The Girl of the Sea of Cortez (23 page)

“Kill it!”

“You want it dead, you kill it.” Jobim had nodded at the cudgel he kept in the boat to stun sharks.

“Don’t
you
want it dead?”

Jobim didn’t answer. He was staring fixedly into one of the eel’s eyes. The muscles in his arms and shoulders flexed and twisted as he fought to keep the eel from writhing free. Then he squeezed harder with his left hand, and the eel’s mouth opened wider, and he squeezed still harder, and the two jaws separated and made a line that was almost vertical, as if the bottom jaw had unhinged completely.

Jobim opened the pliers and pushed his hand into the eel’s mouth.

“He’ll bite off your hand!” Paloma had cried, and she grabbed the cudgel and raised it with both fists over the eel’s yawning mouth.

Jobim pushed his hand farther down the gullet, and Paloma saw the eel’s flesh bulge as his knuckles passed through. His hand was gone, and his wrist, and half his forearm.
Still the eel writhed and hissed, and every fiber in Jobim’s left arm danced. He lowered his eyes closer to the eel’s eye, and he probed with the pliers, feeling for the barb of the hook. He found it, and his hand twisted beneath the pulsing green skin, and slowly his arm and wrist began to withdraw, coating with shiny slime, and his hand came free, then the pliers and the steel hook.

Still holding the eel’s head in his left hand, he lowered the entire body back into the water and slowly sloshed it back and forth to get water flowing once again over the gills. When he was sure the eel would not succumb to shock and stop breathing, he released it.

The ball of green muscle sank a foot or two, then uncoiled like a waking snake, then wriggled to stretch the tired tissues, and then—suddenly aware and awake and sensing that it was vulnerable in open water—it darted with quick, snapping thrusts toward the bottom.

Several times Paloma had asked Jobim why he hadn’t killed the moray, and, annoyingly, he had persisted in answering her question with a question. He was busy untangling the fishing line that had coiled around his knees as he fought to free the moray.

“Why should I kill it?”

“It could’ve bitten your hand off.”

“It could not have bitten my hand off. It could have bitten me.”

“Isn’t that bad enough?”

“To make me kill it? No. I hooked the animal by accident. I hurt it. I put a hook in its throat and dragged it out of water, where it knew it couldn’t breathe and was going to die—instinct told it that—and I squeezed its head so hard that its mouth had to open, and then I jammed a steel thing and a big bone down its throat and poked around and caused it pain
and terror. Bitten me? I wouldn’t have blamed it for biting my head off. Now, why, on top of all the things I’d already done to that animal, should I kill it?”

As Paloma opened her mouth to speak, Jobim added quickly, “And don’t say, ‘Why not?’ ‘Why not kill?’ is a question you must never ask. The question must always be ‘Why kill?’ and the answer must be something for which there is no other answer.”

Paloma had no good answer for “Why kill?” and so she said nothing.

That afternoon, when they had finished fishing, Jobim had moved the boat to the shallowest part of the seamount and told Paloma that he would take her for a dive. She was tired and didn’t feel much like getting wet, but a dive with Jobim always promised fun and excitement and was a treat she would never decline.

Jobim cut a fish into small pieces and put them in a plastic bag tied to his waist, and together they pulled themselves down the anchor line. On the bottom, he motioned for her to stay at the anchor line, and he went off among the rocks, looking for something. Soon he had found whatever it was, and he waved her over to him. His face was six inches from a crevice in the rocks, and he pulled her down beside him.

In the second that it took her eyes to focus and her mind to recognize what she was gazing at, she concluded that her father had gone mad and was trying to kill her.

Guarding the crevice with its gigantic head and puffing cheeks and black eyes and gaping mouth was a moray eel so large that it made the other one seem like a garden snake. Its head filled the hole, and each time the gills rippled they scraped the coral sides. Paloma believed that if the eel should shrug, it could consume her entire skull.

She jerked backward in reflex, but Jobim caught her arm
and forced her to return to his side. He took a hunk of fish from the bag at his waist and held it up to the moray’s face. For a moment the eel did not move. Then it slid slightly forward, as if on a mechanical track, and Jobim dropped the morsel of fish; the eel let it fall into its mouth and closed its mouth and swallowed, and the gills rippled in unison and the eel slid backward into its hole.

Jobim fed it another piece, and another, and by then he knew that Paloma was short of oxygen so he motioned that they would go up.

As they rose, Paloma looked down and saw that the eel had slid more of its body—four or five feet—out of the hole and had turned its head and was looking up at them. Then it must have decided that they were truly gone, for it slid back and disappeared.

When, on the surface, Paloma tried to speak, Jobim waved her silent and touched his chest, signaling that he wanted to hurry and return to the bottom.

This time the eel seemed to have watched the last part of their descent, for its head was a foot outside the crevice and its eyes were tracking them.

Jobim handed Paloma the bag of bait. She shook her head, no: She wouldn’t do it. But he forced the bag into her fist and put a hand on her shoulder in assurance and embrace.

She knew enough to keep the bag itself concealed, for any fish, once it knew the location of the source of the morsels you were feeding it, would ignore individual bits and would dive for the bag and rip it away from you.

The first piece she held a full two feet from the eel’s mouth, until Jobim pushed her hand closer. The eel slid forward; Paloma dropped the bit of fish; the eel swallowed.

With each new piece she grew bolder, for the eel made no motion to do anything but what she intended, and the last
piece from the bag she actually lay within the eel’s lower jaw and pulled her hand back well in time for it to close its mouth on nothing but the fish.

Back on the surface again, she was elated and amazed. Her thoughts came so fast that her words could not keep up with them. Finally, by pointing and puffing and speaking as slowly as she could, she was able to convey to Jobim that she wanted to cut up another fish and return immediately to feed the moray.

“Not me,” he said somberly. “He could bite my hand off.”

“What?”

“It’s too dangerous.”

“But …”

“I think we should kill him before he hurts somebody.”

Now Paloma knew what Jobim was doing, and she screamed and splashed water at him, and he threw back his head and laughed.

While they rested, he cut up a bigger fish into bigger pieces, for the moray had been bigger than he had guessed it would be. He told Paloma that morays were like sharks, in that you never knew how big an individual might be: The hole you poked your hand into might contain an eel no longer than your arm and not as thick, or it might house a creature taller than a man and as broad as his chest. This one was probably seven or eight feet long, and its head was more than a foot wide.

They had spent many minutes away from the eel, and it was not there when they returned. But as soon as one of their shadows crossed before the crevice in the rocks, the huge green head slid forward and hung there, gills and mouth pulsing together.

Jobim was like a dog trainer, teaching the animal to beg
for its food. Each morsel he held farther and farther from the hole, urging the eel to slide farther out. But he did not tease the animal: When Jobim had established where the food would be, there he left it. The eel’s decision-making machinery was rudimentary and primitive, and if Jobim had pulled the food back after the eel had committed to exposing itself a certain distance, the eel might have registered signals of betrayal and danger, which might have driven it into a defensive posture, which might have expressed itself in an attack on Jobim.

The eel would not come all the way out of the hole. Apparently, it needed the security of knowing that its tail was anchored in the rocks so that if anything should go awry, it could dominate the encounter.

And as Jobim told Paloma when they were back in the boat, he saw no reason to encourage the animal beyond its own limits, especially on first meeting.

“You mean we can do it again?” It hadn’t occurred to her that something so special could be repeated.

“We’ll see. Some people can.”

“What do you mean?”

“With most people, something like that is luck. They get there, the conditions are right, the animal doesn’t feel threatened, he’s hungry, they don’t do anything stupid, so they succeed. But they—the people—are not in control. They’re just fortunate that things went their way. Some people, very few,
make
it happen. There’s something—I don’t know what it is, maybe it’s like the sounds we can’t hear and the sights we can’t see. Some people have something special with animals. It may be the same thing some animals have with each other, that they send and receive each other’s signals so they understand each other. By nature, animals in the wild don’t trust
people, and they shouldn’t. But these few people, the people who have this thing, animals trust.”

“You have it, then.”

“I have a little of the good thing, but not a lot. I never know from animal to animal. Maybe we were lucky with this eel today. Maybe he was in a good mood. We’ll see.”

Paloma said hopefully, “Maybe I have a lot of the good thing.”

“Maybe. But don’t hope too much. It’s nice, the good thing, but it can be dangerous, too.”

“Why?”

“You can believe in it too much, believe you can do anything. You try to put yourself in the animal’s mind and imagine yourself as the animal, and suddenly you think you can control it. You forget that you’re a human being and
it
isn’t. You try to reason with it. It can’t reason. You take one step too many. If you’re lucky, you end up with scars and a good lesson. If you’re unlucky, you get hurt. Or killed.”

They had returned to the eel the next day after fishing. As Jobim set the anchor, Paloma had asked if he thought the eel would still be there.

“Why would it go away? Where would it go?”

“How would I know?”

“Animals usually have a reason for going somewhere or staying somewhere.
They
don’t know they have a reason, but their bodies know. Their instincts tell them. Most sharks have to move because if they don’t they’ll sink to the bottom and drown. Simple. Schools of fish have to move because the little things they feed on move, and if they’re to continue to eat they’d better keep up with their food. Reef fish stake out a territory on the reef and patrol it all their lives unless something comes along and drives them off. Moray eels will find a
hole and make it their own as long as enough food passes by for them to grab. When it doesn’t, they’ll find another hole. This big fellow has no reason to move now: He has comfort, safety and, best of all, since yesterday he doesn’t even have to hunt. Some fools are bringing him dinner.”

The eel was there, hovering in its hole, and it had to be coaxed to take the first bite of fish.

He’s sulking, Paloma thought. He’s angry because we went away.

Once the feeding reflex was stimulated, the eel became ravenous. More and more of it hung out of the hole, and Paloma, her confidence blooming, backed farther away, trying to bring the eel entirely out into the open.

She did not see, and never knew, that Jobim, as he stood a foot or two to one side, had a knife clenched in the fist he held behind his back.

She fed the eel five separate pieces of fish as it hung in the water, stabilized by barely perceptible ripples of the fins that ran along the top and bottom of its body.

There were half a dozen pieces of fish left in the bag, and now Paloma took a piece of fish from the bag with her left hand and slowly, calmly drew it wide and back toward her shoulder. With a brief shudder, the eel followed the fish.

Paloma drew it back around her head, where she slipped it into her right hand and continued to lure the eel around behind her. The eel’s tail was over her left shoulder, its head over her right, when she gave it the piece of fish. It swallowed the fish and stayed there, wrapped around her shoulders like a fine lady’s stole.

She fed it two more pieces of fish, and there were three left. She glanced at Jobim and saw that his eyes were wide and the veins on either side of his throat were thick as anchor
line. For a second she thought he was afraid for her, and perhaps he was, but then it struck her that neither of them was breathing, could breathe, and yet both had to breathe.

Paloma took the last pieces of fish in her right hand, squeezed them into a ball and held them up before the eel’s open mouth. She pushed them upward so the eel would have to rise slightly to reach them, and as it did she ducked down and pushed backward with her feet and shot on a sharp angle toward the surface.

Jobim didn’t chastise her; he didn’t have to. Each knew what the other was thinking, and mostly their thoughts were the same: Paloma had been reckless but had succeeded, had taken a risk and had won; she had the good thing, probably a lot of it, but it was something she would have to learn how to use. And she should not try stunts like this without Jobim close by.

All the way home in the boat, they had only one exchange:

She had said, “I think I’ll call him Pancho.”

He had replied, “It’s not a ‘him.’ It’s an ‘it.’ It doesn’t have a name, and don’t give it one.”

Still, she had permitted herself to think secretly of the eel as Pancho, and every day she was out with Jobim she had looked forward at the end of the day to visiting with Pancho.

On every visit the eel would curl around her shoulders, sometimes after only a bite or two of fish. Occasionally, it would let its weight drop onto her shoulders, and it would lie there, and she could stroke its smooth skin while she fed it.