Beach Music (73 page)

“We’ve got plenty of time,” I said, now tying the hook on to my lure.

“We’re on a sandbar,” Jordan said, looking down at his line.

“No way, José,” Mike said. “This is the middle of the Atlantic. Sandbars won’t be a problem until we get back to the sound.”

I cast my line out near Jordan’s and instantly saw that something was wrong. My bait had landed on a sandy bottom.

“I can see my bait,” I said.

“I can see my bait on the bottom too,” Jordan said.

“We’re over sixty feet at least,” Mike said, checking the depth-meter.

“Then how come we’re both looking at our bait?” Jordan asked.

“We’re in three feet of water, Mike,” I said.

“I still read sixty feet.”

“Read what you want,” Jordan said. “Come look.”

Mike walked to the back of the boat, shaking his head and swaggering as he pulled the bill of his baseball cap low over his forehead. He adjusted his sunglasses, then lifted them off so he could see into the water with less distortion.

“I see your baits,” he said. “They are on the bottom …”

Then Jordan and I both heard Mike’s voice freeze and we could feel his fear spreading like a fatal toxin in the air between us.

“Jesus Christ. Reel your lines in slow, boys. So slow that it can’t feel a thing. Don’t move. Don’t breathe. Don’t do shit but slowly get your hooks away from that big son of a bitch.”

“What is it?” Jordan whispered. “The marlin?”

“I don’t know what the hell it is, but it could eat that marlin.
My God, it just keeps on going. I’ve never seen anything so big in my whole life. Never.”

We reeled our lines in slowly, with imperceptible movements of the wrists, and the light off the water made the water diamond-backed and opaque. Whatever Mike saw we could not yet see. When we set our rods down, we sank to our knees beside Mike and peered into the depths. Yet again, it looked as though we had drifted above a sandbar composed of the blackest parts of the sea and the earth. The black bottom we were over was alien and strange, but I still could not see what had alarmed Mike so much. Then Jordan spotted it and gasped in amazement.

“My God in heaven,” he said. “Don’t move a muscle, Jack. I see it, Mike. I see it. It’s huge.”

“I don’t see nothing at all,” I said, frustrated that I was looking at the exact same area that Jordan was. It was like one of those children’s puzzles with the animals hidden in the foliated shapes of the forests—and then my eyes adjusted to what I was actually seeing. Slowly, it became clear that what I thought was land was alive. Not only was it alive, I was staring at the largest sea creature I had ever seen. It wasn’t swimming, it was hovering the way ospreys and kingfishers hover over lagoons before diving down for mullet. To my left I saw the delicate movement of a wing that must have weighed a ton. To my right, I saw a black fin break the surface of the water, then slide back beneath the water’s barely ruffled surface.

“I’ve seen one of these things before,” I said. “It’s a manta ray. A devilfish. The biggest one in the world. They’re harmless, just don’t move a muscle. Call Delia Seignious.”

When I was eight years old I had been taken out to fish the wreck of the
Brunswick Moon
, which had sunk off the Isle of Orion during the hurricane of 1893. My father and grandfather had brought me as a rite of passage; I was being initiated in the habits and folkways of men. My grandfather Silas taught me how to find the wreck by placing our boat in the center of six palmettos that sat to the right of a bent live oak on shore. I remembered that day not so much for the fish we had caught, but for the stories I heard the two men tell and the feeling that adulthood was a club and an
entitlement. While we were coming back from that fishing trip we encountered a school of manta rays playing in the channel that led to the small port in Waterford.

Whether the manta rays were engaged in a mating ritual or frolicked for the sheer joy of play was never clear, but I knew that my father and grandfather felt as awed by this gathering of giants that day as I was. The rays frolicked with such enthusiasm that they made the water around them seem storm-tossed. It was like watching dark fields suddenly spring to life, new acreage at play. The shape of the mantas was bestial, demon-winged and massive. The school could have been mistaken for a feeding frenzy among tiger sharks lost in a maze of chum and blood. But what I remembered was how frisky they were, like spaniels, with each other, capable of great horseplay and affection. They leapt out of the water and played tag like overactive children released from a strict day-care center. The ocean was turbulent with their size and exuberance, and for an hour we had followed the manta rays as they performed their great and inexplicable dance along the coastal waters of South Carolina. Though huge, none of the mantas that day approached the immensity of the creature that hovered like a black, birdlike chimera three feet below us. It could have been asleep; it could have been watching us out of curiosity. The manta ray’s mouth looked large enough to swallow our eighteen-foot Renken whole. The boat that had always seemed solid and seaworthy to me now seemed as fragile as a balsa raft.

“I’m going to try to hook this baby,” I said, recovering my composure. “I hear they love shrimp.”

I reached for my pole, but Jordan grabbed my wrist hard and held it. “I was joking,” I said. “Do you think I’m an idiot?”

“You don’t joke about something that big,” Jordan said.

Then we heard Mike scream and turned around just in time to see Capers Middleton, the great-great nephew of William Elliott, raising his harpoon into the sunlight and throwing it powerfully toward the spine of the great manta ray. Neither Jordan nor I had time to utter a single word of alarm or caution—we saw the blade of the harpoon slashing through the air, then we were pitched forward as the manta ray came hurtling out of the water and over our boat.
Looking up after my head hit the boat’s railing, I saw the creature’s white underbelly pass over the boat like some biblical angel of death after the expulsion from Paradise. A terrible breaking of metal interlocked with our terrified screams as the harpoon rope tangled with the motor and tore it off as though it were made of wax. We almost capsized as the rope swept along the length of the boat, and if any of us had been standing, it would have decapitated us in an instant. It tore the windshield off as though it were made of bread. The next thing we knew the boat was being dragged through the water at a speed that seemed enormous.

For several minutes, Jordan and I lay shaken next to each other, disoriented among the debris in the bottom of the boat. My left eyebrow was cut open and blood was streaming down my face. A hook had pierced Jordan’s cheek and, in agony, he was trying to work it out. Mike and Capers lay still and blood was pooling beneath Capers’ head. The sun was still high and I estimated that it must be nearing three o’clock in the afternoon. I could not believe how fast we were hurtling through the ocean without a motor. Before I rose, I tried to figure in my mind how large the fish was that passed over us in the agony of its first leap. Its shadow had cut the sun like an eclipse, and its shape was unearthly. I moved toward Mike and realized he was seriously hurt. A piece of broken bone was sticking out of an ugly wound on his forearm.

“Mike, you, oh, God,” I cried out.

Then I heard a strangled sound and saw Jordan pointing to his mouth and the hook. I struggled toward Jordan and worked the hook until I saw it come out of the bloody soft tissue near Jordan’s lower molars. Taking the hook I pulled it out the front of his mouth. Then reaching into my own tackle box, I took out a first-aid kit and rubbed the wounded cheek down with raw alcohol and again heard Jordan scream out in pain.

“We’re in deep shit,” I said.

“Help me throw Capers overboard,” Jordan said, holding his cheek. “We’re in this pickle because he’s a dumb-ass.”

“He didn’t know,” I said, trying to clean Jordan’s face and keep my eyes away from Mike’s broken arm.

“That thing could have killed all of us.”

“Give it time,” I said.

“Why did he throw that harpoon?”

“Because he lost the marlin,” I guessed.

Jordan shook his head and said, “No. I bet he thought he was being true to the aristocratic spirit of our Elliott ancestors. Those family ties’ve screwed our boy up. He’d rather kill a Yankee at Antietam, but spearing a devilfish is the next best thing. He might’ve just killed all four of us.”

“They’ll come looking for us,” I said, trying to be reassuring. “Waterford’s got a great Marine Rescue Squad.”

“They don’t know where in the hell to look,” Jordan said. “They think we’re crabbing in one of the creeks, reading back issues of
Playboy
magazine. It’s gonna be a leap for them to know we’re being towed out to sea by a two-ton manta ray.”

We then placed life preservers beneath Mike’s and Caper’s heads; both were still unconscious. We climbed to the bow of the boat and studied the taut rope that disappeared into the sea thirty yards in front of us. The harpoon must have driven itself deep into that black-muscled wing and it occurred to me that the beast was simply fleeing like any grazing animal surprised by hunters and enduring unimaginable pain. The manta ray was trying to escape from our boat. That much was clear as the wind blew through our hair and the sun bore down on our faces and wounds, which stung every time the bow broke through a wave of a now-rising sea.

Later, we would talk about the things we should have done in those first minutes, but both Jordan and I were still in shock at the violence and suddenness of what had overtaken our fishing trip. We took no pleasure in the joyride by the great fish, but simply rode it out passively in a Zen-like state, subsumed by the awesome power of the unseen and the ineffable. One moment of sheer recklessness had placed us in great peril and we watched, witnesses to our own executions, as our fate played itself out in the water beneath us. But we could also feel the terror and the panic of the immense manta as it tore through the ocean with the blade driven into its flanks. We thought that we might soon die, and though we sat shoulder to shoulder on the boat, I felt as though I were taking that ruined, wild
ride alone. We offered each other no sense of companionship or fraternity.

For twenty miles the manta ray dragged the boat through surf that grew increasingly rough. As a wind arose from the east, the animal began to slow down, no doubt from exhaustion and loss of blood. I wondered if we would be dragged down to the bottom of the sea when the giant manta died, and it was only then that I said, “Should we untie the rope?” to no one in particular.

“We’ll have to cut it loose from that front cleat,” Jordan said, still holding his hand over his cheek.

Then suddenly the rope slackened in the water and I thought that the manta ray had managed to free itself from the harpoon. But within seconds the manta came roaring out of the water in its full monstrous glory like some forgotten behemoth from the mythology of a lost continent. It was winged and titanic as it took to the air and flapped its wings like some fierce prehistoric bird. Its leap took us by surprise and we nearly fell off the side of the boat when it hit the water with a thunderous clap that could have been heard for miles. Frightened, we eased down into the seats of the boat and held on tightly as the manta ray executed a series of leaps. It rose out of the water again, then again, like some new species of death and darkness that fear had fashioned for its leisure.

Then the manta ray reversed its course and began coming toward the boat. Mike screamed in pain as he awoke, but we were so transfixed watching the rope go slack again, suspended in an agony of anticipation as we awaited the sounding of the great fish, that we did not respond. Mike was still screaming when the manta ray left the water, coming out toward and over us, the white belly passing over and blocking the sun once more, eradicating all hope of our deliverance and eventual safety. The boat seemed puny in the shadow of the wounded beast, and if the manta ray had landed on top of it, it would have crushed all four of us as easily as if we had been the larvae of eels. But the manta twisted away, somersaulted in midair, and loosed itself from the harpoon, snapping the rope at the same instant. Its left wing smashed down on the starboard side of the boat, and as the craft dipped into the sea we took in water before it suddenly righted itself.

Jordan and I began bailing with the Dixie cups that lay scattered all over the boat. Bailing with two hands and cups, it seemed forever before the boat was mostly clear of water. Only then could we turn to Mike, whose moaning was dreadful to hear.

Jordan set Mike’s broken arm as best he could, wrapping it tightly with rags torn from a tee shirt and waterproof tape from one of the tackle boxes. He checked on Capers and washed out the deep wound at the back of his head, guessing out loud that Capers had a concussion. He even offered to sew up the ugly gash that ran across my eyebrow, but I demurred.

We drifted that night, heavy with sun and exhaustion, into a dreamless sleep that resembled unconsciousness. It felt as deep as the sea itself.

I was already up when Capers awoke and the first light seeped out of the eastern horizon. Though still dazed and unsteady, he took in the sleeping figures around him, touched his head wound several times, and surveyed the condition of the boat.

“What in the hell did you boys do to my father’s boat?” he said in a loud voice.

“Go back to sleep, Capers,” I said.

“What’d you do to the motor?” Capers said. “Oh my God, my father’s gonna kill you guys when he sees what you’ve done.”

“You don’t remember?” I asked.

“Remember what?”

“The manta ray?”

“You mean the marlin?” he said. “I hooked a marlin that got away. Then I went to sleep and I woke up and you guys have ruined my daddy’s boat.”

“Save your strength, Ahab,” Jordan said, sitting up and looking out at the ocean spread out around us.

“You guys are going to have to help me pay for the damage,” Capers said, his voice growing more shrill. “The motor alone cost over two thousand bucks.”