“Is it always this noisy?” she asked, having to raise her voice.
I shook my head. “Just while we’re running out. When we start fishing, we troll on one engine, throttled down. Hardly any noise at all.”
“Oh,” she said, as if relieved.
The boat was a thirty-five-foot sports fisherman with topside controls and big outriggers capable of bouncing a marlin bait. Holt kept her in superb condition so her white topsides sparkled in the sun. He and his Mate were both taciturn types whose sole interest in life was fishing. They were good, too. I’d enjoyed fishing with them.
It was a few minutes before nine and Key West was down on the horizon when we crossed the edge of the Stream shortly to the south and east of Sand Key light. It was beautiful, running dark as indigo in a ragged line beyond the reefs with just enough breeze to ripple the light ground-swell rolling up from the south-east. The
She took it and looked round at me. “Now what do I do?”
Normally I detest people who want to talk when I’m fishing, but this was different. I was curious about her, and becoming more so all the time. “Just watch your bait,” I said. “You see it? A little to your right, and about seventy-five feet back?”
She looked. It skipped across the surface momentarily, and slid under again, fluttering. “Yes. I can see it now.”
“Keep your eye on it,” I said. “Watch it every minute-”
She nodded. “That’s so I’ll know when I get a bite?”
I restrained an impulse to wince. “Strike,” I said. “These fish out here don’t nibble; they hit. But that’s not the reason for watching it. You’ll know when you get a strike, whether you see it or not. Sam or the Skipper will tell you, for one thing. Sam’ll be standing up in back of the chair, and the Skipper’s topside, so they can both see down into the water better than we can because our angle’s too flat and there’s more defraction. They’ll always see the fish before you will, and they’ll generally know what it is by the time it hits. But if you
I glanced at her. She was wearing dark glasses now, so I couldn’t see her eyes, but I had that feeling I’d had the other times that she was hanging onto every word with rapt attention. Sam handed me the other rod. I threw the reel on free spool and thumbed it lightly while he ran the line up the outrigger. For the time I forgot her, watching my own bait with the old eager anticipation while we trolled quietly. The sun was hot. Flying fish skittered out of the blue side of a swell. A tanker in ballast went past to seaward, rocking us in its wake. Water boiled under my bait, and there was a slight click as the line snapped off the outrigger.
“Mackerel,” Holt said laconically.
I lowered the rod tip till the slack was gone, and then raised it, setting the hook. It was a small one, not over three pounds. “Good marlin bait,” Sam said, as he grasped the leader and dropped it in the box. I glanced at Mrs. Forsyth. She was lighting a cigarette. The fish appeared to bore her. Well, it wasn’t much of a fish.
An hour went by. I landed a barracuda of about fifteen pounds, and then a bonito that came in badly slashed by barracuda. She had no action at all, but she didn’t appear to mind. She seemed to be lost in thought. We went on trolling. I watched my bait.
“Bird,” Sam said behind us.
“I see him,” Holt replied. The beat of the engine picked up, and we swung in a sharp turn.
Mrs. Forsyth glanced round at me. “We aren’t going to chase birds, are we?”
“Man-o”-war,” I said. “A frigate bird.” I stood up and looked forward, and spotted him. He was about a half- mile ahead, off the starboard bow. She stuck her rod in the holder on the rail and came over to look too.
“When you see one hovering like that,” I told her, “he’s usually following a fish—”
“Why?” she asked.
“Table scraps,” I explained. “When the fish locates a school of bait and starts to feed, he drives them to the surface. That gives the bird a chance at ’em.”
She nodded. “I see.”
Captain Holt was starting forward. “Probably dolphin,” he said. “I see some dunnage.”
“How about taking it on the port side?” I asked.
“Sure.”
”Get set,” I told Mrs. Forsyth. She sat down in the chair and I fitted the rod into the gimbal for her. “There’s a big plank up ahead, and we’re going to pass it on your side. If he hits, lower your rod and reel in till the slack’s gone, and then strike once by raising the tip—”
“How do they know it’s a dolphin?” she asked, watching me with that intent expression on her face.
“They don’t actually,” I said. “It’s just an educated guess. Dolphin like to he under anything floating on the surface.”
We came abeam of the plank, and then it began to drop astern. I stood up to watch. Her bait fluttered past it, started to draw away.
“Here he comes!” Holt said tersely.
It was one of those moments that’d still give you a thrill if you fished for a hundred years. I saw the blue bolt of flame under the surface, and then he came clear, quartering and behind the bait, a bull of eighteen or twenty pounds flashing green and gold and blue in the sunlight, and took the bait going down. Her line snapped off the outrigger. I hoped he wouldn’t take mine too. Sometimes they will—take both baits in one blinding strike so fast you think you’ve hooked two separate dolphin all at the same instant.
He didn’t. He took only hers, set the hook himself when she forgot to hit him, leaped, made one fast, slashing run, leaped three more times, and was gone. She reeled in. Sam looked at the leader. “Kink,” he said.
“What did I do wrong?” she asked, casually taking cigarettes from the breast pocket of her blouse.
“Nothing,” I said.
“But he got away.”
I was beginning to get it now, though it made no sense at all. The whole thing had bored her profoundly and she didn’t mind in the slightest that she’d lost the fish, but she wanted me to explain why.
I explained. “When he was jumping, he threw a kink in the leader. Wire’ll always break if it kinks. It happens to everybody.”
“Oh,” she said thoughtfully.
She wasn’t interested in fishing, and never had been. She was listening to my voice.
There was no possible explanation for it, but I knew I was right. I watched her closely the rest of the day, checking it, and found that whenever I was talking, no matter what the subject, she listened in that same way. She said nothing about herself except that she was the private secretary to a businessman in a small town named Thomaston in central Louisiana. It might even be true, I thought, in spite of the expensive watch. She could have presents like that any time she wanted them. There was no longer any doubt that fishing bored her. She raised a sail, and lost it, with no more interest than she’d shown in the dolphin. I hooked up with a six-foot sail, and landed it; it wasn’t badly hurt and there was little blood, so we released it. That was it for the day, except for two or three small dolphin and another bonito. We were back at the dock at four forty-five.
We paid Holt, and I drove her car back to the motel. Outside No. 17, she held out her hand and smiled. “It’s been wonderful. I enjoyed every minute of it.”
“Would you like to go out again tomorrow?” I asked.
“I’d rather not take that much sun again so soon.”
“How about dinner tonight?”
I got the same cool, polite brush. “Really, I couldn’t. But thank you just the same.”
I went back to my own room. After I’d showered and changed into gray flannel slacks and a light sports shirt, I sat down in front of the air-conditioner with a cigarette and went back over the whole thing from the time I’d noticed she was eavesdropping. She’d looked me over and dropped me. Why? And what had she really wanted? An adventure, an interlude, a break? Whatever it was, I’d failed to measure up somewhere. Well, you couldn’t win ’em all. The phone rang.
