Fancy's Grouper

I'll say straight out: Here on Cape Hatteras, on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, we are far off the flow of civilized currents, distant from manmade horizons and modern complications of life. It's no mystery to us that down through the wind-blown years, we have been haven to all manner of scoundrel, every stripe of ruffian, desperado and holy terror you'd care to name. Edward leach, whom most called Blackbeard, was one you'd know, but there were plenty others drifted over from the world to shelter from the law, murderers and smugglers, embezzlers and robbers, some who walked the beach in shiny shoes. Willie Striker had a past, too, but none would ever have known it if he hadn't gone to sea for a living and hooked his grouper, because commercial fishermen think they are God's own image of male perfections, a swollen-head gang afflicted with the desire to lord, bully and triumph when they think they can get away with it. I'll say also that a fish story is like any other, never about a fish but always about a man and a place. I wouldn't even mention it if I thought everybody knew.

•

We saw the boats off that morning, like we always do, and near an hour later, Mrs. Mitty Terbill(continued on page 156) Fancy's Grouper (continued from page 92) came into the marina store to post a sign she had made, a little gray cardboard square she had scissored from the back of a cereal box. It said: lost dog. yorkshire terrier. name--prince ed, my sole companion, reward, and then a number to reach her at.

"What's the reward, Mitty?" I asked. It was five dollars, which is about right for a Yorkie, measured by appeal per pound. Mitty Terbill is not an upright-standing woman, but then, considerable woe has befallen her and keeps her squashed into her pumpkin self, allowing for only brief religious ascension. She spent that much plus tax on a 12-pack and trudged back out the door, foot-heavy in her fishwife's boots, going back to her empty house on the beach to sit by the phone. Well, this story's not about the widow Terbill; that's just how I remember the day settling down after the dawn rush, with Mitty coming in, some of the fellows cracking jokes about how one of the boys must have mistook Prince Ed for bait and gone trolling for shark. But, please, let me go on.

Life is slack at a marina between the time the boats go out early and vacationers get burned off' the beach about noon and come round to browse; then in the afternoons, all hell breaks loose when the boats return. So it was just me, my manager, Emory Plum, and my two sacked-out bay retrievers in the place when I hear what might be an emergency broadcast on the citizen's band, because it's old grouch Striker calling J.B. on the open channel, channel 17. Willie Striker has been one to spurn the advancement of radio and the charity of fellow captains, not like the other jack-ers out there-bounced wave to wave on the ocean. They yammer the livelong d ay, going on like a team of evangelical auctioneers, whereas you wouldn't find Willie reaching out to speak his mind. He kept to himself and preferred to talk that way, to himself, unless he had a word for his wife, Issabell.

J.B.J.B.... come in, Tarbaby,1 hear, and even though an individual's voice coming through the squawk box fizzes like buggy tires on a Hooded road, you know it's Willie Striker transmitting, because he had the weight of an accent to his voice, a low spin or bite on some words. Like mullet, Willie Striker would say maul-it.

Tarbaby, come in, I hear Willie say. That was the name of J.B.'s work boat. I was restocking baits, ballyhoo and chum, my head bent into the freezer locker, and Emory was behind the counter, studying delinquent accounts. "Turn her up a bit there, Emory," I told him, "if you please."

He spun the dial to volume nine, put a hailstorm and a 50-knot blow between us and the boats. "Well, who's that we're listening to?" Emory yelled out. "That's not our Mr. Fancy, is it?"

Some 25 years it's been, I guess, that Willie Striker has lived among us, married Issabell Preddy, one of our own, came south, it was said, sick and tired of Dayton and a factory job, and from the day he showed his jumpy self at the Old Christmas celebration in Salvo, folks called Striker Fancy. If you've seen his picture in the paper, you'd never know why, since now he looks like any other raggedy-butt bottom fisherman on the Banks, but back then, he came to us adorned in finery--a handsome blue suit, silver cuff links in the shape of eagles, gold in his teeth, shoes that gleamed like black glass. He had a small, shrewd but skittish face with darting, then locking eyes, a chin that never grew, some skinny teeth right out in front of his mouth and his upper lip was short, tight, some called it a sneer. The top of his head was ball round and bald up to the crown, then black (now white) hair spread smooth like fur. He was fancy, all right, too fancy for us, since it was plain as day he didn't have a penny in his silk pockets.

Outsiders have always meant complications to us, one way or another; the truth is, we don't take to them very well. That's one thing, but the fact is, Willie Striker wouldn't care and never did if a Midgett or a Burrus or a Foster ever said, "Fine day, iddn't, Skipper?" to him or not. He wasn't that type of man, and we weren't that type of community to look twice at anyone unless he had our blood and our history. But then, Issabell Preddy was the type of woman inwardly endeared to signs of acceptance; she wanted love but didn't know how to ask for it, which you could say was the result of having a drunkard father and a drunkard mother. She was sweet but in a motionless way, and not the first on anybody's list. She had one eye floating and purblind from when her daddy socked her when she was small, wore handed-down boys' clothes and sack dresses on Sundays. Her skin was such thin milk, you never saw her outside all summer. Back then, and all these years until Fancy caught his grouper, something inside of Issabell made her afraid of a good time, which made her the only Preddy in existence with a docile nature.

One by one, Issabell's brothers quit school and took off, joined the Navy and disappeared, and Issabell herself moved back down the road from her aunt Betty's in Rodanthe to Hatteras, rented the apartment above the fishhouse and got employed packing trout, fared modestly, didn't hide herself, exactly, but wouldn't so much as sneeze in company without written invitation. The island had temporarily run out of eligible men when Terry Newman met Willie Striker in a Norfolk juke joint and brought him back with him for the Old Christmas fete, when all the longtime families on the Banks come together to feast and game and make music and, when the sun goes down, to brawl. On that occasion, Willie had a mix-up with Terry's brother Bull Newman, who took issue with the way Fancy dressed, especially those, silver-eagle cufflinks. Fancy laid Bull's nose flat with his beer bottle without breaking the glass, threw open the window at his back and scrambled out into the night.

No one saw Willie Striker again until a week later, raking scallops in the sound with Issabell Preddy. The way I heard it was, Willie got to the road that night about the same time Issabell was headed back to Hatteras from her visit with her aunt Betty, driving a $50 Ford truck she had bought as a Christmas present to herself, and even though Willie was hitching back north, she stopped and he got in anyway and went with her south, neither of them, the story goes, exchanging a word until they passed the lighthouse and got to the village, everything shut down dark and locked up, not a soul in sight, of course, and Issabell said to him that he could sleep in the truck if he wanted or, if he was going to be around for the week, he could come upstairs and have the couch for 30 cents a night or, if he had plans to stay longer, he could give her bed a try. Willie went the whole route: truck, couch, Issabell Preddy's lonely single bed.

In those days, scalloping was woman's work, so it was hard to raise any sort of positive opinion about Willie. He was a mainlander and, worse, some brand of foreigner. Out there in the sound, wading around, it appeared he had come to work, but not work seriously, not do man's work. He had moved into Issabell's apartment above the fishhouse and burdened her social load with scandal; and he had clobbered Bull Newman, which was all right by itself, but he hadn't held his ground to take licks in kind. He had run away.

The following Old Christmas, Willie wedded Issabell Preddyin her aunt Betty's kitchen. For a few years there, he went from one boat to another, closemouthed and sore-fingered, every captain and crew's backup boy, and Issabell scalloped and packed fish and picked crabs until they together had saved enough for a down payment on the Se a Eagle. Since that day, he had bottom-fished by himself, on the reefs and sunken wrecks, at the edge of the stream or off the shoals. He got himself electric reels a couple of years ago, wouldn't drop a line until the fleet yas out of sig4, wouldn't share loran numbers, growled to himself and was all-round gumptious, a squirrelhearted stand-alone, forever on guard against invasion of self, and in that sense, he ended up where he belonged, maybe, because nobody interfered with Willie Striker, we let him be. Whatever world Willie had fallen from at mid-life, he wound up in the right place, with the right woman, to bury his past.

•

Fancy" finally connected with J.B., who bottom-fished as well, not possessing the craft or the personal etiquette--that is to say, the willingness to baby the drunken or fish-crazed rich--to charter out for sport. Likewise, he was a mainlander, a West Virginian with a fancy for the sea, and for these reasons, Willie, I suspect, would not loathe chancing J.B.'s favor. We heard them decide to switch radio channels to 22 in order to gain privacy. I asked Emory to follow them over. Up at the Striker trailer in Trent, Issabell must have been listening in on her own unit. Hers was the first voice on the air when we transferred. She questioned Willie about what was wrong; he told her to pipe down. Then J.B. butted in.

"What you need, Sea Eagle?" we heard him squawk. After a moment, Willie came back on.

"Tarbaby," he said, "something ... something ... assistance. Can you ...?"

"What's he say was the trouble?" Emory bellowed. "I couldn't tell, could you?"

"I didn't get that, Willie," J.B. said. He assumed the Sea Eagle had broken down. "Where the hell are you, Sea Eagle? Gimme your numbers and I'll come rescue your sorry ass."

"Negative," we heard Willie say. "Report your numbers and I'll come to you."

So that's how it went, Striker ignoring his Issabell's pleas to divulge the nature of his trouble, J.B. staying at location while the Sea Eagle slowly motored through three-foot seas to find him, while we sat around the marina, trying to figure out what it meant. Fancy had a problem, but it didn't seem to be with his boat; he needed help, but he would go to it rather than have it come to him. J.B. was about 20 miles out southeast of the shoals, tilefishing; likely, Willie was farther east, sitting over one of his secret spots, 100 fathoms at the brink of the continental shelf. We heard no further radio contact except once, more than an hour later, when Striker advised J.B. he had the Tarbaby in sight and would come up on his starboard side. Back at the marina, the parcel-service man lugged in18 cartons of merchandise and we were fairly occupied and thought no more about it. Then past noon, J.B. called in to us, jigging the news.

"Diamond Shoals Marina,"J.B. crowed, "y'all come in. Dillon," he said to me, "I expect you better clean up things around there and get ready for a fuss. Fancy caught himself a fat bejesus."

J.B. declined to offer more information, claiming he would not be responsible for spoiling the fine suspense. I slid over to channel 22, waited for Issabell to stop badgering Willie, took the transmitter and asked him what was up.

"Up?" he spit into the microphone. "I tell you up!Up come victory, by God. Up come justice ... going to seventeen," he muttered, and I flipped channels to hear him advertise his fortune to a wider audience.

"Ya-ha-ha," we all heard him cackle. "Cover your goddamn eyes, sons of bitches. Hang your heads. Age of Fancy has come .... "

We had never heard him express himself at such provocative length.

•

The island's like one small room of gossip-starved biddies when something like this happens. People commenced telephoning the marina; took no more than five minutes for the noise to travel 60 miles throughout the Banks. "Don't know a thing more than you," Emory told each caller. "Best get down here to see for yourself when he comes in around three." I took a handcart to the stock room and loaded the coolers with Coca-Cola and beer.

Now, there are three types of beast brought in to the dock. First kind are useless except as a sight to see, tourists gather round and take snapshots, Miss Luelle brings her day-care kids down to pee their pants, old stories of similar beasts caught or seen are told once more, then, when the beast gets rank, somebody kicks it back into the water and that's that. I'm talking sharks or anything big, bony; red-meated and weird. Second style of beast is your sport beast: marlin, tuna, wahoo, barracuda, etc., but primarily billfish, the stallions of wide-open blue water. This class of beast prompts tourists to sign up for the stream, but Miss Luelle and her children stay home, as do the rest of the locals, unless a record's shattered, because these are regular beasts on the Outer Banks, at least for a few more years until they are gone forever, and after the captain and the angler quit swaggering around, thinking they are movie stars, I send Brainless, the dock boy, out to cut down that poor dead and stinking hero fish and tow it into the sound for the crabs and eels, and that's that, too. The third style of beast is kidnaped from the bottom of the world, something extra-huge and rare, living in the middle of midnight, like a jewfish, weighing a ton and worth a fortune, and that's what Striker would have. He wouldn't bring anything in for its freak value--he was the last man on earth to recognize sport--all he did day in, day out was labor for a living, like most but not all of us out here, so I figured he hooked himself a windfall beast destined for finer restaurants; he'd weigh it and set it on ice for brief display, the. House, exchange beast for cash and steer home to Issabell for supper and his bottle of beer, go to bed and rise before dawn and be down here at his slip getting rigged, then on the water before the sun was up.

First in was J.B. on the Tarbaby, which is a Wanchese boat and faster than most; J.B. likes to steam up a wake, anyway, put spray in the air. Already, the multitudes converged in the parking lot and out on the porch, elbowing to the store. Vickilee came back across the street with her cousins from the firehouse to start her second shift; Buddy led a caravan of four-wheelers down the beach from Cape Point. Packers and pickers and shuckers shuffled drag-ass from inside the fish house, gas-station geniuses sauntered over from the garage. Coast Guard swabs drove up in a van, the girls from Bubba's Barbecue, Burrus from Scales and Tales, Geegee from the video rental, Cornbread from the surf shop, Sheriff Spine, Sam and Maggie from over at the deli, the tellers from the bank, Daddy Wiss leading a pack of elders, and tourists galore drawn by the scent of photo opportunity and fish history. Before three, all Hatteras had closed and come down, appetites inflamed, wondering what the devil Willie Striker was bringing in from the ocean floor that was so humongous he had to defy his own personal code and ask for help.

J.B.'s mate tossed a bowline to Brainless; took him in the face, as usual, because the poor boy can't catch. J.B. stepped ashore in his yellow oilskins and scale-smeared boots, saying, "I can't take credit for anything, but damn if I can't tell my grandkids I was there to lend a hand." Without further elaboration, he walked directly up the steps to the store, went to the glass cooler and purchased one of the bottles of French champagne we stock for high rollers and unequaled luck. He bought a case of ice-colds, too, for his crew, went back out to the Tarbaby with them under his arm.

"Well, come on, J.B.," the crowd begged, making way for him, "tell us what old Fancy yanked from the deep." But J.B. knew the game, he knew fishing by now and what it was about when it wasn't about paying rent and kept his mouth glued shut as he flung tilefish guts to the pelicans.

Bobby Bayliss shouted, "He just come through the inlet!"

The crowd buzzed.

Someone else said, "I heard tell it's only a mako shark."

Another shouted, "I heard it was a tiger!"

Then, "No, sir, a great white's what I hear."

"Hell it is," said another boy, "it's a dang big tuttie."

"Them's illegal," said his friend. "Take your butt right to jail."

One of our more God-fearing citizens maneuvered to take advantage of the gathering. I wasn't going to have that; I stepped back off the porch and switched on the public-address system. Jerry Bomfield, I announced in the lot, this ain't Sunday and this property you're on ain't church. I don't want to see nobody speaking in tongues and rolling an the asphalt out there, I said. This is a nonreligious, nondenominational event.

"Here he comes now," Jimmy Hobe hollered. We all craned our necks to look as the Sea Eagle rounded the buoy into harbor waters, and gave a rebel cheer. Cars parked in the street, fouling traffic. The rescue squad came with light flashing for a fainted woman. I went and got my binoculars from under the counter and muscled back out among the porch rats to the rail, focused in as Willie throttled down at the bend in the cut. I could see through the glasses that this old man who neither gave nor received had the look of new-found leverage to the set of his jaw. You just can't tell what a prize fish is going to do to the in sides of a man.

I went back inside to help Emory at the register. Issabell Striker was in there, arguing politely with Vickilee, who threw up her hands. Emory shot me a dirty look. Issabell was being very serious--not upset, exactly, just serious. "Mister Aldie," she declared, "you must make everyone go away."

"No problem, Mizz Striker," I said, and grabbed the microphone to the PA. Y'all go home now, get, I said. I shrugged my shoulders and looked at this awkward, lonesome woman, her floppy straw hat wrapped with a lavender scarf to shade her delicate face, swoops of strawberry hair poking out, her skin unpainted and pinkish, that loose eye drifting, and Issabell just not familiar enough with people to be used to making sense. "Didn't work."

Her expression was firm in innocence; she had her mind set on results but little idea how to influence an outcome. "Issabell," I said to her," what's wrong, hon?" The thought that she might have to assert herself made her weak, but finally, the story came out. She had spent the last hours calling television stations. When she came down to the water and saw the traffic tie-up and gobs of people, her worry was that the reporters and cameramen wouldn't get through, and she wanted them to get through with all her sheltered heart, for Willie's sake, so he could get the recognition he deserved, which he couldn't get any other way on earth, given the nature of Hatteras and the nature of her husband.

Issabell had changed some but not much in all the years she had been paired with Fancy in a plain but honest life. She still held herself apart, but not as far. Her hands had curled up from' working at the fishhouse. Striker bought her a set of Jack Russell terriers and she began to breed them for sale, and on weekends during the season, she'd have a little roadside flea market out in front of their place, and then, of course, there was being wife to a waterman, but what I'm saying is, she had spare time and she used it for the quiet good of others, baking for the church, baby-sitting for kids when someone died Once, I even saw her dance when Buddy's daughter got married, but it wasn't with Willie she danced, because Willie went to sea or Willie stayed home, and that was that. I don't think she ever pushed him, she knew how things were. The only difference between the two of them was that she had an ever-strengthening ray of faith that convinced her someday life would change and she'd fit in right; Willie had faith that the life he'd found in Hatteras was set in concrete, and all he asked in return was for folks to let him be. All right, I say, but if he didn't want excitement, he should've reconsidered before he chose the life of a waterman and flirted with the beauty of the unknown, as we have it here.

"Mizz Striker, don't worry," I comforted the woman. A big fish is about the best advertisement a marina can have, besides. "Any TV people come round here, I'll make it my business they get what they want."

"Every man needs a little attention now and then," she said, but her own opinion made her shy. She lowered her eyes and blushed, tender soul. "Is that not right, Dillon?" she questioned. "If he'd done something to make us all proud?"

Out on the bayside window, we could watch the Sea Eagle angling to dock, come alongside the block-and-tackle hoist, the mob pressing forward to gape into the stern, children riding high on their daddies' shoulders. Willie stood in the wheel-house, easing her in, his face enclosed by the bill of his cap and sunglasses, and when he shut down the engines, I saw his head jerk around, a smile of satisfaction form and vanish; he pinched his nose with his left hand and batted the air with the other, surveying the army of folks, then he looked up toward me and his wife. You could read his lips saying "Phooey."

"What in tarnation did he catch, anyway?" I said, nudging Issabell.

"All he told me was 'a big one,'" she admitted.

One of the porch layabouts had clambered down dockside and back, bursting through the screen door with a report. "I only got close enough to see its tail," he hooted.

"What in the devil is it?" Emory said.

"Warsaw grouper," said the porch rat.

"Size of an Oldsmobile, I'm told."

"Record buster, is she?"

"Does a whale have tits?" said the rat. "'Scuse me, Mizz Striker."

You can't buy publicity like that for an outfit or even an entire state, and taking the record on a grouper is enough to make the angler a famous and well-thought-of man. I looked back out the bayside window. Fancy was above the congregation on the lid of his fish box, J.B. next to him. Fancy had his arms out stretched like Preacher exhorting his Hock. J.B. had whisked off the old man's cap. Willie's tongue was hanging out, lapping at a baptism of foamy champagne.

"Old Fance come out of his nest," Emory remarked. I fixed him with a sour look for speaking that way in front of Issabell. "Old Fance's on top of the world."

Issabell's pale eyes glistened. "Fancy," she repeated, strangely pleased. "That's what y'all call Willie, isn't it?" She took for herself a deep and surprising breath of gratitude. "I just think it's so nice of y'all to give him a pet name like that."

•

The crowd multiplied; a state trooper came to try to clear a lane on Highway 12. At intervals, boats from the charter fleet arrived back from the Gulf Stream, captains and crews saluting Fancy from the bridge. Issabell went clown to be with her champion. Emory and I and Vickilee had all we could do to handle customers, sold out of film in nothing Hat, moved 38 cases of beer, mostly by the can. I figured it was time I walked down and congratulated Willie, verify if he had made himself newsworthy or was just being a stinker. First thing though, I placed a call to Fort Lauderdale and got educated on the state, national and world records for said variety of beast, so at least there'd be one of us on the dock knew what he was talking about.

I untied my outboard runabout over at the top of the slips and puttered across the harbor, tied up on the stern of Sea Eagle and J.B. gave me a hand aboard. For the first time, I saw that awesome fish, had to hike over it, in fact. Let me just say this: You live on the Outer Banks all your life and you're destined to have your run-ins with leviathans. You're bound to see things and be called on to believe things that others elsewhere wouldn't, wonders that are in a class by themselves, gruesome creatures, underwater shocks and marvels, fearsome life forms, finned shapes vicious as jaguars, quick and pretty as race horses, sleek as guided missiles and exploding with power, and the more damn sights you see, the more you never know what to expect next. Only a dead man would take what's below the surface for granted, but when I looked upon Fancy's grouper, I confess my legs lost strength and my eyes bugged; it was as though Preacher had taken grip on my thoughts, and I said to myself, Monster and miracle greater than me, darkness which may be felt.

J.B. revered the beast. "Fattest damn unprecedented jumbo specimen of Mongolian sea pig known to man," he said. He could be an eloquent fool. "Saint Gompus, king of terrors, immortal till this day." He leaned into me, whispering, fairly snockered by now, which was proper for the occasion. "Dillon," he confide*"don' think I'm queer." He wanted to crawl down the beast's throat and se it felt like inside, have his picture taken with his tootsies sticking out the maw.

"Stay out of the fish," I warned J.B. "I don't have insurance for that sort of prank."

A big fish is naturally a source of crude and pagan inspirations. I knew what J.B. had in mind: get my marina photographer to snap his picture being swallowed and make a bundle selling copies, print the image on T-shirts and posters, too. He could snuggle in there, no doubt, take his wife and three kids with him, there was room. The fish had a mouth wide as a bicycle tire, with lips as black and hard, and you could look past the rigid shovel of tongue in as far as the puckered fold of the gullet, the red, spiky scythes of gills, and shudder at the notion of being suckered through that portal, wolfed down in one screaming piece into the dungeon of its gut.

I asked J.B. where Willie had put himself, it being high time to hang the beast and weigh it, see where we stood on the record, have the photographer take pictures, let tourists view the creature so we could move traffic and the oilier fishermen would have space to go about their daily business.

"He's up there in the cuddy cabin with lssabell," J.B. said, nodding sideways. "Something's gotten into him. don't ask me what." Vacationers shouted inquiries our way; J.B. squared his shoulders to respond to an imprudent gal in a string bikini. "Well, ma'am," he bragged, "this kind of fish is a hippocampus grampus. Round here, we call 'em wads. This one's a damn big wad, didn't it?" As I walked forward, I heard her ask if she could step aboard and touch it, and there was beast worship in her voice.

I opened the door to the whcelhouse; ahead, past the step-down, there was Willie Striker, his scrawny behind on a five-gallon bucket, the salty bill of his cap tugged down to the radish of his pug nose, hunched elbows on threadbare knees, with a pint of peppermint schnapps clutched in his hands. If you've seen a man who's been skunked seven days running and towed back lo port by his worst enemy, you know how Willie looked when I found him in there, lssabell was scooched on the galley bench, her hands in front of her on the chart. She was baffled and cheerless, casting glances at Willie, and she played nervously with her hair where it stuck out under her hat, twisting it back and forth with her crooked fingers.

I tried to lighten the atmosphere of domestic strife. "You Strikers're going to have to hold down the celebration," I teased. "People been calling up about you two disturbing the peace."

"He don't want credit, Dillon," lssabel I said in guilty exasperation. "A cloud's passed over the man's golden moment in the sun."

Here was a change of heart for which I was not prepared. "Willie," I began, but stopped. You have to allow a man's differences and I was about to tell him he was acting backward. He cocked his chin lo look up at me from under his cap, had his sunglasses off and the skin around his eyes was branded with a raccoon's mask of whiteness, and I'm telling you, there was such a blast of ardent if not furious pride in his expression right then, and the chill of so much bitterness trapped in his mouth, it was something new and profound for me. lo be in the presence of a fellow so deeply filled with hate for his life, and I saw there was no truth guiding his nature, I saw there was only iron will.

His face contorted and hardened with pitiless humor; he understood my revelation and mocked my concern, made an ogreish laugh in his throat and nodded like, All right, my friend, maybe you know my secret, but since you're dumb as ajar of dirt, what does it matter? and he passed his bottle of bohunk lightning to me. Say I was confused. Then he mooned over at lssabell and eased off, he took back the pint and rinsed the taste of undeserved years of hardship from his mouth with peppermint and jerked his thumb aft.

"Where I come from," Willie said, rubbing the silvery stubble on his cheek, "we let them go when they are like that one." His face cracked into a net of shallow lines; he let a smile rise just so far and then refused it. "Too small." (Sniull is how he said it.) "Not worth so much troubles."

I thought, What the hell, let him be what he is. reached over and clapped him on the back, feeling the spareness of his frame underneath my palm. "Step on out of here now, Captain," I said. "Time for that beast lo be strung up and made official."

"Willie," coaxed lssabell with a surge of hope, "folks want toshake your hand." He was unmoved by this thought. "It might mean nothing to you," she said, "but it makes a difference to me."

Striker didn't budge except to relight his meerschaum pipe and bite down stubbornly on its stem between packed front teeth. On the insides of his hands were welts and fresh slices where nylon line had cut, scars and streaks of old burns, calluses like globs of old varnish, boillike infections from slime poison.

"What's the matter, honey?" lssabell persisted, "'Tell me, Willie, because it hurls to know you can't look your4 own happiness in the face. We've both been like that for too long." She tried tmile but only made herself look desperate. "I wish," she said, "I wish...." lssabell faltered but then went on. "You know what I wish, Willie, I wish I knew you when you were young."

Issabell jumped up, brushing by me and back into the sunshine and the crowd.

"Now she will despise me,"Willie said suddenly; and I turned to leave.

•

J.B., me and Brainless rigged the block and tackle and hoisted the beast to the scales. The crowd saw first the mouth rising over the gunnel like upturned jaws on a steam shovel, fixed to sink into sky. People roared when they saw the grisly, bulging eyeball, dead as glass but still gleaming with black, wild mysteries. Its gill plates, the size of trash-can lids, were gashed with white scars, its pectoral fins like elephant ears, its back protected by a hedge of wicked spikes, and it smelled to me, in my imagination, like the inside of a castle in a cold and rainy land. You could hear all the camera shutters clicking, like a bushel of live crabs. When I started fidgeting with the counterweights, the whole place hushed, and out of the corner of my eye, I could see Striker come to stand in his wheelhouse window, looking on, the lines in his face all turned to the clenched pipe. He was in there percolating with vinegar and stubbornness and desire, you know, and I thought, What is it, you old bastard, have you decided Issabell is worth the gamble? The grouper balanced. I wiped sweat from my brow and double-checked the numbers. Fancy had it, all right, broke the state mark by more than 200 pounds, the world by 26 pounds, seven ounces. I looked over at him there in the wheelhouse and, brother, he knew.

I made the announcement; people covered their ears while the fleet blasted air horns. A group of college boys mistook J.B. for the angler and attempted to raise him to their shoulders. A tape recorder was poked in his face; I saw Issabell push it away. Willie stepped out of the wheel house then and came ashore to assume command.

•

You might reasonably suspect that it was a matter of honor, that Willie was obliged to make us acknowledge that after 25 year son the Outer Banks, his dues were paid, and furthermore obliged to let his wife, Issabell, share the blessing of public affections, so the poor woman might for once experience the joy of popularity. Willie knew who he was, but maybe he didn't know Issabell so well after all. You just can't figure bottom dwellers.

Anyway, I swear no man I am familiar with has ever been more vain about achievement, or more mishandled the trickier rewards of success, than Willie after he climbed off Sea Eagle. The crowd and the sun and the glamor went straight to his head and resulted in a boom of self-importance until we were all fed up with him. He came at first without a word to stand beside the fish as if it were a private place. He was wary and grave, then humble, as more and more glory fell his way, then a bit coy, I'd say, and then Bull Newman plowed through the crowd, stooped down as if to tackle Willie but instead wrapped his arms around Willie's knees and lifted him up above our heads so that together like that, they matched the length of the fish. The applause rallied from dockside to highway.

"I make all you no-goodniks famous today," Willie proclaimed, crooking his wiry arms like a bodybuilder, showing off. Bull lowered him back down.

"Looks like you ran into some luck there, Fancy," Bull conceded.

"You will call me Mister Fance."

"Purty fish, Mister Fance."

"You are jealous."

"Naw," Bull drawled, "I've had my share of the big ones."

"So tell me, how many world records you have?"

Bull's nostrils flared. "Records are made to be broken, Mister Fance," he said, grinding molars.

"Yah, yah," Willie's accent became heavier and clipped as he spoke, "und so is noses."

Bull's wife pulled him out of there by the back of his pants. Willie strutted on bow legs and posed for picture takers. His old adversaries came forward to offer praise--Ootsie Pickering, Dave Jonson, Milford Lee, all the old alcoholic captains who in past years had worked Willie like a slave. They proposed to buy him a beer, come aboard their vessels for a toast of whiskey, come round the house for a game of cards, and Willie had his most fun yet acting like he couldn't quite recall their names, asking if they were from around here or Johnny-come-latelies, and I changed my mind about Willie hating himself so much, since it was clear it was us he hated more. Leonard Purse, the owner of the fishhouse, was unable to approach closer than three-deep to Willie; he waved and yessirred until he caught Fancy's eye and an impossible negotiation ensued. Both spoke merrily enough but with an icy twinkle in their eyes.

"Purty fish, Willie. How much that monster weigh?"

"Eight dollars," Willie said, a forthright suggestion of an outrageous price per pound.

"Money like that would ruin your white-trash life. Give you a dollar-ten as she hangs."

"Nine dollars," Willie said, crazy, elate "Dollar-fifteen."

"You are a swine."

"Meat's likely to be veined with gristle on a beast that size."

"I will kill you in your schleep."

"Heh-heh-heh. Must have made you sick to ask J.B. for help."

"Ha-ha! Too bad you are chicken of der vadder, or maybe I could ask you." Vickilee fought her way out of the store to inform me that the phone had been ringing off the hook. TV people from New Bern and Raleigh, Greenville and Norfolk were scheduled by her one after the other for the morning; newspaper people had already arrived from up the coast, she and Emory had talked to them and they were waiting for the crowd to loosen up before they tried to push through to us, and one of them had phoned a syndicate, so the news had gone out on the wire, which meant big-city coverage from up north, and, of course, all the sports magazines said they'd try to send somebody down, and to make sure the fish stayed intact. Also, scientists were coming from the marine research center in Wilmington, and professors from Duke hoped they could drive out tomorrow if we would promise to keep the fish in one piece until they got there. The beer trucks were going to make special deliveries in the morning, the snack man, too. Charters were filling up for weeks in advance.

So, you see, Fancy and his grouper were instant industry, the event took on a dimension of its own and Willie embraced this role, knew he was at last scot-free to say what he pleased without penalty and play the admiral without making us complain. He sponged up energy off the crowd and let it make him boastful and abrupt, a real nautical character, and the folks not from around here loved his arrogance and thought we were all little. squirrelly devils. Issabell seemed anxious, too; this was not quite how she had envisioned Willie behaving, him telling reporters he was the only man on Hatteras who knew where the big fish were, but she beamed naively and chattered with the other wives and seemed to enjoy herself, even her goofed eye shined with excitement. It was a thrill and maybe her first one of magnitude and she wasn't going to darken it for herself by being embarrassed.

Willie left the fish suspended until after the sun went down, when I finally got him to agree to put it back on the boat and layer it with ice. Its scales had stiffened and dried, its brown and brownish-green marbled colors turned flat and chalky. Both he and Issabell remained on the boat that night, receiving a stream of visitors until well past midnight, whooping it up and having a grand time, playing country music on theradio so loud I could hear it word for word in my apartment above the store. I looked out the window once and saw Willie waltzing his wife under one of the security light poles, a dog and some kids standing there watching as they carefully spun in circles.

•

Life in Hatter as is generally calm, but Tuesday was carnival day from start to finish. Willie was up at his customary time, before dawn, fiddling around the Sea Eagle as if it were his intention to go to work. When the fleet started out the harbor, though, he and Issabell promenaded across the road for breakfast at the café, and when he got back, I helped him winch the fish into the air, and like magic, we had ourselves a crowd again, families driving down from Nags Head, families who took the ferry from Ocracoke, Willie signing autographs for children, full of coastal authority and lore for the adults, cocky as hell to any fisherman who wandered over. A camera crew pulled up in a van around ten, the rest arrived soon after.

"What's it feel like to catch a fish so big?" they asked.

For a second, Willie was hostile, glaring at the microphone, the camera lens, the interviewer with his necktie loosened in the heat. Then he grinned impishly and said, "I won't tell you."

"You broke the world's record, is that right?"

"Maybe," he allowed indifferently and winked over a TV person's shoulder at me and Issabell.

When the next crew set up, he more or less hinted he was God Almighty and predicted his record would never be broken. After two more crews finished with him, the sun was high; I made him take the fish down, throw a blanket of ice on it. Every few minutes, Emory was on the EA., informing Fancy he had a phone call. Vick-ilee came out and handed Willie a telegram from the governor, commending him for the "catch of the century." I guess the biggest treat for most of us was when the seaplane landed outside the cut, though nobody around here particularly cared for the fellows crammed in there, Fish and Game boys over to authenticate the grouper, so we pulled the fish back out of the boat and secured it to the scales. Hour later, Willie took it down again to stick it in ice, but not ten minutes after that, a truck came by with a load of national-park rangers wanting to have individual pictures taken with Fancy and the grouper, so he hung it back up; then a new wave of sight-seers came by at midafternoon, another wave when the fleet came in at five, so he just let it dangle there on the arm of the hoist, beginning to sag from the amount of euphoric handling and heat, until it was too dark for cameras, and that's when he relented to lower it down and we muscled it back to the boat. He took her down past the slips to the fishhouse, I thought to finally sell the beast to Leonard, but, no, he collected a fresh half ton of ice. Willie wanted to play with the grouper for still another day.

•

On Wednesday, he strung the fish up and dropped it down I'd say about a dozen times the of flow of onlookers and congratulators and hang-arounds had decreased. Issabell was animated as a real-estate agent and girlish as we'd never seen, but by midday, the glow was oft". She had been accidentally bumped into the harbor by a fan, was pulled out muddy and slicked with diesel oil, yet still she had discovered the uninhibited powers of fame and swore that she had been endowed by the presence of the fish with clearer social vision.

By the time Fancy did get his grouper over to the fishhouse and they knifed it open, it was all mush inside, not worth a penny. He shipped the skin, the head and the fins away to a taxidermist in Florida, and I suppose the pieces are still there, sitting in a box like junk.

Now if you didn't already know, this story winds up with a punch from so far out in left field, there's just no way you could see it coming, but I can't apologize for that, no more than I could take responsibility for a hurricane. About a week after everything got back to normal down here, and Fancy seemed content with memories and retreated back to his habits of seclusion, Brainless came crashing through the screen door, arms and legs flapping, his tongue too twisted with what he was dying to say for us to make any sense of it.

Emory looked up from his books. I was on the phone to a man wanting a half-day charter to the stream, arguing with him that there was no such thing as a half-day charter that went out that far. "When's that boy going to grow up?" Emory clucked. He told Brainless to slow down and concentrate on speaking right.

"They'se takin' Fancy away," Brainless said. He pointed out the door.

I told the fellow on the line I might call him back if I had something and hung up, went around the counter and outside on the porch, Emory, too, everybody came, in fact, Vickilee and Buddy and Junior and Albert and two customers in the store. It was a foggy, drizzly morning, the security lamps casting soupy yellow columns of light down to the' dock, most of the boats hadn't left yet, but their engines were warming up. I don't think the sun had come up yet, but you couldn't be sure. The boy was right, a group of men in mackintoshes was putting handcuffs on Fancy and taking him off the Sea Eagle. The other captains and crews stood around in the mist, watching it happen. The men had on street shoes and looked official, you know, as you'd expect, and they led Willie to a dark sedan with Government license plates. One of them opened the rear door for Willie, who kept his head bowed, and sort of helped him, pushed him, into the car. None of us tried to stop it, not one of us spoke up and said, "Hey, what's going on?" He was still an outsider to us and his life was none of our business. None of us said or even thought of saying, "Willie, goodbye." We all just thought. There goes Willie, not in high style. The sedan pulled out of the lot and turned north.

"He's a goddamn natsy!" squealed Brainless, shaking us out of our spell.

"I told you not to cuss around here," Emory said that was all anybody said.

Fancy's true name, the papers told us, was Wilhelm Strechenberger, and they took him back somewhere to Europe or Russia, I believe it was, to stand trial for things he supposedly did during the war. The TV said Fancy had been a young guard for the Germans in one of their camps. He had been "long sought" by "authorities," who thought he was living in Ohio. One of his victims who survived said something like Fancy was the crudest individual he had ever met in his entire life.

Boy, oh, boy--that's all we could say. Did we believe it? Hell, no. Then, little by little, yes, though it seemed far beyond our abilities to know and understand.

Issabell says it's a case of mistaken identity, though she won't mention Willie when she comes out in public, and if you ask me, I'd say she blames us for her loss of him, as if what he had been all those years ago as well as what he became when he caught the fish, as if that behavior were somehow our fault.

Mitty Ierbill is convinced it was Willie who grabbed her Prince Ed for some unspeakable purpose. She's entitled to her opinion, of course, but she shouldn't have expressed it in front of Issabell, who forfeited her reputation as the last and only docile Preddy by stamping the widow Terbillo nher foot and breaking one of the old lady's toes. She filed assault charges against Issabell, saying Issabell and Willie were two of a kind. Like Mitty, you might think that Willie Striker being a war criminal explains a lot, you might even think it explains everything, but I have to tell you I don't.

Now that we know the story, or at least think we do, of Willie's past, we still differ about why Willie came off the boat that day to expose himself, to be electronically reproduced all over the land: Was it for Issabell or the fish? I say I don't know what he felt about Issabell besides safe, but I do know this: Like many people around here, Willie liked being envied. The Willie we knew was a lot like us, that's why he lasted here when others from the outside didn't, and that's what we saw for ourselves from the time he conked Bull Newman on the nose to the way he abused what he gained when he brought in that beast from the deep and hung it up for all to admire. He was, in his manner, much like us

We still talk about the grouper, all right, but when we do, we automatically disconnect that prize fish from Willie--whether that's right or wrong is not for me to say-- and we talk about it hanging in the air off the scale reeking a powerful smell of creation, day one, so to speak, and it sounds like it appeared among us like ... well, like an immaculate moment in sport. We've been outside things for a long time here on the very edge of the continent, so what I'm saying, maybe, is that we, like Issabell, we're only just discovering what it's like to be part of the world.

"She told him that he could sleep in the truck or, if he had plans to stay, he could give her bed a try."