Brackish

A rod to the left of the fighting chair screamed, line zipping from its golden bail.

“I need an angler!” Jethro shouted to the den of Union men.

One was heaved from the salon and wedged himself into the fighting chair, pushing the limits of its weathered wood. Jethro spun him in the same direction the line was going out, shoved the butt end of the rod into a holder between the Union man’s thighs, and clipped a rope to either side of the rod, connecting it to the chair.

“Let him run as long as he wants,” Jethro said to the wide-eyed Union man. “As soon as he stops, reel your fat ass off, ya hear me?” The union man nodded.

Jethro grabbed him by his meaty jowls, “Do not. Stop. Reeling.” And ran to the other rods in the corners of the deck to get them in. “A little help!” He shouted to no one in particular.

Bunk killed the engine. He flew down the ladder as swiftly as he did for the fire alarm and cranked the closest rod handle. “That’s the last one,” Jethro told him with a pat on the back.

The Union man had begun to reel. The handle was racing through his porky fingers. Worried the fish could have spit the hook, Jethro tugged on the line from the tip of the rod to asses the tension.

In defiance, Bunk’s rod bent its tip to almost touch the water with a hiss. He stepped back to admire the ferocity of the line rolling from the reel. It zinged for what felt like long enough for the fish to make it to shore.

“We’re hooked over here!” Bunk yelled to Jethro. “And it’s pissin’ something fierce.”

Jethro skipped around the fighting chair and watched the line run from the bail. It ran, and it ran and finally slowed just as he could see the golden shimmer of the spool. Bunk cranked it as hard as his skinny arms would go.

“You need the belt?” Jethro asked him.

“I need the chair,” Bunk replied.

Jethro turned to the Union man, “How we doin, muscles?”

The Union man’s cranks were much slower as he winced with nearly every flip of the rod handle. His t-shirt collar loosened and became translucent with sweat. The back of his neck had turned pink below where his barber cut a janky line for his flat-top haircut. The overflow of skin on the sides of his head was strangling the thin wires of his aviator sunglasses.

Jethro took the gaff from a rod holder on the boat’s ledge and positioned himself at the stern. “Easy, boy,” he hollered over his shoulder, “almost here.” He saw its top fin treading the water no more than twenty yards from the stern. They had drifted from the oil slick and the bubbles by now, so his yellow shine easily shined through.

The Union man’s tuna gave one last dip, ripping a good thirty yards of line straight down. “Crank!” Jethro yelled, “he knows it’s almost over!” The man’s arm moved like it was churning through molasses, inching the line in, then in a mighty crank, it came free. Bunk leaned over the stern with the gaff above his head, ready to strike. He could see the glimmer of the tuna’s head torpedoing straight to the surface. And it flew; it flew clear over Jethro; he lost track of it as the sun crossed its path. It flew, and it fell in the lap of the Union man. No thrashing of gasping life, no struggle to flee back to the chilly water, no fight left at all. Just a fish head, mouth still moving opened and closed, dripping silky red from behind its eyes. Something darker crept through the water.

There was no time to mourn their loss. The Union man’s legs flailed, knocking the gutty fish's head to the deck. Jethro unhooked the rod so the Union man could squirm from his rackety throne. Jethro tossed the fish head to the bait cooler and waved Bunk to take a seat.

“Whataya got, captain” Jethro asked.

“Don’t know,” Bunk said, removing his hat to wipe the sweat from his forehead. “Feel like I’m reeling in a boulder.” Bunk had the rod set in the rod holder and used two hands to turn the handle.

“There are sharks lurking,” Jethro said.

“Could be,” Bunk replied, “could be a marlin that got him.”

Jethro had never bagged a marlin. He couldn’t afford trips for pleasure, and when the guys were out chasing trophy fish, they’d have other captains, real captains, mate for them. On those days, Jethro would go back to the skiff and hope to sell a bushel of blue crabs to lotioned tourists. The billfish are big and powerful, and how you get your picture in the magazines or the bar walls. Images flashed of all of them with boat names painted on their sides. One great billfish, and he’d be flooded with phone calls to captain brand-new boats from Manteo to Cozumel. He’d never have to rerun a trot line. He never had to bleach the stench of rotten chicken necks from his hands. Never have to bum a night on the dock or sleep in the skiff.

Bunk moved the rod to the fighting chair and clipped it in.

He shouted to the salon, “Are you boys up to reel?”

He was met with groans and deterred mumblings. He turned to Jethro, “You’re up.” Jethro was once again the little boy holding a fishing rod at his old man’s knee.

Bunk went up the ladder and shouted, “I’m gonna back up on him.”

Jethro reeled. The boat puttered and inched backward to help Jethro in his fight. The fish was over three hundred yards off the stern, probably outweighed him five times over, and knew the terrain well, but they were fighting for the same thing. Jethro tried not to tire himself out too badly at first, knowing it would be a long fight. The sun was reaching its highest, the hottest point of the day. Jethro was running off of nothing but faith and nicotine. The first forty minutes was a tug-of-war match between him and the beast. Once the fish began to tire, Jethro could make some steady ground. He’d pull the rod back smoothly, with no sudden jerks, and reel a reel or two as it dipped back down. Bunk Miller would bump it in reverse from time to time to try and help, but nothing could reel better than willpower.

He ripped his buttoned shirt from his back and wrapped it around his head, leaving nothing to protect him from the sun but a wife beater and a cloud of smoke. The two union men would periodically dump a bucket of ocean water down his back and light him a new cigarette. The veins of his arms bulged the way they would when he’d let them fall asleep over the back of a chair to impress the homeroom girls back in grade school.

He used his right hand to reel as his left pulled the line. The line was hot and sharp and sometimes cut through his soggy palms. The main thing was to keep tension and reel steady; when he could, he reeled in a fury. High pitched. Deafening as it was satisfying. Something about it addicted him; the deepening of the wound filled his belly like the meal it would become. There was something primal to it, raw. Raw as the damp innards of filleted billfish. Rivers of shiny red flowed down his legs and raced to the stern of the boat like rain trails across a car window. He found moments to steal a deep breath. Again yanked and reeled away. Feverishly, longingly, he stopped thinking of his approach: pull rod tip up, just enough choke, don’t give any slack, reel and pull in unison, then he was just cranking. It felt right like it was both the great fish’s destiny and his. His days and nights sleeping on a rotting pier manifested in one beast. He knew it, the rod knew it, the sea birds and squalls knew it, the queasy union men knew it, the poor fish cleaner at the dock knew it, even what was on the other end of the line knew it.

An hour passed. And then another. The line stayed taught, and Jethro began taking control of the tug of war. Bunk kept an eye on the sonar and kept Jethro updated on the black dot on his screen closing in. One of the union men poured Jethro a cup of ale that he slurped down before Bunk could see it. He instructed the union man to bring one every ten minutes until something new was in the boat. Jethro switched to reeling with his left, back to his right for a little while, and then back to whichever felt the most spry.

“We’ve got a fin!” Yelled Bunk from the crow’s nest.

“Good fin or bad fin?” Jethro answered.

“Good fin!” Bunk Miller was becoming giddy. “He’s on top, giving up; bring him home!”

Jethro gave all that he had left to the fish. He gave him the years of pulling in crab pots; he gave him the nights of stealing food from coolers of the fleet, he gave him his brother, he gave him his father.

Bunk Miller killed the engine and came to Jethro’s side. “We’ve got color,” he told Jethro.

“Size?”

“Big.”

The fish leaped. She scurried across the water as if she had legs. Her size shrunk the men and showered the deck with her landing. And she leaped again. Clearing the water and the height of the stern. With every leap, she grew in the wide eyes of the anglers. She was tired, but he was fighting. She and Jethro tugged at one another, trying to prove to each other who they were. She dragged the boat through the choppy sea and dove once more but was wrangled in the clasp of something inevitable. When she got close enough, Jethro stopped reeling, hurled himself from the chair, and pulled her to the transom by hand. She gave some final flutters of struggle but submitted. She was longer than Jethro, and Bunk put together by a good bit.

“She’s pushing Herrington!” Bunk shrieked. Herrington, the angler who held the North Carolina state blue marlin record since 1974, 1,142 pounds.

Bunk hollered behind Jethro to gaff her and tie a noose around her tail. His weak arms hoisted the gaff above his head to solidify their capture. Even in her fading moments, the marlins Jethro spent summer after summer watching be hung by tourists withered in her elegance. She was the life at sea that Jethro longed for. Her eye was the deep black that comes from such; he stared long enough for rings of bright purple to flow through and absorb him. Jethro disregarded Bunk’s voice behind him. It was becoming increasingly muffled before fading to a dull ring.

A cold wave knocked Jethro backward. Bunk Miler had fallen to the deck and struggled to get his legs back under him. The sea before him grew ferocious, hurling what felt like barrels of sea over the stern. She was now thrashing and wasn’t alone. Burgundy murk clouded her tail and trailed off to a dark fin circling back towards them.

Jethro did his best to steady the gaff; there was no time to scurry for the harpoon. He braced himself for the impact of if the tooth-filled beast should take out a chunk of the wooden stern. Water glid off the crown and fin of the shark as it encroached on them. Jethro steadied, closed an eye for aim, and tightened every muscle he had left.

A clip of sharp bursts came from behind his right shoulder. The shriek of the pistol crumbled him to the deck and overcame him with darkness.

When he pulled himself upright, Bunk was tying a rope around the belly of the billfish. A fleshy chunk was taken out of her tail. It took a moment for Jethro to get his wits about him.

“Heave!” Bunk ordered.

Bunk Miller hugged his arms around her dorsal fin as Jethro heaved her by the bill through the transom door. After a few pulls, they got her in, crowding the stern. Jethro cut her open and tossed her innards to the sea. The fish with mouths full of teeth could have their way with it now. He filled her insides with as much ice he could cram in there, as they made their voyage back to the docks, he’d refill her crevices until the sun was nowhere to be seen. He went into the drawer of the mapping desk in the salon and pulled a white flag from the drawer. A hand-me-down, it was tattered and stained and hadn’t been flown since his father hung it several decades ago. It showed a marlin, the way captains would buff their chests for the day. Upside down meant it was caught and released. This one would not be.

Excerpt from Brackish, a work in progress.