Free The Forty Fathom Bank and Other Stories by Les Galloway

“I think they know what goes on up here. They know when the weather will change and when feed will get scarce. Probably they have some kind of extra sense we don’t know about.”
    It was the longest single statement I had heard May make. His voice was unreservedly warm, almost chatty, as if he’d finally accepted me as his friend. Suddenly it occurred to me that, quite probably, he’d been as uncertain of me as I had been of him and, until he knew me better, had confined himself to pertinent observations, to the business at hand. He opened his old black suitcase, rummaged about for a moment, and came up with a tablet of writing paper and a new yellow pencil.
    â€œWe have enough bait for one short set after this one,” he said. “Then we’d better get back before it blows.” He broke the cellophane wrapper on the tablet and, carefully squeezing it into a ball, tossed it into the paper bag he had set out for garbage.
    Somehow this change in May seemed to clear away the last vestige of mystery surrounding him, revealing, no more nor less, the simple fisherman his license had claimed him to be. With immense relief, I realized I was no longer afraid.
    I was reflecting on all this yet at the same time considering the prospect of still another set following the one still to come in. A thousand hooks and another half a thousand more. For the next five or six hours, I pictured myself working in a state of exhaustion hauling in these squirming tons of soupfin sharks. The hold would be full and they’d be all over the decks and probably down in the cabin too. They’d represent more money than most men ever saw in a lifetime. Yet when I was all through, I’d get nothing,absolutely nothing for all my labor. And there wouldn’t be another chance tomorrow or probably ever again. There was no doubt about it now, the weather was changing.
    Suddenly, like the cellophane wrapper in the garbage bag, I felt myself squeezed into a tight ball. With a rush of anger all my night thoughts returned. I lit a cigarette and flicked the still burning match on the deck.
    â€œThis whole damn deal was no good to begin with.” My voice was tight and I could almost feel the pallor on my face. “I must have been nuts to have agreed to it.”
    Anger surged up into my throat. For the first time in my life I didn’t want words, but some kind of violence. Then suddenly I could feel the deep flush burning in my cheeks. I glanced at May. He had not even looked up. He opened his tablet on the table, adjusted the black lined paper under the top sheet and, with an expression of serious concentration in his pale green eyes, began printing something in large capital letters. When he had finished with his writing, which turned out to be only his name and address at some hotel on Bush Street, he carefully tore out the paper and, weighting it with a box of Kirby hooks, looked over at me with an expression of such ingenuousness and goodwill that I wondered if possibly my impulsive outburst of a moment before was just a figment of my imagination.
    One way or another, it was a disturbing little scene, and I was glad when the
Blue Fin
was under way again and we were heading toward the black flag that marked the set’s end and May was setting the tubs in a row alongside the power gurdy preparatory to bringing in the line.

10

    The little breeze was strong enough now to dimple the tops of swells and to make the flag flutter on its bamboo pole. As we approached the keg, my head suddenly began to pound and my grip on the wheel got weak. It lasted only a moment and, I suppose, was caused by my thinking about the sharks that might already be on the line. Despite the fact that none of them would belong to me, once I got to thinking about them, my mind seemed to turn immediately into a regular calculating machine. A thousand hooks, I thought. One every fifth hook. Two hundred sharks times fifty pounds would be