Mundo's Sign
August, 1983
In the fading darkness, the small boats, 12 in all, were dragged into the water from the camp on Southwest Cay. Masts were stepped quickly and the sails unfurled in the silence of the coral lagoon. Wind-filled and ghost-white, they rounded the leeward edge of the cay and scattered in all directions across the fishing banks.
Bowen Delavett, a marine biologist from the States, was in the bow of Mundo's catboat, huddled against the cool dawn breeze. He and Gabriel faced each other, their knees bumping, but Gabriel lay back, relaxing, his arms spread out along the gunwales. Mundo was in the stern, his brown flesh sallow, his eyes and cheeks puffy--evidence that he had not slept well. Bowen hugged himself, his head down, shivering as the veiled pastel sun rose behind him. A bird landed on his shoulder.
"Doan move, mahn," said Gabriel. "Daht is good luck."
The white man turned his head slowly to look at the bird. It was a green finch, little enough to fit in his hand. Through his T-shirt, Bowen felt the light, pricking pressure of the bird's claws as it balanced to the rock of the boat.
"A bird never landed on me before," he said.
"Daht is good luck," Gabriel insisted. "Good fah de boat."
The bird fluttered from Bowen's shoulder to the gunwale and then hopped to the bottom of the boat, pecking at flecks of dried fish. It ran, rodentlike, under Gabriel's seat, in and out of sight in the shadows.
"Keep your head down now, Mistah Bone," Mundo said. The word mistah was a joke, a mocking intimacy that Bowen had finally to accept. A friendship with Mundo had not been easily established. Delavett had come to Providence to study the sea turtles that were still numerous in the waters of the archipelago. Because of his junior rank at the university, his research grant was modest. He knew he would have to rely on the cooperation of the locals. His interviews with the fishermen had led him to Raimundo Bell, the man most respected on Providence Island for his abilities in the water. Mundo was naturally suspicious of him at first, but Bowen was honest and persistent, offering to trade a seat in Mundo's boat for a share of the everyday work. If it were a question of proving oneself, Bowen had done so, he hoped, through his sweat and dirtiness and exhaustion. The difference in the lives of the two men had gradually diminished and they had become close. Still, Bowen could not talk Mundo out of calling him Mistah or pronouncing it in a tone that underscored the temporary nature of their relationship.
Mundo stood in the back of the boat, the two rudder lines gathered from behind him, held in his big hands like the reins of a horse. "Gabriel?" he warned. Mundo was rarely more than laconic, and yet Gabriel always responded precisely. Mundo crouched down, dark and solid, steering for extra wind.
"Yes," Gabriel answered, rising. "Goin' speedify directly, mahn."
He began to pull in the mainsheet. The boat heeled and pressed into the clear water, going faster, bracing the men against the windward hull. Mundo jibed the boat. Once the sail had luffed, Gabriel allowed the boom to swing over. The canvas inhaled again and held the air. Bowen sat up straight and repositioned his weight in the boat. He could see the sunrise now, lavender towers of clouds lining up away from it. The light was like a warm hand on his face.
Behind them, they heard the flapping of another sail as it spilled wind. "Look dere," said Gabriel. "Ezekiel turnin' ahcross, too."
"Daht bitch," Mundo grunted; and, twisting his head, he shouted back, "Ezekiel, you old piece ah fuck, you think you cahn race me, mahn?"
Ezekiel would not answer, nor would he look toward them. Within minutes, his boat had fallen far in their wake. Months before, Bowen had approached Ezekiel because he heard the old fisherman had once caught a mulatto hawksbill, a crossbreed between a hawksbill and a green turtle that Delavett's colleagues back in Miami insisted was only mythical, a tall tale. He wanted to prove them wrong. Mundo said he himself had shot a mulatto two years before, on the fishing banks in Serrana, and that he had seen the one Ezekiel had netted. When Bowen went to Ezekiel for verification, the old man was unintelligible, a pathetic figure who could not focus his memory. Bowen pitied him and expressed his regret to Mundo. Mundo said, "Daht mahn steal from de mouth of he children. He beat de wife fah rum money. Doan feel sorry fah de devil, I tellin' you."
"Mundo, where you goin', mahn?" Gabriel finally asked. Bowen had watched him fidgeting, building up to the question until he was certain of their course. Gabriel was a handsome man and knew it well, shaving his sideburns into broad flares and wearing a gold cross on a thin chain around his neck. He had once told Bowen he was too good-looking to be a fisherman, that he would like to work in a shop or as a waiter. But on Providence, lost in the middle of the Caribbean Sea, there was no other work but fishing for a man who did not own land. Mundo didn't seem to care, though. He loved the sea no matter how hard it worked him, no matter how much trouble or sadness it brought into his life.
"Mundo, you sleepin'?" Gabriel said.
"Jewfish Hole," Mundo said. "Headed up daht way."
"True? Not Five Shillin' Cay?"
"No."
Gabriel sucked his teeth and asked why not. Last night, during supper, they had discussed where they might fish today. Mundo had argued that if the wind stayed the way it was, they must sail for Five Shilling Cay or Aguadilla Reef instead of closer waters. That was fine with Bowen, because he wanted to go ashore on the cay and see what there was in a place where man never came.
"Light bulb, whiskey bottle, piece ah plahstic baby, dead, stinky stuff ahnd birds," Mundo told him. Maybe a mulatto hawksbill, too, Bowen added, and Mundo had said, "De malatta cahn be ahnywhere, mahn. Daht's only luck."
"Mundo, wake up now. Dis a bahd wind fah Jewfish Hole."
Mundo peered at them both through hooded eyes. "I get a sign," he said. Bowen looked at him curiously, wondering what he was talking about. Mundo stared past him, out of the boat, measuring the waters of Serrana as if those 80 square miles of unmarked banks were city streets he had grown up on. He steered several degrees off the wind; Gabriel automatically trimmed the sail.
"So you get a sign, Mundo?" Gabriel said.
"Yeah."
"What's that?" Bowen wanted to know. He smiled, because he was not sure if the two men were joking with each other. Mundo was too serious and impassive this morning. He should have been singing. He liked to sing when they were sailing: Jim Reeves, Bing-Bing, salsa, anything.
"I get a dream lahst night daht was a sign."
Bowen frowned at that revelation. Back on Providence, Mundo didn't play the lottery, so he never talked about his dreams like those who did. The town would wake up in the morning and somebody would be saying he had had a dream, and then the dream book would be consulted, a finger-worn copy published in Harlem in 1928, and the dreams figured out. "No, I tellin' you, a white horse is six, de white cow is two six ahnd a white lady is six one one. In dis dream, you see a white lady milkin' a white cow? Oh, ho! De lady come first, so daht six one one two six. No, I tellin' you, is de lady come first, mahn, not de cow. If blahck on de cow, daht six two." A boy would be sent running to Alvaro's shop to buy the number. But Mundo always said the lottery was foolish.
Bowen dipped his hand over the side to feel the water. He liked the quiet, surging speed of the catboat, the water as transparent as lab alcohol, the white and rose and amber colors of the bottom refracted and blurry, just colors streaming by. "Is that so?" he asked. "You had a dream?" Mundo said yeah.
"I didn't know you dreamed, Mundo," Bowen said. "Did you dream you saw a white lady wearing a white dress riding a white jackass?"
"Mistah Bone think you makin' joke, Mundo," said Gabriel. "He believe you jokifyin'."
Mundo's eyes sparked, showing Bowen the hubris he saw in many black men. "Dis a sign fah dis place only," he replied harshly. He was moodier than Bowen had ever seen him. This place, Bowen thought. This place wasn't a place at all. It was wide open. It was openness, sunlight shattered blue and unstopped in all directions. There was another world beneath, a mint-cool wilderness, treacherous and lush; but here on the surface, the boat pushed into an empty seascape.
"No kidding?" Bowen asked.
"No."
"What's the sign?"
"Fuck a mahn."
"Oh, yeah?" Bowen said incredulously.
"Fuck a mahn."
"Daht a funny sign, Mundo," said Gabriel.
"What's he talking about?" Bowen asked Gabriel almost incidentally, squinting beyond him to study Mundo. His skin slicker now in the sun, the light stuck across Mundo's narrow face in sharp pieces, leaving him cheekbones but no cheeks and emphasizing his stolid mouth, lips parted but no teeth visible. Bowen expected Mundo to smile at him, but he didn't. His distance seemed acted out, like part of a magician's masquerade. He's playing with me, Bowen thought. No, he decided, looking at him again, he's serious. After almost six months with Mundo, Bowen felt himself a stranger once more.
"So, Mundo, you fuck a mahn, eh?" Gabriel said.
"Yeah, boy," Mundo answered. He began to uncurl his arms and legs from the tight ball in which he sat and warmed up to his story. "I dream I fuck a mahn. I stayin' in Costa Rica, in Puerto Limón, when I play basebahll in de leagues, ahnd I stayin' in Dis residencia. Dis girlie mahn come to visit wit' a bottle of aguardiente. We drink de bottle, den I fuck him."
"Oh, ho," said Gabriel, as if he were (continued on page 80)Mundo's Sign(continued from page 72) saying, "Yes, I see."
Mundo navigated the boat through a porcelain-blue channel that furrowed between two ridges of coral. Outside the reef, the water deepened gradually, a darkening translucence. The waves rose to one third the height of the mast. They were on the open sea now, outside the coral walls. The faraway sail of Ezekiel's boat had disappeared. Mundo followed the reef northward. Already the sun was strong, and Bowen was acutely aware of its power to stupefy. Before the words dried up in his mouth and his mind muddled, he wanted to know what it was about the dream that meant something to Mundo.
"You dreamed you fucked a man," he said cautiously. "What does that mean? What kind of a sign is that?"
"A good one," replied Mundo.
The bird reappeared on Mundo's knee. He made a quick grab for it, but the finch was in the air, scooting low over the waves.
"Come again next day," Gabriel called after it. The bird hooked east toward whatever land might lay that way. The mystery had become too absurd for Bowen. He mimicked Alvaro the bookie and his high, rapid voice, like a little dog's: "Costa Rica, dat's two oh one; mon's arsehole, dat's naught; drinkin' aguardiente, dat's oh oh oh. Boy, you get a nice numbah dere, Mundo. Put a fivah on it, mon."
Mundo's weak smile patronized Bowen. He blinked ostentatiously, widening his hidden eyes for the first time that morning, as if only now he had reason to come awake, to come away from the dream.
"No, let me tell you, Mistah Bone. Dis sign mean I mus' shoot a big he hawksbill," Mundo said emphatically. He raised his thick right forearm. His fist clenched; the dark muscles flexed from elbow to wrist. "Big!" he said.
"Mistah Bone doan believe," said Gabriel in a sad, false voice. He nodded at Bowen. "He is a sci-ahnce mahn. He only see sci-ahnce." Then he laughed, pushing Bowen's knee good-naturedly.
Bowen was silent. It sounded as if Mundo were bragging, but he did not trust that perception; Mundo's own conviction, his tone of inevitability, had undercut the preposterousness of the words. Bowen didn't know what to think. Sometimes he thought he knew everything there was to know about Mundo. Mundo was strong, his will unshakable. He never wasted a minute; he was a clock ticking perfectly on time. He could lie around all day in the sun with an unlit cigarette in his mouth and that would be the right thing to do. He had never wanted anything from Bowen--perhaps that was why they had become friends. Bowen had first offered Mundo a little money to take him in the boat and help him keep track of how many turtles were being caught by the islanders. Not only had Mundo refused payment, he insisted on giving the scientist one third of the earnings of the boat as long as Bowen worked as an equal. Bowen knew the black man was curious about him, as if Mundo, too, welcomed the opportunity to study something of interest.
Hearing Mundo and Gabriel talk about the sign made Bowen feel for a moment that he had lost all contact with them. He leaned forward earnestly, resting his forearms across his bare thighs. He could not resist speaking and yet he hesitated, sure that he was being drawn into a situation full of trouble.
Finally, he asked, "Tell me, you can shoot a hawksbill turtle because you dreamed you assholed somebody?" An image of the dream flicked through his mind: Mundo bent over slim, tar-black buttocks, mounting like a beast; the "girlie mahn" in a stupor, slurring a languid, corrupt Castilian. "How is that?"
"How you mean, mahn?" Mundo looked keenly at Bowen, a challenging eyebrow cocked, teasing him with a twisted smile, a taunting, boyish delight, ready to invite Bowen into his house and then beat him at dominoes all night long. "You evah fuck a mahn, Mistah Bone?"
"No," Bowen said immediately. He was surprised that the question had embarrassed him so easily, as if it exposed a level of manhood he had not achieved.
"Mistah Bone wahnt to investigate evryting, but he doan fuck a mahn yet?" Gabriel said, his voice scaling to a parody of a question.
"Some men just be like womahn. Gabriel--right?"
"Daht's true. It's de same, mahn."
"Oh, Christ," Bowen said, shaking his head slowly. He tried to play along. "Let's let it all out," he said facetiously.
"So, Mistah Bone," Mundo continued, "you evah take a womahn like daht?"
"My God."
"You doan like it?"
Bowen folded his arms across his chest and refused to answer. There were pieces of himself that he did not wish to share, even in a game. To be forced to that realization, to admit that something in him would instinctively retreat into rock, like a sea anemone, made him angry.
"Mistah Bone," Mundo said. "When we reach bahck to Providence, we find you a mahn to fuck."
Gabriel winked at Bowen. "Doan have to be in de ahss, you know."
"No, thanks," Bowen answered coolly. "You asshole."
Separating himself from the conversation, Mundo came up off his seat to look around. Bowen wondered how he could know where they were when there was absolutely nothing out there to sight on. Mundo sat back down, rocking rhythmically from side to side, letting the waves loosen his shoulders and neck, dancing with the sea.
"Fuck, fucka, fucka mahn," he chanted.
"Sail the boat."
"Sailin' like a bitch right now."
"Black-man bullshit. Jungle stuff."
"Uh-oh, Mundo. Mistah Bone vexed now wit' dis dream bodderation."
"All right. All right. Enough," Bowen declared. "Go shoot your turtle. You do that trick, then I'll start fucking men. Maybe you first, Gabriel."
"Oh, me God, Mundo," Gabriel laughed. "Look what you talk Mistah Bone into."
"He gettin' de picture now, boy," Mundo said. "You doan worry, Gabriel. Mistah Bone lookin' hahd to fuck dis bunch ah guys bahck in de States who say malatta hawksbill a make-believe."
"You're damn right I got the picture now, so let's drop it." Bowen resented having his ambition described through such a coarse metaphor, but now that the point had been made, he felt comfortable again with the two black men. To his relief, Mundo said nothing more but sat quietly, like a schoolboy, with an expression of overbearing innocence.
They sailed for another 20 minutes, cutting progressively nearer to the reef until they were only yards away from the foam left behind by the waves that broke across the shallow coral. Then the reef bowled inward, pinched by a channel that they rode through into calmer water. After a short distance, Mundo tacked back toward the inside of the main reef, and when they were a couple of miles down-current from the channel, he steered into the wind.
"Come, you workin' today, mahn?" Mundo called. Bowen looked at him stupidly. He had let himself fall into a daze, the light, like thick crystals growing on the water, overcoming him. His deeply tanned skin felt scratchy and sore and sticky.
"Get de sail, mahn. Quick."
Bowen jerked himself out of his lethargy and stood up, holding the gunwales for balance. He concentrated on his equilibrium, judging how the water moved the boat until he was sure of himself, straightened up and then leaped from the bottom of the boat to his seat. He grabbed the mast with one hand and extended the other one out toward Gabriel. Gabriel (continued on page 144)Mundo's Sign(continued from page 80) stood behind him, rolling the sailcloth onto the boom as far as he could, passing it to Bowen until the flour-sack sail was furled around the wood and the boom was parallel with the mast.
"Gabriel, watch out," Bowen said.
"You OK, Mistah Bone. You become ahn expert."
But Bowen wanted to know that Gabriel was ready if he should lose his footing in the pitch of the boat. He lashed the boom and the mast tight together with the sheet line, grunting, as it took all his strength to lift the long, heavy mast from its step. He rested the butt on the seat, spread his arms on the poles, like a weight lifter, and lowered the mast slowly to Gabriel and then to Mundo, who had his arms up ready to receive it.
When the mast was down, they passed it back to Mundo far enough that he could stow it under the seats. Bowen pulled the two handmade oars from the gear in the bottom of the boat. Slipping them through the rope oarlocks midway on each gunwale, he jammed them back into the boat and left them ready while the boat drifted. It was still early in the morning.
"Sun hot," Gabriel said. He always said that before he set to work.
"Daht's right."
"Watah too cool," he said, cupping his hand into the sea and splashing his face. Bowen stood up to negotiate a piss with the churning of the boat but remained there for some minutes, prick in hand, unable to relax.
"Mahn, jump in de sea if you want a piss."
He removed his shirt and sat down with his legs over the gunwale. Mundo and Gabriel leaned toward the opposite side of the hull to counterbalance the canoelike boat and then quickly leaned back after Bowen hefted himself over the side. He let himself sink a few feet below the keel, felt the temperature subtly change, cooler and cooler until it was all the same, the blue pressure bearing against him completely. He opened his eyes briefly, welcoming the rough sting of the salt that took away his drowsiness. He kicked back to the surface, spinning in slow circles for the pleasure of it, relieved himself and struggled back into the boat. Without a diving mask to see clearly what else was there with him, he did not like to stay in the water long. No matter how casual Mundo and Gabriel were around sharks, Bowen couldn't muster the same aloofness. They chided him about that, but still, Mundo wore a cummerbund of old sheet around his waist for bandaging in case of trouble. And Gabriel's left arm was arced with purple scars across his biceps. "Ahn eel do daht. Shahrk doan molest mahn. It's true."
Bowen dried his face and hands on his shirt and put it back on as protection against the sun. Underneath the bow seat, he kept an oatmeal tin. He stretched and found it, unscrewing the lid. Inside, wrapped in a plastic bag to keep out moisture, were a pack of Pielrojas, a box of matches, the precious spear points and a sack of hard candy labeled simply Dulces, which he had bought at Alvaro's right before the fishermen had set sail from Providence eight days before. The candy had turned gummy in the sea air. He took a red piece and bit into its waxy surface, chewing vigorously and swallowing the whole lump without determining its flavor. The sweetness took the salty, sour heat out of his mouth. Mundo asked for a Pielroja and Bowen lit one for him, smoking it down a bit before he passed it along with the point for Mundo's spear. Bowen switched places with Gabriel and began to row, bringing the boat around into the current, pulling against the tide just enough to stay where they were.
The black men silently outfitted themselves, and to Bowen, they already had the grim look of hunters on them. The cigarette jutted straight out, like a weapon, in Mundo's tight lips. He propped his long metal gun between his legs and unclasped its spear, screwing on the point, and then set the gun aside while he pulled black flippers snugly onto his white-soled feet. Bowen watched him; each piece of equipment he added seemed to alter his humanness, and now, more so than with the dream business, Mundo was becoming impenetrable, the friendship between them a triviality. From under his seat, the fisherman took his diving mask and spit on the inside of the glass, spreading the tobacco-flecked phlegm with his fingers to prevent the glass from fogging. He washed the mask out in the sea and adjusted it to rest on his forehead, pressing into the short curls of his hair--not kinky hair, like Gabriel's, but more Latin, straighter and oily. He sucked the ash of the cigarette down next to his lips, knocking the butt off into the water with his tongue before it burned him. He exhaled deeply and then inhaled and then exhaled normally. Turtles made that same noise when they sounded for air, thought Bowen, that sudden, single rasp of inhalation popping out of the sea from nowhere. Mundo's eyes were expressionless, without pupils, the irises dark, without color. "Go fuck your big turtle," Bowen said to himself. He began to see that the prophecy was an easy one--like a handsome man boasting he would seduce an available woman--because there were plenty of turtles in the water. This was their mating season, the end of the hurricanes. They had come from all over the oceans to return here to breed.
"Ahll right," Mundo said and pulled his mask down over his eyes and nose. He was out of the boat promptly, disappearing silently below the surface.
Gabriel procrastinated, sharpening the point of his spear on the block of limestone they carried in the boat. Bowen heard Mundo purge his snorkel. Looking over his shoulder to check the diver's position, he began to row.
"Wait a minute, Mistah Bone," Gabriel said. He slung his legs over the side and crossed himself vaguely, lifting the crucifix from his chest to kiss it. He fitted the mouthpiece of the snorkel behind his lips and they bulged apishly. Splashing into the water, face down, the gun ready, he turned a spiral to examine what was there below him.
Bowen pulled ahead six times and then paused, unable to locate Mundo. Gabriel was to Bowen's left, kicking mechanically into the two-knot current, his gun cradled from elbow to elbow. Mundo surfaced ten yards ahead, going down again like a porpoise. Bowen went after him, quickly over the glossy boil that marked Mundo's dive.
He leaned out of the boat and looked down. Below him, in about eight fathoms of water, he could see Mundo in pieces, distorted fragments of motion rising and coalescing into human shape, the curve of his dark back floating up to him, the red, faded trunks looking like raw skin under the water.
His back broke the surface first, a long brown bubble, smooth and headless. The snorkel poked up, gargled and wheezed. There was a moment's calm before the water in front of the diver was flying apart, twisting and scattering and white. Blood swelled olive-green from the center of it all. Mundo fought for control over something Bowen had not yet fully seen. Again there was quiet. And then this: Mundo's torso suddenly out of the water, pendulous beside the boat, his arm dipping the spear down inside and letting a slab of great, furious life slide off it at Bowen's feet. The fish was as long as the arm that had released it, violently thrashing, the fan of its dorsal spines sharp enough to cut through leather. Bowen fell back off his seat, drawing his legs out of the way.
"Jesus."
He found the ironwood mallet and bent over, striking at the fish, unable to hit it effectively. Blood and bits of rubbery tissue sprayed onto his chest. Finally, the fish's movements slowed and he was able to direct a clean blow to the broad, bull-like slope of its head.
"Goddamn it."
The shot had not been clean. The spear had struck behind the head but too low to hit the spinal cord. It had entered through the huge gills--thus, the excess of blood now in the boat--and had come out on the other side, below the pectoral fin. The blood all over Bowen made him feel filthy. He was stone-eyed now, full of his job. Mundo's head bobbed along the gunwale. He was amused.
"You like daht one, mahn?"
"Shoot better," Bowen said.
Mundo laughed wickedly and sank out of sight. Bowen could hear the click of the spear sliding into the latch of the trigger as Mundo reloaded the spring-action gun against the hull of the boat. Gabriel was calling. He held his spear in the air, a lobster skewered on the end of it. Bowen was there in a minute, screwing off the flanged spear point to take the catch into the boat.
He set the oars and stood up to rearrange the gear under his seat. Mundo's fish was a grouper, by Bowen's estimate 25 to 30 pounds. To shield it from the sun, he tugged it into the cleared space below the seat. The lobster was thrown into the stern behind a coil of rope. He used to put the lobsters with the fish, but if they weren't dead, they kept crawling out from beneath him and he would stab his feet on the thorns of their shells. Before he could sit down again, Gabriel was beside the boat with another lobster.
"Four more in de hole, boy. I tellin' you, de bird was good luck."
Bowen hovered over Gabriel until the diver had brought up the remaining crayfish. It took some time, and only then did Bowen search for Mundo. He spotted him far off, impatiently waving the boat forward. The muscles in Bowen's arms cramped from the fast rowing. By the time he reached him, Mundo had his face back down in the water, staying afloat with his fins. Bowen had to shout to get his attention. Mundo raised his head, a glare in his eyes exaggerated by the mask. He lifted a fish and hurled it into the boat.
"What's the matter?" Bowen asked defensively. "Sharks?"
"Keep up, mahn. Keep up."
"Yeah, yeah." Bowen shrugged off Mundo's admonishment. It was impossible to stay with both divers unless both divers stayed together. He took his own mask and held it on top of the water, providing a small, round window to the scene below. There were no dark, darting shadows, nothing ominous at all.
Mundo swam crosscurrent into deeper water, his flippers continuously slapping the surface. In pursuit of something beneath him, he doubled back and sped past the boat headed in the opposite direction. He vanished as Bowen put all his effort into turning the boat around, determined to keep on top of the action. He heard the rasp then, a sound like that of a vacuum filling with air. Off the starboard, he saw the green, pale-throated head of the turtle bouncing in the swell, and he understood Mundo's urgency, because two or three turtles would double the value of a day's work. He couldn't see Mundo, but he knew that the man was carefully ascending beneath the creature, taking slow aim. The turtle lurched forward and tried to submerge as the spear shot through one of its hind flippers. Mundo surfaced, hauling the spear line in until the turtle was beside him, hopelessly struggling to shake the iron rod from its leg. Bowen was there.
"Nice work," Bowen said. "You did it."
Mundo handed the gun to Bowen. While Bowen held the turtle by the rim of its shell, Mundo wrestled to extract the spear. Once he had succeeded in unscrewing the point, it slid out easily from the thin flesh of the flipper.
"He's a big one."
"Not so big."
"He's a male and pretty big. That was your sign."
"Nah," Mundo grunted.
"Close enough."
"Dis no hawksbill. Lift him up now."
The green turtle weighed close to 100 pounds. Bowen almost fell out of the boat pulling it in. The turtle banged down the curve of the hull, its flippers clawing for water that wasn't there, a dull, callused scrape across the wood; its mouth gasping; the lower mandible unlocked, like an old man's jaw. I'll be damned, thought Bowen; this was the biggest turtle their boat had brought in here on the banks. Only two loggerheads netted by Ezekiel's boat were bigger.
He turned the heavy green on its back. The yellow plates of its belly glowed like butter. He set his feet on them, feeling the turtle's cold-bloodedness. Its sea smell was clean, without mucus or secretion. From a wooden toolbox, Bowen took the small bundle of palm fronds that every Providence fishing boat carried. He pulled two short strands from it. Grabbing one of the turtle's anterior flippers, he placed it against the hull and with the tip of his diving knife punched a hole through the enameled flesh that formed the shape of a man's hand with the fingers fused together. He did the same to the opposite flipper and then threaded the cuts with a frond, tying the ends off in a square knot. With its fore and hind legs thus bound, the turtle was immobile.
"Prayin' aht both ends," the fishermen called it.
"Why don't you use fishing line?" Bowen had asked when he first saw Gabriel bind a turtle.
"Palm leaf nice," Gabriel told him. "Turtle ahpreciate daht. He know mahn respect him."
Bowen rowed on, occasionally pausing to fill the calabash bailer with sea water to cool the turtle, which now suffered in the sun. The first time he did that, the turtle curled its head and appeared to look at him. Bowen turned away. It made him feel foolish, but he did not like to see a sea turtle's eyes. They were too mammalian and expressive, a more vivid brown than the eyes of a human being, lugubrious; they teared out of water, salty, silken tears beading down the reptilian scales, and he did not like to see it. In the ocean, there was no movement with more grace, no ballet more perfect, than the turtle's.
The men worked for several more hours before switching. Mundo shot another turtle, an average-sized hawksbill, which Bowen tied and was able to fit under the seat. There was a long period with no luck. Then, like a magic returning, the divers found fish again. The boat began to fill up.
Bowen tended to the divers, the citric tang of sweat in his nostrils, his eyes closed now and then to soothe them from the glare. His navy trunks and his white T-shirt were smeared with blood and with the gray slime that came off the fish. Trailing the swimmers, his back to them as he rowed forward, he counted the strokes of the oars, an empty meditation broken by the need to cool the turtles or to take another fish into the boat. Alone again, he would look up, his thoughts not yet refocused on his labor, and be startled by the uncut geography of the sea, the desolate beauty, the isolation.
The sun was straight up and fierce. Patches of wind blew off the glassy veneer of the surface. The waves lumped high enough to conceal the divers if they weren't close to the boat. Mundo and Gabriel treaded water together, casually talking, their snorkels jutting out from under their chins. Bowen came over to them. Hours in the sea had made Mundo look younger, Gabriel older. They clung to the side of the boat.
"Mistah Bone, dis Jewfish Hole a pretty spot. Come give Gabriel a rest."
Bowen stowed the oars and went to the bow for his diving gear, anxious to leave the confinement of the boat, the blind sense of being denied something others took for granted. They would not always let him fish. They had spent their lives on the water; for all his effort, Bowen could not begin to match their skill. On a good day, though, he would take over for Gabriel. Mundo was in love with the reef and knew that Bowen, more than Gabriel ever would, felt the same way. There were times when he would hurry Bowen out of the boat if there were something extraordinary he wanted the white man to see. They swam together like two farm boys at a carnival, exploring everywhere, the joy of it all and the mystery running between them like electricity.
Bowen lowered himself into the water after Gabriel was settled in the boat. His ears filled with the steady, fizzing static of the ocean moving against its cup of earth. The reef seemed scooped out here, forming a wide, horseshoe-shaped arena, ten fathoms deep in the middle where they were, the bottom tiering up in amber clusters of coral until the perimeter shallowed in a dense thicket of staghorn branches. A school of fry, a long cloud of flashing arrows, passed with the current toward them, herded by watchful barracuda. It parted and reclosed around the divers, obscuring them from each others sight for several minutes.
The sandy paths of the surge channels wove through the swaying flora on the bottom, continuing up, like white ribbons, from the open end of the pool, where the water gathered more dimension and the channels disappeared into a fog of infinite blue. Here, the current pushed in from outside the reef.
They started to swim. Bowen followed Mundo's lead. Gabriel stopped them with a shout.
"Mundo, me see a boat!"
Mundo swam, like a dog, with his head up and coughed out his snorkel: "Who?"
"Cahn't see. He way up, mahn."
Mundo stuck his head back into the water, uninterested in that piece of news. He led them closer to the coral walls, turning again into the current when the water reached about 40 feet, the depth at which Bowen managed best. They swam toward the wide mouth of the canyon, which kept expanding as they kicked onward. Beyond, the visibility blurred and faded, a chiaroscuro lanced by drifting shafts of sunlight. The blank distance shadowed and materialized into shapes, accumulating more and more detail as they moved ahead.
Bowen swam with his gun out in front of him, like a soldier on patrol. Surveying an isolated button of brain coral, Mundo pointed to the antennae of a spiny lobster. Bowen jackknifed and dived, missed the first shot. On the second shot, he took aim more carefully. There was a screeching sound of old armor when he yanked the lobster from its den. He ascended quickly, fighting for the sterling surface as he ran out of air. Gabriel came alongside.
"I see two guys," he reported, taking the spear from Bowen and removing the point. "Maybe daht's Ezekiel."
Bowen didn't respond. It wasn't so unusual to see another of the boats off in the distance during the course of the day. The fact that the boat was close enough for Gabriel to see the men in it didn't mean anything to Bowen. He reloaded his gun and swam away to catch up with Mundo.
Together, they continued ahead, frequently descending to inspect a cave or a niche in the polychromatic reef. Fish were everywhere, but they sought only those that appealed to the restaurants of the mainland. Cutting in and out of a pink forest of gorgonian coral, a mako shark rose toward them curiously but then stopped halfway and returned to its prowling. The shark was too small and too preoccupied to worry Bowen; still, he had tensed upon seeing it, and adrenaline had driven into his heart. Mundo plummeted, found the shark interested in a red snapper nosing in the silt for food and shot the fish. The shark skirted away when Mundo jabbed at it with his empty gun. The boat was there when he surfaced.
"It's Ezekiel," Gabriel told the two of them. He slipped a hand into the gills of the fish and took it from Mundo. "Ahnd Henry Billings. Dey driftin' on de current from down de outside."
"Turtlin'," Mundo said. He handed his spear to Bowen while he defogged his mask.
Ezekiel and Henry were too old to dive any more--"Divin' squeeze up a mahn's insides"--but they went along on expeditions to the banks to line fish, net turtles and collect conch from the shallows. They did not mingle much with the other fishermen, who were mostly young and scorned the insipidness of fishing with a hand line and a hook. Gaunt and unhealthy, Ezekiel looked like a wrinkled black puppet, simian with lackluster eyes. He suffered the bitter condescension of the islanders because he was too much a drunkard. Most people treated Billings, round and smooth-faced, as though he were a moron. Bowen had never heard him speak a word; some said he had been like that for 20 years.
"Dey lookin' excited, boy," Gabriel said, standing up to get a better view. Bowen and Mundo could not see the other boat from the water. "Ezekiel buryin' he head in de watah glahss, ahnd Henry rowin' hahd, hahd like he racin'."
Mundo pushed away from the boat, followed by Bowen, who had trouble catching his breath. They were now approaching the same windward channel in the barrier reef that they had sailed through earlier in the morning. The water doubled in depth; the bottom became more sand than coral. Bowen kicked harder to keep up with Mundo as the current increased. It tugged against him relentlessly and he began to tire. He halted and pressed himself out of the water as far as possible but could not see Mundo over the swell of the waves. He tried to move ahead again, grew discouraged and let the tide sweep him back to the boat.
Gabriel helped him aboard. Bowen saw that they were going out through the channel while Ezekiel's boat was steering in 150 feet or so in front of them off the port. Mundo was almost halfway between the two boats, still headed straight upcurrent.
"Dey on de trail of a turtle," Gabriel said. They watched Ezekiel take one hand off the water glass and reach behind himself to grasp an iron-hooped net used to catch turtles. Ezekiel called back to Henry, urging him forward. He held the net over the bow, waiting for position. Mundo spun in the water. He looked quickly around and then back at his own boat. Bowen saw him, imagined he saw a calculating look in his enlarged eyes. He stood on the aft seat and waved his arms at the diver. Mundo put his head back down and charged across the channel, angling toward Ezekiel's boat.
"Mundo!"
Bowen was not certain whether or not Mundo realized that Ezekiel's boat was so close. He yelled again.
"Mundo!"
Ezekiel positioned the net and dropped it. Mundo was past the center of the channel and nearing the other boat. In an instant he was out of sight under the water. Perched in front of the boat, his face hidden by the wooden sides of the water glass, Ezekiel became more and more animated until he had come to his feet, his head still stuck, ostrichlike, in the box. He took one hand off the glass to shake his fist.
"Mundo," he shouted in a garbled voice, difficult to understand. "Mundo. Wha' de fuck!"
"Oh, shit," Gabriel said. "Look Ezekiel dere bein' so voicetrous. Mahn, he cryin' a lot of nonsense, you know."
Mundo had been down for about two minutes and his limit was four. Bowen pulled on his mask and rolled over the side of the boat, biting down on the mouthpiece of his snorkel just as he hit the water. "Son of a bitch," he said to himself, seeing what was happening below.
Suspended in deep water six or seven fathoms down, Mundo struggled to free a turtle from Ezekiel's net. One hind flipper was loose, pierced by the spear and sea-anchored by the gun that Mundo had let drop. The diver held the turtle by the stub of its penis tail and used his free hand to untangle the netting from the other back flipper. Bent around the turtle so that his feet were in front of him, he kicked himself backward to resist Ezekiel's effort to raise the net. The flipper finally pulled clear and flailed wildly about.
With one set of flippers extended, the turtle was easily Mundo's length, the caramel-and-yellow carapace twice the man's width. The exaggerated size even more exaggerated by the water's magnification, the turtle seemed unreal, like a cartoon monster, to Bowen. Mundo moved spiritedly, hovering now on the back of the turtle. He reached for a front flipper, but the turtle fought him. Each time he worked the limb out of the net, the turtle jerked and recaught itself. The diver sprang off the turtle as if he were a rider being dismounted up into the sky. He exhaled as he ascended, great silver spheres of air boiling from his mouth, forming a column that he appeared to climb, hand over hand, to the surface. Bowen heard the agonized suck of his inhalation--"Mundo!" This from Ezekiel--and then he was down again.
By the time Mundo was back to the turtle, Ezekiel had hauled the net up nearer to the surface. Bowen dived to help his partner, but he had entered the water without his fins and could not make the depth. At the bottom of his descent, he saw Mundo bend the turtle's left foreleg back through the net and wrench it over the shell. As Bowen turned upward, he heard the pop of the turtle's elbow joint dislocating.
Gabriel threw Bowen his fins. By the time he had them on, the turtle was out of the net, its two foreflippers dangling awkwardly, the third flipper weighted by the spear, the fourth performing its sad ballet. Mundo dipped below the turtle, retrieving the gun that hung from the spear by its line. He swam sluggishly toward the air, with the turtle in tow by its impaled flipper. Bowen watched them rise. The sight of the black man and the turtle was like a dream-born image floating in cool ether. The bright surface gleamed like the edge of sleep; the head of the leviathan turned from it toward the dark mouth of the channel that sloped down and away.
They came up between the two boats. Ezekiel began his protest.
"Daht my hawksbill, Mundo. Wha' hahppen, mahn? Wha' hahppen?"
"Here now, Ezekiel," Gabriel shouted back. "You makin' a mess ah noise, boy. Stop dis ugliness."
Mundo kept his back to Ezekiel's boat and would not answer the charge. He dragged the spear line in, bringing the turtle between himself and Bowen. Both men caught hold of opposite sides of the shell and waited for Gabriel to position himself. The turtle wagged its huge head back and forth out of the water.
"Wha' hahppen, mahn?"
"Ezekiel," Gabriel said across the distance between the boats. "You shut up."
"Wha' hahppen, mahn?"
"Shut up now or come here ahnd take some licks."
Mundo and Bowen faced each other over the mound of the carapace. Blood clotted on the side of Mundo's face.
"Doan move up too high, Mistah Bone," Mundo warned. "Keep in de middle or he snahp you."
"You're bleeding some."
Mundo just grinned. To Bowen, his grin seemed to celebrate mischievousness.
"Did you shoot him," Bowen asked quietly, "before they netted him?"
"What do you think?" The tone of Mundo's voice didn't answer him but simply posed the question. Bowen suspected that the net had reached the turtle before Mundo had, but there was no way to prove it. Only Mundo and Ezekiel knew for sure.
"I think this is a damn big turtle," Bowen said.
It took them a while to get the hawksbill into the boat. Ezekiel and Henry raised their mast and set sail for the camp on Southwest Cay. Gabriel restepped their own mast to give them more room in the bottom of the boat; but even so, they had to remove the middle seat to fit the turtle in. Bowen straddled the shell. He subdued the two hind flippers and tied them with palm fronds. He was shivering unconsciously, a condition Gabriel called dogleg. When Mundo joined them, the boat sank low in the water. He took his seat in the stern and stared thoughtfully at the turtle, as if he were preparing to interrogate it.
"Dis beast must weigh tree hundred pounds, Mundo," Gabriel proclaimed.
"Daht's good luck."
All at once, Bowen was tired and hungry and thirsty. The oatmeal can and the water bottle were buried in the chaos of fish and rope; he had no energy to look for them.
Gabriel unfurled the sail and changed places with Bowen on the turtle to work the sheet line. They began the long sail back. Because there were only a few inches of freeboard left to the boat, Mundo would not let Gabriel trim the sail too tightly. The boat plugged slowly through the head seas. When they were on a direct course, Gabriel put the sheet line between his horny toes and stepped on it to keep it in place. He and Bowen scaled the fish and cleaned them, dropping the guts overboard into the water that was still clear but now colorless again, the blue gone out of it with the beginning of twilight. "Come, shahrk, come," Gabriel said each time. "Here's a nice piece ah food. I treat you good, you know." Mundo sang country-and-western songs, throwing all the melodrama he could into them. The air became steely and dense with haze.
They entered the lagoon shortly after dark. For some time, they had watched a flickering bright light come from the camp; even from a mile out at sea, it cast a wobbly, liquid thread of illumination that ran out from the cay to their boat. It was obvious now that someone had built a large bonfire on the shore; and as Mundo steered into the shallows and they prepared to beach, a man moved out of the darkness into the firelight, the flames rising above his head. To Bowen, the silhouette was grotesque, crippled--the shadow of a beggar.
"Mundo," Gabriel said, "Ezekiel wahnt to make a cry, mahn."
Mundo thieved the hawksbill from him, Ezekiel shouted crazily. The other fishermen gathered around him now.
"Mundo teef de hawksbill."
"Wha' hahppen, Mundo?"
"Henry, come tell dem, mahn."
But Henry would not come out of the darkness and speak. As they dragged the boat ashore, the fishermen moved down next to the water to help them and to have a look at the big turtle. Among the crowd, talking all at once, the three of them were solemn and quick, anxious for an end to the work. Ezekiel pushed forward, keeping the boat between himself and Mundo.
"Wha' hahppen, Mundo?" he said witlessly. "Wha' hahppen, mahn? You fuck me."
Mundo would not acknowledge him but spoke instead to the other men assembled around the boat. He looked predatory in the changing light of the fire, dangerous.
"I shoot de hawksbill," Mundo said. "You see it dere in my boat. De hell wit' daht bitch Ezekiel." He wouldn't say anything more. Together, he and Bowen lifted the two big turtles out of the boat and placed them gently in the sand. The old man yelled a lot, but Bowen could not understand what he was saying. Colbert, a fisherman from the same village as Ezekiel, called out boldly from the group.
"Gabriel, speak up, mahn."
Gabriel talked softly, as though to counterbalance Mundo's disdain for Ezekiel. Although he would not speculate on what had happened in the water, he explained how on their way out in the morning Mundo had revealed his dream and how the bird had flown into the boat. Immediately, the excitement returned. The dream and the bird inflated the drama and the importance of the dispute, and that pleased the onlookers. Someone called for Bowen to tell what he knew. Most of the men stopped arguing to hear him. Bowen was reluctant to speak, aware of his difference and how it would distort what he said to them, how it would become a story that ended, "Ahnd den de white mahn say. ..."
"It was like Gabriel said. Mundo told us he had a dream about fucking a man. He said this was a sign that meant he was to shoot a big male hawksbill. There's the turtle right there."
"Sci-ahnce mahn doan believe in dreams," someone yelled at him. "Dreams is fah peoples like we."
"Maybe so, but this one came true, didn't it?" Bowen said calmly.
Ezekiel shoved forward toward him. "No!" he shouted. "Dis dream a lie. Mundo teef de hawksbill. Wha' hahppen, Mundo?"
"The dream is no lie," Bowen said, unable to keep the impatience from his voice. He hated the way the focus had been entirely transferred to him. It seemed that everyone except Mundo was ready to grant him the full authority of his judgment because he was white and educated.
"Yes," a voice agreed. "But you see Mundo shoot de hawksbill before de net reach?"
Gabriel spoke before anyone else could. "Mahn, wha' de fuck it mahttah? De dream come true. Daht's daht. Quit dis fuss."
Bowen bent over into the boat to collect the spear guns, wary that Ezekiel would see only him, blame only him, and if there were uncertainty on his face he must hide it from them, because he knew now what he had to say. On the sail back, Mundo and the turtle wouldn't leave his mind. There was the dream, as undeniable as it was incomprehensible, a coincidence announcing itself, a magic somehow conspired between man and beast. He could not stop himself from accepting it and from believing that what Mundo had done had been done by right of the dream. As a biologist, he had been sincere; but what had drawn him to the sea in the first place was the feeling that it held mysteries that no man could measure. Now a series of events had taken place that he could never rationalize, never accurately explain.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Mundo watching him. Bowen wished he could know what the black man was thinking, but he had no intuition for what was at stake between them. His only impulse was to protect the knowledge of the dream.
"Mundo shot the turtle. The net wasn't there yet. It fell right after the shot."
"You see it, mahn?"
'That's how it happened."
"You see it hahppen daht way?"
"I'm telling you what I know."
Bowen's proclamation put an end to it. Everyone agreed then that the hawksbill was Mundo's. Ezekiel wouldn't be quiet, but he walked away from them anyway, still shouting passionately, and others shouted back at him to shut up. The men went back to their cooking fires to have their suppers. The three of them were alone again. As they finished unloading the boat, Mundo whispered to Gabriel, "Mistah Bone find a mahn to fuck."
"Oh, ho," said Gabriel, turning around to see if Bowen had heard. "Maybe next he get a sign, too. Mistah Bone--right?"
No guilt burned into him, no sympathy for Ezekiel. The dream was more important than what he had or had not seen. Mundo had come to the turtle first, through the dream, and that could not be changed, not by Bowen, not by Ezekiel's net. It frightened him that something so intangible could become so absolute in his mind. He confronted Mundo.
"Was I wrong?"
"You mus' decide, mahn. But you doan hahs to lie fah me."
"I did it because of the dream."
"Maybe daht's so," Mundo said, watching Bowen carefully. "Maybe you find out someting. But lissen to me, Bone. Dreams nevah is true. Dey lead you, mahn, ahnd de rest is up to you."
"I should have stayed out of it," he said. Then he realized that for the first time, Mundo had not called him "Mistah."
"No, mahn, you was right, so you mus' fuck Ezekiel so. De hawksbill was mine no mahttah wha' you say to dem. I hahd ahdvantage."
"There was no lie, then."
"No, but you behavin' like a blahck mahn, speculatin', not like a sci-ahnce mahn."
They picked up their gear and hauled it to camp. While Gabriel prepared to cook their supper, Bowen found his tape measure, notebook and pencil and went with Mundo back to the boat. Together, they carried the turtles down the beach and set them under the narrow, thatched ramada built by the fishermen to shelter them from the sun. They placed the turtles among the others already there. Bowen tallied the ones brought in by all the boats, measured the length and the width of their shells, counted the dorsal plates, recorded the sex and the species. As always, he checked for the ghost-white markings of a mulatto hawksbill. Mundo scratched his initials into the bellies of his turtles with a diving knife.
"Damn," Bowen said, finished with his notes. "No mulatto."
"Daht's only luck, mahn. Have faith."
The firelight rubbed weakly on the carapaces and spun like small gold drops in the eyes of the turtles. Their flippers stretched out front and back from beneath the rows of shells, the palm fronds pinning them together in a frozen clap, an endless prayer.
"I goin' bahck."
"All right. I'll be there in a while."
Bowen did not know why he wanted to stay with the turtles, but he lay down in the broken coral, too tired to help with supper, and listened to the sea creatures take their air, the gasping litany that committed them to the surface and to men. He saw them in the sea again, male and female clasped together, hawksbill and green turtle, the plates of their shells flush. They would join each other in that embrace and mate, drifting in the shallows, pushing up together to breathe, the female encircled by the flippers of the male for a day and a night until the mythical pas de deux had ended and a new form had been conceived from different bloods. Then they would unlock to spend a year alone in the sea. The images stopped there and he felt himself falling asleep. He did not want to sleep here in the ramada with the turtles, so he rose and walked back to camp, to the men and to his supper. The tide had changed, and he heard the difference in the night. The sea pulled back off the reef, sucking the air down through coral bones, and then released it again and again.
"'Dis sign mean I mus' shoot a big he hawksbill,' Mundo said emphatically."
"Splashing into the water, face down, the gun ready, he turned a spiral to examine what was there."
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