Thomas McGuane - Ninety-Two in the Shade

The Rudleighs had opened the thermos and were consuming its contents exactly as the heat of the day began to spread. Skelton was now poling down light, flushing small fish; then two schools of bonefish, not tailing but pushing wakes in their hurry; Rudleigh saw them late and bungled the cast, looking significantly at Mrs. Rudleigh after each failure.

“You’ve got to bear down,” she said.

“I’m bearing down.”

“Bear down harder, honey.”

“I said: I’m bearing down.”

Now the wading birds that were on the flat in the early tide were flooded out and flew northwest to catch the Gulf of Mexico tide. Skelton knew they had about lost their water.

“It’s kind of slow, Captain,” said Rudleigh.

“I’ve been thinking the same thing,” Skelton said, his heart chilling within him. “I’m going to pole this out and make a move.”

A minute later, he was running to Saddlebunch and got there in time to catch the incoming water across the big sand spot; he hardly had a moment to stake the skiff when the bonefish started crossing the sand. Now Mrs. Rudleigh was casting, driving the fish away. Rudleigh snatched the rod from her after her second failure.

“Sit down!”

Rudleigh was rigidly prepared for the next fish. Skelton would have helped him but knew in advance it would make things worse. He felt all of his efforts pitted against the contents of the thermos.

“You hawse’s oss,” said Mrs. Rudleigh to her husband. He seemed not to have heard. He was in the vague crouch of lumbar distress.

“I can fish circles around you, queen bee,” he said after a bit. “Always could.”

“What about Peru? What about Cabo Blanco?”

“You’re always throwing Cabo Blanco in my face without ever, repeat, ever a word about Tierra del Fuego.”

“What about Piñas Bay, Panama.”

“Shut up.”

“Seems to me,” she said, “that Raúl commented that the señora had a way of making the señor look real bum.”

A small single bonefish passed the skiff. Rudleigh flushed it by casting right into its face. “Cocksucker.”

“That’s just the way you handled striped marlin. Right there is about what you did with those stripes at Rancho Buena Vista.”

Rudleigh whirled around and held the point of his rod under Mrs. Rudleigh’s throat. “I’m warning you.”

“He had a tantrum at the Pez Maya Club in Yucatán,” Mrs. Rudleigh told Skelton.

“Yes, ma’am. I see.”

“Uh, Captain—”

“I’m right here, Mr. Rudleigh.”

“I thought this was a permit deal.”

“I’m looking for permit on this tide. I told you they were a long shot.”

“Captain, I know about permit. I have seen permit in the Bahamas, Yucatán, Costa Rica, and at the great Belize camps in British Honduras. I know they are a long shot.”

Skelton said, “Maybe your terrific familiarity with places to fish will tell us where we ought to be right now.”

“Captain, I wouldn’t presume.”

A skiff was running just off the reef, making sheets of bright water against the sun.

“Do you know what today’s tides are?” Skelton asked.

“No.”

“Which way is the Gulf of Mexico?”

Rudleigh pointed all wrong. Skelton wanted to be home reading Proudhon, studying the winos, or copulating.

“Is that a permit?” Mrs. Rudleigh asked. The black fork of a large permit surfaced just out of casting range: beyond belief. Rudleigh stampeded back into position. Skelton slipped the pole out of the sand and began to ghost quietly toward the fish and stopped. Nothing visible. A long moment passed. Again, the black fork appeared.

“Cast.”

Rudleigh threw forty feet beyond the permit. There was no hope of retrieving and casting again. Then out of totally undeserved luck, the fish began to change course toward Rudleigh’s bait. Rudleigh and Mrs. Rudleigh exchanged glances.

“Please keep your eye on the fish.” Skelton was overwhelmed by the entirely undeserved nature of what was transpiring. In a moment, the big fish was tailing again.

“Strike him.”

Rudleigh lifted the rod and the fish was on. Skelton poled hard, following the fish, now streaking against the drag for deep water. The same skiff that passed earlier appeared, running the other direction; and Skelton wondered who it could be.

“God, Captain, will I be able to cope with this at all? I mean, I knew the fish was strong! But honest to God, this is a nigger with a hotfoot!”

“I’m still admiring your cast, darling.”

Skelton followed watching the drawn bow the rod had become, the line shearing water with precision.

“What a marvelously smooth drag this reel has! A hundred smackers seemed steep at the time; but when you’re in the breach, as I am now, a drag like this is the last nickel bargain in America!”

Skelton was poling after the fish with precisely everything he had. And it was difficult on the packed bottom with the pole inclining to slip out from under him.

His feeling of hope for a successful first-day guiding was considerably modified by Rudleigh’s largely undeserved hooking of the fish. And now the nobility of the fish’s fight was further eroding Skelton’s pleasure.

When they crossed the edge of the flat, the permit raced down the reef line in sharp powerful curves, dragging the line across the coral. “Gawd, gawd, gawd,” Rudleigh said. “This cookie is stronger than I am!” Skelton poled harder and at one point overtook the fish as it desperately rubbed the hook on the coral bottom; seeing the boat, it flushed once more in terror, making a single long howl pour from the reel. A fish that was exactly noble, thought Skelton, who began to imagine the permit coming out of a deep-water wreck by the pull of moon and tide, riding the invisible crest of the incoming water, feeding and moving by force of blood; only to run afoul of an asshole from Connecticut.

The fight continued without much change for another hour, mainly outside the reef line in the green water over a sand bottom: a safe place to fight the fish. Rudleigh had soaked through his khaki safari clothes; and from time to time Mrs. Rudleigh advised him to “bear down.” When Mrs. Rudleigh told him this, he would turn to look at her, his neck muscles standing out like cords and his eyes acquiring broad white perimeters. Skelton ached from pursuing the fish with the pole; he might have started the engine outside the reef line, but he feared Rudleigh getting his line in the propeller and he had found that a large fish was held away from the boat by the sound of a running engine.

As soon as the fish began to show signs of tiring, Skelton asked Mrs. Rudleigh to take a seat; then he brought the big net up on the deck beside him. He hoped he would be able to get Rudleigh to release this hugely undeserved fish, not only because it was undeserved but because the fish had fought so very bravely. No, he admitted to himself, Rudleigh would never let the fish go.

By now the fish should have been on its side. It began another long and accelerating run, the pale sheet of water traveling higher up the line, the fish swerving somewhat inshore again; and to his terror, Skelton found himself poling after the fish through the shallows, now and then leaning over to free the line from a sea fan. They glided among the little hammocks and mangrove keys of Saddlebunch in increasing vegetated congestion, in a narrowing tidal creek that closed around and over them with guano-covered mangroves and finally prevented the boat from following another foot. Nevertheless, line continued to pour off the reel.

“Captain, consider it absolutely necessary that I kill the fish. This one doubles the Honduran average.”

Skelton did not reply, he watched the line slow its passage from the reel, winding out into the shadowy creek; then stop. He knew there was a good chance the desperate animal had reached a dead end.