The reef was inviting, her languid coral nudging the breakers as they
returned from sea. From the instep of the dingy, the fisherman in his
broken English was advising the seated men of dangers indigenous to
these waters.
"None of that hostile marine life business, Steve--keep it simple--use
words he's familiar with," the man with a razor lip, Cliff, muttered to
his companion. The other was busy going through the motions in heavily
accented Spanish broadly emphasizing common words that lead to nods and
ballyhoo, those expected currencies of behavior.
"I'm getting through," came the reply. "Seems beyond the reef, dolphins
and the occasional shark gather. Good fishing, though--red snappers and
groupers with anemones along the bottom--the Mexicans eat those you
know--call'em seaeggs."
Cliff, only vaguely interested, beckoned Steve's attention back to that
one inescapable query--was it safe to dive.
Another brief flurry of words were exchanged with the fisherman raising
a bronzed arm to touch the crown of his cap. Some indecipherable
Spanish mutterings followed and another burst of loud exclamations
before Steve halted his forays into that basic issue of logic and
pernicity. Cliff eyed the two and then spoke again.
"I don't have to catch every word of his conversation to understand the
general drift of his speech. He feels some danger exists, so why chance
it? Why soften his warning with your doggerel translations. Your
Spanish is at least good enough to surmise what I'm instinctively
feeling. Let's quit and go ashore."
"Not so fast. The water's calm here and the visibility rings like a
bell. He mentioned sharks have been sighted here not that there's ever
been an attack."
"Yeah, well if there's never been a problem it's because this spot is
so isolated. Remember this area is no regular mecca for divers of any
type. Consider its remoteness and then do a little basic thinking as to
why no one has reported an aggressive White, let alone one barracuda
incident. I say it's not worth chancing and I can tell by his face that
even despite your bundle of pesos something has been set registering."
Steve feigned disinterest. Buckling his tanks, every nodule of
perspiration shone like beaded stud marks across his back. The salt on
their skins was razor sharp and the wind's jerky movement caused
incessant choppy movements about the breadth of the boat's rhythm. A
cross-section of moods was close to enveloping them. For one, the
afternoon sun was like a bayonet shoved through the thin sky.
Obtrusively red, it fumbled renewed sweat beads across each man's brow
like an eager dresser's haste with an awkward button. No sooner was one
silenced than another plodding moisture bead appeared. Only the Mexican
could remain unmoved to droplets skidding toward the vicinity of his
lower eyelid. It conjured up tales of flies crawling into the eyes of
aborigines in the Outback but without any apparent discomfort to the
owners of those eyes. The two Americans, distracted by their sweating,
cursed the heat and the loggerheads of their situation. No flies or
bobos, as they were know here, added to their misery given their great
distance offshore. Their greater paralysis of the will lay in the low
horizon of the shore receding, then, appearing silhouetted against
blows of driven water. This, then, was the mainstay of their
indecision. All that blue--the blue of shining sky married with further
Wedgwood blue sea careening in a plaster paris water dish, bounced up
as if up from the shadows and made renewed fear inevitable. The
fisherman, quiet above all this, seemed content to let inertia make her
case. He knew heat held a silent, unassailable logic. Sooner or later
the water would call or repel its proteges. His task was no easier
whatever their final deliberation. A long toil with stubborn currents
lay ahead, whatever. The journey to shore was inescapable. And so he
sat, patiently content to provide that most meager of gruel--his slight
infusion of calm and warning to the strange fellows he knew only as
Touristas or more profitably, "amigo," Steve and Cliff. His lines,
staked for fish, would remain regardless and the thin fingers of his
existence remained coiled about a routine as numbing as that the two
men had pretended to escape.
Now, at first furtively, then with the fury of an immense belch only
the sea could muster forth, a school of porpoises broke about the
little craft. Baleful but expression-filled eyes of each beast broke
with water, then took in as only an intelligent creature can, the
mission of the three surface beings. Each in a return splash shimmied
the dinghy making for a resurgence of what, until now, had been a
barely muted panic. Yet most of that brief moment was consumed in
expectation and, as suddenly as it had begun, the pregnancy of the
incantation was dissolved. Slipping beneath the waves, these most human
of fish returned to nurse from the ocean's depths.
"Five of them," Steve was yelling--all at least twelve feet in length.
Incredible.
The Mexican was smiling. Apparently what had taken place was not an
everyday occurrence even for the likes of a grizzled seafarer as
himself. Steve was found announcing something, too. Something to the
effect the animals were benign or all three wouldn't be able to renew
the urgency of the dive.
Cliff, as if moved by the last events or his friend's logic, also
appeared to have altered his position.
"See, that settles it. Porpoises are the natural enemies of sharks. A
school surrounds nursing calves and will, on occasion, rupture an
intruder by butting the offender's abdomen. We have no more reason to
fear. Any shark is long gone."
It was now Steve's turn to renew the apprehension. The size of the
animals and the crash of their drift against the boat, was sobering
reality of this stretch of water's potential for the unexpected.
"Cliff, I have all the makings of a complete smart ass. All this talk
of being an experienced diver--that's all armchair politics at this
point. Sure, I've done my bit in pools and their like. But the
immensity of this place terrifies me. Just staring down through the
shades of colour, seeing the breadth of that reef, what with all this
salt and heat, is taking its toll. I've lost my sense of the dramatic.
The rapture of the deep has been displaced by a chilling realization we
don't know the state of any conditions normally common knowledge before
a dive--drop-offs, undertows, further hostile marine life, the ...."
"Hostile marine life," back to that eh, chickenshit. Hey, where's your
wings, boy? That little show whetted my appetite. I'm all for seeing
what's below. Yet I'll give you this much. I'm sick of the confidence
racket we've been pitting against ourselves. What's more, my body
fluids are near depleted. I'm numb with heat--I can imagine myself
thirsty for disaster drinking seawater and thinking there's a spring
nearby. And that sun grows more forbidding the lower it drops. And, as
you say, I am also angered at ourselves for our naivete. No one can
appreciate how enervating it is just watching our skin sear and peel
displaced of its water. That's been the real experience out here
today--seeing what this world does to an outsider. I imagine an odour
growing from my arm by the moment. All I can see is yours and his face
swimming before my eyes. I don't want to get punch drunk. I fear the
prospect of going down into whatever awaits us and struggling to
re-enter a little boat with a fisherman whose so hazed he's beyond
understanding what turmoil comprises our lot. I move we do go in, but
only at the insistence we ponder a little more firmly what the words,
"devil fish," moray and danger mean to cock and bull swaggers like
ourselves.
"This is no Keokuk, Iowa venture into the tristate area on a licensed
Mississippi riverboat. This is as bitching as blood can seem."