T. Boyle - Wild Child and Other Stories

“Something like that,” Mark said, gazing off into the distance.

“She just needs to get her sea legs, is all.”

“I shouldn’t have brought her. She only did it for me — to please me, you know? The only time she’s been on a boat before this was the ferry between Copenhagen and Goteborg and she said she vomited the whole time — but that was years ago and I figured, we both figured, this would be different. Plus, we got her the patch.”

Hunter thought about that a moment, even as Damian started in weighing the relative merits of patch and pill as if he’d just stepped out of pharmacy school. He was feeling bitter. Bitter over the day, the place, the fish, the lack of fish, over Cee Cee and Ilta and Julie and all the rest of the unattainable women of the world. He was picturing Mark’s wife in the cramped stinking head, cradling the stainless steel toilet, alone and needful while her husband gnawed his burger and guzzled beer, and he was about to say something cutting like “I guess that just proves the seas’s no place for a woman,” when the captain’s voice droned through the speakers. Haul in, the captain commanded, and Hunter went to his pole and began to crank the reel, the weight of the sinker floating free, and the hook, when it was revealed, picked clean of the wriggling anchovy that Julie, in her bikini, had threaded there for him.

Mark didn’t move. “I’m already in,” he said, by way of explanation. “But you watch, he’s going to take us southeast now, nearer the tip of the island.” He paused, chewing. “That’s Anacapa, you know. It’s the only one of the Channel Islands with an Indian name — the rest are all Spanish.”

Hunter didn’t resent him showing off his knowledge, or not exactly — after all, Mark was the authority here, the regular, the veteran of scute and scale and the cold wet guts and staring eyes of the poor brainless things hauled up out of the depths for the sake of machismo, buddyhood, the fraternity of hook, line and sinker — but he didn’t want to be here and his stomach was fluttering and for all he knew he’d be next in the head, like a woman, like a girl, and so he said, “Don’t tell me — it means Soup-can in the Indian language, right? Or no: Microwave, Microwave Oven.”

“Come on, Hunt, you know they didn’t have any of that shit.”

Damian had set down his burger to reel in, the plastic cup clenched between his teeth so that his words were blunted. He was warning him off, but Hunter didn’t care.

“It means illusion,” Mark said, as the boat swung round and everybody, as one, fought for balance. “Like a mirage, you know?

Because of the fog that clings to it — you can never be sure it’s really there.”

“Sounds like my marriage,” Hunter said, and then, as casually as if he were bending over the coffee table in his own living room to pick up a magazine or the TV remote, he leaned over the rail, the sudden breeze catching his hair and fanning it across his forehead, and let it all heave out of him, the burger and bun, the beer, the coffee and brandy and Dramamine, and right there at the end of it, summoned up from the deepest recess, the metallic dregs of the gin.

The next spot, which as Mark had predicted, was closer to the island, didn’t look much different from the last — waves, birds, the distant oil rigs like old men wading with their pants rolled up — but almost immediately after the captain dropped anchor, people began to hook up and a pulse of excitement beat through the crowd. One after another, the rods dipped and bent and the fish started coming over the rail. In the confusion, Hunter dropped his burger to the deck, even as Damian’s rod bowed and his own began to jerk as if it were alive. “You got one!” Damian shouted, stepping back to play his own fish. “Go ahead, grab it, set the hook!”

Hunter snatched up the rod and felt something there. He pulled and it pulled back, and so what if he’d inadvertently slipped on the catsup-soaked bun with its extruded tongue of meat and very nearly pitched overboard — this was what he’d come for. A fish. A fish on the line! But it was tugging hard, moving toward the front of the boat, and he moved with it, awkwardly fumbling his way around the others crowding the rail, only to realize, finally, that this was no fish at all — he was snagged on somebody else’s line. In that moment, three people up from him, the spider man was coming to the same realization.

“Jesus Christ, can’t you watch your own fucking line?” the man snarled as they separately reeled in and the tangle of their conjoined rigs rose shakily from the water. “I mean you’re down the other fucking end of the boat, aren’t you?”

Yeah, he was. But this moron was down on his fucking end too.

It wasn’t as if it was Hunter’s fault. It was nobody’s fault. It was the fault of fishing and lines and the puke-green heaving ocean that should have stayed on the front of a postcard where it belonged. Still, when he’d finally made his way down the deck and was staring the guy in the face, he ducked his head and said only, “I’ll get my knife.”

That decision — to shuffle back alongside the glassed-in cabin and across the open area at the stern of the boat, to dig into the tackle box Damian had brought along and come up with the bare blade of the gleaming Swiss-made knife there and measure it in his hand while everyone on the boat was hooking up and the deck had turned to fish and a wave bigger than any of the others that had yet hit rocked the boat like a potato in a pot — was regrettable. Because the captain, hooded above, outraged, pressed to the very limit, let his voice of wrath tear through the speakers: “You with the knife — you, yeah, you! You trying to stab somebody’s eye out?”

Hunter lurched like a drunken man. He squinted against the sun and up into the dark windows that wrapped round the wheelhouse till it seemed as if the boat were wearing a gigantic pair of sunglasses. He saw the sky reflected there. Clouds. The pale disc of the sun. “No, I’m just—” he began, but the captain’s voice cut him off. “Put that goddamned thing away before I come down there and throw it in the goddamned ocean!”

Everyone was looking at him while they pumped their bent rods or hustled across the deck with one writhing fish or another suspended by the gills, and he wanted to protest, wanted to be the bad guy, wanted to throw it all right back at the dark god in his wheelhouse who could have been Darth Vader for all he knew, but he held himself back. Shamefaced, he staggered to the tackle box and slammed the knife into it, the very knife Damian had insisted on bringing along because men in the outdoors always had knives because knives were essential, for cutting, hewing, stabbing, pinning things down, and when he turned round, one hand snatching at the rail for balance — and missing — Julie was there. The wind took her hair — dark at the roots, bleached by the sun on the ends — and threw it across her face. She gave him a wary look. “What’s the problem?”

she asked.

“I didn’t do anything,” he said. “I just wanted to cut a tangle, that’s all, and he — this guy up there, your precious captain, whoever he is, unloads on me …” He could hear the self-pity in his voice and knew it was all wrong.

“No open knives allowed on deck,” she said, looking stern. Or as stern as a half-naked woman with minute fish scales glittering on her hands and feet could manage to look on the deck of a party boat in the middle of a party.

He could have blown it, could have been a jerk, but he felt the tension go out of him. He gave her a smile that was meant to be winning and apologetic at the same time. “I’m sorry, I guess I didn’t know any better. I’m not a regular, but you already knew that, didn’t you — just from looking at me, right? Tell you the truth, I feel a whole lot better experiencing the mighty sea from a barstool in that place back at the wharf — Spinnakers, you know Spinnakers? — with a cocktail in my hand and the fish served up on a plate, and maybe a little butter-lemon sauce? To dip? And lick off your fingers?”