Hemingway's Boat (22 page)

Beauty. She shines on the back of his eyeball every time he stands up from his writing desk to stretch his aching muscles. It's mid-July 1934
,
and he's had his boat for two months. A few days from now Ernest Hemingway will take
Pilar
across to Cuba for the remainder of the summer and fall's marlin season. He intends to be in place for the first quarter of the new moon, by which time the striped marlin will have commenced their yearly run, down from Bimini. No one knows why the big fish always appear off Bimini, on the western edge of the British-held Bahamas, a couple of months before they decide to run in Cuba. But they do. As Captain Harry put it in that recently published story
, “One Trip Across” (
payment for which has helped pay for
Pilar):
“They aren't here until they come. But when they come there's plenty of them. And they've always come. If they don't come now they're never coming. The moon is right. There's a good stream and we're going to get a good breeze.… The small ones thin out and stop before the big ones come.” Sweet Jesus, though, if this hasn't been a queer year in the Stream for marlin. Haven't the big boys taken their own time in getting down? Something like his work in progress, at least some days
.

Every part of his fishing machine still has a kind of factory gleam. He's been keeping her at the sleepy Key West Navy Yard. (Captain Jackson, the commanding officer, who's been out on the boat as a guest a Sunday or two, is opening the facility to private boats, since nothing much is going on there anyway.) This means she's at anchor not even ten minutes by foot from his front gate, ten minutes from the second-floor room behind the main house where pages of his new and experimental Africa book are filling up almost daily. The work, which hasn't yet found its true title (he'll have to go through the usual list making), is going across with him, of course. The title for now is “The Highlands of Africa.”

Like the sentences that made him famous, the beauty of his boat is of the spare, clean, serviceable kind. She's been written, you could say, in the deceptively plain American idiom. She's long, low-slung, sexy, a black hull, a green and canvas-cladding topside, and butternut-colored decks and side panels. Her heat-reflecting green—which is what you'd mainly
see if you were looking at her from the air—is not quite turquoise, not quite jade, not quite emerald, but something blending all three. As for her mahogany brightwork—on the decks and cabin sides and transom—well, it's almost as if you're gazing at the insides of a lit jack-o'-lantern
.

If you stood away from her, at about thirty paces, and gave her a level look, she'd strike you as something tubular. Tied up at the dock, nodding in the wash like a thoroughbred aching to go, she's apt to put you in mind of one of those classic open-cockpit racing cars at Indy, whose drivers climb in wearing skintight aviator caps and outsize goggles. A large part of the sleekness is owed to the way her curved and raked stern has been cut so low—a whole foot lower, the better for bringing over, on a large wooden roller bar that projects slightly aft of the transom, the thousand-pounders of her master's deep-sea imagination
.

When she's out on the water, starting to move at a good clip, slicing through whitecaps, with both engines hooked up—the big seventy-five-horse Chrysler, the little four-cylinder Lycoming—she'll appear a little less submariney. Three years from now, when her flying bridge is constructed over top of the cockpit, she'll become even more of an upright-looking craft. But even then, her lines will still be quite aesthetic. Like her owner's prose, there will always be something linear about her
.

If she'll never be a speedboat on the high seas, the lady's got some surprising wheels. As noted, she can do sixteen knots at top speed, and do it almost without breaking a sweat. It's true you get a pretty strong vibration at that level. When he cuts off the little engine, the ride goes much smoother, mainly because the big Chrysler beneath the floorboards is rubber mounted. Typically, he has her at about ten knots. This saves on gas. In addition to her three-hundred-gallon-capacity fuel tanks, he can store another one hundred gallons in portable drums in her forward compartment, and carry an extra one hundred gallons of drinking water up there, too. He can troll her all day on ten gallons, using the little guy. The big guy will use up about fifteen gallons in a day's trolling, but at low speeds
Pilar
runs quiet as a watch, or at least this is how the captain brags about her
.

She's got a twelve-foot beam and a three-and-a-half-foot draft. Her cockpit is both an open-air and enclosed sedan-like structure on the back third of the boat. Seven or eight people can fit into this space without feeling suffocated. It's the vessel's nerve center and the place where you'll most often see him, port side, at the helm, unless he's taking a nap or fighting a fish astern from his high-rigged and slat-back swivel fishing
chair. Several of the cockpit windows are screened, and others have roll-down canvas curtains, providing a tent-like, house-like, feeling. (The curtains can also be swung out—awnings on his summer porch.) The middle window in the cockpit on the port side swings inward and can be latched to the wainscotted overhead (there aren't any “roofs” at sea; rather overheads) with a hook-and-eye screw, in the same way a screen door latches to a doorjamb. So the ventilation throughout is generally superb, even on the fiercest Gulf Stream days, when “the sun gives you something to remember him by,” which is how the owner put it in his latest
Esquire
dispatch, out on stands that very week
.

There's a bell in the cockpit, and he loves to clang it loudly with a loop of cord
.

Her name, his favorite Spanish feminine name, is painted in handsome lettering at the center of her stern, along with the name of her home port. Like this:

PILAR
KEY WEST
FLA

The name appears again, in smaller font, below the cockpit window, out of which her master, standing at the wheel, can often be seen leaning and waving to folks on shore as he's easing off. (“Pilar” is lettered in the same place on the starboard side, too.)

One of Arnold Samuelson's jobs every morning is to swab the dew off the green cladding on the top of the cockpit. In these two months of his employment, the Maestro, the Mice, has been learning to sleep in a sway, a different kind of hobo's lullaby
.

She's got no ship-to-shore radio. Basically what she's got is a lighted binnacle holding a compass, a wheel, various engine controls. The throttles for the two engines look like handlebars on a bicycle. There's a dashboard with gauges and switches for monitoring such things as oil levels and engine temperatures, and for turning on the bilge pumps and running lights. (The port-side running light is red, the starboard green—any seaman knows this.) But, really, this whole cockpit lash-up seems almost as elementary as what you'd encounter on the dash of a Ford tractor. And yet everything's here to navigate in and around and through the shoals of surprise, if you just keep your nautical wits
.

Consider the helm: again, elegant simplicity. Many parts of
Pilar
will
get replaced over the next three decades, but never her wheel. It's made of wood, with six tapered knobs, built on three shafts, each shaft running to a hub. Set into the wood, flush with it, is a circular plate bearing the manufacturer's name in raised brass lettering: “Wheeler Shipyard, Brooklyn, New York.”

Inside the cockpit, on either side, are two long cushioned bunks, for general lounging, as well as for seating at meals. At the factory, they've custom built the starboard-side bunk to be a foot wider than the one on the other side, the better to accommodate the bulk of
Pilar
's master when he's taking a siesta or using it as his nighttime bed. At mealtime, a table gets put in place and secured on two outer legs from its stowed position a few feet behind the wheel. Presto, a stable space for four diners, maybe more if they're willing to get elbow to elbow. Presto, a cockpit becomes an open-air dining salon, with two banquettes, with the food and the wine brought up from the galley below. When Mrs. Hemingway's aboard, a tablecloth gets spread, and real dishes and silverware will get put out—well, not always. Sometimes things go grungy
.

Forward of the cockpit, on a lower deck level, is the main sleeping compartment. You step into it through a varnished half door. (The in-between space is referred to in the catalog literature as the “companionway.”) There are upper and lower berths down here, a tight toilet, a cubbyhole galley. Also down here, forward of the main sleeping compartment, is a smaller compartment, which gets used for storage as well as bunking. On a boat you never have enough storage room. Belowdecks is its own little universe
.

On the topside, in the middle of
Pilar
's long snout, is a hinged hatch cover, which serves as an air scoop for the main sleeping compartment. At the bow is another hinged hatch and a small sliding doorway, which provides access to the two interior compartments as well as to the bow and which also helps with air flow. Everything about her design feels artful, tidy, crafted, efficient, thought out
.

The forward cockpit—really just a small, triangular, walk-around and open-air space at the bow—is where the anchors and winches and ropes and throw-off lines and “fenders” get stowed. Fenders are those cushioned pads—sometimes old tires are employed—that protect the sides of the boat from getting cut up when she's settling in at the dock. When the boat is under way, the fenders get hauled up and stowed with the ropes and anchors. A boat with her fenders showing is a damn sloppy boat
.

Pilar
's captain has been so devoted to learning her quirks and tics and little running secrets that he's been more or less willing to leave the actual fishing of late to his guests. The fact is, on this side of the Gulf Stream, the Florida side, the fish aren't big enough. He needs marlin, and they're over there, across the Straits of Florida, off Cuba's north coast. Meantime, on this side, waiting to go, he's been practicing his swivel maneuver. With one engine pushing forward, the other in reverse
, Pilar
can turn in her own literal length. You couldn't hope to do this on a one-screw boat. The swivel maneuver is both tricky and crucial when it comes to chasing a large fish. The enraged, terrified animal wants to dive beneath you, tangle your line in the other fishing lines, drag you and your thirty-eight-foot machine around the sea as if she were a toy boat
.

You're adjusting the throttles and listening for the pulse of the engines as they start to synchronize. You're eyeing the tachometers. This swivel skill is about your ear as much as your eye, and you learn in roughly the same way that a student pilot learns to shoot approaches on a runway: by putting aside the manuals and strapping on a chute and going up with the instructor and then just practicing over and over
. Pilar
's master has been serving as his own instructor, learning by the seat of his pants, not that he's yet got her eating out of his hand, turning on a nickel and returning him some change. But soon
.

Hilariously, he's ordered custom-made sailor suits for his “crew.” They're in both navy blue and summer-dress white. They have his boat's name stitched across the breast. He's sent them on ahead to Cuba. You'll forgive him this bombast. In a year or so, the monogrammed uniforms will get ditched
.

Pilar,
as I said, snoozes at night less than ten minutes by foot from where her master's been toiling on his new book from about 8:30 in the morning until 1:30 in the afternoon. In April he'd begun this work, not really knowing where it was taking him, on rustle-free onionskin sheets, and the slanted sentences were then getting written in a small, concentrated hand: it was as if you could sense the torture of the start just by the size of the words. At page 91
—
that was early June—he'd switched over to newsprint, cheaper even than onionskin, the kind on which he used to pound out his copy in Kansas City and Toronto and Paris. Now, three months in, the words quite round and large and fewer of them per page, the old newshound is at 201 sheets. It's Bastille weekend. On page 201 he'd evoked a shady little hotel porch in Africa, and his wife dancing with the manager to a scratchy gramophone, and the emetine with which they'd
shot him through for his amoebic dysentery, and the wind that blew like a gale, and, not least, the smoking-hot teal and fresh vegetables that the waiters had brought to the table on that cold night. You render something like that on the page and it's as if you've earned your afternoon on the boat, rid of everything mental, just the blessed life of action once more
.

So picture him getting up from his desk, going down the stairs, grabbing a few things from the main house, and saying good-bye to his wife and calling to the kids to behave themselves and promising to be home by supper and then exiting by the front gate and making a sharp right on Whitehead Street. It's in the vicinity of two o'clock. He walks in a west-by-northwesterly direction, cutting through the old Afro-Bahamian quarter, which abuts his own estate-like home. He angles past the raw-board houses, the roosters roaming with the freedom of sacred cows, the curbside food stalls, the hair-straightening parlors, the female cyclists pedaling lazily along with their dresses provocatively hiked up. He moves through the white glare of a Key West afternoon in that curious, rolling, cantilevered, ball-of-the-foot, and just-off-kilter gait that suggests a kind of subtle menace. He's on dense and narrow and aromatic streets bearing people's first names—Olivia, Petronia, Thomas, Emma, Angela, Geraldine. He's Tom Sawyer on a Saturday in Hannibal, tooting like a steamboat, rid now of Aunt Polly's clutches, left to his own devices, not to show back home until the sun is slanting in long bars. He's Jake Barnes on a spring morning in Paris, when the horse chestnut trees are in bloom in the Luxembourg gardens. Jake is expert at shortcutting down the Boul ‘Mich' to the rue Soufflot, where he hops on the back platform of an S bus, and rides it to the Madeleine, and then jumps off and strolls along the boulevard des Capucines to l'Opéra, where he then turns in at his building and rides the elevator up to his office to read the mail and sit at the typewriter and prepare a few cables for his newspaper across the Atlantic. “There was the pleasant early-morning feel of a hot day,” is the way Jake's creator, living in this different region of light, had said it at the start of chapter 5 of
The Sun Also Rises.