The Girl of the Sea of Cortez (13 page)

Lying on the surface of the water now, listening to the high, buzzing sound, Paloma tried to recall if Jobim had taught her any tricks for judging how far away a sound was. Either he hadn’t taught her, or she couldn’t remember them, and in any case it didn’t matter. She assumed the noise was coming from a boat, probably an outboard, passing in the distance, and if so, it would surely keep on going.

Paloma checked to make sure her knife was secure in her belt, then took her breaths and dropped down to the manta. She saw the big round eye swivel up as she approached and follow her until she had passed out of its range and settled onto the broad black back. As she let herself down slowly, she noticed that her knees were smudged with black. She touched the manta’s flesh and looked at her fingers: It was black, too. The manta’s protective mucous coating came off on her skin like a black stain.

She turned to the wound; there were very few ropes left, and she was able to reach them with the point of her knife. She removed them all and then, with her fingertips, swabbed at the bits of debris left in the wound. She had to force herself not to think of what it would be like to have someone poking fingers into an open sore of hers, for when the thought first crossed her mind, she nearly fainted.

But the manta did not give any signs of pain, did not flinch
or shudder. Either the wound was so deep that it was beyond superficial nervous sensation, or such sensations didn’t exist in the manta. Whatever the reason, Paloma was able to clean the wound and cut away all the dangling shreds of putrescent flesh.

The feelings in her head and in her chest told her that she still had some time—half a minute or more—before she would have to surface, so, using her hands as trowels, she began to pack the torn flesh together into the cavity of the wound, pressing it down as if to encourage it to adhere to itself and grow again.

It should have been a silent task, but the flesh as she slapped it sounded like THUCK, and her moving around caused her to emit squeaky streams of bubbles, and the pulse in her temples drummed ever more insistently. And all these sounds, when added to her intense concentration, obliterated the noise of the outboard motor as it approached overhead.

Now she had to surface. She pushed off the manta’s back and swept once with her arms and kicked a few times. It was only habit that made her look up: Jobim had taught her always to look up as she ascended from a dive, to avoid knocking her head on the bottom of the boat.

When she did look up, she expected to see the surface or the sky. Instead, all she saw was Jo’s face, peering down at her from the surface through a glass-bottom bucket, his grin distorted by reflection into a gargoyle’s leer.

She recoiled, shocked, and looked again to make certain she hadn’t imagined it. Then she saw Jo’s fingers creep around the edge of his homemade viewing box and wave to her.

P
aloma broke through the surface and reached up for the gunwale of her boat. Jo had put a line around her anchor rope, so they were moored together.

He was still looking through the glass-bottom bucket. “Mother of God! What a monster! How did you catch him?”

Indio said, “Let me see.”

Paloma’s heart was stuttering. She could hear it beat in her chest and feel it in her throat. She took a deep breath and tried to calm herself, for she had to be in control of herself before she could hope to deal with Jo and Indio and—looking so smug, sitting in the bow—the miraculously recovered Manolo. Her first impulse was to shriek at Jo, to lash out at him, for she felt betrayed, even violated.

There were three of them, however, and but one of her,
and nothing would be accomplished by a display of rage, except that Jo and his mates would laugh, and she would feel even more humiliated.

“How did you catch him?” Jo asked again.

“I didn’t catch him,” Paloma said. “He’s not caught.”

“He’s dead, then?”

“No.”

Indio was looking through the bucket. “
Look
at ’em all! This place is a fish market! It’s a gold mine!”

A surge of nausea swept through Paloma and made her dizzy. Though she still hung in the water, she felt beads of sweat form on her forehead.

“I told you,” Jo said to Indio. “I knew she wasn’t coming out here to study shrimps.”

“You were right.”

“You didn’t believe me,” Jo went on. “ ‘Let’s stay here,’ you said. A lot you knew.”

“Okay, okay,” Indio said. “I said you were right. I admit it. I take it back. Now let’s get at ’em!”

As if on cue, Manolo threw a baited hook overboard and fed the weighted line through his fingers.

“Don’t!” Paloma shouted.

Manolo laughed. “There are fish down there. Are you saying I can’t fish for them? That’s what fish are for. To fish for.”

“You’re wrong.” Paloma pulled herself toward the bow of her boat. “You’re not so important that God put
any
thing on earth just for you to kill.”

With one hand, Paloma grabbed her anchor rope; with the other she reached back into her belt and pulled out her knife and slashed the line that moored the other boat to hers. The line was taut, for the strong tide wanted to pull the boat away, so the sharp blade sliced through the fibers so quickly that they made a popping sound.

Immediately, the bow of Jo’s boat swung wide, tangling Manolo’s fishing line in the limp mooring line, and the boat slid away down-tide.

Furious, Jo leaped to his feet, cursed Paloma, and yanked on the starter cord of his outboard motor. The cord came away in his hand. He cursed the motor, and cursed Paloma again, and the cord, and all boats, and the sea. He rewrapped the cord and pulled a second time, and the motor sputtered and died. He cursed spark plugs and carburetors and gasoline.

Paloma clung to her anchor rope and watched Jo teeter in the stern of his boat and nearly capsize. Then she saw a puff of blue smoke and heard the outboard roar to life and saw the boat swing in a tight circle and head back toward her. Quickly, she pulled herself aboard her own boat, for she knew that Jo’s rages were sometimes blind and violent, and he was capable of threatening to run her over with his boat. She didn’t believe he would actually do it, but he might hit her by accident.

Aiming directly at Paloma’s pirogue, Jo kept his motor at full throttle until he was only ten or twelve feet from her, then cut his power altogether. His boat stopped six inches from Paloma’s, and it caused a swell that lifted her boat and tipped it and almost spilled her overboard.

Manolo, cheeks livid with anger, whipped his bow line around her anchor rope and made it fast. His fishing line was wrapped in a tight spiral around the bow line. He tried to unravel it, but every time he freed a loop of fishing line, the loop behind it kinked and doubled. He took a knife from his belt and cut the fishing line and snarled at Jo, “If you can’t make her behave,
I
will.”

“Don’t worry,” Jo said. “I’ll take care of her.”

“Jo, look!” said Indio, who had put the glass-bottom
bucket overboard and was surveying the seamount. “
Cabríos
. Dozens of them. And goldens! And jacks! Jesus, a million jacks!”

Jo looked at Paloma and said, mocking her, “Not much out here, eh? Not many groupers. Just the same old stuff. I knew I couldn’t trust you.”

Paloma was stunned. “
You
couldn’t trust
me?
Who was it who said he wanted to learn to dive?”

“I do, I do.”

“To study things, to learn about animals.”

“I do.”

“No. All you want to do is kill things.”

“No,” Jo said, and he grinned. “I want to kill things and
then
I want to learn things. When I can sell enough fish to get enough money so I can get out of here, then I’ll learn things—in Mexico City.”

Paloma took the knife from her belt again and moved forward toward the mooring line.

“Paloma,” Jo said in a tone reminiscent of Viejo’s martyr voice, “don’t be so silly.”

“Give up, you mean. Let you kill everything here.”

“There you go again, exaggerating. Even if I wanted to I couldn’t kill everything on this seamount. If we take something, something else comes in to replace it. The sea goes on forever, you ought to know that.”

“That’s nonsense. You could wipe out the whole place.”

“I’m not going to argue with you, but … what do you care, anyway? We won’t take your precious oysters.”

“What? I …”

Jo smiled. “Didn’t think I knew, did you?”

What does he know? Paloma wondered. He can’t know about the necklace. He can’t. He’d spoil it. If he knew, he’d
find some way to spoil it, just to get back at me for … for what? For succeeding where he failed?

Paloma stalled. “Knew what?”

“That you take oysters from here. You’re so pure, you never take anything from the sea, sure, sure. Well, I’ve seen oyster shells in your boat.” Jo chuckled. “Or that thing you call a boat.” He looked around and was pleased at the appreciative smiles from Indio and Manolo.

“A couple of oysters,” she said, relieved, and she added for emphasis, “to eat right here. That’s all.”

“That’s what we want: a few fish to sell. That’s all.”

“Jo …” Paloma hesitated before continuing. “Papa wanted this seamount saved, left as it is. He told me we had a kind of trust, that we had to preserve it. It … it was his favorite place.”

Jo flushed. “I know that. You think I didn’t know that?” The words spilled from his mouth. He turned to Indio and said contemptuously, “Of course I knew that. You heard me say that.”

Indio looked quizzically at Jo, but said nothing.

Then Jo glared at Paloma and shouted, “Papa is dead, Paloma! Dead, dead, dead!”

She put her hands to her ears, for she did not want to hear.

“I don’t care if he told you to save the whole world! He is dead, and what he said doesn’t mean a damn! Do you understand that? Not a God damn! It is what I say that makes a damn, and I say I am more important than your stupid fish!”

There was nothing more Paloma could say, and so she raised her knife to cut the mooring line.

“That won’t stop us.”

“Yes it will. I’ll pull my anchor and go. You’ll never find this place again.”

“I’ll buoy it.”

“I’ll cut your buoys away.”

“I’ll take landmarks.”

“You?” Paloma sneered. “You couldn’t find your way around the house with a landmark. You don’t know how.”

“I can learn.”

Paloma knew he was right. He could learn to take landmarks, and once he had the skill, he could find the seamount as easily as she did.

“Look, Paloma, we don’t have to fight like this.” Jo was trying to sound reasonable. “We can work it out. We can still be friends.”

Paloma had been looking away from him. Now her eyes snapped back to his face, to see if he was purposely mocking her. He was looking intensely sincere.

He said, “I’ll make a deal with you.”

“What deal?”

“I won’t tell anybody about this place. It only makes sense that I’ll keep my word; after all, it’s good for me, too. We’ll fish it with lines only, no nets. Anything we catch that we can’t use, we’ll throw back.”

Paloma saw that Jo’s mates were eying him as if they thought he had lost his mind, but they stayed silent.

“You have to admit that’s fair,” Jo said. “I don’t
have
to do anything. I could come out here and throw dynamite overboard.”

“You could,” Paloma agreed. “But you know that if you did”—she hoped her voice had a tone of quiet menace—“I’d get revenge. Somehow, someday, you’d pay.”

Jo roared with laughter and slapped Indio on the back, but there was a brittle quality to his laughter, for Paloma was—physically, at least—an unknown and thus an unmeasurable
adversary. He was bigger and stronger, but he seemed to sense that she was quicker and smarter, and driven by a passion that gave her courage.

Paloma thought about Jo’s “deal” and concluded at once that it was no deal at all; it was a not-very-subtle kind of blackmail. If Paloma agreed to let them fish as often and take as much as they wanted, they would not spoil a good thing by spreading the word to their competitors. If she harassed them by cutting away their bait and their boat and their buoys, they would broadcast the location and its richness.

Worse still, Paloma doubted that they would be able to keep their end of the agreement. It was inevitable that one of them would find himself in a conversation in which he needed something to brag about, a feat that would set him apart from and above his rivals. And once the existence of the seamount was known, its location would follow speedily.

It was also inevitable that before long Jo and his mates would begin to fish with nets. The temptation would become too great to resist. It would be like placing a plate of Easter sweet rolls before the three famished boys and recommending that they eat no more than one apiece because there would be no more when that plate was gone. They would see huge schools of
cabríos
and jacks beneath their boat, and each flashing body would ring in their minds as a silver coin. They would be catching four or six or fifteen fish on their lines, and they would begin to speak of the immense fortune that was swimming away from them because they could not use nets. Then they would agree to try the nets just this once, to see how many fish they could catch—an experiment, they would say, that’s all. They would catch hundreds and hundreds, and there would be no satisfying them with less. The seduction would be complete.