Cayos in the Stream (3 page)

You look down into the clear blue water from the flying bridge. The water is so shallow, you can easily see the bottom. You see sand and rocks and seaweed and starfish and spiny urchins and a turtle sculling along above its own shadow. It is like looking through blue stained glass from an old church window. Ripples in the sea could be flaws in the glass.

Then Josep takes the boat farther out to sea. The bottom falls away. Flying fish spring from the water. Mackerel leap after them. Terns and frigatebirds circle overhead. Sometimes one will fold its wings and arrow into the ocean. Maybe it will come up with nothing. Maybe a fish will thrash in its beak.

If a fish thrashes in a tern’s beak, as often as not a frigatebird will try to take it away. Frigatebirds are big and strong and mean and lazy. They would rather steal than work. Stealing is easier. Put a frigatebird in a uniform coat and give him a chest full of medals and he will make you a fine Fascist.

Seeing the small fish and the bigger fish chasing them makes you think of bigger fish yet. Sailfish. Swordfish. Marlin. A great marlin can go better than a thousand pounds. What you would not give to pit your strength against a grander like that! You have caught many big fish, but never one so big.

When you are up on the flying bridge, you are supposed to be watching for U-boats. Your eyes should not stray to the fighting chair at the stern. The stern is lowered. You have put in a roller there to help you bring aboard large fish. You are hunting Germans now. You should not remember you bought the
Pilar
to go after fish.

But you can watch up here only so long. After a couple of hours, you will not pay close heed the way you should. Then it will be time for someone else to come up and watch. You can bait a stout hook with half a bonito. You can sit down in the fighting chair and see how your luck runs. The day is warm and muggy. You can have someone fetch you a bottle of beer from an ice chest.

The American ambassador and the FBI man in Havana will not like to hear you are fishing for marlin while you are patrolling for U-boats. Well, obscenity on what they will not like. If you catch one, you and your crewmates will eat like kings. Nothing tastes better than a fish you have just pulled out of the sea yourself. Nothing. Obscenity on all the cans in the galley, too.

You do hook one, not half an hour after you take your place in the chair. He is not the monster you dream of. Life has a nasty way of not living up to your dreams, or why are you on your third wife and squabbling with her? But he is longer than a man is tall. He has to weigh as much as you do. And he fights for his life like the free, wild thing he is.

Line smokes off the reel. The marlin is furious and strong, so strong. You have a thick chest and muscled arms, but it is not the same after you pass forty. You shout and roar so you do not have to look at that, but it is not the same whether you look at it or not. You have the rod and the reel and the line and the hook. You have the fighting chair to brace against.

What does the fish have? Only himself. Yet you soon feel like an old man on the sea. But the marlin also feels it. Let him dive. Let him jump. Hook and line and rod still link him to your arms. You work the reel as you can. Sometimes the line pays out when he runs. More often, now, it comes in. You gain. Little by little, you gain.

“Come on, God,” someone behind you says. “Keep the stinking sharks away. Give us a whole marlin, not one all chewed to hell and gone.”

You are so wrapped up in the fight, you did not know someone stood in back of the chair. Neither do you know about God. If He is inclined to answer prayers, though, you hope He answers that one. You hate sharks. And a hooked, exhausted marlin is a feast at Maxim’s for them.

You keep on reeling in the fish. What else can you do? If a shark comes, he comes. That is the long and short of it. After most of an hour, you have beaten the marlin. He lies by the stern, spent but beautiful. No shark has torn that blued-gunmetal hide.

A gaff goes into the marlin. Eager hands pull him up over the roller. His mouth gapes wide. He cannot breathe air, but he does not know that, poor thing. “Watch the bill!” you say sharply. The marlin may spear someone even with his dying thrashes.

An iron pry bar comes down on his head, hard. Once, twice, three times. Eyes and skin dull. It is over.

You draw a knife from a sheath on your belt. You feel the soft yet firm resistance of flesh as the blade goes in. When you yank the knife from the gills down toward the vent, offal spills on the deck. You and your crewmates push the guts into the water.

Sharks now! The ocean behind the
Pilar
boils as they tear into the gift. A small stretch of sea briefly goes from blue to red.

“Holy cow!” one of the men says. “A big bastard just swallowed one of the little guys.”

“They might as well be people,” you say. “Give them shirts with collars and neckties and they will be running for Congress in the next election.” Your crewmates laugh. You are kidding, but kidding on the square.

You hack big, thick steaks from the marlin’s flank. The meat has almost the texture of beef. Grilled and seasoned with lime juice and salt and cayenne, it will be fine. The Japs eat their fish raw. You like it fresh, but not that fresh.

You haggle off another steak. Plenty of people want to stick knives into politicians after they lead them astray. They do not get the chance often enough. That they do not is another of the world’s sorrows.

Now you are well into the Archipelago de Sabana. Sometimes Josep takes the
Pilar
between two
cayos
through a channel so narrow you can piss on the beach to port, then go to the starboard rail and piss on the mangroves there. The seaweed under the boat’s keep sways in the water like grass in the breeze.

Josep never runs her aground. A good thing, too. She has gone aground before, more often than you wish she would have. It is hard on her. It is particularly hard on her motors and screws. And it is hard on your temper. When things go well, you always want everyone within buying range to share your good luck. But when things go wrong, chances are you will blame anyone else close by ahead of yourself. You are not proud of that, but you cannot seem to help it.

Then the warm sea opens out. It darkens ahead, which means it grows deeper. Josep smiles a thin smile at the wheel. His hands ease their hold a bit. Making a passage seem effortless is not the same as getting through it without effort. That is as true on the water as at the typewriter.

“Will we make Cayo Bernardo today?” you ask.

Josep considers. “We can, if you want me to fire up the Chrysler,” he replies in his peculiar Spanish. “Otherwise, tomorrow morning.”

“Save the gas,” you say after a little thought of your own. “Tomorrow morning will do. If there are Nazis on the
cayo
, better to have a whole day to find them and plenty of light to see them by.”

“Plenty of light for them to see us, too.” The stinking, twisted stogie jerks in his mouth.

“We can’t pull off these little tricks without taking a chance here and there.” You make your tone light. Once more, seeming effortlessness not gained without effort.

“
Sí, Señor
,” Josep says. It might mean anything. It might mean nothing, only Josep is not a man in the habit of saying things that mean nothing. He adds, “The
niños
will be ready.”

“The babies and the frags,” you agree. The
niños
—the babies—are the Tommy guns. You swaddle them in goatskins against sea air and salt water. You carry them in the skins, too, like little children. Someone who sees them in your arms may take them for
botas
: leather wine flasks. And the frags will settle anyone the
niños
do not. If you meet a U-boat before you make Cayo Bernardo, you have the bomb that looks like an extinguisher.

You have almost given up on meeting a U-boat. The ocean is wide. The
Pilar
is small. Even from the flying bridge, you cannot see far. Nor is a U-boat large, not as vessels made for war go. The top of a conning tower does not rise high above the sea. U-boats are made to be hard to spot while surfaced. When they dive, they vanish.

But a periscope does not let a U-boat under the water see far or see well. And a submerged U-boat moves slowly. It soon uses up its battery power. So U-boats hunt on the surface when they can. They go under to kill or to get away.

You can see all the way to the bottom here. The sea is as clear as a full bathtub before you get in. It is not much deeper than a bathtub, either. If the
Pilar
passes right over a U-boat lurking in the bath-warm water, you will see it. You will see it, yes, but you will not be able to do anything about what you see.

With its periscope, a U-boat can see you even if you do not pass right over it. The skipper in his white-crowned cap—the white crown is the only way to know he is the skipper—can take his time deciding what to do about you. If he chooses to sink you out of hand, your tale will be one of those that have not a happy ending.

Yet why should he squander a torpedo on the
Pilar
? Why should he spend even a few deck-gun shells? The
Pilar
is no destroyer. No navy yard spawned her to slay submarines. She looks like—she is—a pleasure craft, a fishing boat.

A U-boat skipper will not know you have aboard what is left of that fighting marlin. But a canny U-boat skipper will suppose you carry something worth eating. If you have had some luck, it will be marlin or swordfish or tuna. If your luck is out, you will still have cans of roast-beef hash. You will have beer or whiskey or rum. You will likely have beer and whiskey and rum. You may have orange juice.

When did German U-boat sailors last taste orange juice? Before the war started, chances are. Or maybe when they plundered some other fishing boat.

Up on the flying bridge, your field glasses sweep the sea. They also sweep the
cayos
scattered across the sea at random.
Cayos
with beaches.
Cayos
with jungle.
Cayos
with goats that have chewed the jungle down to nubs. Cayo Bernardo was where the Nazis were—where you think they were—when word of them got to you. Nothing says they have to stay there. Your glasses sweep all the
cayos
.

They say a watchstander on a U-boat conning tower cannot go longer than two hours at a stretch. After that, the strain starts to tell on him. He sees things that are not there. Worse, he misses things that are.

This is the Hooligan Navy. It does not run by the clock. Your time up here is not rationed to the minute. Still, you have been up here a while. You feel it in your neck, and in your back. Pretty soon, you will go down to the deck and hand off the glasses so someone else can sweep the sea.

Handoff. Sweep. It sounds like a football game. Newspapermen write about football as if it were war. It is not war. It is a game, a kids’ game. If it were war, the players would carry knives and .45s. A halfback would score a touchdown only after the defenders went down wounded or dead.

Blood would run in the stands, too. Football stays on the gridiron, where it belongs. War has a nasty way of slopping over.

Well, what do newspapermen know? Not very goddam much. You wrote for the papers. You get that if anyone does.

You sweep the glasses along one more time. You are about to give it up and have someone else take a turn. Then—by themselves, it seems—the field glasses snap back along their track.

The water seems to boil there, a couple of hundred yards to port. It is not a dolphin leaping for joy. You see that much right away. You need just a heartbeat or two to realize it is not a dolphin’s larger cousin, either. It is not a whale rising to blow, as it was before.

It is a U-boat, a German U-boat. It dwarfs the
Pilar
. You knew it would, if you ever met one. As with so many things, knowing takes a back seat to seeing for yourself.

You did not know the U-boat would be ugly as old sin. You have studied photos of German submarines. But those turn out to be like photos of Hollywood starlets. Their subjects seem prettier than they really are. Hollywood starlets already look good. Type VII U-boats damn well don’t. But this one is uglier than any photograph you ever set eyes on.

That should not surprise you. A lot of your photos come from German propaganda pieces. Dr. Goebbels wants to make the
Führer
’s subs look as good as he can. His pictures do not show quick, sloppy welds. They do not show peeling paint. They do not show rusty patches, either. If any barnacles grow like mange on the hulls Dr. Goebbels orders photographed, his retouchers have made them disappear.

The sailors popping out of the conning tower are a mangy lot, too. They have not shaved in weeks—months, more likely. Where the face fuzz does not hide them, their skins are corpse-pale. They wear torn, grease-stained shirts and creaseless dungarees.

They can kill you even so, of course. They have the machine gun on the conning tower and the deck gun. The deck gun is an 88. It is made to sink freighters so the U-boat does not have to waste torpedoes on them. One or two hits from it will not just sink the
Pilar
. They will rip her to splinters and everybody aboard her to cat’s-meat.

Quietly, the men bring the
niños
up where they can grab them in a hurry. Swaddled in goatskins, the Tommy guns could be anything. Sure as hell, Josep tips his to his mouth, pretending it is a wineskin. No one gets excited or afraid because a submarine is in the neighborhood.

No. Nobody acts excited or afraid because a submarine is in the neighborhood. It is not the same thing. It is not even close. Your balls have climbed up into your belly. Your heart drums loud and fast in your chest. Beads of sweat dot your palms. If you try to spit now, what will come out? Dust, as in ashes to ashes, dust to.

“Won’t be long now, boys,” you say. Despite your flannel tongue, you sound like yourself. It is a neat trick. You wish you knew how you did it.

One of the Nazis on the conning tower wears a cap with a white crown. Not a very clean white crown, but still . . . That is their captain. If he plays it smart, you have not got a prayer. He will not let you near the submarine. He will send over a boat and take whatever you have that he wants. The Germans at the deck gun and the machine gun will cover the
Pilar
. You will not be able to do a thing.