Ultimate Sports (23 page)

“No. Keep the tip high.”

Another twenty… forty… sixty yards of line comes off the reel. There’s hardly anything left on the spool.

Then the screaming ends.

“He stopped!”

“Reel!”

Andrew starts to reel. The line goes completely slack. The rod straightens. Andrew’s shoulders sag. He stops reeling. “He’s gone. I lost him.”

“Reel!”

“But he’s gone,” Andrew argues. “There’s nothing there.”

“There won’t be if you don’t reel.”

Andrew gives me a questioning look.

“Do what he says.”

Andrew starts to reel. “What’s going on?”

“He’s coming back toward us.”

“Huh? Why?”

“Because he’s a bonefish. Reel faster!”

Andrew reels like a maniac. Suddenly the line goes tight again.

Vic smiles. “There he is.”

This time the bone takes off across the bow, the thin
monofilament line kicking up a spray as it cuts through the water.

Eeeeeeiiinnnn!
the reel starts to scream again. Andrew turns the crank.

“Stop reeling. Let him run.”

The rod arcs as the fish shoots through the water.

“That’s not a fish, it’s a torpedo!” Andrew cries.

“Tip up.”

The bone’s second run isn’t quite as long as the first. Andrew reels again.

“Man, my arms hurt. This thing must be a giant!”

“Eight to ten pounds.”

“No way!”

Andrew gets the bone within thirty feet of the boat when it turns and races off again.
Eeeeeeiiinnnn!

“I can’t believe this!” he gasps.

I share a look with Vic that turns into a smile.

The bone has two more runs. Andrew holds on to the thin rod, babbling like a little kid at the circus for the first time. Short of jumping off the boat and trying to run across the flat, he’s done almost everything wrong.

And yet the fish is still there, now exhausted, floating on its side next to the boat. Grabbing the line, Vic brings the bone close without taking it out of the water. The silvery fish has dark stripes. Its eyes are blank and defeated. Vic gently removes the hook, sloshes the fish back and forth in the water to get its gills working, then lets it go.

Slumped in his seat, his arms hanging helplessly at his sides, Andrew shakes his head. “Unreal…”

“Ready to go home?”

“No way. I want to catch another.”

The afternoon winds down. Andrew and I hook four more bones; manage to land two.

Now the sun is a deep orange ball hovering on the liquid horizon. The cottony clouds above are streaked crimson and pink. The whole sky is a huge dome of gradually shifting pastel hues. The water has turned the color of slate. The air is silent, profoundly still.

The fishing’s over. It’s hard to see the transparent fins in this light, but we sit for a moment before heading back. The skiff rocks gently; no one speaks. The sunset is a vast panorama of color. We might as well be a thousand miles away, a million years in the past, or on another planet altogether.

“Time to go, gentlemen.”

We race home over the smooth water, the wind in our faces, the sky turning dark in the east. Feeling tired but satisfied, I hope the people who make beer commercials never get their hands on this.

Andrew’s been strangely quiet.

Back at the dock, it’s dark. We thank Vic and pay him. He turns the skiff around and heads off into the inky shadows with his red and green running lights on. For him it was just another day’s work.

Andrew and I stand under the bare lightbulb at the end of the dock, watching the red and green lights gradually disappear into the dark. Vic’s wake sloshes against the pilings under the pier. Bugs and moths flit around us, crazed by the lightbulb. The kids are still in the pool, screaming.

Andrew turns toward me. “Next year?”

I slap his hand. “Yeah. Save those quarters.”

Todd Strasser has written several award-winning novels for teenagers, among them
Angel Dust Blues, Friends Till the End
,
A Very Touchy Subject, Workin3 for Peanuts, The Complete Computer Popularity Program
, and
Beyond the Reef
, along with a trilogy about a musical group
(Rock
V
Roll Nights, Turn It Up!
, and
Wildlife)
, a horror series
(Nightmare Inn)
, and a romance series
(The Lifeguard)
. Among his most popular books are
The Accident
, a mystery about a teenage drunk-driving accident, and
Help! I’m Trapped in My Teacher’s Body
, a humorous story about what happens when a boy and a male teacher switch bodies. Jake Sherman, the main character in that novel, returns in
Help! I’m Trapped in the First Day of School
, in which he discovers he can’t get to the second day of school without making some serious changes. Another recent novel by Todd Strasser is
How I Changed My Life
, the story of a shy young actress and an injured football player trying to discover whether they are meant for each other.

Mr. Strasser has also gained notoriety for his novelizations of popular movies, including
Ferris Bueller’s Day-Off, The Wave, Home Alone
, and
Free Willy. US
magazine called him “the most prolific writer” of this kind of book.

When he isn’t writing at his home in Westchester County, New York, or conducting writing workshops for young people in schools across the country, Todd Strasser likes to play tennis, ski, and fly down to the Florida Keys to fish for bones.

“If”
is such a funny little word, isn’t it? A conjunction, we learned in class, joining two clauses, but really, joining whole worlds of what might have been, or better, what here and now
is
. Let me start my story by adding up the ifs:

—If I hadn’t grown up with a father who took me, his daughter, sailing on the Norfolk Broads because he had a wife who gets seasick just looking at a boat…

—If I hadn’t done that Italian cookery course when I was only fifteen because my mother wanted me to do something “civilizing”…

—If I hadn’t gone backpacking to New Zealand when I was sixteen…

—If I hadn’t had a letter of introduction to that mad family in Auckland…

—If I hadn’t stepped foot on a yacht called the
Dolphin
…

Then I wouldn’t be settling down to talk to a tape recorder. I wouldn’t be back in my parents’ Elizabethan
cottage just outside of Oxford, England, with a letter on the oak desk offering me ten thousand pounds for my story in five thousand words.

That’s right, you heard—ten thousand pounds. The figure leaped out at me, about the only thing I could understand of four pages of small legal jargon signed by someone called Penelope Higgins, Publisher. First, actually, she rang, wanting a reporter to come and do an “in-depth” interview. My father said, don’t consent to a bit of it, in-depth or otherwise. He’s an academic, a child psychologist who writes books on things like child abuse and is always being misquoted. “They always get it wrong,” he said. “Do it yourself, girl.”

So here I am, doing it myself, the talking. After that they will have my tape transcribed onto paper and they will help me edit it down to five thousand “words. I’ve not the foggiest notion what five thousand words looks like.

“Just talk for a couple of hours, my dear,” Penelope said on the phone. “Just tell your story.” If she isn’t the Duchess of something she ought to be. My father, who knows about book contracts and editing, insisted that my letter back say something about my retaining final approval.

So, here I am, a contract signed, feeling a bit of an idiot, but I guess that’s a small price to pay for ten thousand pounds. I’m lying on my patchwork quilt. Bess (she’s my Labrador) is snoring at my feet; the diamond-shaped panes of my attic bedroom windows want cleaning. I can smell old dust, old lavender, Mother’s Benson & Hedges, seawater in my wet-weather gear hanging behind the door, my own Benetton perfume. The scene is pretty, cozy—and doesn’t move. Outside June is bustin’ out all
over. Bluebells, jonquils, the copper beech, the apple trees, Mother’s white roses, striped just-mown lawns.

Oh, it’s all a long long way from the rolling sapphire seas of the South Pacific….

Perhaps I’d better explain that these days I’m a professional yachtsperson. Kirsty Fleming, aged nineteen, from Oxford, England. I’ve just been chosen for the British challenge in the Whitbread round-the-world yacht race, the only woman on an otherwise all-male crew. I’ve just sailed round the Pacific, the only woman on an otherwise all-male crew, and I wasn’t chosen for my cooking. Well, in a sort of way I was, but I was
not
the bottom sheet, despite what you may be thinking. On that trip I had a different sort of training, and it was mostly in stamina.

Stamina, I hear you say?

You need more than stamina to race around the world. You need to know about spinnaker poles and knots and rigging and halyards and sheets and guys and splicing and jibs and genoas and navigation and sextants and weather and signals and flags and lights and buoys and rules of the road and medical emergencies and how to sleep in two inches of black water with the boat on the verge of a capsize and an unseen iceberg lurking two miles ahead.

What’s something nebulous and unskilled like stamina got to do with it?

I can’t do this cold—talking to a machine?

Are you listening, in there?

I’m going to call you Martin.

I once had a friend called Martin. He was my first boyfriend, me aged fourteen, him fifteen. But he didn’t like my mother or my father’s demands, too early in our friendship, that he come sailing, make up a threesome
on the eighteen-foot day boat we keep on the Norfolk Broads. Martin hated sailing. He came only once and got seasick, and then puked over the wrong side of the boat and the wind blew it all back. So our romance went nowhere. But he was a sweet boy, gentle, nonmacho, and we kept talking. He listened to all my ravings for a year or so. I felt safe with him. He’s at Cambridge now, reading English. He graduates next year.

So listen, Martin.

What? Oh, you want some ground rules. No sailing jargon; no poops and stanchions and heaving to and all the rest of it. All right, I agree with that. Most stories about the sea are so full of sailing jargon you need a nautical dictionary to get past the first page. Ever tried to read Joseph Conrad? As a kid I couldn’t even cope with Arthur Ran-some! So I’ll talk about the sharp end, the blunt end, the kitchen, my bed, ropes. Okay, mate?—as they say in New Zealand.

Oh yes, New Zealand, where it all started. You remember I ran away to New Zealand when I was sixteen? Well, it wasn’t quite running away, not an act of teenage defiance and rebellion, a daughter-goes-missing, headlines-in-the-
Daily Mail
sort of thing. I just told my parents I was flying to New Zealand next week because it was the middle of winter and I couldn’t stand the snow and school one moment longer and it was either an airplane or a bottle of pills.

I meant it.

I said I’d booked my fare and could they please loan me a thousand pounds for the ticket, a new backpack, and spending money until I got a job in New Zealand. Mother had an attack of the vapors about me being far too young and not finishing my A-levels and the dangers of young
girls going hitchhiking, but Dad knew what I was on about.

He signed a check and gave me this letter of introduction to some old friends in Auckland. He’d been at university, Yale or Duke or somewhere, with the wife. Mother bought a money bag to put around my waist and a whistle to blow if/when I got raped. She helped me pack so that I didn’t start off already overweight. Dad lifted my bulging purple backpack into the car. They both cried at the airport. Then there was a five-hour delay while we waited for a blizzard to blow itself out. I wanted them to go, leave me, but they wouldn’t.

Remember, Martin, I rang you the night before I left?

You couldn’t or wouldn’t understand. Why New Zealand,
New Zealand
for God’s sake? Because it’s as far away as I can possibly get, I said, unless I sign up for space travel, and after watching Christa McAuliffe’s spacecraft fly to pieces on the telly five minutes after takeoff, I wasn’t so keen on that. Jumbo jets to New Zealand don’t often go down in flames. They usually arrive.

Auckland’s a hole, you said. It wasn’t like you, Martin, that comment, not you at all. You’ve never been there, how could you know? I said, Missing me already? Desperately, you said. Come with me, I said. Take a trip. The slight pause at the other end of the phone made me think you just might. Come with me.

But you didn’t and Auckland wasn’t a hole. It was a Monday in January. Coming nonstop from Los Angeles, we flew in from the north, which meant over the Hauraki Gulf and the Waitamata Harbor. The pilot was a Kiwi who liked talking to his passengers, so we heard all about the famous cruising grounds, and Rangitoto, which is the circular volcanic island at the entrance to the harbor, and the
anniversary regatta. This regatta, he explained, was why there were so many yachts out sailing: over a thousand, celebrating the founding of the city in… I think he said 1840. It was the oldest and largest one-day regatta in the world. Yawn. He apologized for the low cloud. Air traffic control had told him that occasional rain squalls were giving the yachts a hard time down there on the water. Just get this airplane down safely on the tarmac, I thought. I couldn’t see much anyway, just low green hills, white-speckled sea, drifting gray clouds. I was sitting between a fat businessman who had asked for (and got) two meals each mealtime and a very ugly baby attached to a young mother in leather jeans. Neither of them was going to tell me much about Auckland’s cheapest backpackers’ hostels, were they? We landed in the pouring rain at six at night. Actually, Martin, I was scared stiff.

I shall pass with dignity over the airport, where they made me empty out my backpack to the last pair of panty hose, and the bus trip into town, where I got off at the Hilton by mistake, instead of the Hylton Backpackers, and my first night in a dorm with two German lesbians who seemed to think I was one of them. I speak enough German to understand something of what they were saying. Eight o’clock next morning I got on the phone to Dad’s friends and by that night I was one of the family.

Now, to understand why I’m now a famous round-the-world yachtsperson, Martin, you’ve got to understand something about Auckland. The place is sailing-mad. In Britain we might think Cowes is something special, and over in America they’ve got Newport, Rhode Island, and Chesapeake Bay and Miami and San Diego, but in Auckland you don’t have to be rich to own a boat.
Everybody
sails something, or drives something flashy with a big engine,
or small with a little outboard, or goes windsurfing or surfing or fishing or canoeing or rowing or just swimming. They’re sea-mad.

The family I stayed with weren’t rich, but they owned about five boats: a keelboat, three sailing dinghies, and a runabout with an outboard, and two Windsurfers. The keelboat was seventy years old, vintage wooden; the sailing dinghies were between ten and fifty years old; the Windsurfers were brand-new, and they kept them all in a scruffy tumbledown boat shed on the edge of the harbor. Perhaps “scruffy” isn’t quite the right word. “Messy,” “chaotic,” “a shambles,”—totally fascinating. You wanted it, some bolt, or block, or brass screw or length of rope or scrap of sail, Pete would find it for you, somewhere, like an archaeologist digging in a scrap heap.

They don’t really come into this story much—Pete and his boats and his mad, messy, chaotic, and fascinating family: the wife who went to Yale, five teenagers, four cars, five boats, two dogs, and a pet seagull—except as links in the chain that led me to be turning over the tape for side two.

Are you still listening, Martin?

Where was I? Oh yes, Pete the teacher. If I thought my father was slightly obsessed with his little day boat on the Norfolk Broads, I hadn’t then met Pete, or other equally boat-mad Aucklanders. Various members of the family and friends thereof sailed most weekends and all the summer holidays. They painted other weekends. They read yachting magazines at night and talked races and designs and sailing gossip round the dinner table. The house was full of sailing ship watercolors and wet life jackets.

When the Whitbread round-the-world yachts came to Auckland every four years, they hosted a crew, which
meant providing dry stationary beds and iced beer for fifteen randy young men and doing great piles of their stinking laundry. One year they all took Spanish lessons because they were to be hosting a Spanish yacht. Next time it was the Russians. Pete taught science and maritime studies at a high school, “the wife” taught clinical psychology at the Auckland medical school, and the five kids were all students, from university down to primary school.

Now, I didn’t freeload, Martin. I really liked Mrs. Pete and Fanny, the daughter, same age as me, and I didn’t mind being teased about my Pommy accent and pale skin. During the two weeks I was there I pulled my weight with housework and shopping and odd jobs on the boats. All the schoolkids were going back to school at the start of their new year in February. I lay on the beach down by the boat shed, below the house, and stupidly got blistered quite badly on my shoulders. They’d warned me about New Zealand’s ultraviolet sun and holes in the ozone layer, but after Oxford’s snow I just couldn’t resist basking. I began to see Auckland as the beautiful city it is, between two harbors, with its little green hills that are dormant volcanoes. Not dead, note: dormant. They say one of them will pop sooner or later. You can climb up and see the old craters, shaped into deep and sinister cones.

Mid-February is lazy time in New Zealand. The kids are all back at school and university, but the country still feels like it’s on holiday. I had started to make halfhearted attempts to find a cheap apartment and get waitressing work when Pete suggested I meet some youngish blue-water yachting friends of his who were looking for crew.

The next if.

The silly thing is that I wasn’t then an athletic type, far from it. Yes, I’d done some sailing with Dad at home. I
knew how to steer a boat and put the sails up, but I wasn’t really hooked on sailing as “my sport.” I didn’t particularly see the need to have a sport at all. I liked going to films, cooking things like sauces for pasta and especially rich Italian cheesecakes, just being with my friends. I loathed any exercise, but especially the team games we did at school, hockey and such. I was hopeless with a tennis racket, and no one swims much in England, though technically speaking I could stay afloat with a sort of breast-stroke. I was a bit plump. Let’s say, being truthful, very plump. I smoked quite a bit to avoid becoming plumper. I wore very baggy clothes, of dark and obscuring colors. I was a bit of a blob, really.