The Girl of the Sea of Cortez (18 page)

“Depends how big the ferryboat is and how many pieces you want it in.”

Jobim described his imaginary ferryboat. It was old and ratty and not too big, and it hadn’t been carrying anything of value when it sank. He wanted to be sure there was nothing about this boat that would be of interest to a salvage company. “How much do you think your company would charge to blow it up?” he asked when he was finished.

His friend shook his head. “We wouldn’t touch a small job like that.”

“I didn’t think so. This … PLS … you talk about, is it hard to use?”

“Easy. Anybody can do it, long as they’re careful.”

“Even me?” Jobim smiled.

“Someone good with his hands as you? A snap.” Then his friend saw where Jobim was taking the conversation, and he said, “But there’s a problem.”

“Where can I get some?”

“That’s the problem. You can’t. Have to have a license for it. It’s what they call unstable, and they don’t want just anybody to have it and leave it lying around.”

“How much would I need?”

“From what you say, a couple of gallons. Say, a gallon of each of the two parts. But you might as well want a ton. You can’t buy it.”

“Your company … wouldn’t have any extra …”

His friend shook his head. “If we did, we couldn’t sell it unless you get a license.”

Jobim didn’t know what to ask next. To keep the conversation moving, he said, “That ferryboat is costing a lot of people a lot of money. It’s taking food from the mouths of children.”

“I wish I could help you. If we were caught, we’d lose our business.”

“Of course,” Jobim had said. He didn’t want to push too hard and put his friend in a difficult position. “You don’t have any you could just … spill for me, do you?” He smiled again, to show his friend he was joking.

“That stuff you don’t spill,” his friend said with a laugh. “There’s no such thing as extra. After a job, what’s left over we have to throw away.”

“Where do you throw it?”

“In the sea.”

“Where in the sea?”

His friend waved his hand toward the water. “Right out there. Off Cabo San Juan.”

Jobim lowered his voice. “How far off?”

“Not far. Maybe a hundred yards. At the edge of the shelf.”

“How deep is the shelf?”

“Fifty, sixty feet. A lot of the stuff falls over the edge, though.”

“Some doesn’t, I bet.”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“You throw it away mixed?”

“No. It could go off. It’s in its separate elements.”

“In cans?”

“In plastic bottles.”

“… that don’t rust.”

His friend nodded.

Jobim looked at the height of the sun in the sky and said,
“I have to get back on this tide.” He stood and held out his hand to his friend. “It is good to talk with you.”

Shaking hands, his friend said, “One more thing, just for your … interest: The plastic bottles are different colors. It takes one red and one white to make a whole …”

“… a whole pink one.”

Jobim stopped at a store where they sold hardware and electrical parts. Then he returned to his outboard motorboat and made sure that both his gas cans and his freshwater jug were full, because the trip home could take anywhere from six to eight hours, depending on wind and tide. He told everyone at the dock that he was heading straight for Santa Maria, and he took messages from cousins for cousins, from friends for friends.

At the mouth of the harbor he turned right, which was the way home, and waved one more time. The people on the dock waved back and as far as they were concerned he was gone, which was true, although he stopped for a few minutes for a couple of quick plunges off Cabo San Juan.

For the next two days after he got home, Jobim stayed ashore and tinkered. He scavenged things from here and there and built things from this and that and endured all the teasing from his neighbors about how the schools of
cabríos
and jacks were running thicker than ever. People wondered what he was doing, and they asked delicate questions that hinted at the basic question—“What are you doing?”—but they never asked that outright. They all knew Jobim well enough to be aware that he permitted them to know about him only those things he wanted them to know.

Usually, when he was involved in an eccentric project, he let slip information little by little, and saved the final result as a surprise—at which everyone would either marvel (if it was a success) or laugh (if it was a splendid failure). When he
failed spectacularly, he laughed harder than anyone. But, in front of children, he made sure they realized that failure was just as important as success because you had to fail in order to know that failure wasn’t worth fearing. If you feared failure, you would never try difficult things, and trying was more important than failure or success. (It was a lesson Jo persistently refused to learn: He loathed risks and was frightened by the unknown.)

This time, Jobim let slip no information about anything. He acknowledged only that he was working on some silly notion that was doomed to failure but that had preyed on his mind for so long that he had to play it out to its conclusion.

One night after supper, he told Miranda he was going for a walk, and he disappeared into the twilight. Much later, all anyone would remember was that they were positive they hadn’t seen him again that night. He hadn’t taken out his boat, that was certain, because many men were down at the dock cleaning fish and sewing nets; he hadn’t been entertaining the neighborhood children, because people recalled that that was the night they had taken turns ministering to the little girl who had been stung by a scorpion; and he hadn’t been in his own house until just before dawn. As far as anyone knew, he hadn’t been anywhere. (He confessed to Paloma that he had enjoyed causing the mystery; it added spice to the otherwise predictable daily routine of the island.)

In fact, he had gone to the opposite side of the island—uninhabited, wind-burned, rocky, dotted with little puffs of the hardiest vegetation—where there was no lee in which to keep a boat or build a house or even pass a moderately comfortable night.

He skidded and scrambled down the steep slope. About three quarters of the way down, he stopped at a hole in the rock face and tore away the branches he had stuffed into its
mouth. Inside was a large plastic garbage bag and a wooden platform about three feet wide and six feet long, to the bottom of which had been attached, with bolts and ropes, four old automobile-tire tubes.

He dropped the platform the last fifteen or twenty feet into the water and, with the plastic bag slung over his shoulder, hurried after it and climbed aboard it. He positioned himself on his knees, at the exact center of the raft, with the plastic bag tucked between his legs. Like a surfer on a board, he began to paddle away from the island.

He had picked his night carefully: It was flat calm, so paddling was easy, and there was no moon. There was just enough of a ground swell so his little raft would not be visible in the starlight: An observer’s eye would be accustomed to a gently moving horizon; something as small as the raft would blend in. The timing and direction of the tide were exactly as he wanted them.

It was after ten o’clock at night when he arrived at his destination, a spot of water in the open sea, to most eyes no different from any other spot of water in the sea, but to his at the precise juncture of imaginary straight lines drawn from three landmarks faintly perceived—more sensed than seen—by the light of the stars.

From the bag he took a line and a killick. He dropped the killick overboard and waited for it to set in the rocks on the seamount. He checked his drift and the amount of anchor line left and decided that he had ample play: He could pull himself up-tide, or let himself drift down-tide, over a distance of a couple of hundred feet.

From the plastic bag he took two gallon jugs, one red and one white. He poured half of each overboard, on opposite sides of the raft, which was a silly caution but one that gave him comfort. Then he poured the contents of the white jug
into the half-full red jug, and screwed the cap into the red jug. The white jug he returned to the plastic bag.

The cap of the red jug had been prepared ashore. A hole had been drilled through it, primer cord fitted through the hole and sealed. The primer cord looked like thin plastic clothesline, which was essentially what it was, except for the fact that it was filled with a substance like gunpowder that burned much hotter and many times faster.

To the other end of the primer cord Jobim had connected, by electrical contacts, a hand-powered generator. You squeezed it, and squeezing it turned some wheels that squirted power into the primer cord.

He lowered the full red jug into the water. If it had been empty and open, the plastic jug would eventually have filled and sunk. But filled now with a liquid of approximately the same density as water, and capped off with a bit of air trapped inside, it floated. Its neck bobbed, and the white primer cord waved back and forth, very visible against the black water.

Jobim didn’t want the jug to float on the surface. He wanted it to have enough negative buoyancy so that it would tend to sink and yet be able to be held close to the surface by the tension of the tide working against the primer cord. The tide would try to pull the jug down and away; the primer cord would hold it up and near, and Jobim could pull in or let out more cord until he had the jug suspended where he wanted it—four feet below the surface.

So from the plastic bag he took a handful of pebbles, and he dropped them into the red jug and recapped it and tested it and put more pebbles in and tested it again until, finally, it was right.

And then he lay on his stomach on the raft, and he waited.

With nothing to do but wait, he worried. He worried first that he had thrown away too much of the PLS liquid, that the
combined gallon he had saved wouldn’t answer his purpose. But if his friend had said two gallons would blow a ferryboat to bits, surely one gallon would do for this job. After all, he was not trying to replicate World War II.

Then he worried that he had too much of the liquid, that it would do too much damage. Maybe he ought to …

Just then the light breeze brought the sound of voices. There were men approaching, and they were not being careful to keep their voices low. They had no fear of being overheard, this far out to sea. The only precaution they had taken was to paddle rather than use their motors, for they knew that the sound of a motor carries for miles in still air across still water.

Jobim lay quietly on his raft, his head down so he would make no silhouette against the night sky. He heard four distinct voices separated into two distinct pairs: two boats, traveling together but keeping a convenient distance from one another.

So far, he had guessed right: There had to be more than one boat, because to spread and gather the net from one boat would take so much time that dead fish floating on the surface would begin to drift out of range. A third boat, on the other hand, wouldn’t contribute much but would add risk: The more people who knew about these expeditions, the more chance there would be that someone would talk too much. Besides, the fewer partners, the larger each partner’s share.

Now, Jobim guessed, the two boats would stay close together. One would drop an anchor, and the other would moor to the stern of the first boat. They would check the drift and ready their nets, and then they would throw the dynamite—probably one stick off each side. The dynamite would explode so deep that all they would feel up here would be a weak thump of pressure on their wooden hulls. Then the anchored
boat would feed out the net, and the other boat would drop back and drift with the tide, dragging the net, and paddle in a wide circle, returning finally to the anchored boat.

After a few minutes’ wait, all that would remain would be to draw the net tight and haul in the fish and fill their boats and paddle home.

The voices drew closer, and still Jobim heard the sounds of paddles swirling through water, and he knew he had made a terrible error: By picking what he regarded as the ideal spot, he had picked the exact spot they were coming to. They were going to paddle into him, or at least into his anchor line.

Then what? At worst, depending on who these people were, Jobim would find himself in a fight for his life against four men, all carrying knives as an item of clothing and who had sticks of dynamite that they could lob at him from a safe distance; he didn’t give himself much of a chance. If he could get close enough to them, and if he had time, he could blow everybody up, including himself, but that wasn’t what he had in mind. At best, the four men would deny everything and proceed along as if they had important business elsewhere, and tomorrow night they would show up somewhere else, somewhere Jobim could not wait for them.

But the paddling stopped. Jobim heard the splash of an anchor and the rasping sound of the anchor line rubbing against wood.

They had stopped precisely where he had hoped they would—between five and ten yards down-tide from him, in the line of the drift. He heard something bang against one of the glass net-floats in the anchored boat, and a casual argument about the length of the fuse on one of the sticks of dynamite. He hoped the argument would turn bitter, even for a moment, for raised voices would cover any noise he might make.

Still lying flat on his raft, with his cheek pressed to the wood, he eased the red jug overboard and let it slip back in the tide. He could not place the jug yet—he would have to raise his head to do that—so he held the primer cord and waited for the men to busy themselves.

He heard the scrape of a match and saw the flaring light as it reflected off a stubbly chin. A hand cupped the match, and two fuses touched the flame. The fuses hissed briefly, then sparkled, and an arc of sparks flew off each side of the boat as the sticks of dynamite were thrown into the water. Immediately the men turned to the net and began carefully to prepare it for an orderly slide into the water.

Jobim raised up on his elbows and fed the primer cord behind his boat, letting it out a foot at a time, watching the white cord and hoping the men would not turn around and see it, trying all the while to see in his mind how far down the sticks of dynamite had fallen. It would be nice (not necessary, but nice) if the men could be made to believe that what had befallen them was the result of someone getting access to, and tampering with, their gear, for that would reinforce Jobim’s scheme—to convince these people that they were known and marked. But for that, his explosion would have to be coordinated exactly with the detonation of the dynamite below.