Benchley, Peter - Novel 08 Page 4

  Darling poured Mike some coffee, and they went outside and stood on the dock and watched a cormorant wheeling over the bay in search of food.

  “I guess we’ll go pull the aquarium’s traps,” Darling said. “We leave ‘em down too long, critters might die or get eaten … traps could break away.”

  “Aye.”

  “Might take along some bait … just in case.”

  Mike nodded, finished his coffee and went to the freezer in the toolshed to fetch some mackerel for bait.

  Darling boarded the boat and started the big Cummings diesel and let it warm up.

  The Privateer was a shrimp dragger that Darling had bought at a yard in Houma, Louisiana, and had converted to an all-purpose Bermuda workboat. Her name back then had been Miss Daisy, but he had known at first sight she was not a Miss Daisy. She was big and broad and strong, steel-plated, steel-bulkheaded, steel-decked, a safe, stable platform that rode good weather comfortably and challenged bad weather with defiance, slamming into the seas as if daring them to hole her or pop her rivets.

  She’ll knock you down, he’d say, but she’ll never drown you.

  She had a dry and roomy house, two compressors, two generators and racks for twenty scuba tanks.

  Darling was as superstitious as the next man, but he defended himself against the offense of changing the boat’s name by declaring that since she had been misnamed to begin with, all he had done was give her her right name.

  Still, just to be on the safe side, on the bulkhead inside the wheelhouse he had nailed a little obeah figurine from Antigua, and in times of trial—such as the day when a small cyclone made up directly over Bermuda and the wind went from 8 to 120 knots in five minutes and blew like the howling hounds of hell for an hour— he’d give it a rub.

  Mike hopped aboard and cast off fore and aft. Darling put the boat in gear and eased out of Mangrove Bay and around the point to Blue Cut.

  Settling himself onto a hatch cover in the. stern, Mike muttered at a recalcitrant pump motor as he cradled it in his lap.

  Darling had set the aquarium’s line to the northwest, about six miles offshore, in five hundred fathoms of water. He could have found five hundred fathoms closer on the south shore, for there the reefs ended and deep water began only a mile or two from land. But for some reason the creatures that interested the aquarium seemed to live only off the northwest edge.

  Now, as they cruised among the reefs, the water was calm but with enough of a ripple to cut the glare and give definition to the different colors of the corals, which gave Darling leave to wander away from the cut and thread his way through the high heads. There was truth to the old rule that the darker something was, the deeper it was, so as long as he could see the yellow villains beneath the surface, he could avoid them.

  Standing on the flying bridge, cooled by the northwest breeze and warmed by the young sun, Whip Darling felt himself a happy man. He could forget, for a moment, that he didn’t have any money, and could dream dreams of vast wealth. He allowed himself to fantasize about stacks of silver coins and serpentine chains of gold. Sure, it was fantasy, but it was reality, too, it had been known to happen: the Tucker treasure, the Fisher treasure from the Atocha, the billion-dollar bonanza from the Central America. Who could say it couldn’t happen again?

  And gold and silver weren’t the only treasures waiting to be discovered. There were animals, unknown and unimagined, especially in the deep, that might change people’s ideas about everything from biology to evolution, that might give clues to cures for everything from arthritis to cancer. Finding one or two of these creatures wouldn’t fill Darling’s pocketbook, but they were the things that nourished his spirit.

  His gaze drifted from the white sand holes to the crevices in patches of reef, and always his eyes searched for the telltale signs of a shipwreck that could be as old as the time of the first James.

  Nobody knew when the first ship had come to grief on the Bermuda volcano: at least as far back as Elizabeth, because there was evidence that a hapless Spaniard had passed an unplanned holiday there during the reign of the Virgin Queen. The man had spent a lot of time and trouble carving an inscription on a rock that was still legible: F.T. 1543.

  Bermuda had always been a ship trap, and it still was, even with all the modern miracles like RDF, loran and satellite navigation, because the volcano, albeit extinct, protruded from the bottom of the sea like a wand full of electromagnetic anomalies. Machines, electronic or magnetic, seized up and went berserk around Bermuda. Nothing worked, not reliably. Compasses reeled back and forth like drunks. A mariner who asked a loran where he was might well be told he was in the mountains above Barcelona.

  The whims of the Bermuda volcano helped spawn the legends of the Bermuda Triangle, for when the mind of man got hold of a nugget of truth and twisted it into a pretzel of fancy, it conjured up everything from Atlantis to UFOs to omnivorous monsters living in the core of the planet.

  Darling didn’t object to people indulging themselves in nonsense about the Bermuda Triangle, but it seemed to him a waste of time. If people would make an effort to learn about the wonders that did exist, he thought, their appetite for dragons would be well satisfied. Seventy percent of the earth’s surface was covered by water, and ninety-five percent of that seventy percent had never been explored by anybody. Instead, man kept spending billions of dollars to explore places like Mars and Neptune, to a point where it was an established fact that we already knew more about the back side of the moon than we did about three-quarters of our own home. Crazy.

  Even he—a nobody in a tiny, pissant corner of nowhere—had in his twenty-five years on the ocean seen enough to know that the sea sheltered ample dragons to fuel the nightmares of the entire human race: thirty-foot sharks that lived in the mud, crabs as big as motorcars, finless fish with heads like horses, viper eels that ate anything including each other, fish that went fishing with little lanterns that hung down off their eyebrows, and so on.

  These days, the Bermuda ship trap snared one or two victims every couple of years, usually a Liberia-or Panama-registered tanker, owned by a partnership of dentists or podiatrists from someplace like Altoona, Pa., whose Taiwanese captain spoke not a word of English. He would leave Norfolk, say, and set his course for the Straits of Gibraltar and turn on his automatic pilot. Then he’d go below to drink tea or have a nap or get a shiatsu massage, without bothering to notice an insignificant blip on his chart some six hundred miles to the east of North Carolina.

  A couple of nights later, the airwaves would suddenly be flooded with S.O.S. calls. Sometimes, if the night was still and clear, Darling had only to walk out his back door and look to the north or northwest, and there on the horizon would be the lights of the stranded vessel.

  His first thought always was, Lord, don’t let her be laden with oil. His second was, If she has got oil, Lord, don’t let her have a hole in her.

  Back in the old days, the reefs were capturing so many ships that an industry arose of people who made their living rowing out and salvaging stricken ships. Some weren’t content to wait; they wanted to make their luck, and they’d wave phony lights to lure ships onto the reefs.

  Darling had always been amused by what he regarded as a nice irony: Mariners had made Bermuda a ship trap. They could have avoided Bermuda; the trouble was, they needed it.

  Until the 1780s, there was no such thing as reliable longitudinal navigation. Sailors could tell their latitude by the angle of the sun off the horizon, had been doing it for a thousand years with cross-staffs, astrolabes, octants and sextants. But to tell where they were on the east-west axis they needed an accurate—truly accurate—chronometer. And there wasn’t one.

  Bermuda was a known fixed point in the ocean, and once they found it, they knew exactly where they were. And so, they would leave the West Indies or Hispaniola or Havana and sail north in the Gulf Stream, then northeast, until they reached 32 degrees north latitude. Then they would turn east and look for Bermuda, which would
give them the course to set for home.

  But if they ran into a storm, with winds so fierce and seas so high that they couldn’t see, or if there was a fog, or if their navigator was a bit addled, by the time they finally did see Bermuda, the chances were they would be on Bermuda.

  Charlotte had once read Darling a line a poet wrote: “… many a midnight ship and all its shrieking crew.” He liked the words, because they spawned in him a vision of what it must have been like aboard one of the old-timers facing doom: sailing along, safe as a bird on the wing, the sounder up in the bow dropping his lead and getting no bottom, then all of a sudden—what’s that?—the sound of surf—surf? how can there be surf in the middle of the ocean?—and they strain their eyes but they can’t see, and the boom of the surf grows louder— and then the sounding lead does find a bottom, and there’s that moment of horror when they know… .

  Today, Darling saw no signs of shipwreck in the shallow water, but what he did see—for it was all he saw— drew the happiness out of him like a syringe pulling blood: one parrotfish, a needlelike garfish tail-walking across the surface, half a dozen flying fish that spooked away from the boat’s bow, and a few meandering breams.

  Reefs that had once teemed with life were as empty as a train station after a bomb scare.

  He felt as if he were witnessing a funeral for a way of life … his way of life.

  Soon the shallows sloped away, to forty feet, sixty feet, a hundred feet, and he stopped looking at the bottom and began to search for his buoy.

  It was where he had left it, which half surprised him, because over the past year or two desperate fishermen had begun to abandon the code of honor that said, No man touches another man’s pots. And even without human intervention, the baits were so deep that some great survivor could have taken and run with them—a six-gill shark, perhaps, or a big-eyed thresher—and dragged the traps miles away before breaking loose.

  “Coming up on it,” Darling called down to Mike, who put his pump motor aside and reached for the boat hook.

  The orange-and-white buoy slid down the side of the boat, and when it reached the stern, Mike snagged it and pulled it aboard and walked it forward and wrapped the rope around the winch.

  Darling put the boat in neutral, letting it wallow in the gentle sea, and came down from the flying bridge.

  “Go you,” Mike said, and Darling pushed the lever and turned on the winch, and as the rope began to come up, Mike fed it into a fifty-five-gallon plastic drum.

  They had put down three thousand feet of polyethylene rope, with the buoy on top and twenty-five pounds of sash weights to keep it on the bottom. Starting at two thousand feet, they had attached, at every hundred-foot interval, a twenty-foot length of forty-eight-strand stainless-steel airplane cable, and at the end of each cable was one of the aquarium’s gimmicks. Some were small wire boxes, some were contraptions of fine-mesh net. Most had bits of gurry inside to attract whatever creatures lived down in the dark. Because Darling didn’t know—nobody knew—what those creatures might be or what they liked to eat, he had indulged his theory about ocean scavengers—whatever stinks most works best—and had baited the traps with the rankest, rotten-est flesh he could find.

  Into a few of the traps he had put no bait at all, just Cyalume chemical lights, following another of his theories—that light was such a novelty in a world of perpetual night that some animals might be drawn to it out of curiosity.

  His hope was to bring the animals up alive and keep them alive in a cold-water tank on the boat. Every week or so, a scientist from the aquarium would come to examine the catch, and the creatures that were rare or unknown he would take back to study in the laboratory in Flatts.

  Darling estimated that twenty percent of the animals survived the trip and the transfer to the aquarium—not a great number, perhaps, but as good a cheap way as possible to gather new species.

  And it paid his fuel bills, which really mattered these days.

  Darling held the lever and kept his eye on the rope. It was taut, squeaking and spitting water, but it should be, considering the weight of half a mile of rope and twenty-five pounds of lead and the traps and the cables and the baits.

  He put his foot on the bulwark to steady himself against the wallow and looked over the side, down into the blue gloom, hoping to see some big fish cruising by.

  Not bloody likely, he thought. If there were any such left in the sea, they had long since departed Bermuda.

  “Something’s not right,” Mike said. He had a hand on the rope, feeling the tension with his fingertips.

  “What?”

  “She’s stuttery. Feel.” Mike passed the rope to Darling and stepped back to take the winch lever from him.

  Darling felt the rope. It was trembling erratically. There was a thud to it, like an engine misfiring.

  The rope was marked in hundred-fathom sections, and as the third mark passed, Darling held up a hand, telling Mike to slow the winch, and bent over the side to see the first trap come into view. If it was fouled around the rope, he wanted to clear it before it banged against the boat. Some of the tiny abyssal animals were so delicate that any slight trauma would kill them.

  He saw the glint of the first stainless-steel swivel holding the length of cable, saw the cable, and then … nothing.

  The trap was gone.

  Impossible. The only animal large enough to take it was a shark, but there was nothing in the trap to interest a shark. And if one of them had taken a run at it, he would have taken the whole rig with him, rope and all. There was no way a shark could have broken the cable.

  He let the winch bring the cable up to him, and he unsnapped it from the rope and looked at the end. Then he held it up to Mike.

  “Busted?” Mike asked.

  “No. If she’d popped, the strands’d be all frizzy, like a head of hair when you stick your finger in a light socket. Look: These strands are still as tight as in the factory.”

  “So?”

  Darling held the end of the cable close to his eyes. It had been sheared off, cut as clean as if by a scalpel. There were no gnaw marks, no worry marks.

  “Bit,” he said. “Bit clean through.”

  “Bit?”

  Darling looked out over the water. “What in the name of Christ has a mouth that can bite through forty-eight strands of stainless steel?”

  Mike said nothing. Darling gestured for him to start the winch again, and in a moment the second cable came up.

  “Gone,” he said, for that trap had vanished, too, that cable bitten through.

  “Gone,” he said again as the next cable appeared, and the next and the next. They were all gone.

  Now he saw the sash weights coming, and there was something strange about them, so he told Mike to stop the winch, and he pulled the last of the rope up by hand.

  “Sweet Jesus,” he said. “Look here.”

  One of the traps had been wrapped around the weights, embedded into them so hard it was as if everything had been melted together in a furnace.

  They pulled the gnarled mass up and set it on the deck; it was a confusion of steel reinforcing rod, wire and lead.

  Mike stared at it for a long moment, then said, “Jesus, Whip. What kind of sumbitch do that?”

  “No man, for sure,” said Darling. “No animal, neither. At least, no animal I’ve ever seen.”

  6

  THEY DIDN’T SPEAK as they disassembled the rig, coiling the lengths of cable and securing them with twist ties, discarding the chemical lights, jamming the final fathoms of rope into the plastic drum.

  Darling was running through the catalog of creatures in his head, trying to think of what might have the power and the inclination to destroy that rig.

  He even considered Mike’s thought that it might have been a man, some fisherman who was angry, resentful, jealous—although what Whip Darling had these days that anybody’d be jealous of he couldn’t imagine. Or maybe just somebody bent on destruction for its own sake. No. He didn’t
think that any man could do it, and he was certain that nobody’d bother. There was no logic to it.

  So what did that leave? What could have bitten through a cable woven of forty-eight strands of stainless steel?

  Part of him hoped that they’d never know.

  He wasn’t a stranger to the fact that Nature had a dark side. Once, more than two decades ago, he had been crew on a tanker off South Africa when, out of nowhere—an easy sea and a steady barometer—had come a rogue wave that had put a hundred-foot wall of water in front of the ship. The captain had never seen such a thing, no one on board ever had, and because they didn’t know what to do they steamed directly into the wall of water, which closed over the ship, drowning it, sending it plunging to the bottom. If Darling hadn’t been sent up to the crow’s nest three minutes earlier to fetch something, he would have gone down with the ship. Instead, he had washed overboard and drifted on a hatch cover for two days until a coastal freighter picked him up.

  Another time, in Australia, he and some mates had jumped ship after discovering that the captain was addicted to ouzo and boys, and had embarked on a feckless treasure hunt in the outback. They had met up with a family on holiday in a little caravan, and one afternoon they came back to find the whole family dead, killed by a taipan, a snake that attacks for the sake of attacking, that kills for the sake of the kill.

  Darling had gradually concluded that Nature wasn’t to be trusted; often enough, she revealed a sinister side.

  Mike had had no such experiences, and he was not happy with the unknown. He didn’t mind so much not having answers himself, but he didn’t like it when Whip didn’t have them. He hated to hear Whip say, “I don’t know.” He preferred the security of knowing that somebody was in charge, somebody knowledgeable.

  So now he was worried.