected his commander. He didn’t talk much—he barely spoke, in fact—and if he had any opinions, he kept them to himself. He communicated most intimately and joyfully with Darling’s most hated enemies: machines. Utterly unschooled, he seemed to intuit the workings of engines and motors, be they powered by diesel oil, gasoline, kerosene, air or electricity. He talked to them, soothed them, cajoled them and seduced them into doing what he wanted.

Darling poured Mike some coffee, and they went outside and stood on the dock and watched a cormorant wheeling over the bay in search of food.

“I guess we’ll go pull the aquarium’s traps,” Darling said. “We leave ‘em down too long, critters might die or get eaten … traps could break away.”

“Aye.”

“Might take along some bait … just in case.”

Mike nodded, finished his coffee and went to the freezer in the toolshed to fetch some mackerel for bait.

Darling boarded the boat and started the big Cummings diesel and let it warm up.

The Privateer was a shrimp dragger that Darling had bought at a yard in Houma, Louisiana, and had converted to an all-purpose Bermuda workboat. Her name back then had been Miss Daisy, but he had known at first sight she was not a Miss Daisy. She was big and broad and strong, steel-plated, steel-bulkheaded, steel-decked, a safe, stable platform that rode good weather comfortably and challenged bad weather with defiance, slamming into the seas as if daring them to hole her or pop her rivets.

She’ll knock you down, he’d say, but she’ll never drown you.

She had a dry and roomy house, two compressors, two generators and racks for twenty scuba tanks.

Darling was as superstitious as the next man, but he defended himself against the offense of changing the boat’s name by declaring that since she had been misnamed to begin with, all he had done was give her her right name.

Still, just to be on the safe side, on the bulkhead inside the wheelhouse he had nailed a little obeah figurine from Antigua, and in times of trial—such as the day when a small cyclone made up directly over Bermuda and the wind went from 8 to 120 knots in five minutes and blew like the howling hounds of hell for an hour— he’d give it a rub.

Mike hopped aboard and cast off fore and aft. Darling put the boat in gear and eased out of Mangrove Bay and around the point to Blue Cut.

Settling himself onto a hatch cover in the. stern, Mike muttered at a recalcitrant pump motor as he cradled it in his lap.

Darling had set the aquarium’s line to the northwest, about six miles offshore, in five hundred fathoms of water. He could have found five hundred fathoms closer on the south shore, for there the reefs ended and deep water began only a mile or two from land. But for some reason the creatures that interested the aquarium seemed to live only off the northwest edge.

Now, as they cruised among the reefs, the water was calm but with enough of a ripple to cut the glare and give definition to the different colors of the corals, which gave Darling leave to wander away from the cut and thread his way through the high heads. There was truth to the old rule that the darker something was, the deeper it was, so as long as he could see the yellow villains beneath the surface, he could avoid them.

Standing on the flying bridge, cooled by the northwest breeze and warmed by the young sun, Whip Darling felt himself a happy man. He could forget, for a moment, that he didn’t have any money, and could dream dreams of vast wealth. He allowed himself to fantasize about stacks of silver coins and serpentine chains of gold. Sure, it was fantasy, but it was reality, too, it had been known to happen: the Tucker treasure, the Fisher treasure from the Atocha, the billion-dollar bonanza from the Central America. Who could say it couldn’t happen again?

And gold and silver weren’t the only treasures waiting to be discovered. There were animals, unknown and unimagined, especially in the deep, that might change people’s ideas about everything from biology to evolution, that might give clues to cures for everything from arthritis to cancer. Finding one or two of these creatures wouldn’t fill Darling’s pocketbook, but they were the things that nourished his spirit.

His gaze drifted from the white sand holes to the crevices in patches of reef, and always his eyes searched for the telltale signs of a shipwreck that could be as old as the time of the first James.