The Barracudas

The trim, sound 50-footer Lorelei was holding her own in the churning waters of the Gulf. Rolling from trough to trough, she creaked and groaned and refused to come apart at the seams. Gerald Millinder was watching his wife and the Skipper. They're actually enjoying the storm, he was thinking. He tried not to seem alarmed.

Captain Banks looked back over his shoulder to reassure him from the wheel. "Don't worry, sir, she's not splittin' in two. She's plenty of boat. I'll sneak her into the Marquesas before sundown."

The Skipper was lank and hard and the skin was weathered tight over the strong sculpturing of his face. Every move he made was capable, confident, almost cocky. Millinder, with his rather delicate face and a bicycle-tire of fat at the belt-line, was ready to hate him for his leanness and his grinning disregard – if not relish – of danger.

"Isn't Al wonderful?" Madge said.

Instead of answering, Millinder tried to smile for his wife. She was a strong, handsome woman of 30 who had had three children and eight demanding but not really unhappy years with Gerald. These she carried lightly, for she still bore a startling resemblance to the Wellesley lacrosse player who had made a lasting impression on some Smith and Barnard teams, and eventually on young Gerald Millinder.

In their cabin last night she had advanced the theory – with just a little too much enthusiasm, Millinder thought – that men like Al Banks were throwbacks to a more heroic and primitive age, of a breed with Eric the Red, Captain Morgan, Laffite and Bowie. "I wonder if modern women aren't getting a little tired of brainy men burdening their wives with their thorny intellectual problems," she had said, and then had caught herself, or rather, the pained look on her husband's face had caught her. Gerald had had a year of thorny intellectual problems and overwork. It was the first, faint rumblings of breakdown that had led to this cruise – doctor's orders:

"Gerald, there's nothing wrong with you but pressuritis. Too much of this tug of war between artistic conscience and family responsibility. The medicine for you is a month, well let's say at least two weeks in a different world, some place that never heard of book club demands and intellectual integrity and the strain and stress of creative work. You book fellows with your ulcers and your nervous breakdowns – the occupational disease of Homo Intellectualis."

"I can't help it, Lew, it's a terrible decision. A book club is offering me $35,000 for the new book, but there's a catch in it. They're asking for certain changes I know in my heart I don't want to make. But taking a year out to write a novel can be pretty rough on a family. And $35,000 is a helluva lot of money, more than I've made out of my last

three books put together. I've got my kids to think about, and Madge . . ."

"I still say go away," his doctor had told him. "A week or two in the sun, I can give you the address of a place I think you'll like on the Florida Keys. Don't worry about a thing but how good the fishing is. I know you'll say you can't afford it, but think of it as medicine, and saving hospital bills. Then come home, rested, with a clear mind, and make your decision."

So Millinder had splurged at Abercrombie's, bought himself a long peaked fishing cap and some ducks to knock around in and a light blue fishing jacket and here they were aboard the Lorelei, dutifully "getting away from it all," just as travel books and practical physicians advise. Only instead of sun there was wind, and instead of fish there were waves, and instead of the second-honeymoon closing of emotional ranks with Madge, there was – well, nothing that Millinder could give a name to, just a nagging interior itch of strain and suspicion. In all their eight years, there had been no real schism, or even any rows serious enough to survive a single good night's sleep. What they hoped to find a cure for here in the Gulf was their sense of mutual fatigue, of love's having been carried away in tiny pieces by problem ants. Although she had had her share of delicate invitations, Madge had always shied away from the more literal forms of infidelity. All she had felt was a kind of private sigh – Oh, maybe it would do her good to go to bed with some nice, healthy male she hardly knew, someone who didn't get love all mixed up with writing problems and the ethics of art.

Someone, she had thought that morning – not seriously but merely as an example, as speculation – well, like this Skipper, Al Banks, a natural, lean-bellied, firm-muscled man, a man who was hard because nature was hard, and who was direct because that's the way life had been before it got all mucked up with too much civilization: progressive schools and child psychology and her friends' accounts of their sessions with their analysts and prejudice and social obligations and to what extent Gerald should sacrifice his principles to the needs of his family – Oh the sea was wonderful, let the wind blow hard in her face forever, let the boat rock, rise, drop, crash back into the sea, the foamflecked, violent, primordial sea.

"Gerald – darling – are you all right?"

Madge was bending over him with a solicitousness that was faintly irritating. Damn it all, he wanted to be wanted – not mothered. He sat up straighter in the fishing chair into which he had retreated in hope that its exposed position in the stern might help to counter his panicky anticipation of seasickness.

"... all right?" Her voice was part of the wind.

"Hell yes." Gerald tried to give the words a hearty ring, as if in half-conscious imitation of Al Banks. "How much longer till we get there? The Marquesas?"

"Al says he'll sneak us in in about an hour and a half. He's going to try a little short cut into the lagoon. Says he's never done it before but he thinks he can feel his way."

Madge's face was shiny with spray, and exhilaration. If only he could enjoy the violence of the weather. He wished she and Al Banks weren't so –

"Gerald, are you sure you're all right?"

"Yes. Yes. Hell yes." He said it a little too sharply.

"You look a little green."

Well, he felt a little green. But, "I'm all right," he said. "Those Dramamines seem to be doing the trick."

"I feel wonderful," Madge said. "I love a stormy day like this." She turned her face into the wind and her long dark-brown hair blew wildly. She was wearing shorts and a sweat shirt and Gerald admired her long muscular legs, with strong calves and a pleasing fullness at the thighs from lacrosse and lots of tennis and a fondness for walking. He wished he had a better figure. He had never been very good at outdoor games. He could never find time for them. He had been a quiet, serious kid with a compulsion to work a little harder than he had to. Breaking in as a radio writer the summer he left college, he had forced himself after a few strenuously profitable years to cross the bar into that world where one must play slave to his own Simon Legree: free-lance writing.

He had worked passionately, religiously, and in 10 years there had been five novels, one of them a mild bestseller. Gerald Millinder had nine lines in Who's who in the East, an honorary degree from his college, and a secure niche in the insecure bracket of "promising authors." But a pattern of all-night typing and an incapacity for recreation had left him jittery. There was a notebook full of ideas but little to draw on for physical confidence. He had driven himself – as everybody called it – to the point of exhaustion. Right now, for instance, his stomach awash with the sickening roll of the boat, he had only to think around the edges of his book club dilemma and he could feel tears coming into his eyes. First little signpost of breakdown, his doctor had warned. Where did responsibility to conscience begin and to family welfare leave off? Hell, the complexities of modern life, the compromises it kept demanding of you. No wonder this was a field day for those civilized witch doctors, the psychoanalysts.

Al Banks was holding the Lorelei's bow at right angles to the swollen waves, easing her down, into and through the sea aroused by winds blowing out of the north. Once in a while he threw his head back and sang in a not-bad voice a snatch of a chanty. The words were a lusty description of the buxom charms of willing maids, and he looked around roguishly to see if they were with him.

"Isn't he delicious?" Madge said. "He's been telling me the most marvelous stories. He sailed all through the Caribbean by himself in a 20-foot yawl. He's brought alligators back alive from the Everglades. He's even been a harpooner on a whale boat. He's done everything."

"Mmmhmmm, I can imagine," Gerald mumbled. As far back as he could remember he had been tormented with a fear of doing things. Physical things. He was, he knew to his regret, a sorry example of the atrophied genus homo sapien megalopolis – modern city man. He had used his right arm to push a pencil by the hour, to dial the telephone, to shake hands and hold narrowstemmed glasses at cocktail parties, to keep a chain of cigarettes nervously alive in his mouth and to tip an endless line of cab drivers, waiters, hatcheck girls and doormen.

Madge patted him on the hand, rather patronizingly, he thought, and said, in the same way, "I love you." He answered with a weak nod. Why, at this moment, must she tell him that? Could it be a twitch of guilt for the attraction she was feeling toward the Skipper? Gerald felt impatient with himself for admitting such a thought. He watched as Madge went forward and stood beside Al Banks at the wheel. She stood with her legs apart and braced and it was something to see her standing there without holding on to anything and yet not losing her balance as the deck of the Lorelei angled precariously back and forth. Once the water fell away from the hull and the boat plunged downward with a resounding crash that almost sent Madge reeling backwards. She and Al looked at each other and laughed together in such a way as to make Gerald think, Somehow they're going to find a way to have each other, these two strong, freshair, physical people. And in any other society but ours his kind of man would have won her. In our brainy, shut-in world, women fall in love with our prestige and our Early American houses and our private schools for the children, with our winter vacations, with our evenings of hi-fi culture, with our minds.Not that Madge would ever think of it (continued on page 34)Barracudas(Continued from page 24) that way. In fact, if she had been able to read his mind she would have been shocked, and hurt, and probably angry. What he meant was that his intelligence and little niche of prestige had given him the power, the opportunity to attract a woman like Madge that he would never have had in a less mental, more primitive society.

He dozed off into a troubled dream too jumbled to unravel or interpret, the toned-down ending of the book they wanted him to change, falling over-board and drowning and his youngest girl sobbing and Captain Banks and Madge making love on the deck. Then he was falling again, over the side and into a swarm of man-eaters. At the last moment he managed to save himself by suddenly waking. An abrupt lurch had almost swung him out of his chair and he saw that Madge was at the wheel, heading into the waves as Al had shown her doing fairly well although the pitching of the Lorelei was even more violent now.

Gerald felt as if his stomach was rolling up through his chest and into his mouth. Scraping the bottom of his strength and concentration, he fought down the impulse to purge himself of the impurities that were poisoning him. Hold me in, hold me together, oh Dramamine, he prayed, and he hated worse than the biliousness the sign of weakness in front of these two. Some-how, in the green turmoil it seemed as if the two strong ones standing upright were man and wife and he was the intruder, that despised outsider whose un-welcome presence makes a crowd.

Al Banks looked around at him and tried to cheer him up. "Nearly there, Mr. Millinder. Are you OK? How do you like my new mate?"

Madge was steering confidently and Al Banks, close behind her, was leaning over her shoulder to check the compass.

At what seemed to Gerald the last possible moment for survival, he was given a reprieve. Al Banks took over and was working his way into the channel. In a few minutes they were on the lee side of the island and the sea cradled them gently. The horizon had swallowed the sun and a curtain of mist, incredibly blue, hung over the lagoon. The only inhabitants of the island were a few herons who stared at them suspiciously. There was a small beach and Al Banks eased the Lorelei in as close as she would draw. After the anchor-splash there wasn't a sound in the lagoon. More closely viewed, it looked as if blue smoke were rising from the smooth dark surface. Fifty yards into the lagoon was a miniature island with a slender arm of sand curving into the water to form a natural pool.

Madge went back to join her husband in the stern. "Know what it reminds me of? That picture on our record album – The Isle of the Dead."

"Half an hour more and you could have buried me there," Gerald said. He had held on and soon he would be all right. He unbuttoned his shirt to his waist, exposing his narrow chest and a soft white belly. He took a deep breath and thought about how the fishing would be tomorrow if the wind let up. He breathed deeply again, enjoying the fresh evening air cooling his throat.

"Madge, how about a drink? Then we'll go ashore and claim these islands in the name of the Authors League of America."

"I'd love a drink," Madge said.

He went below to dig out a bottle of 15-year-old rum picked up on the Keys. He took off his canvas shoes and his socks and rolled up the cuffs of his pants. He wondered if Al Banks knew what a lucky s.o.b. he was, no worries, no problems, except to match wits with the winds and the tides. He twisted the cork out of the bottle and gulped a mouthful. He felt a little giddy with recovered strength, an unfamiliar vigor.

He brought the bottle back with him. Madge was peeling off her sweat shirt.

"Are you up to a swim?"

"Isn't it too late?"

"The water looks beautiful, Gerald. All velvety."

He took another swallow from the bottle and handed it to Madge.

"OK, I'm game."

His momentary euphoria flagged at the thought of having to explore the deceptive calm of these waters. But he had to keep up with Madge. With Madge and her Al Banks. He had to show them. He had to prove something to himself.

Madge put one leg over the railing, ready to dive. She paused a moment, to remember it. About 20 feet off the stern there was a splash, a momentary swirl from which a circle of ripples widened toward the boat.

Madge said, "Al, something broke out there."

Al Banks came aft and studied the dark water. He held a light rod with a steel jig. He cast well out into the lagoon and reeled in rapidly. He watched the water closely as the jig wiggled up to the stern. Following it in was a long, slender shadow that sensed the boat and knifed away.

"A scooter," Al Banks said. "The place is crawling with 'em."

"You mean barracuda?" asked Madge.

"Will they really attack you?" Gerald wanted to know.

The Skipper laughed. "Let me have a shot of that pain-killer and I'll tell you a little story."

He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

"There's this fellow from Minneapolis, manufactures television aerials and stuff like that, who comes down every winter. Only has one arm. His left arm is off clean, just below the shoulder. When he hooks a fish, someone has to hold the rod for him while he reels in. Most people who come out with me, the last thing they want to hook into is a scooter, but not this joker. 'Al,' he says to me, 'all I want is to get me a barracuda.' Well, it's not much of an order down here in the Gulf. So we find him his barracuda and he reels 'im in and then when I swing 'im in over the stern this one-armed bastard from Minneapolis takes a club and beats the head of that scooter to jelly. Then he says, 'OK Al, that's all the fishin' I want for t'day.' Every winter the same story. I never asked him about his arm and he didn't seem over-anxious to tell me, but last winter we got weathered in for a couple of days at the Dry Tortugas and he got himself pretty well whiskied up and this is what he tells me.

"About 15 years ago he was fishing out here in the Gulf and something hit his line and took off in such a hurry that it jerked him clean overboard. He was under water fighting to get to the surface when something hit him like a buzz-saw. The Skipper finally fished him out, but as for the arm, well by that time a 30-pound barracuda was sitting down to a fancy dinner."

Al Banks laughed and helped himself to another swallow of rum. The laugh puzzled Millinder. It was not even a nervous laugh. He was just laughing because he felt good and because he didn't mind about the arm and because he liked to sit out there over a jug of rum and spin the evenings away.

"Then these scooters really are dangerous?" Gerald said.

"I wouldn't say so," Al Banks said cheerfully. "A thing like that happens, well maybe once in a thousand times. I've been fishing these waters since I was a kid and I've yet to see a man bit. Maybe if the scooter is crazy hungry, or if you're wearing something bright like a wide gold ring that flashes in his eye he might decide to go for you. But if you feel like you want to swim I'd say go ahead. I don't think these scooters will give you any trouble."

"How about you, Captain? Would you go in?"

Gerald's question had a petulant edge. Al Banks grinned disarmingly.

"Me, I never go in. Not even a swimming pool. I'm strictly a boat man."

Madge stared down into the black (continued on page 50)Barracudas(continued from page 34) velvet water that was dead quiet now. "I think it's getting pretty late anyway."

Gerald was grateful. He had not been able to stop thinking about the feeling of barracuda jaws ripping at his flesh. Unseen and unheard it was on you like that and there was your arm in its cold sharp mouth.

"It does look a little too dark," he said, as casually as possible, as if 10 minutes earlier he would have been eager for the dip.

After dinner they sat up for a while drinking rum and listening to Al Banks' tall stories of fishing and exploits of the sea. There was the time on a yawl when he was caught by 60-mile winds that snapped his mast and swept him a hundred knots off his course. And the time he was alone in a dingy leaking faster than he could bail and a 12-foot shark came up alongside to wait for him and he got rid of the thing by reaching his leg over the side and kicking it right in the face. "I know it sounds like a fish story but Mister Shark took off and never came back-again."

"And you weren't frightened, Al?" Madge had been watching him with what Gerald described to himself as flattering intensity.

"Why be frightened? If you live on the sea I figure she's gonna get you sooner or later. So you might as well have fun right up to the minute they deep-six you. And that I have, Madge."

He had never used her name before and it sounded strangely intimate. "Everything I do is fun because I don't do nothin' I don't want to do. Maybe I do some things I shouldn't oughta do – things the missus would tan my hide for if she knew – –" He winked in a way that was winning enough to make Madge smile, though Gerald saw the gesture as overbearing and cheap. "Yes sir, what I always say is if you can't always be right have fun going wrong. Let every man do what he's man enough to do and if it hurts someone else that's his tough luck."

The Skipper was feeling his rum. Gerald noticed for the first time how small his eyes were; the pupils had contracted until they were the size of gunshot. Gerald didn't like the way Al Banks kept looking at Madge as he talked. It struck him – he was convincing himself as he thought about it – as a look of frank appraisal, of open invitation.

Around 10 o'clock Gerald began to feel drowsy. "Well, if the weather is with us we ought to pull out of here by dawn. What do you say we hit the sack?"

"I'm not sleepy yet," Madge said, "and it's turning out to be a beautiful night. I think I'll have another cigarette."

Gerald felt awkward. He wasn't sure whether he should turn in alone or sit it out with Madge and the Skipper. After a few minutes of forced conversation, he went below. Madge came down more than half an hour later. He had looked forward to this, hopefully, as a romantic night on the water, as a special adventure for them, and now it was spoiled. This was more like the tension they had had before they left Westport. For no objective reason and almost without any exchange of words, a gulf would cut between them. Gerald made a furtive move toward her, at once appeasing and possessive, and she turned toward the edge of the bunk until her back made a wall against him.

He said something to her, almost in a whisper, and she said no, she was too tired.

"You weren't too tired to stay up on deck for an hour."

"Gerald, please, if you mean what I'm afraid you mean – –"

"I don't mean anything. I just wondered."

"Just wondered what I was doing up there with him for 25 minutes."

"You don't have to put it that way."

"Oh yes I do. I have to put it exactly that way. I could see the looks. I could feel the righteous suspicion. For God's sake, Gerald, I hardly know the man. If I was the sort of woman who – –"

Finding herself caught up in the cliches of domestic strife, defending herself where there was no act, no case that needed defending, she lapsed into a resentful silence, first pretending sleep and then with healthy insensitivity actually slipping off into a deep, restful slumber. Gerald Millinder lay awake with his nerves and his fears, wondering if this was how a marriage dissolves, worrying about his children and the money-making changes that would weaken his book and the man from Minneapolis who had left his arm in the hungry jaw of the 30-pound barracuda.

. . .

When they moved out of the lagoon at dawn the sea was almost as quiet outside the atoll as within.

"We'll catch fish this morning," Al Banks called to them.

But after trolling for nearly an hour all they had were some barracuda, around five pounds apiece. Al would lower them into the fish box with the hook still in their mouths and slam the lid down on their heads to hold them so as to get the hook out without taking a chance of their catching him with their sharp teeth.

"Nasty things," Madge said.

"I call 'em the rats of the sea," Al Banks told her as he threw back a dead one.

"But you still don't think they'd bother us?" Gerald said.

The Skipper shrugged. "Like rats. If they're cornered or hungry. But around here there's plenty of small stuff for them. From sardine to shrimp. They ought to be satisfied."

"Before I took any chances with them I'd want to know for sure," Gerald said. "I'd just as soon not serve myself up as an extra little snack for some glutonous barracuda."

"What do you want to bet you could swim completely around this boat right now," Al Banks said, "and come out the same way you went in?"

"Thank you, no – –" Gerald started to say, and then his rod dipped suddenly under pressure of a solid strike and he had to attend to business. As he reeled it toward the boat they could see it was another barracuda. "Just an-other small one," Gerald was saying and then something hard hit his line and the line went slack. All he pulled in was the head of a barracuda. The body had been severed as cleanly as if a fishmonger had whacked it off with a sharp cleaver. The decapitated head was still alive.

"Ugh," Madge said.

"Another scooter went for him," Al Banks explained. "They'll do that sometimes."

"Nice fellers," Gerald said.

They cruised north for a few miles and then turned west for another half-hour. Except for one small bonito, it was the same story.

"Looks like barracuda day," Al Banks said. His business was to find game fish and he always felt increasingly fidgety and mean when this kind of fishing went on too long.

Finally, after Madge had pulled in another scooter she said, "Why don't we go in toward shore again and do some bottom fishing? We can catch some grouper and yellowtail. At least we'll have fresh fish for lunch."

Al Banks despised bottom fishing and he never ate fish when he could help it, but it was their 50 bucks. He worked in toward shore and fussed about until he found a good place to drop anchor.

Gerald didn't feel like fishing on the bottom for small stuff. He wanted action, sport, heroics, the things he had been missing all his life with his nose to the typewriter. But there wasn't anything else to do and he'd just get more restless watching Madge and thinking too much, so he dropped a line over too.

They caught a couple of fair-sized grouper and some grunts. The Skipper's silence as he handled the fish for them (continued on page 79)Barracudas(continued from page 50) seemed contagious. Al Banks was thinking about dolphin and sailfish and wahoo; Gerald Millinder was wondering how long this state of things would go on between him and Madge, and whether he was hopelessly ineffectual for not being able to make up his mind once and for all about the book ending. Madge was wishing there was something she could do to keep Gerald from getting so moody. She had hoped this fishing trip would help but it was turning out to be a mess.

In the silence, suddenly, they heard a splash a hundred yards or so off their bow. Al Banks turned his head quickly, with the sense of excitement real fishermen never lose. He was tired of this lazy, hand-line stuff and there was something about this joker Millinder that made him want to nudge the writer into action.

"There's something out there. Let's make one more pass at 'em before chow. Maybe we c'n catch ourselves an amber jack. Pull in your lines."

Half drowsing in the sun and looking on indifferently as a gray snapper teased his bait, Gerald Millinder was looking up from his desk, home in Westport, as Madge came in with the day's mail.

– Madge, the book club called today. They'll take the book.

– Oh, Gerald! How wonderful! – Yes, it is. It means 35,000 dollars.

Madge hugged him. The book had taken longer to write than he had figured and the publisher's advance hadn't quite seen him through it. They had had to borrow on their insurance. And if the book should only sell five or six thousand copies, like the last one...Madge had been worried, more than she had let him see.

– 35,000! We'll put half of it away for the children's education.

That had been one of the things worrying them.

– Only wait a minute. There's a catch in it, Madge.

– Oh?

– Yes, they want me to change the ending.

He had tried to make it sound casual but it went to the heart of what he was trying to do. Eight years ago he had quit a 20,000-a-year radio job to write as he pleased, to be his own man. The last fortress of individual enterprise, he had half-kiddingly called his study. Change the ending. Lord, the nights he had worked on that ending until he was satisfied that it said what he most deeply wanted it to say. And now they wanted to soften it, tone it down. It was too frim they said, too defiant.

Promptly, characteristically, Madge had said – If I were you, Gerald, I wouldn't do it.

And Gerald, troubled, torn: – Madge, I don't know, we need that money like crazy. And is it fair to the kids, is the ending, any ending, that important? Is there any reason why they should be penalized for my artistic purity? Or maybe the book club people are right. It isn't a bad ending they're suggesting. Not a too-convenient happy ending or anything like that. Just a little less shocking, a little less – well, they think I go too far.

– I wish I could help you, Madge had said. – But you'll have to do what you have to do.

You have to do what you have to do. "– all lines in the boat."

The sound of the motor and the sense of forward motion in the Lorelei brought him back from the bends of Westport to the blue-green quiet of the Gulf. The doctor was right – rest, relax, breathe deep, fish...

From the stern came an unfamiliar grinding sound and then, over his shoulder, snapping Gerald Millinder back to here and now, he heard a brief, vivid oath from Al Banks.

"God damn it, didn't you hear me tell you three times to get your god damn lines into the boat?"

Gerald drew on his line and realized for the first time that it was taut, held firm, and being pulled out of his hand by something unyielding beneath the water. For a moment he thought he must have hooked a big one, a Jewfish perhaps, and then he heard Banks cussing – –

"God damn it, you got your line fouled in her goddamn propeller."

In a blaze of profanity, the Skipper shut off the goddamn motor before the line could work its way right into the goddamn propeller shaft.

Shaken, and hating Banks, the Lorelei, fishing and primitive life in general, Gerald leaned over the railing and peered helplessly down at the fouled propeller. A few feet below the surface there were three barracuda, lying side by side, attracted by the bait on the line wound around the propeller.

The Skipper stood right behind him. "Are you a pretty good swimmer?"

Gerald looked up into the hard, leathery face. "What – what are you talking about?"

"I'm talking about your line fouling up my propeller. Someone's gonna have to go over the side and work it clear."

"Can't we just leave it there and go on?"

"And grind your line into my propeller shaft? Sorry, Mister, not on my boat."

The Skipper stared at Gerald Millinder and Gerald looked down at the deck and then at the water and then at the Skipper again and then at Madge.

She was standing there watching them with a stiff, uncertain expression on her face. I know what she's thinking, Gerald grieved, that I'm afraid, that I'm not a whole man, that I'm not a positive male animal like A1 Banks.

He leaned over the railing and cupped his hands around his eyes to study the barracuda. They were waiting, motionless, three of them, three big ones. He could feel their teeth ripping into the socket of his arm. He placed his other hand on that arm as if to hold it to him.

"The barracuda?" he said, with hardly any breath in his voice.

"They won't bother anybody. But just to make sure I'll break out my .22. The water's clear enough for me to see 'em and I can scare 'em off if they get frisky."

Nothing is simple any more, Gerald Millinder was thinking. Not even fishing. Problems of decision. Of courage and risk.

A1 Banks was standing there waiting for him to act. The barracuda were down there waiting for him to act. Madge was watching him with a questioning look on her face.

If I can only disconnect my intelligence, Gerald was thinking. If I can find a way to black out this imagination. That's what makes these fearless heroes. A numbness. An ignition key for switching off the imagination.

He looked down into the water and tried. He closed his eyes and tried. And in the sun-struck darkness behind his eyes, he was seized with a strange discovery. He wanted to dive in. He was excited with the feeling of wanting to be down there among the hard, swift, violent barracuda. He was crazy eager to plunge into fear and bloody danger and then to emerge heroic, exalted, primevally and finally alive.

"All right," he said, "get me some goggles," and this was not Walter Mitty living the coeur de lion dream of the faint-hearted, this was incredibly Gerald Millinder himself, stripping down to his swim-trunks in a daze of heroism, moving toward danger with mechanical will, suspended between the twin exhilarations of impetus and triumph.

While he paused at the railing, Madge was conscious of his bony knees, his undeveloped chest, the incipient pouch, the familiar ineffectuality of his physique.

"I think you're a heartless son-of-a-bitch," Madge said to A1 Banks. Her husband had never heard her use that term before.

"Gerald, you're not going in. I'm not going to let him do this to you. It isn't heroic, it's crazy, senseless."

Millinder hesitated, caught between the two worlds.

Madge was telling the impassive face

of A1 Banks, "I don't care about your precious propeller. If he has to, he'll buy you a new propeller. But he's not going into that water. It isn't worth it. His courage – it's a different kind – you wouldn't understand. He's not going to have to prove it in your stupid, ridiculous, animal way."

"Madge, I said I would, and I feel I ––"

"Listen, we have three children, and your work and – you're trying to be brave where it's a lot harder to be brave, and where it counts, for you. If you do this – this idiotic thing – I won't be proud of you. I'll think you're as big a fool as – as he is for egging you into it."

A1 Banks was never a man for argument. Either do it or get off the spot was his philosophy. Now he came over and said:

"Tell you what I'll do with you. I'll sneak her slowly back into the lagoon. She only draws two and a half feet and I can practically lay her stern on the beach. Then I can cut the line out."

"Take her into shallow water and I'll get the damn line myself," Gerald said.

So that's the way it was compromised. Millinder put on the goggles and held himself under the boat a minute or so at a time and finally worked his line free. There was still some slight danger from barracuda – if indeed barracuda are dangerous – but not much. Millinder felt somewhat exhilarated but not as much as if he had accomplished the feat in deep water. A1 Banks felt justified but not as much as if he had been able to prove to Millinder that the fear of barracuda was mostly in his mind. Madge felt satisfied with having put an end to daredevil foolishness but not as much as if she had been able to get Gerald not to go into the water at all.

Between the Millinders and A1 Banks almost nothing was said as he took the Lorelei back across the Straits. Two worlds had collided and held each other fast for a moment, and then each had shaken the other off and backed away to resume its own course.

Sitting with Madge in the stern on the way in, Gerald was thinking of the barracudas lurking beneath the surface of his creative life. Let me dive down among the waiting shadows and realities. Let me dive down.

And then, so clearly it startled him, his decision was in his mind. "Madge," he said, "I just decided. I've got to keep that book my way. To hell with the money."

Madge let her hand rest on his. "Good. We'll manage. I'm glad you decided. Now put it out of your mind. Let's enjoy the day."