The Girl of the Sea of Cortez (26 page)

Amidships, Jo held the harpoon high.

“Holy Mother! Where are they?”

“She can’t stay down this long.”

“How do you know that?”

“Nobody can.”

“What d’you mean by that?”

“I don’t know. I just …”

“If you don’t know, keep your mouth shut.” Jo was annoyed at the awe in their voices. “She has big lungs, that’s all.”

“And she rides the devilfish into the deep. That’s all. A lot you know.”

“I said shut up!”

The talk took no more than a second or two, and during it Indio noticed that the anchor line was drawing taut, and by the time the talk was done the others had seen that the lines connected to the deep net were stretched and throwing droplets of water as the rope fibers trembled.

“Jesus!” Jo shouted, the only coherent word he was able to utter, and from then on there were only screams and shouts and cries for help.

The manta had driven on, into the middle of the mass of fish, until Paloma was engulfed in jacks. They were under her arms, down her back, between her legs, flapping through her trailing hair. They squirmed and gulped and defecated and shivered. The water roiled and clouded, but it made no difference because she could not have seen more than two inches in front of her even in clear water: All was fish.

Somewhere in the attic of her brain, alarms began to sound, but another sentry in her head told her there was no point trying to obey the alarms: She could never make it from here to the surface in time.

The manta flew on, pumping its massive wings up and
down, its horn protruding through the net, its head pressing against it. The net held, and strained, and the manta slowed for a moment.

Above, on the surface, the panicked fishermen felt their boat begin to move. The anchor had been pulled off the bottom and was dragging, and anchor and boat were being hauled through the water by the unseen creature that drove the net forward and down. And because the force was downward, the boat tipped and began to ship water; the fishermen didn’t know what to do but bail, frantically.

Then the net burst. The manta had simply overpowered it. It burst first in the center, and the fish squirted out the hole like grease from a tube. But the manta did not squirt out; it flew on and pulled the connecting lines even tighter until, one by one, the fibers popped. One line snapped first, whipped the net around free at one end, releasing the manta to start for the surface with Paloma on its back and destroying the equilibrium of pull which was the only thing that had kept the boat steady above.

The change was not felt immediately, for the lines were long and it took time for the pressure to travel. But when the change came, it struck suddenly and without prelude. The bow of the boat, from which the first line had snapped, jumped out of the water and spun. Indio, who had been kneeling on a thwart, found himself kneeling on air as the boat shot out from under him. Then he fell onto his back in the water and sank until his violent thrashing returned him to the surface.

Seeing the bow fly up, Manolo had reached to steady himself on the motor, but the stern had sunk and the motor he reached for wasn’t there. He pitched overboard and somersaulted underwater and came up sputtering as the boat yawed away from him.

Jo was now alone in the boat, kneeling on knees bruised and bleeding, watching the sea with horrified eyes, wondering what next would erupt from the unknown below.

The manta flew for the surface, its wings pushing maelstroms that spun fish and blew sand and roiled water.

Paloma gripped lip and wing, but as the distant sunlight rushed toward her she knew she would not make it. All her alarms were in full cry—the pounding was thunderous in her head, the pain excruciating in her chest, her eyes seeing the light of safety as a pinpoint that expanded and contracted, expanded and contracted, as consciousness slipped from her.

The manta flew straight up, not this time to angle and glide but to fly free in the air.

Air was only a few yards away, now a few feet, a split-second in the flight time of the great animal rushing for the sun, when the switch went off and Paloma’s brain shut down and she lost consciousness. All her muscles relaxed, including those in the fingers that held her grip on the manta ray, so she slid away as the broad plain of black back exploded from the water and launched itself high into the air.

It rose above the cringing Jo, higher and higher until it blocked the sun and cast a black shadow on the boat. Water flew from it all around and caught the light and shone in a corona that lit the edges of the ray, and Jo knew he was being besieged by a creature from hell. His lips moved in reflex prayer, his throat uttered guttural whimpers, and he threw his hands over his head to ward off doom.

The manta reached the height of its flight and for a moment hung in majesty against the brilliant sky. Then the heavier head and shoulders began to fall, leaving the tail where it was, and the giant embarked upon a graceful slow-motion back flip.

Jo saw it coming, and he screamed in fear of death, and fell overboard.

He splashed and sank, and even through several feet of water he could not block out the noise, the terminal, shattering crash as tons of cartilage and sinew came down upon the boat and disintegrated it.

The transom with the motor attached broke off and sank of its own weight. The rest of the hull, struck suddenly by such mighty force, splintered, and the splinters fluttered into the sky and rained down on Jo and on Paloma, who was floating on her back by her pirogue a dozen yards away.

The manta did not stop, was not stunned. It forced beneath the surface what few pieces of the boat remained and continued its roll down, backward, and away, then righted itself and shuddered and cruised slowly toward the sunlight again.

What woke Paloma was the lapping sound of the waves from the manta’s splash against the wood of her pirogue. For a moment she didn’t know where she was, and she grabbed her pirogue for safety. Before her and to the sides the sea was empty. Behind her, down-tide to the west, she could see nothing because of the blinding reflection of the sunlight on the water. She heard sounds that could have been voices, but they meant nothing to her; perhaps they were sounds fashioned by instruments in her own addled brain.

Her feet touched bottom, a hard, slick rock ledge near the island, and though she wasn’t sure how she had gotten there so fast she was glad to be home.

Bottom? She shook her head and looked at the pirogue and at the horizon and at the softly rolling sea swells. She was in at least ten, maybe twenty, fathoms of water. Then what was she standing on? For, there was no question that she was
standing on
some
thing. She drained water from her mask and put her face down and saw that the manta had come beneath her and had risen, like a balloon, until it rested just at her feet.

Did it want something? Was it injured again? Paloma took a breath and knelt on the manta’s back, and, very slowly, it began to move. She stood, and the manta stopped. She knelt, and it started to move again; she stood, and again it stopped.

It’s behaving like a dog, she thought; it’s waiting for me. But that, she knew, was impossible; the animal didn’t have such “higher” instincts. And she was reluctant to impute to it “higher” qualities as motives.

And yet she was impelled to respond, even if only to the appearance of a motive. So, disregarding the contradiction of all she knew or reasonably believed, she hyperventilated and dropped to her knees on the manta’s back and gripped with her hands.

This time the manta did not start slowly—it dived fast, shooting for the bottom. Within a few seconds, the top of the seamount rose before Paloma’s eyes. She expected the manta to slow and level off and cruise among the canyons, but it didn’t. As it neared the upper rocks, it banked, like a fighter plane beginning a roll-over dive, and aimed down the sheer side of the rock wall toward the blue mists.

Paloma’s ears were popping, for she had never descended this fast or this far, and though she was nowhere near a crisis of oxygen, the strange new pressures in the strangely cold water made her pulse pound. She wanted to let go, but she didn’t dare: She wasn’t sure she could make it to the surface, however far it was.

At the edge of the darkness, down deep where there were no more reds or yellows or greens, where the blues looked indigo and the indigos violet and the violets black, the manta
suddenly leveled out, banked sharply to the left, and entered a canyon in the wall of the seamount.

It slowed and stopped and hung above a sand bottom, its wings almost touching the rock sides of the canyon. Paloma looked up and could not see the surface—no sun, no shafts of light, just a vague lightening of the gray of the water—and a tic of panic shook her chest, the same kind of panic she felt when she looked down from a very high place. She lowered her eyes and told herself not to look up again, for there was no point: She would either go up with the manta, or she would not go up at all.

What was this place? Why had the manta come here? Perhaps it was to places like this that mantas came for refuge—deep, cool, away from the sun and the surface, protected by the canyon walls from the open-sea currents.

Below was sand, above was water, on the sides were walls of rock like any other rock, except … Something was strange about these rocks. They seemed to be themselves studded with countless small stones.

She wanted to get closer, to see more clearly this place she could never dive to on her own. She rose away from the manta, praying that it would not now suddenly decide to abandon her, and kicked quickly to one of the walls.

She reached out to touch one of the stones, and before her fingertips had made contact she knew what these strange walls were made of: Each of the stones was not a stone at all, but an oyster.

At first they had been unrecognizable to her because they were larger than any she had ever seen—out of reach of all fishermen, they had been allowed to mature completely—and because they were camouflaged—out of the sweep of the currents, they had been covered with living vegetation.

She reached immediately for her knife, but it was not
there. She didn’t stop to wonder why, or to search for it further, but instead she gripped an oyster with her hand and twisted and pulled until it came away from the rock face of the canyon.

Her fingertips were scratched and shredded, her palm bleeding from little cuts, but she felt no pain. Using both hands now, she grabbed and twisted and pulled the oysters free and stuffed them into her dress, dropping them down to her rope belt. When her front was full, she pushed the oysters around her sides to her back, not feeling the sharp shells slice her skin.

Finally, she fell off the wall, exhausted and aching for breath and stuffed fuller than a roasting chicken. She landed on the manta’s back. Had it been a horse, she would have spurred it on, for she needed to go now, and in but one direction—up.

And the manta took her up, flying with the swift grace of a bird seeking the sky. Soon she saw sunlight and blue crystal.

At the last second, the manta slowed so it would not leap clear of the water, and like a whale it rolled through the surface and lay with its back in the air. And on its back lay Paloma, with her arms spread wide and blood running between her fingers.

The manta stayed with her until she had rested and swum to her pirogue and climbed aboard and emptied her dress of oysters. It stayed still as she knelt in the pirogue and watched it, silently, reverently.

And then, as the leading edge of the red swollen sun touched the horizon, the great ray flipped a wing and dipped its head and kicked its tail in the air, and was gone, leaving a ring of ripples that spread across the twilight water and were soon gone, too.

For a long time, until the sun had sunk and the sky had
darkened and the first stars were faintly seen, Paloma continued to kneel in the pirogue, letting the tide take her.

Far away in the night, she heard the voices of Jo and Indio and Manolo, and the words she could discern across the still water were contentious and bitter and accusing, for now they were safely floating and no longer feared for their lives. Later, she would get a motorboat and retrieve them. She thought they would no longer be eager to return to the seamount.

The manta would not return, either. She felt certain of that, though she could not have said why she was certain. Perhaps it was part of having some of the good thing. Perhaps it was a feeling that nature had needed to restore a balance that had been set askew, and to restore it had used the manta ray and, to an extent, had used Paloma as well. And now that the balance had been restored, the manta was released to fly free.

But what did she mean by nature? What was …

She stopped thinking, and she looked at the spot in the sky where soon the moon would rise and hang like an amulet and cast its golden path on the water, and she smiled and said aloud, “Thank you.”

BONUS CONTENT

Note from Wendy Benchley About the Writing of Peter Benchley’s Favorite Novel

R
oughly thirty years ago my husband, Peter, took a wonderfully strange ride in the deep—a once-in-a-lifetime ride on the back of a giant manta ray that would compel him to write this, his favorite novel
, The Girl of the Sea of Cortez.

Peter chronicled the full story of how he encountered the manta and the exhilarating rides that ensued in his book
Shark Trouble.
He was filming an
American Sportsman
segment on the huge schools of hammerhead sharks that used to gather periodically in the Gulf of California, also known as the Sea of Cortez, but the majestic manta ultimately became the center of the program’s cinematic attention and affection
.

In truth, manta rays are like floating islands, oasis sanctuaries that host a myriad of animals seeking shelter, protection, and sustenance from these grand giants. But they are very shy and almost
never
permit human contact
.