fish back. The rod blank creaks. Then he groans and deflates, piling atop his knees on the casting platform.
Give some slack, the man says, and he might come out yet.
Like stitches bursting at a seam, small bright flicks of water appear at the surface as the fish braids its way through the submerged roots. The Brit watches, stands, and with a grunt of resolution bows the rod again and yanks. The clear leader snaps with an audible crack, and he stumbles backward off the casting deck; simultaneously the rod recoils, straightens briefly overhead, clocks forward with uncontrolled fulcrum momentum and slams, just as he regains balance, onto the bow.
The shattered fiberglass hangs together at the ferrule by a few fibers, a broken antenna.
No one says a thing. A catbird lifts from the mangroves, rows a few strokes upwind, then turns tail. Someone curses, someone laughs. Then the lodge owner lifts the cooler lid with his toe and hands a beer to the Brit, who cracks it and takes a quick triple swallow, insisting, as he wipes foam from his lips, that he’ll pay to have to have the rod replaced. The lodge owner will hear none of it. The beer, though, he jokes, will cost three hundred American.
The men laugh—the incident has not vitiated the afternoon but emblazoned it in memory. They reenact the moment with comic gestures. Perhaps the potential investment, all but embalmed at lunchtime after nearly three days of angling futility, now possesses at least a pulse.
Staring from his perch atop the boat’s motor at the mangrove warrens into which the bonefish disappeared, the man reckons that the fish might yet be lingering: the snapped line looped around a mangrove shoot, attempting to worry the hook out of its mouth. True, the other guides are home with their second glass of Green Seed in hand, but on a slim day like this, it is worth a look.
The man begs pardon and, jumping down into the water from the transom, asks his employer to hold this stake. Quick glance before we go, he says.
Not on my account, the Brit insists. I had my fair shot.
But the man is already over the transom, making for the cay. He takes several fleet steps on the firm bottom before a layer of muck elasticizes his strides, then he dives in and front-crawls the last ten yards to shore. As he surfaces, two previously unseen brown pelicans lift ponderously out of the mangroves and bank away on the wind.
Not far into the maze of gray roots, the man sees his favored pink fly betraying the fish’s camouflage. Strung taut between the hook and the shoot around which it was wound, a yard of fifteen-pound-test monofilament tippet shines. Most fish would have fled at his footfalls, but this gorged seven-pounder merely wallows on its back as the man nears, eyeing his approach submissively through its nictitating membrane. With his right hand the man clasps the fish behind the gills; his left hand snaps the shoot off at its base.
THE ROTUND THING LIES GASPING ON THE FLOOR OF THE BOAT, still attached to the mangrove, and the lodge owner asks to have a look inside the distended belly.
A swift flick with the fillet knife from the anus to the gills: the man is quick to dispatch since the act insures the fish will feed his family later tonight. He peels out the cauly strings of the intestines, the red inner workings, and proffers the stretched bag of the stomach, which he slits open with the tip of the blade: out spills a partially digested shrimp, a small blue crab missing one of its claws, a schoolmaster, and a beet-red urchin—all of which he tosses without further regard over his shoulder and into the water.
This curious handful of food: the man’s memory of it, the details precise, unflinching, will persist against the wash of time.
From behind them, with the noise of heavy rain, a barracuda surfaces and with three open-mawed swipes clears the water of the chum. Then before the water settles, before the men can so much as remark, the barracuda rockets toward the boat on the edge of its tail, chased by a shark that, with a thump off the hull, wheels and catches the ’cuda: the hunter turned hunted vanishing in the ten-foot lemon’s bloody stranglehold.
The man chokes the engine twice and lets it idle for a moment, then revs the throttle and runs the skiff onto a plane.
One must work to achieve enlightenment and then return to the common world.
—BASHO
Meko was going to teach me how to pole a skiff—that was the notion, anyway. A southerly snapped the flags straight, though, and the waves in the channel lapped on themselves in frothy lines. Late day, dead low tide: the sand from which the water had recently receded shining like billowing silk. Hands full of rigged rods, a backpack of tackle strung over my shoulder, I bumbled down to the docks where a few guides lingered after a long day’s work, hosing down their boats, scrubbing the chines free of grime.
“What’s all the gear for?” Meko called, wringing out a sponge. “I thought you were driving and I was fishing!”
“I wasn’t sure, with all this—” I pointed up at the roughhousing palms.
“You know what they say about the wind,” said a tall mustached guide I hadn’t met. He took a toothpick from his mouth and shot hose water at Meko’s feet. “It blows.”
“You’ll have to forgive my uncle William,” Meko said, putting a hard-bristled brush to the floor of his boat. “He was out with the governor today so he’s a little chippy.”
Later I would learn that a high-ranking elected official from the South was indeed visiting the lodge—also that William Pinder was one of David’s sons—but for the time being I just nodded, like I was in the know.
“Up to the Cross Cays,” William said. “Fussy fish. Spooked every fish we saw except the mudding ones. Fit, though. Man, you could pole a skiff through a puddle with him.”
“Up to Big Sound, maybe?” Meko asked.
“Worth a look tomorrow afternoon on the flood,” William said, motioning for Meko to throw him the brush. “You’ve got the governor tomorrow. Everybody wants to fish with Meko.”
I hung my feet over the edge of the dock and listened to a third guide—baby faced, twenty years old, I guessed—seated behind the silver steering wheel of his unwashed skiff, complain animatedly about how the veterans always got more experienced clients, thus handicapping the youth. How am I supposed to find a fish for a guy who can’t cast two pole lengths? Meko nodded, acknowledging, I assumed, the youth’s soliloquy as the clichéd lament of an angler who could find fish but lacked the ability to communicate with nuance and thus establish a trusting client base. Once the young guide had motored off to the gas tanks, Meko and William began to recount the day’s trips in detail.
Always a bit therapeutic in nature, these postguiding exchanges usually contained a bit of truth, a dose of braggadocio, a jab at a client’s ineptitude or ambivalence, and maybe even an element of friendly trickery—were the bonefish truly spooky in the Cross Cays, for instance, or was William simply reporting as much so he could have the flat to himself tomorrow? In Montana, anyway, I might buy a fellow guide a drink to grease the proverbial wheels, but the top-shelf stuff was attainable solely through the barter system: tell me something true, and I’ll do the same for you.
I reflected on how, to some extent, my own guiding had become, after over a decade of work, largely transactional.
