The Girl of the Sea of Cortez (22 page)

Paloma liked the last possibility best. Yes, that’s what she could dream was happening to them if they weren’t home soon.

But, walking toward the path to the dock, she suddenly realized there was a more likely reason for Jo’s lateness—and it was a reason that made the palms of her hands go cold and wet, and then a trickle of sweat ran down her sides and a bubble of fear made bile rise in her throat.

From the top of the hill she saw that this was the true reason.

Jo’s day had been successful beyond his dreams. They had netted so many fish and killed them and brought them aboard that they had had to drive the boat home at its slowest speed to keep it from swamping and sinking. The slightest wave of water would rush over the bow of the boat; the merest tipping of a railing would cause a flood.

As the boat puttered toward the dock, Paloma saw Jo and Indio and Manolo all sitting on fish, hip-deep in fish, surrounded by mounds of fish.

In a single day’s netting they had caught more fish than in a month of line-fishing. But that alone was not what distressed Paloma. The great schools of jacks and
cabríos
could sustain—did sustain—heavy losses quite often, and they soon returned to full strength. There were so, so many of them, and they reproduced with such speed and in such profusion, and the sea was so vast that the few regular fishermen could
not hope to catch up with them all; they could endure all but catastrophic onslaughts—dynamite, say, or a sudden invasion by the huge factory ships from the Orient, both of which were forbidden by law.

No. Worse for Paloma than the quantity of the catch was its quality, worse than the numbers were the species. Even from this distance and in the dwindling twilight she could see how Jo and his mates had fished, for they were pawing through the corpses in the boat and flinging overboard those that did not measure up to their suddenly high standards.

When they had caught little, they had taken everything and claimed to need every bit; they had to feed their families and sell the rest. There was no waste, they claimed, no disrespect. The death of anything gave life to something else. Very noble.

But now that they had plenty of fish—more than plenty—and the guarantee, as they saw it, of endless more, why should they bother to save anything that did not bring silver coins just as is, without further effort? Why bother with fish whose price was by the ton, not the pound, fish that had to be carted away and dried and ground up into meal? If those fish came up in the net and got killed, it was more economical to throw them away than to process them. And if some of them were fish that did
not
school, did
not
breed countless young so that many must naturally survive, did
not
exist in profusion on the seamount, well, to clean out these “trash fish” this way was probably efficient, probably a good idea, because it meant that each successive netting would yield a higher percentage of the more lucrative species.

As for maintaining a balance of life on the seamount, a balance that had taken nature scores of decades to establish, they would argue that it was well known how resilient nature was. Nature would always come back from anything. If this
seamount was fished out, move on to another one, and by the time that one is fished out, maybe this one will be coming back. Or another one will. There is always more. You just have to be smart enough to find it.

By the time Jo and Indio and Manolo had finished culling through their catch, night had come, and they did the last of their work by the light of the rising moon. They were tired and hungry, so they did not bother to clean their boat or prepare their gear for tomorrow.

“We can do the boat in the morning,” Jo said as they strode up the path. Paloma was crouching in the brush at the top, watching the three shadows approach.

“Now we know where the place is.”

“And what’s on it. Baby Jesus! I’ve never seen anything like that.”

“I bet we could go late and be back by midday.”

“We could go twice, do two trips a day.”

“
You
go twice. One load like that’s enough for me. My back’s about to break.”

“Maybe we ought to get another boat.” This was Jo’s voice, moving past Paloma and on up the hill.

“That’d mean more people.”

“Why share?”

“We could double the catch.”

“For the same profit, though. We’d have to go partners.”

“No we wouldn’t. We could make a deal: We take them there—maybe we blindfold them so they can’t find the place again—then we take all our catch plus half of theirs.”

“I don’t know.”

“Me neither.”

“We meet after supper,” Jo said. “To talk. We don’t have to decide anything.”

“Okay.”

“Remember: Nobody talks to anybody. Or you’re out.” Jo added gravely, “Finished.”

“Sure, sure.”

The voices stopped and footsteps faded as the three dispersed, each to his home.

Paloma waited until she could hear no sound but the breeze rolling over the island. Then, staying in the shadow of the bushes in case someone should return for a forgotten tool, she crept down to the dock.

The moon was high enough so its light penetrated the shallow water by the shore and cast a faint mantle of white on the rocky bottom.

But there was little bottom to see, for most of it was littered with the dead.

There were floating corpses and corpses that had sunk, corpses that tried to bob to the surface but were blocked by others, corpses battered and mangled and without color, their brilliant capes faded into a sameness at death. And their eyes, all black and blank, stared glassily at nothing.

Jo and his mates must have thrown away a fourth of their catch, all but the biggest of the most valuable kinds, the ones that would bring at least a silver coin apiece. Here in the water by the dock were smaller jacks and yellowtails, a few little
cabríos
, and other groupers that should have been pulled from the net alive and put back in the sea immediately, for they were the future of their species.

Here too were those fish Jobim had called the innocents, those that had no market value, could not be sold as individuals, and were not worth gathering in the numbers, the tons, that would produce fish meal or cat food and be worth a few pennies at the factory.

They were the pufferfish, gentle and shy and gallant in their defiant instant obesity, contributors to no one’s purse
and no one’s table, but hilarious jesters for anyone who dived into the sea.

They were the angelfish, whose chevrons changed color in every stage from infancy to adolescence to maturity, like an army man displaying seniority, radiantly beautiful at every age, the fluttering sentinels of the seamount.

The smaller rays—stingrays and leopard rays and eagle rays—recluses who hid beneath a veneer of sand and exploded in a puff at a stranger’s approach, snared in flight from one hiding place to another.

A turtle so young, still soft of carapace, its wrinkled throat garotted by a strand of netting, its flippers limp, its tail a tiny comma flopping on the belly shell.

And others, like sergeant majors and parrot fish, grunts and chubs and hogfish and porgies, all killed and cast away to wash in the shallows and rot.

The carnage was immense; this was not fishing.

Here, kneeling on the dock, leaning over the edge and gazing into the water, Paloma saw her reflection shimmer in the moonlight, and she realized she was weeping.

She wanted to run up the hill and call out to the other fishermen, the grown men, and lead them down and show them this massacre, but she did not, because it was nighttime and her interruption would not be welcome. She wanted to bring Viejo down, and point out to his dim eyes all the bodies, all the waste. But she did not, because she knew her outrage would not be shared. There would be some tongue-clucking, some intentions expressed to teach the young men how better to cull their catches. But that was all.

And by morning, what she saw before her would be no more, for Jo was not an utter fool: They had arrived home at a full flood tide, and for the next six hours, as the tide ebbed, the bodies would be sucked out to deep water where some
would sink and others would be eaten and others would be caught in passing currents and carried off somewhere, so that when the other fishermen arrived at the dock in the morning, all that would remain of the carnage would be a few floating fish and a few half-eaten skeletons on the bottom—a normal amount of flotsam and jetsam from a day’s work.

Even now, the corpses on the surface were beginning slowly to drift away from the rocks on shore, obscuring her view of parts of the bottom but letting her see into new crannies.

She saw an animal between two rocks. It looked to be curled up, like a sleeping puppy, as if it had chosen to lie cozy in death. She dropped to her stomach on the dock and reached down and stretched for the bottom, wrapped her hand around slick and solid flesh and brought it up and set it on the dock.

It was a green moray eel, young and unscarred, and more than any other of the animals it touched her. For while the other animals were simply dead, not alive anymore, this moray was contorted in the agony of its death, frozen at its final moment. It was tied in a knot that made it seem to be more than merely dead: It seemed that it would be dying forever.

This was a hideous snapshot of an animal that in life had had dignity but that in death had been transformed into a gargoyle.

Paloma knew well that morays often died in this grotesque way. It was, in one strange sense, a natural death, for it reflected the morays’ behavior in life.

Morays lived in holes or small caves or crevices or under rocks, and they lurked at the entrance to their lair, mouth open, gills pulsating rhythmically, hypnotically, skin color blending with their surroundings.

When prey passed by, the moray would shoot out its
body—a single tube of muscle—and snatch the prey and begin to swallow it. The mean-looking fangs in the mouth were but gatekeepers: Beyond, back in the throat, was another set of teeth that gripped the prey and forced it down, down in rippling spasms, down into the gullet.

If the prey was large, larger than the eel’s weak eyesight had anticipated, and if it struggled and threatened to yank the eel from its hole, the eel would anchor its tail around a rock or a coral boulder and contract its central muscles until no free-swimming prey could resist.

Thus, breath-hold divers were doubly careful about poking around in holes in reefs. First, there was the fear of being bitten, because the bite was excruciating and the wound it caused was ragged and would not close and the eel’s mouth was coated in a slime that contained virulent infectants. But worse than the bite was the knowledge that if the eel grabbed a hand or a foot or a shoulder and could not sense the size of the prey (for it would not actually try to eat something so much bigger than itself as a human), it would anchor its tail and sink its fangs deeper and hold on until the prey stopped thrashing and the eel could come out of its lair and see what it had caught.

Once in a while, a moray would catch itself unawares—half out of its hole or swimming in the ocean from niche to niche—would snatch a prey and have no rock on which to fasten a grip. Then it would tug against itself.

It would whip into a perfect knot, wrapping the tail around the head and back down through the loop made by neck and body, and it would pull its prey through the loop, flopping and bouncing and rolling down the reef and out into open water—secure that it had an anchor and its prey did not.

Mostly, the eels knotted themselves this way when they
encountered a force stronger than they—like a steel-barbed hook that fastened in the back of their throat and was attached to a filament that slid between the fangs and could not be bitten off and was connected, finally, to a man on a boat above who had strength and patience and the ability to tie off his line and let the moray exhaust itself.

Fishermen hated morays. They bit at any bait, large or small, so there was no way to avoid catching them. They were useless, for no customers would buy them and no islanders would eat them. They were dangerous: They were never dead by the time they reached the boat, and they were always tied in a slimy, slippery knot, and unless you were prepared to cut away and lose your leader and swivels and hook, you had to retrieve the hook from down deep around the second set of teeth in the throat. The boat was rocking, the eel was thrashing, the other fishermen were grousing because you were upsetting them and their gear and the boat itself, while you tried to bash the eel on the head and render it unconscious so you could slit its gills or get inside its mouth with a pair of pliers.

The combination was perfect for a severe, painful, perhaps incapacitating bite.

So moray eels were “bad” animals—ugly, useless, dangerous, probably offspring of the devil or, at least of some of his underlings.

One day, Jobim had hooked a moray and brought it up to the boat. It was tied in a knot, and as it struggled in the water it swung like the pendulum of a clock. Paloma had never seen a live moray before, and, looking down through the roiled water, she did not know what it was. It looked like a mess of living weed.

“Give me the pliers,” Jobim had said.

She handed him the pliers and watched as he gently brought the eel to the surface.

“Hold this.” He had passed her the fishing line, and she felt it twitch and thrum with the eel’s desperation. He held the pliers in his right hand and, with the same hand, slid two fingers down the leader to within an inch of the eel’s mouth. Then he pinched the leader and pulled the eel clear of the water and, with his left hand, grabbed the eel behind the head and squeezed.

She had never imagined a creature like this. It wasn’t a fish, it was a monster. Its black pig’s eyes bulged and glistened. Its mouth was agape and strung with strands of mucous slime. Its gills, what she could see of them amid the pile of bulbous green flesh, throbbed. It grunted. It hissed.

“Kill it!” she shrieked. “Kill it!”

“Why?”