Hugo awards the short st.., p.221
Hugo Awards: The Short Stories (Volume 1), page 221
Then I began to explore, letting the gentle swells carry me over perfect lace-coral fields, dazzled by neon-blue angels, admiring the impossible pink of the ill-named and delectable hogfish – another proof, if one were needed, that no one had yet shot over this reef. Clouds of blue-headed wrasse were feeding in my shadow: I paused for a long inspection, hoping to catch sight of one of the juvenile females, who mate in schools, in the phase of growing into a much larger, red-and-yellow, monogamous male. Until recently these two forms had been considered separate species, and I never see them without wondering what our own social system would be like had humans evolved with this trait.
Imagine our world, if all the senior males, the O.J. Simpsons, the Walter Cronkites and Leonid Brezhnevs, had started out as little girls and young mothers? Just in time, I remembered not to chuckle and choke myself.
Never had the underwater world been more ravishing; I flippered lazily through turquoise and liquid air, noting that the light was now tinged with faint gold. Even the evil head of a moray eel protruding from its hole in the reef was a green-gold heraldic emblem of villainy, and the enormous grouper stupidly eyeing me from a half-spear shot away was crusted with dark jewels.
The sea was so calm that I decided to cross the inner reef and have a look at the coral heads where the so-called sleeping sharks occasionally hide. I had acquired companions; three young barracudas were circling me, disappearing for moments only to rejoin me from a new angle, their mouths as usual open in toothy gapes. I had taken the normal precaution of removing all shiny gear, even to my medical-plaque chain, but one large fellow was showing so much interest in my diving watch that I debated hiding it in my suit. The local barracudas are said to be harmless – I had been instructed, when meeting one nose-to-nose under water, to shout “Boo!” But I had found this difficult, especially in a snorkel mask. My sound came out as a pallid “Urk!” I found a pass in the inner reef and flippered through, momentarily losing my carnivorous friends. The in-shore bay was an uninteresting grass-plain relieved here and there by a giant orange starfish, a flotilla of yellow-tails, or a huge live conch. It was the isolated brain-coral heads which interested me. I cruised along up-current; the old learn quickly to start their journeys upwind or uphill, so that nature will help them home. What I was looking for was a large pile with a cave at its base in which a sleeper shark might lie.
A NOTE ABOUT THE MAYAS OF THE QUINTANA ROO
The Quitana Roo – pronounced Keen-TAH-nah Row – is a real and very strange place: The ‘wild’ Easternmost shore of the Yucatan Peninsula, officially, but not psychologically a part of Mexico. A diary of life on its shores could often be taken for a log of life on an alien planet.
For example, few people know that the millions-strong Maya peoples quite recently rose and fought bloodily for their independence, principally against Mexico. They were not totally defeated; the Maya wars ended with a negotiated truce only in 1935. (The Secretary of the Maya Annies died the year of my first visit.) Mexico promptly divided the peninsula into the provinces of Campeche, Yucatan, and the Territory of Quintana Roo, which includes Cozumel. On that coast there are today (1980) Maya villages who still exercise their treaty rights of remaining unassimilated and ‘modernized’. They are visited only rarely, and by invitation. The governor of Cozumel, a friend of mine, last year paid such a visit; he went alone and for the last 16 miles, along an archaic sac bé, on foot.
It is difficult for those afflicted by Mayaphilia to shut off, but perhaps the Good Editor will allow two more points: First, Mayas, the most oriental of all native American Indians, are as different from the oft-conquered, tribally-mixed, tourist-acclimated Indians you meet in Mainland Mexico as an unreconstructed Highland Scot is from a cockney of London. And second, 99 percent of the substance of the yarns that follow is simple fact… and I could not swear that what seems fictional was not recounted to me by the four-thousand-year old voices that murmur still in the nights of the Quintana Roo.
Most were too small, so I swam out further, toward the second reef. From here I could just glimpse the shining white dot above the hazy southern coastline which was the white tower of Tuloom, high on its cliff. Tuloom is our chief local ruina, a mediocre remnant of greatness whose claims to fame are its glorious site and one strange carving, unique in all Yucatan, which may – or may not – concern this tale.
By the center of the second reef I spotted exactly what I was looking for: It was perfect – great rounded boulders, with a big dim cave or tunnel at the base like those where I had encountered the sleepers in younger days, before my trick ear took the deeper dives away. This one was only about five meters down. Peering, I was almost sure that the sun was lighting something rounded and amber-tan floating in the cave. Moreover, my attendant barracudas seemed to have found business elsewhere. Could I dive down and look?
Debating, I took off my mask to clean it and noticed that the sun was now definitely slanting down. There was not much time for the long return. Dilemma: I longed mightily to look at that shark, and I longed mightily not to. It was not merely the pain I would suffer in my ear – to tell the truth, it was a lonesome place and time, if this happened to be shark wake-up hour. But – that gnawing question of my life – was I needlessly afraid? Was I, er, chicken?
As I dithered, two things occurred almost at once. The first was auditory – I heard the beat of a boat’s motor around the point. This drove the shark from my mind – there is no shame in taking refuge from the occasional maniac who tears full speed along the inner reef to make time, trusting to the god of machismo that he won’t hit a coral head. Many of them also enjoy making swimmers dive for their lives. I paddled as fast as I could go for the white water of the middle reef, feeling like a wheelchair driver caught on the Indianapolis raceway.
Here I met with the second, larger event: At the base of the big reef was something long and moving. The water was roiled, and at first I thought I was seeing some unearthly endless centipede, walking south. Then a clear interval showed me what it was – langustas, the tropic lobsters – an enormous unending file of them, all sizes and ages, following each other along the base of the reef. I was looking upon a recently discovered mystery – the Migration of the Lobsters, coming from God knew where, en route to an equally unknown destination, upon which few people have ever set eyes.
I stared, counting to the hundreds, before I came out of my trance to realize that no rooster-tailed sportscraft had appeared. In fact, now I could hear clearer, it was not a speedboat at all, but the throbbing of a much larger craft moving along the outermost reef. Correct: around the point was coming the ramshackle box-form of a langustera – a lobster boat – her white paint looking deceptively smart in the afternoon sun, and her old motor setting up an out of synch cacophony. She was towing a pair of dinghies.
The uproar ceased as she came opposite me by the far reef; there was a rattle of anchor-chain, and the dinghies were double-manned and cutting along side the reef with unusual speed. As the nearest anchored, a figure in bright red shorts stood up and tossed his long hair before masking up. Unmistakable.
“Lorenzo! Lorenzo Canseco! Qué tal?”
Typically, he gave me an offhand wave; he had long since spotted and identified me. Lorenzo was one of our local diving superstars, which meant that the langustera was the Angélique. I knew her captain well.
But there was less than the usual gaiety to Lorenzo’s wave, and he was in the water fast and businesslike. The other diver, whom I hadn’t seen clearly, was already in and working. The far boat was empty too. All four divers were searching the outer reef and the space between, normally a source.
I looked down at my procession of strange little beings. So long as no one crossed the middle reef in the right spot they were safe.
I swam over to Lorenzo’s dinghy, a plan forming in my mind. The other diver was just coming up to boat two undersized langustas and a respectable grouper. To my surprise, it was my friend the owner-captain himself, an emaciated gold-tanned figure, with white hair and a remarkably distinguished white hairline mustache.
“Don Manuel! Se recuerde de su viejo amigo?”
My Spanish has been called unicamente desastroso; it was possibly that, rather than my appearance, which enabled him to greet me with warmth. Then he rested his elbows on the gunwales, and I saw that he was quite tired. This probably meant that he had engaged in exertions that would have hospitalized most gringos.
“How goes it?”
Captain Manuel shook his white head, baring his teeth in a combined grimace of despair, fatalism, and hate. He seemed content to chat a moment while he rested. So I asked him more.
He had, it seemed, been all the way to Punta Rosa, starting before light.
“Good catch, I hope?” (But I had already noticed that the Angelique was riding much too high in the water.)
Manuel made an untranslatable remark, the essence of which was that one Carlos Negron and his new boat could have sexual congress with the devil. It seemed that Carlos had outrun him down the entire route, preempting all the choicest spots, and at one point even side-swiping Manuel’s dinghy.
“The irony of it is, Carlos doesn’t even know where to fish. He is new. But he hired that loco Arturo whom I fired for drunkenness, may the devil screw them both. After all I put up with from Arturo, teaching him…”
“A bad trip. I am grieved.”
He stared somberly at the Angélique, his thin face a stoic mask.
“Worse than that. I have not made even the diesel bill. And I had to place so much hope on this trip.”
“There is need?”
He tossed his white hair back proudly; I could see him considering scornfully what a gringo could know of need. But our long friendship prevailed.
“There is need,” he said simply. Nodding his head. “Muchos difficultates à la casa. Mi nina – my little girl, and my wife, both they are sick. They require specialistos, you understand. Muy pronto. With the government nothing can be done.”
During this interchange the vision of my helpless lobsters, streaming by two hundred meters inshore, had been rising unwelcomely behind my eyes. Marching in their thousands, on the mysterious journey that had gone on since long before the trivial race of man. A journey that was, perhaps, essential to their survival. Elsewhere they were already heavily overfished; perhaps even now they too faced their end.
But the trivial race of man was my race, and Manuel was my friend. The threat to him and his was real too. Still – had I not been there by chance, would not Manuel’s own expertise have had to suffice? Nor would I have known of Carlos Negron, nor the illness of Manuel’s family.
While I floated there in the beauty, miserable, the other dinghy came up. A boy named Ruffino captained it. “Nada,” he said, gesturing expressively. “And the petrol begins to lack. We go?”
Captain Manuel let his eyes droop closed for a moment, an expression of despair I had not before seen on his strong face. And at that moment a thought occurred to me:
“My” lobsters were not safe – not safe at all. They were headed straight toward the nets and spears of the predatory Carlos when they rounded Punta Rosa – not to mention the depredations that would be made by casual pot-hunters for a hundred miles.
“Wait, Manuel,” I said. “Tell them to wait. I want you to follow me over there.” I pointed to the inner reef, thinking there was just enough time to take at least a few to do him some good. The feeling of Judas choked my throat; I had to clear my snorkel twice before we were looking down at the great horde of marchers, lit by the inshore sun.
Time… but I had not counted on Maya speed and endurance, nor the sharp Maya eyesight – nor the underwater focos Manuel and Ruffino carried to light the scene.
The Angélique was moved twice before it was over, deep in the water and groaning in every ancient timber when Manuel called it a day.
“How can I ever thank you, my friend?” Manuel inquired as the dinghies were hoisted and the Angélique prepared to depart. “You will wish Lorenzo to carry you back to the rancho in the skiff?”
“No. Many thanks, but I would prefer to go with you to Cozumel tonight. I have a small négocio to do in the morning. If you could perhaps lend me a shirt and help me get to the Maya Cozumel? I keep an old maleta of clothes with Senora Blaustein.”
Manuel nodded approvingly. The Maya Cozumel is not one of your tourist palaces, but a sober and inexpensive Mexican commercial traveler’s inn, run by one of the formidable Hispanic-Teutons who conduct much of Mexico’s invisible commercial life.
“It would by my pleasure,” said Manuel. “But the rancho will be searching for you, no?”
“Ah, but Don Pa’o has now a short-wave radio, on which they must listen for the Gardia Aereo for an hour at nine every night. If you could change crystals and tell him to pick me up at the Playa del Carmen ferry tomorrow morning? You could say you fished me from the sea, to avoid trouble with the Gardia.”
“Oh, no problem. Everybody uses that band to sell a motor and buy two ducks. This is an excellent idea, my friend. But you will not stay at the Maya. You will come home with me to celebrate.”
“We will plan that later, Don Manuel old friend; you know I have not your strength for celebration and you will need to see to your wife.”
And so it came about that Don Manuel and I reclined upon the bridge on the Angélique, while she creaked and grumbled her way across the moonlit straits towards Cozumel. The other divers, after a cold meat of snapper seasoned with what tasted like live coals, had promptly made for their hammocks. Don Manuel was doubtless twice as tired, but pride compelled him to take the captain’s watch. The sea was quiet now, but nothing in the Quintana Roo is to be granted perfect trust.
To help him stay awake, we chatted idly in our usual mixture of tongues: of doings of mutual friends, of the iniquity of government, of all that had changed since the days when he was a young sportsboat captain and I an eager lover of the sea. His English was only somewhat better than my Spanish, but we had always understood one another well, and the tale that follows reflects that understanding as much as the literal words.
We were commenting on the skills of the various divers, notably that of Lorenzo, his head boy.
“Ah, yes. Lorenzo Canseco. He is good, very good. But the boy you should have seen was K’o.” Manuel nodded, and repeated with special relish and the full Maya click:
“Audomaro K’o. Mayo puro, you understand; he was proud of it even then. K’o, K’ou – it means something like Lord, or young god, maybe. We were boys together, you see, in those days when the scuba was just getting started here.” Manuel chuckled, shaking his head. “No one had ever heard of safety; we tied our gear on with sisal ropes. But K’o – he was the first to buy a proper watch. There will never be his like again.”
“He is… gone?”
Captain Manuel hesitated and let himself make one of his few Maya mannerisms, a high-pitched sound deep in his throat. He belonged to the old school, before it became fashionable to be more Maya than Spanish. “Yes, he is gone,” he said finally. “I saw him go. But…”
“A diving accident?”
“Oh, no. You must understand that K’o never had accidents. He was strong, he was handsome, he could do anything – but he had also the cabeza.” Manuel tapped his forehead. “Others did foolish things – not he. I tell you: incredible – Once, below a hundred meters, his companion’s air-hose broke, and K’o brought him up safely, holding his own mask on the boy, back on himself, then back on the boy – all the time using his watch, so that they would not get the bends. It took nearly an hour like that to bring them both safely up. And the sea bad and night falling. I ask you – who could do that? And then the next week, Marco, the damn fool he saved, went down to two hundred and caught the rapture of the deeps. He untied himself before we knew. The last we saw of Marco, he was diving down, down into the Cuba current that runs off the north reef. We could see his light for a short time, going ever deeper and faster. Then it vanished. Even his body was never found.”
“God.”
“Yes. Oh, there are endless stories about K’o. He was good. When the Capitan Cousteau came through here, he chose K’o to dive with him. De vero. But the most funny story was about the cinema people, when K’o played the shark with the girl.”
“What?”
“Yes. Everyone was crazy then, you understand, and the cinema people were loco locissimo. In this story a beautiful young actress is pursued by a shark who catches her and –” Captain Manuel glanced at me expressively “– the shark ah, makes love to her. Can you imagine? Well, they fixed K’o up in this shark body and he pursued the girl – she was a puta, but a beauty, the director’s girl. K’o caught her all right – and then, by god, he actually did the business. Right there in the water. In that crazy shark outfit. He just barely kept the girl from drowning, too, she was screeching like a perriqua. And the director jumping up and down in the boat – nothing he could do except howl and scream and fire K’o, who did not give a damn. I always wanted to see that film. But I think something went wrong with the camera, everyone was laughing like lunatics.”
We were both chuckling too, while the old boat thudded on, following the rising moon. A school of porpoises was playing in the bow wave, their phosporescent trails vying with the moonlight. Behind us the moonlit spark that was Tuloom was sinking out of sight. It was the last hour of true night, before the sky beyond Cozumel, island of sunrise, would fade to grey.
On the strength of the movie starlet’s fate I decided to try a highly diluted sample of the good captain’s fiery tequilla, while he had his normal libation.
“Ah, yes, stories of youth,” the old man said when we were settled again. “We were young, life was to spend. So many gone. I remember one that scared us all, though. We were exploring the great reef that slants down to the north – the one Marco jumped off into the deep – and something went wrong with this other boy’s tank. His companion – not K’o – panicked and cut him loose, and poor Pedro shot to the surface like a bullet. K’o was in the boat. We pulled him in; he seemed all right but he was dead, you understand. He knew he only had a few minutes. He sent messages to his mother and sister, and then, just as the nitrogen was starting to work on him, he gave K’o his watch. It was a cheap little thing, I remember it well, because K’o always wore it, on his left wrist. Then of course the sickness took him, every cell in Pedro’s body began to rupture and collapse, and the boy screaming, screaming; like a screaming bag of jelly toward the end… I tell you, we were all a bit more sober after that.”
