The second the Belinda Blue touches the pier at the Moray Key Marina, Bob Dubois jumps ashore, leaving the fishermen behind him. They look up from the afterdeck, and he’s gone. “Where’d the sucker go? Hey, Cap, where’re you off to so fast?” They look around in confusion. What now? They’ve caught twenty-six fish, sea trout and redfish, had one hell of a fine morning out there on the bay, got exactly what they paid for, but they’re not sure what comes next. And the fact that just as they docked at the marina the captain of the boat took off, just jumped ashore and disappeared, leaves them confused and slightly irritated.
The Jamaican mate says, “You wan’ keep dese fish, mon?” He wraps the last of the rods and reels in oilcloth and lays it in the locker atop the others. “Can filet dem if you want.”
There are four fishermen, friends and relations from Columbia, Missouri, partners in an insurance company. Two are sons-in-law, the older two are brothers, all four are red-faced, with fat pink bodies, loud voices. They’ve finished their three-day convention stay in Miami and have come out to the Keys in a rented car for a few days of “R and R,” which means drinking and fishing and calculating their combined financial conquests made during the convention — a couple of real estate packages in Louisville and a chemical manufacturing company trying to get started in Arkansas. They laugh and plan and count, and they remind Bob Dubois of his brother Eddie. The ease with which they hurtle through financial abstractions brings back to Bob Eddie’s hectoring lectures, his impatience and condescension, and Bob has found himself treating his clients the same way he usually ended up treating his brother, with sullenness, feigned inattention, partial deafness — as if he were out on the bay this morning for his own private amusement and the fat men in shorts, Hawaiian shirts and bill caps were keeping him from it. Naturally, since the men have hired him, his mate and the Belinda Blue, not vice versa, they condescend to him from an even greater height than they might otherwise, calling him “Cap” and referring to the Belinda Blue as “the tub,” and when their lines snarl on the reels or tangle with one another, simply handing Bob or his mate the rod and reaching into the cooler for another cold Budweiser.
It’s been a hard morning for Bob Dubois, then. Hard, too, for his mate, Tyrone, a knotty, dark brown Jamaican with a dense beard and finger-length dreadlocks. Tyrone is in his late thirties, has spent his entire adult life crewing for charter fishing boats on the Keys, the last three years working for Avery Boone, and it’s he more than anyone else who taught Ave, and now Ave’s old friend from the North, Bob Dubois, how and where to fish these waters. As a teenager, Tyrone fled a migrant work camp in the cane fields west of Miami and drifted across the Everglades and down the Keys, putting to good use everything he’d learned as a boy working for white American yachtsmen back in Port Antonio. Ave’s dependence on Tyrone’s knowledge, and now Bob’s, is like that of the Americans back in Jamaica; it gives Tyrone power in a world in which he is otherwise powerless.
One of the sons-in-law laughs and slaps Tyrone on his bare back. “You betcha goddamn ass we want them fish, boy! We earned them suckers.”
“Paid for ’em too,” the other son-in-law adds.
The older men, brothers, fathers of the brides, have stepped free of the boat and are waiting on the pier. One of them announces, “I’m gonna get me a real drink. An al-co-hol-ic beverage. See you boys over there at the restaurant,” he says, and he and his brother head down the pier toward the Clam Shack.
When they reach the wobbly screened door of the place, they notice Bob a few feet away about to get into his car, and the older of the two, who wears mirror sunglasses which he no doubt fancies make him look like a state trooper, stops and hails Bob. “Hey, good buddy, you runnin’ out on us?” The younger brother, eager for his drink, has continued into the restaurant.
“No,” Bob says.
“Well, then, whyn’t you sit down and have a drink with us. Tell us some fish stories.” His glasses glint in the noonday sun. The man is portly and soft-fleshed, but he moves and makes faces like a man who thinks he is lean, hard-muscled and a little mean-tempered. Everything he says and does has a trace of sarcasm to it. “ ’Course, you don’t have to sit down with us if you don’t want to. That ain’t part of the deal.”
“No. I just … I got to get on.” Bob opens the door of his green station wagon. Four hours earlier, up on the bridge of the Belinda Blue, alone, bringing the boat out of the marina at dawn and breaking the still, milky waters of the bay, he was at peace, a rock of a man, smooth-grained, balanced, centered. He was in charge, he was the captain, and for a few moments he knew he’d earned that right, which only added to his pleasure at finding himself up on the bridge, the waters spread before him newly familiar, the boat an old, trusted ally and the smell of the sea in the morning breeze filling him like a particularly cheering childhood dream, a dream of flying over the cold, gray surface of the Catamount River, of leaping from the hill above the mills, the brick smokestacks and tenements, gliding across the river to the high, ancient glacial moraine on the other side, and once on the other side, still soaring, over pine trees now, toward the mountains. He’d come down here to Moray Key and after three months of hard work under Ave’s and Tyrone’s tutelage, he’d made himself into a fisherman, not the best, not even as good as Ave, but good enough, which was something to admire, he knew, and every morning when he had occasion to take the Belinda Blue out of her slip and gunned her into the bay, he enjoyed a few moments of admiring himself. He felt like granite then, warmed by the rising sun.
Now, however, he feels crumpled and torn, papery, subject to puffs and gusts from any direction. It’s no one’s fault. He can’t blame the man in front of him or the man’s brother or the sons-in-law. They’re nobody and everybody, the kind of people every man has to deal with to get through his day, just four more insensitive men, self-centered and arrogant and carrying wallets stuffed with credit cards and traveler’s checks that they use to buy themselves their own kind of pleasure, a few hours at a time.
“Up to you, Cap,” the man says. “You want any of them fish for yourself? My son-in-law’s got your nigger gutting and filleting ’em right now. Too many for us.”
“Well … thanks, no. You keep ’em.” Now, that was stupid, he thinks, and he’s grateful Elaine is not here to hear him say it. There’s fifty dollars’ worth of fish that’s going to be tossed out, she’d say, while we buy hamburger at the A & P for two dollars a pound.