Cayos in the Stream (2 page)

Only a whale. Thinking of a U-boat can make a whale into only a whale. You have trouble imagining anything else able to do that.

“Well,” one of the fellows says, “now we have a fish story to top every fish story since Jonah put to sea.”

You shake your head. “A whale isn’t a fish. It wouldn’t need to blow if it were a fish.”

“Thank you, Encyclopaedia Britannica,” he answers. Everybody else laughs. After a beat, you join in. Things will not stay smooth if you do not. And you know too well that Americans cannot stand intellectuals. To most of them, an intellectual is anyone who knows anything they do not. Your crewmate goes on, “What I want to find out is, how heavy a test line would we need to reel in that baby?”

“They don’t make test line measured in tons,” you say. “I’m goddamn sure they don’t make test line measured in that many tons.”

Now your crewmates laugh with you, not at you. You have to make them do that if you aim to lead them. You are no Navy officer. You have no shoulder boards or gold stripes above your cuffs. Come to that, you have no cuffs. If they are going to obey, it must be because of the man of you, not on account of rank. Leading like that is magic. But it is a magic you know how to use.

The whale slides under the sea again. As its front end goes down, its tail rises for a moment. The flukes go higher than your perch on the flying bridge. Then they slap the blue water. A wave circles out from the slap. A few seconds later, it kisses the
Pilar
’s wooden flank.

“Damn,” someone whispers.

“Couldn’t have put it better myself,” you say. You win another laugh. It is a small one, but it will do. You add, “I wonder how far away hydrophones will pick that up.”

When everything goes just right, a U-boat’s hydrophones can reach out past thirty miles. They can pick up the sound of a ship’s engine, and of its screw turning through the sea. A good operator can tell the difference between a fishing boat and a freighter and a warship. Does a surfacing whale sound like a surfacing submarine? You do not know for sure. You have done a pile of things in your time, but going below is not one of them.

Everything does not always go just right, either. The border between the warm Gulf Stream and the cooler waters to either side will throw hydrophones off. So will other things. Even the submariners do not understand them all. Sometimes, though, they do not know they have company until too late.

No U-boat skipper will fear your boat. Whether he hears it thirty miles away or sees it in his periscope from as close as the whale was does not matter. Fear is for important things. The only way the
Pilar
can be important to a U-boat skipper is as a fish market—one he does not have to pay. That is your big hope in going out on patrol to begin with. If you find a U-boat, you have a chance to surprise it.

A chance. If you find one. And if you and your friends can carry on the way you are supposed to. A whale coming up for air was enough to turn all the spit in your mouth to dust. What will you be like when you find a U-boat? If you find one.

Cuba is a big island off the shore of the American mainland. Smaller islands lie off the shore of the Cuban mainland. Some of the smaller islands have smaller islands still lying off their shores. Some of the smaller islands still have rocks lying off them. Some of the rocks have pebbles. Some of the pebbles . . . .

So, naturalists observe, a flea

Hath smaller fleas that on him prey;

And these have smaller still to bite ’em

And so proceed
ad infinitum
.

When you get to talking about the islands off the Cuban coast in a bar, you cannot resist quoting Jonathan Swift. People like it. They whoop and holler. It is pretty drunk out, of course.

Some of the people want to know whether that is yours. They will not know better if you say yes. But you tell them, “No, that is by a really good writer.” Grace under pressure. And the sure knowledge that, if you take on Dean Swift, you will be punching out of your weight.

To remind yourself of it, you give the crowd Swift’s next two barbed lines:

Thus every poet, in his kind

Is bit by him that comes behind.

More whoops. More hollers. They like it that you can use somebody else’s words to poke fun at yourself. Some of them turn what you say into Spanish for those who do not follow English well.

You do not talk about the islands off the Cuban coast by accident. You do it smoothly, but on purpose. There are dozens or hundreds of those little islands—thousands, for all you know. Just how many at any one time depends on tides and storms.

Some of the islands have villages. Some have goatherds. Some have fishermen who visit now and then. Some just have palms and ferns and geckos and hummingbirds. If you plant a supply dump on one of those, who will be the wiser? Only the sailors who row in from a U-boat to pick up what you have left behind.

All those Spaniards here in Cuba, organized into the Falange. Franco’s toadies. And Franco is Hitler’s toady. Without Hitler, what would Franco be? One more tinpot general who tried for a putsch but did not make it.

And a good many Cubans will line up with those Spanish fifth columnists. Yes, President Batista declared war on Germany and Italy and Japan after Pearl Harbor. But he was General Batista before he was President Batista. He finagled the impeachment of the guy who ran the country before him. He is smoother than Franco—he did not have to fight a war to take charge of things—but he is stamped from the same cheap metal. No wonder plenty of his countrymen line up with the Fascists.

You have got some hope of learning if they try to give the U-boats a helping hand. Spaniards are Spaniards. Cubans are Cubans—Spaniards mixed in this island bowl with Negroes and Indians. They all love to hear themselves talk. What one man knows today, four will know tomorrow morning, sixteen tomorrow afternoon, and the whole country in three days’ time.

You talk in bars yourself. You have never been shy about tooting your own trumpet. You have not been shy about anything for a long time. Making a big noise is what gets a man notice. But you know what seeds you are planting. And, no matter how much you talk, you also know how to listen. You thank God you do not have to be a reporter any more. Still, the little tricks you picked up in that trade come in handy even now. Listening while you seem to be running your mouth is not the least of them.

Something is funny on Cayo Bernardo. You hear it. Then you hear it again a few days later. You are pretty sure the fellow you hear it from the second time does not know the first man who told you. You are also pretty sure you never heard of Cayo Bernardo until that first man mentioned it.

Aboard the
Pilar
, you haul out your charts. Cayo Bernardo turns out to be a flyspeck on the map. It is not far from Cayo Santa Maria, a bigger flyspeck. Cayo Santa Maria, in turn, lies not far west of Cayo Cocos. Cayo Cocos gets close to being a real island.

Cayo
means
island
in Spanish. On the far side of the Florida Strait, it has turned into
key
. You lived on Key West for a while. You first met Martha there, before Spain. Key West used to be Cayo Hueso—Bone Island. Language takes crazy hops sometimes.

“Heading off to chase wild geese again?” Martha asks you when you go from the boat to the house.

“It could be.” You try not to get angry. When you do in spite of trying, you try not to show it. She is after your goat. You do not want to let her know she has got it. You go on, “Men in boats and men in ships are chasing wild geese across all the oceans of the world. It’s part of the war. Wild geese by the hundreds, men chasing them by the tens of thousands. Sometimes they catch them. Sometimes, by Christ, they do.”

“Yes? How often?” she jeers.

“Often enough to make the chasing worthwhile,” you say.

“Ha!” A single syllable of scorn.

“Often enough to make the chase needful, then. There. Are you happier?” You know she is not happier. But you have been jabbed. You counterpunch, the way you do in the ring. And, jabbed once, you hit back twice. “These wild geese chase on their own, remember. If they catch you, you won’t see your home port again.”

“Ernest . . .” She shakes her elegant head. Whatever she swallows is bound to be better left unsaid. She contents herself with—no, she suffices herself with, for she is plainly not content—“What are the odds?”

“If I do go out, I have a chance of finding something. If I don’t, I have no chance at all. That makes the odds worth playing.”

She rolls her eyes. “How long have you wanted to be a hero?”

You do not answer that. The only true answer is
always
. The ambulance driving in the last war, the writing, the hunting, the drinking, the fighting, the womanizing . . . You have chased that one thing your whole life.
Hero
is a four-letter word, too. Sweet Jesus, though, what a four-letter word!

On the
Pilar
, if you find your wild goose, you will also find that one thing. “Odds worth playing,” you repeat.

“Playing.” Martha freights the word with more doubt than it should be able to bear. “But don’t you see, dammit, the Germans won’t be playing even if you catch up with them? They’ll kill you, they’ll log it—if they bother—and they’ll go on about their business.”

They may. For some men, war is only a business. They do not get excited about it, any more than other men get excited about selling shoes or changing spark plugs. Men like that also are often uncommonly good at their trade.

As for you, your log book is a joke. Any Navy officer with a log book half as vague and sloppy would have to commit hara-kiri like a Jap to atone for the disgrace. But you are obscenitied if you want to be like a Navy officer. All you want is to find a U-boat. No. All you want is to find a U-boat and to sink the son of a bitch.

You do not want much, do you?

“Oh, go on!” Martha throws her hands in the air. She is lefthanded, in her body and in the way she thinks. “Go play. You will anyhow.”

You give her the last word. How can you help it, when she is so right?

When you go play, your pilot is a sour-faced Catalan named Josep. Not José. Josep. He is touchy about that. He has lived in Cuba for many years, but he still speaks Spanish with the accent you hear in Barcelona. Any Spaniard will tell you Catalan is only Spanish spelled badly. Josep will punch any Spaniard in the teeth if he starts coming out with that
mierda
.

Josep used to be a fisherman in the Mediterranean. He has fished these waters since he crossed the Atlantic. He fished from other men’s boats when he first came. As soon as he could afford to, he bought his own. That did not take long. He has always worked hard. And he is as cheap as Jews are supposed to be.

He pilots for you now because he hates Fascists even more than you do. You are damn glad to have him aboard, too. What he does not know about the
cayos
and the channels spiderwebbing between them is not to be known. He knows those islands and the waters that wash them the way you know the hair and the scars on your leg.

“Cayo Bernardo?” he says when you tell him where you want to go. His eyebrows do not rise. The come down and pull together instead. They are black and thick and bushy. You wonder if he has Basque blood in him. Then his tanned, seamed face clears. “I can take you there. But why do you want to go? Nothing has happened on Cayo Bernardo since the beginning of time.”

“Something may have,” you answer. You do not want to contradict a man like Josep straight out. That is worse luck than taking a hammer and smashing every mirror you own.

He snorts. “Not likely!”

“The bar talk—”

“Bar talk? Bar talk is piss coming out the wrong end, nothing else but.” Josep pauses. Those heavy eyebrows lower and pull together again. “The bar talk about Cayo Bernardo
is
funny lately, isn’t it? A fisherman missing around there, it could be.”

You nod. “I’ve heard the same thing.”

If he does not take the
Pilar
to Cayo Bernardo, you will not pay him. This carries weight. And he will not be able to hunt Fascists there, if any Fascists are there to hunt. This also carries weight. You fiddle with your pipe. You give him time. You honor his pride. He is a man. You do not try to rush him into anything.

You get the pipe going. Josep lights a Cuban stogie that might be made from shoe blacking. The two smokes, sweet and harsh, war in the air. “We can see what the bar talk is worth. We can see if it is worth anything,” he grudges at last.

“
Bueno
. That’s all I want to do,” you say. “If it has no value, I’ll write Cayo Bernardo off the list and look for German U-boats in other places. If something is going on there, we’ll do what seems best when we see what that something is.”

Josep nods. He smokes without hurrying. He nods again. “Well said.” You nod back gruffly. Your heart sings inside you, though you would sooner die than show it. From a man like him, a man who is a man and who knows he is a man, such praise is more precious than rubies.

Two days later, the
Pilar
chugs east, toward the Archipelago de Sabana. You eye the chart. Cayo Bernardo lies near the eastern end of the archipelago. Only a speck on the map, as you have seen. A speck with a name, though. Some nearby specks have none. Does that make them more insignificant than Cayo Bernardo? Can an island be more insignificant than Cayo Bernardo and still be an island?

It is a question like How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? But it is not quite like that. It is more like How many Nazis can dance on the sands of a
cayo
?

The smaller engine, the Lycoming, pushes the fishing boat along. The
Pilar
does not run fast, but she does not use much gas, either. You never get all you want in this world. Take what you can get and do not worry about what you cannot get and you will be happy enough. How often will you have to tell yourself that before you start to believe it? You want everything, and you want it right away. You always have. You always will.