Дин Кунц - End of the Tiger and Other Stories

At that he had slapped Gerran roughly on the shoulder. “Tomorrow we hook a sail, boy, and it’ll make a man out of you.”

Pedro stepped down onto the fantail, and I handed him my lunch and equipment. Pedro said, in quick, slurred Spanish, “This man talks to me, Señor Thompson, as if I were his gardener.”

“What did he say?” Wolta asked suspiciously.

“He said that he thinks we’ll have a good day.”

“That’s fine!” Wolta said, his eyes still holding a glint of mistrust. “How’d you learn this language?”

“I live here,” I said shortly. “Where’s Gerran?”

“I sent Jimmy after cigarettes. Hope he can find his way back to the boat. Here he comes now.”

Jimmy gave me a shy smile and said good morning as he climbed down into the boat. Pedro’s two hands were aboard — his engineer and his sailor. The sailor went forward and got the anchor line. The marine engine chuckled deeply as Pedro moved ahead away from the dock. We were about fifth or sixth away from the dock.

Wolta examined the heavy boat rods curiously. He fingered the gimbal set into the front of the chair. He said, “You set the rod butt in this thing, eh? Universal joint.”

Jimmy said, “I’ve never done this before. What happens, Mr. Thompson?”

“You sit and hold the rod. Your bait, a fish about eight inches long with the hook sewed into it, will ride the surface about fifty feet astern. See, the sailor’s dropping the bamboo outriggers now. The line will run taut from your bait to a heavy clothespin at the tip of the outrigger. Then there’ll be twenty or so feet of slack between the clothespin and the tip of your rod. The sail’ll come up and whack the fish with his bill. That’s to kill it. It’ll knock the line out of the clothespin, and the fish will lie dead on the water while we keep moving. Then the sail’ll grab it. As soon as the slack is all gone, hold tight and hit him three or four times. Not hard. Like this.” I took the rod and showed him.

“How will I know if he’s hooked?” Jimmy asked.

Wolta roared. “He’ll rise up and talk to you, boy. He’ll come up and tell you all about it.”

Jimmy flushed. He said, “Thanks, Mr. Thompson.”

I was assembling my equipment. For sail I use a five-foot, five-ounce tip, 4/0 star drag reel carrying five hundred yards of 6-thread, 18-pound test line. Wolta looked on curiously. He said, “That’s a lot lighter outfit than these, Thompson.” I nodded. The boat rods carry 32-thread line, 14/0 drag reels. Wolta said, “That rod won’t fit in the gimbal, will it?”

“No,” I said shortly.

Wolta frowned. “What the hell! If you can use that stuff, why should we fish with rope and crowbars?”

I said, “If you never fished for sail before and if you hooked one with this equipment, you’d have a thousand to one chance of bringing him in. He’d break your line or your tip every time.”

Wolta gave me that grin. “I guess you know what you’re talking about,” he said.

The bait was all sewed. It was taken off the ice, and Pedro helped rig the lines. As soon as we rounded the headlands, the bait went out. I said, “You two fish. As soon as you’ve hooked one, the other man reels in. Fast. I’ll take the place of whoever hooks the first one.”

“Hooks or catches,” Wolta said suspiciously.

I looked him squarely in the eyes. “Hooks!” I said.

“Okay, okay,” he mumbled, turning away. I had learned something interesting about Lew Wolta.

The first half hour was dull. Pedro headed straight out, and the shore line began to recede; the dusty brown hills began to appear behind the green hills that encircle Acapulco. The swell was heavy. I watched both Jimmy and Wolta and saw with relief that neither of them seemed conscious of the movement of the boat. A seasick man aboard spoils my pleasure in the day, as I know how badly he wants to return to the stability of the land.

The bait danced and skittered astern, taking off into the air at the crests of the waves, sometimes going under the surface for a dozen yards.

Wolta called for more beer and called loudly again as the sailor was uncapping the bottle.

The engineer, acting as lookout, yelled and pointed. Pedro took a quick look and heeled the boat around. The sail was a dust brown shape dimly seen a few inches under the surge of the blue sea.

We dragged the bait by him, and he seemed to shake himself, move in a big circle, come in on the bait with arrowlike speed. He was headed for Gerran’s bait. For a moment the sail knifed the water a few yards behind the bait and then there was a boiling spot on the flank of a wave and the line snapped out of Gerran’s clothespin.

I watched the line tauten as Pedro cut speed.

“Now!” I said.

Jimmy hit him just a shade late, but hit him with the right force. The line whined out of the reel as the sail, about seventy pounds of angry, startled temper, walked up into the air, three feet of daylight showing under his bullet-lean tail.

Jimmy gasped. The sail jumped high again, ten yards farther. High in the air he shook his head, and we saw the bait snap free and fall out in a long arc. The fish was off the hook and, somewhere under the surface of the sea, he was heading for distant parts.

There was that letdown of tension that always comes with a lost fish.

“Absolutely beautiful!” Jimmy said softly.

Wolta gave his hoarse laugh. “Absolutely butter-fingered, pal. You had him and you lost him.”

“I’ve never seen anything like that,” Jimmy said.

“I’d have liked to see him boated,” Wolta said. “What the hell good is it to look at a fish?”

Pedro smiled at Jimmy and said, in his thick English, “Bad luck. Next time you get heem.” Then he turned to Wolta. “You reel in too slow, meester. Faster next time, eh?”

Wolta, smiling, said, “You run your boat, pop. I’ll reel in like I damn well please.”

I threw my bait out over the side toward the stern. I was learning about Wolta. I said in Spanish to Pedro, “This one is all mouth, my friend.” I said to Wolta, “I just told him that if I hook a fish, he’s to cut your line if you don’t bring it in fast enough.”

Wolta said, “Okay, okay. Don’t get in a sweat, Thompson.”

I sat down. I had the drag off, my thumb on the spool. Jimmy said, behind me, “You don’t use the clothespin?”

“No. When I get a strike, I let the line run free, then throw on the drag when I hit him. It’s harder to do it right this way, but when you get onto it, you can figure the time to fit the way each fish hits.”

Wolta said, a faint sneer in his tone, “Don’t bother the expert, Jimmy.”

I let that one pass.

Ten minutes later Wolta said, “I hear it takes about a half hour, forty minutes to boat one with the equipment I’m using. How long does it take with your rig?”

“Longer. Maybe an hour with the same size fish.”

He still wore the smile. He said, “That’s great! I pay a third of the boat the same as you and then when you hook one, I got to stop fishing for an hour.”

“That’s right,” I said mildly.

Pedro had reached the area he liked. He began to zig-zag back and forth across the area. The Spanish word for that maneuver is, very neatly, the same as the Spanish word for eel.

I was first to see the fish coming in toward Wolta’s bait. I said, “One coming up.” Pedro slowed a little as Wolta tensed. It was as unreasonable as any sailfish. It cut by Wolta’s bait and, instead of hitting mine first to kill it, it gulped it whole. It was one very hungry fish. I hit it immediately.

When it jumped, I saw that it was probably a shade smaller than the one Jimmy had hooked. As it ran I saw Wolta reeling in rapidly.