They’d drunk gin the night before because gin was what they’d drunk in college, gin and tonic, the drink of liberation, the drink of spring break and summer vacation and the delirium of Friday and Saturday nights in the student clubs with the student bands pounding away and the girls burning like scented candles. Never mind that Hunter stuck almost exclusively to wine these days and had even become something of a snob about it (“Right over the hill in the Santa Ynez Valley? Best vineyards in the world,” he’d tell anyone who would listen), last night it was gin. It had started in the airport lounge when he’d arrived an hour early for Damian’s flight and heard himself say “Gin and tonic” to the bartender as if a ventriloquist were speaking for him. He’d had three by the time Damian arrived, and then for the rest of the night, wherever they went, the gin, which had managed to smell almost exactly like the scent of the jet fuel leaching in through the open window, continued to appear in neat little glasses with rectangular cubes of ice and wedges of lime till he and Damian collapsed at the apartment five short hours ago.
He stared blearily down at the blistered boards of the dock and the tired sea churning beneath them. For a long moment he watched a drift of refuse jerking to and fro in the wash beneath the pilings and then he leaned forward to drop a ball of spit into the place where, he supposed, waxing philosophical, all spit had originated. Spit to spit. The great sea. Thalassa, roll on. The water was gray here, transparent to a depth of three or four feet, imbued with a smell of fish gone bad. He spat again, watching transfixed as the glistening fluid, product of his own body, spiraled through the air to vanish in the foam. And what was spit, anyway? A secretion of the salivary glands, serving to moisten food—and women’s lips. His first wife—Andrea—didn’t like to kiss while they were having sex. She always turned her head away, as if lips had nothing to do with it. Cee Cee, who’d left him three weeks ago, had been different. In his wallet, imprisoned behind a layer of scratched plastic, was a picture of her, in profile, her chin elevated as if she were being stroked, her visible eye drooping with passion, the red blaze of a carnation tucked behind her ear like a heat gauge. He resisted the impulse to look at it.
Damian’s voice—“Yeah, man, that’s what I’m talking about, fortification !”—rang out behind him and Hunter turned to see him tapping his Styrofoam cup to those of a couple in matching windbreakers, toasting them, as if there were anything to celebrate at this hour and in this place. Damian had a flask with him. Hunter had already been the recipient of a judicious shot of brandy—not gin, thank god—and he presumed Damian was sharing the wealth. The woman—she was small-boned, dark, with her hair wrapped like a muffler round her throat—looked shy and sweet as she sipped her infused coffee and blinked her eyes against the burn of it. In the next moment, Damian had escorted the couple over to the rail and was making introductions. “Hey, Hunt, you ready for another?” he said, and Hunter held out his cup, hoping to deaden the pain, and then they were all four tapping the rims of the spongy white cups one against the other as if they were crystal flutes of Perrier-Jouët.
“This is Ilta’s maiden voyage, can you believe it?” Damian crowed, his voice too loud, so that people had begun to stare at him.
“This is cor-rect,” she said in a small voice animated by the occasion, and, he supposed, the brandy. “I do it for Mock.” And here she looked to the man in the matching windbreaker, whose name seemed to be either Mack or Mark, Hunter couldn’t be sure.
“I’m a regular,” the man said, grinning as he tipped back his cup and then held it up for Damian to refresh, “but my wife’s never been out.” He looked harmless enough, one of those ubiquitous, fleshy-faced, pants-straining, good-time boys in his forties who probably sat behind a computer five days a week and dreamed in gigabytes, but Hunter would have killed him in a minute for the wife, whom he clearly didn’t deserve. She was a jewel, that was what she was, and that accent—what was it? Swedish? “She eats the fish, though,” Mack or Mark went on. He gave her a good-natured leer. “Don’t you, dumpling?”
“Who doesn’t?” Damian put in, just to say something. He was the type who needed to be at the center of things, the impresario, the star of all proceedings, and that could be charming—Hunter loved him, he did—but it could be wearing too. “I mean, fresh fish, fresh from the sea like you never get it in the store?” He paused to tip the flask over the man’s cup. “I mean, come on, Ilta, what took you so long?”
“I do not like the, what do you say? The rocking.” She made an undulating motion with her hands. “Of this boat.”
They all looked to the boat. It was big enough, a typical party boat, seventy, eighty feet long, painted a crisp white and so immovable it might have been nailed to the dock. In that moment Hunter realized he hadn’t taken his Dramamine—the label advised taking two tablets half an hour to an hour before setting out—and felt in his jeans pocket for the package. His throat was dry. His head ached. He was wondering if the little white pills would have any effect if he took them now, or if they worked at all no matter when you took them, remembering the last time he’d been talked into this particular sort of adventure and the unrelenting misery he’d experienced for the entire six and a half hours of the trip (“There’s nothing more enjoyable—and tender, tender too—than seeing somebody you really admire puking over the rail,” Damian had kept saying). The memory ran a hot wire through him and before he could think he had the package out and was shaking four pills into the palm of his hand and offering them to Ilta. “Want a couple of these?” he asked. “Dramamine? You know, for motion sickness?” He pantomimed the act of gagging.
“We gave her the patch,” the husband said.
Ilta waved a finger back and forth, as if scolding Hunter. “I do it for Mock,” she repeated. “For the anniversary. We are married today three years ago.”
Hunter shrugged, cupped his palm to his mouth and threw back all four pills, figuring the double dose had to do something for him.
“In Helsinki,” the husband put in, his face lit with the blandest smile of possession and satisfaction. He put an arm around his wife and drew her to him. They kissed. The gulls squalled overhead. Hunter looked away. And then suddenly everyone snapped to attention as the other woman—the deckhand in waiting—pulled back the bar to the gangplank. It was then, just as they’d begun to fumble around for their gear, that the man with the spider tattoo thrust himself into the conversation. Hunter had noticed him earlier—when they were in the office paying for their tickets and renting rods and tackle and whatnot. He was a crazy, you could see that from across the room, everything about him wired tight, his hair shaved down to a black bristle, his eyes like tracers, the tattoo of a red-and-black spider—or maybe it was a scorpion—climbing up the side of his neck. “Hey,” he said now, pushing past Ilta, “can I get in on this party?” And he held out his cup.
Damian never flinched. That was his way. Mr. Cool. “Sure, man,” he said, “just give me your cup.”
In the next moment they were shuffling forward to the reek of diesel as the captain fired up his engines and the boat shivered beneath them. Everything smelled of long use, fishermen here yesterday and fishermen coming tomorrow. The decks were wet, the seats damp with dew. Fish scales, opalescent, dried to a crust, crunched underfoot. They found a place in the cabin, room for four at one of the tables lined up there cafeteria style, and the spider man, aced out, made his way to the galley. Hunter had a moment to think about Cee Cee, how she would have hated this—she was a downtown girl, absolutely, at home in the mall, the restaurant and the movie theater and nowhere else—and then there was a lurch, the boat slipped free of the dock and beyond the salt-streaked windows the shore broadened and dipped, and very slowly fell away into the mist.
It was an hour and a half out to the fishing grounds. Hunter settled in gingerly, his stomach in freefall, the coffee a mistake, the brandy compounding that mistake and the Dramamine a dissolve of pure nothing, not even worthy of a placebo effect. It wasn’t as if it wa
s rough—or as rough as it might have been. This was June, when the Santa Barbara Channel was entombed in a vault of fog that sometimes didn’t burn off till two or three in the afternoon—June Gloom, was what they called it in the newspaper—and as far as he knew the seas were relatively calm. Still, the boat kept humping over the waves like a toboggan slamming through the moguls at the bottom of a run and the incessant dip and rise wasn’t doing him any good. He glanced round him. No one else seemed much affected, the husband and wife playing cards, Damian ordering up breakfast in the galley at the front of the cabin, the others snoozing, reading the paper, scooping up their eggs over easy as if they were in a diner somewhere on upper State Street, miles from the ocean. After a while, he cradled his arms on the tabletop, put his head down and tumbled into a dark shaft of sleep.
When he woke, it was to the decelerating rhythm of the engines and a pulse of activity that rang through the cabin like a fire alarm. Everybody was rising en masse and filing through the doors to the deck. They’d arrived. He felt a hand on his shoulder and lifted his head to see Damian looming over him. “You have a nice sleep?”
“I dreamed I was in hell, the ninth circle, where there’s nothing moving but the devil.” The boat rolled on a long gentle swell. The engines died. “And maybe the sub-devils. With their pitchforks.”
The flask appeared. Damian pressed it to his lips a moment, then held it out in offering. “You want a hit?”
Hunter waved him away. He still hadn’t risen from his seat.
“Come on, man, this is it. The fish are waiting. Let’s go.”
There was a shout. People were backed up against the windows, clumsy with the welter of rods that waved round them like antennae. Somebody had a fish already, a silver thrashing on the boards. Despite himself, he felt a vestigial thrill steal over him. He got to his feet.
Damian was halfway to the door when he turned round. “I put our stuff out there in back on the port side—Mark said that was the best spot. Come on, come on.” He waved a hand impatiently and Hunter found his balance all at once—it was as if he’d done a backflip and landed miraculously on his feet. Just then the sun broke through and everything jumped with light. Damian went flat as a silhouette. The sea slapped the hull. Someone else cried out. “And wait’ll you get a load of Julie,” he said under his breath.
“Julie? Who’s Julie?”
The look Damian gave him was instructive, teacher to pupil. After all, as Damian had it he’d come all the way down here for the weekend—for this trip, for last night and tonight too—to cheer up his old buddy, to get him out of the house and back among the living, waxing eloquent on the subject of Hunter’s failings into the small hours of the day that was just now beginning. “The deckhand, man. Where you been?”
“Sleeping.”
“Yeah, well maybe it’s time to wake up.”
And then they were out in the light and the world opened up all the way to the big dun humps of the islands before them—he’d never seen them so close—and back round again to the boat and its serried decks and the smell of open water and Julie, the deckhand, freshly made-up and divested of the shapeless yellow slicker she’d worn back at the dock, Julie, in a neon-orange bikini and sandals with thin silver straps that climbed up her bare ankles, waiting to help each and every sportsman to his bait.
So they fished. The captain, a dark presence behind the smoked glass of the bridge that loomed over them, let his will be known through the loudspeakers on deck. Drop your lines, he commanded, and they dropped their lines. Haul in,he said, and they hauled in while he revved the engines and motored to another spot and yet another. There were long stretches of boredom after the initial excitement had passed and Hunter had an abundance of time to reflect on how much he hated fishing. At long intervals, someone would connect, his rod bent double and a mackerel or a big gape-mouthed thing variously described as either a rockfish or a sheephead would flap in over the rail, but Hunter’s rod never bent or even twitched. Nor did Damian’s. Before the first hour was up, Damian had left his rod propped on the rail and drifted into the cabin, emerging ten minutes later with two burgers wrapped in waxed paper and two beers in plastic cups. Hunter was hunched over his knees on one of the gray metal lockers that held the life jackets and ran along both sides of the boat, his stomach in neutral, trying all over again to get used to the idea of lateral instability. He accepted the burger and the beer.
“This sucks,” Damian said, settling in beside him with a sigh. Their rods rode up and down with the waves like flagpoles stripped of their flags.
“It was your idea.”
Damian gazed out across the water to where the smaller island, the one separated from the bigger by a channel still snarled in fog, seemed to swell and recede. “Yeah, but it’s a ritual, it’s manly. It’s what buddies do together, right? And look at it, look where we are—I mean is this beautiful or what.”
“You just said it sucks.”
“I mean this spot. Why doesn’t he move us already?” He jerked his head around to shoot a withering glare at the opaque glass of the bridge. “I mean, I haven’t caught shit—what about you? Any bites?”
Hunter was unwrapping the burger as if it were crystal, thinking he’d maybe nibble at it—he didn’t want to press his luck. He set it down and took the smallest sip of beer. In answer to Damian’s question, he just shrugged. Then, enunciating with care, he said, “Fish are extinct.”
“Bullshit. This guy on the other side got a nice-sized calico, like eight or nine pounds, and they’re the best eating, you know that . . .” He took a massive bite out of the hamburger, leaning forward to catch the juices in the waxed-paper wrapping. “Plus,” he added through the effort of chewing, “you better get on the stick if you want to win the pool.”
Hunter had been so set on simply enduring that he’d forgotten all about the pool or even the possibility of connecting, of feeling some other force, something dark and alien, pulling back at you from a place you couldn’t imagine. “What are you talking about?”
“The pool, remember? Everybody on the boat put in ten bucks when they gave you the bag with your number on it? You must really be out of it—you put in a twenty for both of us, remember, and I said I’d get the first round?”
“I’m not going to win anything.” He let out a breath and it was as if the air had been sucked out of his lungs.
Mostly, the night before, they’d talked about sex. How when you didn’t have it you were obsessed with it, how you came to need it more than food, more than money. “It’s the testosterone clogging your brain,” Damian had said, and Hunter, three weeks bereft, had nodded in agreement. “And I’ll tell you another thing,” Damian had added after a lengthy digression on the subject of his latest girlfriend’s proclivities, “once you have it, I’m talking like five minutes later, it’s like, ‘Hey, let’s go shoot some hoops.’” Now, because he couldn’t seem to resist it, because they were in college all over again, at least for the weekend, he said, “Just keep your rod stiff, ’cause you never know.”
And then Mark was there, in a pair of disc sunglasses and a baseball cap that clung like a beanie to his oversized head. He had his own burger in one hand and a beer in the other. The boat slipped into a trough and rose up again on a long debilitating swell. “Any luck?” he asked.
“Nada,” Damian said, his voice tuned to the pitch of complaint. “The captain ought to move us. I mean with what we’re paying you’d think he’d work his fish-finding mojo just a little bit harder, wouldn’t you?”
Mark shrugged. “Give him time. I know the man. He can be a bit of a hardass, but if they’re out there he’ll find them. He always does. Or almost always.” He looked thoughtful, his lower face arranged around his chewing. “I mean, sometimes you get skunked. It’s nature, you know, the great outdoors. Nobody can control that.”
“How about Ilta?” Hunter heard himself say. “She get any?”
Mark drew a face. “She’s not feeling so well, I guess. She’
s in the head. Been in the head for the past fifteen minutes.”
“Green in the gills,” Damian said with a joyful grin, and Hunter felt his stomach clench around the tiniest morsel of burger and bun.
“Something like that,” Mark said, gazing off into the distance.
“She just needs to get her sea legs, is all.”
“I shouldn’t have brought her. She only did it for me—to please me, you know? The only time she’s been on a boat before this was the ferry between Copenhagen and Göteborg and she said she vomited the whole time—but that was years ago and I figured, we both figured, this would be different. Plus, we got her the patch.”
Hunter thought about that a moment, even as Damian started in weighing the relative merits of patch and pill as if he’d just stepped out of pharmacy school. He was feeling bitter. Bitter over the day, the place, the fish, the lack of fish, over Cee Cee and Ilta and Julie and all the rest of the unattainable women of the world. He was picturing Mark’s wife in the cramped stinking head, cradling the stainless steel toilet, alone and needful while her husband gnawed his burger and guzzled beer, and he was about to say something cutting like “I guess that just proves the seas’s no place for a woman,” when the captain’s voice droned through the speakers. Haul in,the captain commanded, and Hunter went to his pole and began to crank the reel, the weight of the sinker floating free, and the hook, when it was revealed, picked clean of the wriggling anchovy that Julie, in her bikini, had threaded there for him.