The Last Marlin Page 5

  It was afternoon now. As Verity searched for working birds, David, second mate, rigged mullets and sang to the blue cloudless sky: “Bimini, sweet Bimini, drop your line in the water and catch a blue marlin—one, two, three.” There were many verses celebrating the great catches and limitless bounty of Bimini’s waters. In all the island bars and restaurants guitarists joyfully crooned these lyrics of perennial conquest—they still do today—but David was a natural blues singer and his rendition pricked my fishing optimism and left me with uncertainty and yearning. Over time I would learn that wondering and musing are, at least for me, at the center of marlin fishing. But at fifteen I was not looking for spiritual depths. I wanted a big fish in the boat, I wanted trophies and glory, fame; and David’s song brought me back down to earth. We had not caught a blue marlin one, two, three, and from where I sat it did not seem likely we would. I could not imagine how a blue marlin could find my mullets and mackerel in all the acres of breaking foamy seas. “The big ones come up late in the afternoon,” Eric mentioned to calm me, “when the water begins to cool.”

  As we worked north into head seas, I started each time a school of baby flying fish broke from the crest of a wave, imagining a ten-footer racing up at the school from below. Dad was standing behind me enjoying his sea legs. Soon he began talking about business. As a fisherman I have always needed quiet to concentrate, to ready myself. But talking about fixtures with my father was irresistible.

  Dad was about to close the Aqueduct Race Track deal. I had little enthusiasm for this job and told him so. It was smaller than some of the others and I felt that it was a waste of his time. He would need to spend many hours poring over blueprints deciding which little fixtures belonged in nooks and crannies. I favored the chunky rectangular buildings that in the late fifties and early sixties were springing up in major cities. The new generation of skyscrapers, with thick, tinted floor-to-ceiling windows, required nearly unbroken miles of recessed fluorescents. From the street you could see them lighting labyrinthine mazes of halls and offices.

  Dad assured me that although it was more spread out, Aqueduct Race Track would be a good job, more than a million dollars in lighting. There were offices, restaurants, barns, tack rooms, training facilities, bathrooms. I remained dubious and Dad seemed to consider my restraint. Big buildings were going up all over the country. All of them would require thousands of units of lighting. It was only a question of Dad having the time and health to fly from city to city closing deals. As we fished, we felt the greatness of our plans. Together we would light the cities and troll big baits for marlin.

  Mother and Bill were the other team. I was in the fighting chair, Bill sitting on one of the engine boxes, occasionally looking at me, fuming. He didn’t care about fluorescents. He was biding his time, brooding about his own fishing life, which he would not discuss with me. He dreamed of catching twenty-foot sharks—smashing my father with his great catches. He was already studying books about the Carcharodon megalodon. He believed that somewhere in the dark depths of the ocean there still existed a few of the prehistoric hundred-foot killing machines feeding on giant squid. I read this theory in one of his school notebooks. It was clear that Bill shared his mother’s taste for hyperbole and drama. He was always reshaping the past or implementing extravagant or absurd fantasies.

  As Dad and I talked and watched the baits, David, the second mate, guzzled beer and sang a medley of Bahamian favorites and jazz classics. Although the mate could not speak three words without stuttering into silence, his singing was fluid and arresting. Mother could not take her eyes off him. It made me very uneasy. “He’s beautiful,” she whispered. I hissed at her to stop looking at him.

  Despite David’s heavy drinking and heedless flirtations with white women that often resulted in beatings from captains and husbands, the mate was invited to sing at all the bars and restaurants, including the Game Club. “He has the timing of Nat King Cole,” said my mother. By the end of the evening you could usually find him passed out in his vomit by the side of the road. I was appalled by his drunkenness, but Mother seemed to connect David’s depravity to art. She found David exciting and was disgusted by the insipidness of our lighting fixture dreams.

  By four in the afternoon, the crew was slack from the sun and no action, already thinking about night plans. The ocean was calm. Bill and Mom were asleep when a fish grabbed the trolled mackerel. The fight of my first blue marlin was fast and violent. As the fish grey-hounded on the surface the boat backed down furiously, shuddering, water crashing over the transom. My father shouted, “Look at him jump.” I was bent over the reel, cranking. I couldn’t see a thing. When Verity couldn’t gain ground backing down, he spun the boat on its heels and chased the marlin while I fought him off the side. Eric coached me to save my back by absorbing the power of the fish in my hips and thighs. While the fish sprinted and circled, Dad’s job was to turn the chair so that the rod directly faced the fish, but he kept forgetting to do it. Whenever we hooked up he was prematurely celebrating the catch or too tense to be helpful. Oddly, his timing was never good as a fisherman.

  After half an hour the two-hundred-pounder was close, and Eric began pulling on the wire leader that was connected to the end of my line. When the marlin felt the wash of the props, he went crazy. He leaped into the air only a few feet from our faces, crashed down, leaped again, his bill pointed our way while the boat gunned ahead to keep the fish out of our laps. After a minute of this infighting, Eric was able to get a flying gaff into his shoulder. Then Eric and David pulled him over the gunwale. On the deck the ten-footer tapped a little with his long tail and then grew quiet.

  Following the short run to the Bimini harbor, I was once again the toast of the dock. Ansil Saunders was there admiring my marlin. Cameras clicked while Verity and Sawyer shook my hand. But they had done more than I had. It was at this point in my fishing career that I began thinking that I would like to be the one finding the fish like Bill Verity or Ansil Saunders. The angler just cranked the reel. It was the guide who performed the magic.

  A few years ago Jackson Ellis began referring to Ansil Saunders as the Michael Jordan of bonefishing and the name caught on. At sixty-seven, when a bonefisherman should have lost his extraordinary vision and his strength for poling across the flats, Ansil Saunders remained incontestably the top fisherman on Bimini.

  On most days Ansil outfished the other guides; he had more knowledge and could see better. But more than his many tournament victories and record fish, what was most compelling about Ansil was his restraint. Each morning he would smell the wind and find bonefish, sometimes a large feeding school that remained calm while the skiff drew closer. A small man, Ansil poled his skiff without apparent effort and with hardly a whisper of sound. Sometimes he entered the school itself, an almost gaudy show of hunting stealth, so that the boat was surrounded by hundreds of grubbing, tailing bonefish. You could practically lean over and fondle them with your hand. Other times he would spot a single large fish a long way off, and he would lean hard on the pole, planning his course to intercept the bonefish in fifteen or twenty minutes. If you were a new client, without prior example of his remarkable eyes, you might well decide that he was conning you about the eight-pounder slowly swimming across the grassy bottom a quarter mile away.

  Typically, first thing in the morning, Ansil would position his clients to catch one or two bonefish and then after a flurry of action and high fives, he seemed to withdraw from the hunt; he would begin talking, probing the minds of his charters. He was insatiable for knowledge and had received his college education through a lifetime of conversations with charters. He learned to make political speeches from Adam Clayton Powell in the sixties and eventually was elected Mayor of Bimini. He would talk the trade of his clients, occasionally stand, cast, politely disagree, net a fish, take the hook out with a single sure twist and put it back over the side or, if it was a nice one, place it on the deck under a white cloth. He ate a sandwich, talking, thinking, developing his
ideas about the world, barely fishing, and yet finding bonefish every hour or two.

  If you chartered him regularly it became clear that Ansil could produce fish whenever he wanted. Stretches of time without action were largely a function of his management, and perhaps an aspect of his greater genius. For Ansil, finding fish had relatively little to do with the wiles and vagaries of bonefish; he had conquered such technical questions long ago; rather he was guided by his own whim and aesthetic and the knowledge that catching too many could as easily tarnish a fine day as too few, cheapen and demystify the endeavor. Ansil caught just enough to keep his charters happy, to keep the conversations going. His clients left the flats musing about his ideas perhaps even more than bonefish. Ansil’s sense of the big world was more stirring for being articulated while drifting across this shallow universe that he understood so well in a skiff he had made with his own hands.

  There were times each year when Ansil abandoned understatement and crushed the dreams of other bonefish guides, particularly Bonefish Cordell, who was a great fisherman in his own right and believed that someday he would be recognized as Bimini’s greatest. Beginning in the sixties wealthy businessmen from the states began sponsoring annual Bimini bonefishing tournaments, each of them lasting two or three days. Now, of course, everyone recognized Ansil’s prowess; but still, fishing is fishing, there are elements of luck, and so the guides and their charters began each of these events with great anticipation and hope. Except for a stretch of years when he retired from the flats, Ansil won every single one of these bonefish competitions. Incredibly, in each of the twenty or so events, Ansil not only won, but he boated more bonefish than the sum of fish landed by all the other guides combined—he had never once failed to accomplish this unlikely feat.

  It was following one of his recent victories that Ansil wrote a letter to Michael Jordan, describing his own career, his astonishing record in the Bimini bonefish tournaments and that people were beginning to refer to him as the Michael Jordan of the flats, the nickname bestowed by Jackson Ellis. Ansil invited the legend of the court to come down to Bimini to fish the flats with him and compare notes about artistry and the nature of competition. All the Bimini bonefish guides knew about Ansil’s letter and they looked forward to Michael’s appearance in Bimini and this rare meeting between legends. It was unexpected and disturbing when the great Jordan failed to respond to Ansil’s letter.

  Globe

  THE GLOBE LIGHTING SHOWROOM ON WEST 40TH STREET IN MANHATTAN was where salesmen for the residential line brought their customers. In the front offices attractive secretaries with long painted nails typed swiftly and answered the phones with a chilliness that bordered on disdain. When the principals of Globe, my grandfather Isadore Rosenblatt, known as I.R., or his son Alfred, visited the showroom, the girls sat a little straighter, typed even faster. The Globe secretaries were to me paragons of enticing but unattainable womanhood.

  Spreading uptown from the offices were room after room of lighting fixtures, hundreds of models from which Globe customers could select: there were lamps of assorted designs and heights, chandeliers of all prices and sizes dripping with imported crystal, dining room fixtures that traveled up and down on enclosed pulleys, vanity lighting for bathrooms and dressing nooks in modest or bolder designs, hypermodern models anticipating the space age, austere designs mirroring Protestant values, fixtures in the style of the thirties with richly colored leaded glass, kitchen fixtures and outdoor lighting, a large children’s line, fixtures that were spoofs on fixtures, sleek models with the cold chrome look of money favored by the bourgeoisie in Shaker Heights and Great Neck. There was lighting in the showroom for nearly everyone.

  Globe had risen to the top of the industry through the canny marketing and design work of my immigrant grandfather, who as a young man recognized that attractive moderate-priced lighting fixtures would have a limitless market in this new country.

  In 1911, at the age of fifteen, Isadore Rosenblatt had come to the United States with no knowledge of English and only a few dollars in his pocket. His first meals in this country were potato soup and bread at Ratner’s on Second Avenue for fifteen cents, and when he ran out of money one of the waiters fed him for free. Izzy found a job as a laborer in an automobile factory. Soon he had a second job and was working sixteen hours a day. He married his first cousin Sadie, who had come to the States shortly before him and was working as a seamstress. In several years he had saved enough to bring over his parents, brothers and sisters from Austria, which he always referred as the “old country.” In 1921 he and a few men began assembling very rudimentary fixtures in a dingy loft on the Lower East Side. This was the first Globe factory and the modest beginning of my grandfather’s American dream.

  Thirty-five years later, communities across the United States were reading, eating and sharing family hours illuminated by my grandfather’s designs. Globe had become the lighting of choice in high-rise apartments as well as in Levittown and other prefab communities. Customers buying their kitchen and bathroom lighting from Sears, Roebuck would not have seen it on the label, but they were buying Globe. By the fifties Globe was developing a European market; my grandfather felt enormous pride shipping his newest line to brighten the bleak war-devastated old country.

  Once a week I.R. swept into the showroom for a couple of hours, his stylish gray overcoat chilly and smelling of his new Cadillac. He waved hello to the full-bodied receptionist who tittered and called him I.R. He liked being greeted by the accountants, salesmen and secretaries but it was my impression that he made these appearances on 40th Street mainly for morale, like a general visiting troops stationed abroad. He preferred to stay at the factory, which was the guts of the company.

  As my father did not sell Globe’s residential line, he almost never appeared at the showroom. Whenever I came, it was with my mother or one of my uncles, Chet or Alfred. Chet Mudick, another Globe salesman, was married to Mother’s beautiful sister Thelma, who also worked for the company. They lived twenty minutes from us in Roslyn with their son and daughter in a dream house with tennis courts and a swimming pool nestled into a tiny landscaped forest. What a memorable couple they were. Both of them smart and sexy and riding the high life with Globe’s cachet and power. My handsome, athletic uncle would stop for me in his new white Thunderbird and we would drive into the city talking basketball or the trade. Chet wanted to make it clear that he was a big-time salesman and would refer familiarly to Dad’s contacts such as Sauli Schniderman or Maxi Kamins. I liked to think of Dad operating in a league of his own, and though I loved Chet, his competitiveness with Dad put me on edge.

  Other times I drove into Manhattan with Uncle Alfred, I.R.’s son, a gentle man with a passion for bebop jazz. Alfred was being groomed to take over the company someday; this was Grandpa’s fervent dream. However, by the time I started visiting Globe, Alfred, in his thirties, had deteriorating vision and a bad heart. He slept in his Great Neck house, around the corner from ours, with oxygen canisters beside his bed. Grandpa brought Alfred to the top doctors, put his wealth and resolve to war against his son’s disease, but still the loaded question, who would someday take the helm of the great company, hung in the air during the years of my adolescence.

  I had my showroom routine: after a few hellos I would walk dutifully from the office into the nearest display area, flip on eighteen or twenty switches, notice what was coming on and then turn them off and sullenly move to the next room. After four or five rooms and maybe a hundred switches, I would give up the exercise. My father sold commercial lighting; the residential side of Globe did not engage my imagination. In the showroom there were no eight- and ten-footers to make an office building come alive in the night, no luminated ceilings with intricate lens designs that dipped down with Dad’s miracle hinge. The fixtures here were tacky, like the knick-knacks that came in cereal boxes.

  When I wasn’t flipping switches, I passed time in the showroom with impure thoughts about the Globe secretaries. Where did th
e company find such women? All of them had willowy legs and big breasts, or so it seemed to me. I was surprised and stirred whenever one of them compromised her daunting efficiency to butter her lips and powder her nose in front of a pocket mirror or slowly crossed her legs or adjusted her girdle on the lingering walk to the bathroom. The Globe girls were oblivious to my notice.

  One day Mother mentioned casually that Grandpa came to the showroom for companionship. When I was slow to understand, she added, as though it should have been obvious, that his marriage to Sadie was unhappy and incomplete. How could this be true? Whenever I visited my grandparents in their apartment on West 73rd Street they were sitting on their seventeenth-floor balcony looking out at the Hudson River, Grandma’s legs covered by a knitted shawl; or they were on the living room sofa watching This Is Your Life on television—the show always made Grandpa emotional. How many times had I watched Grandma carefully lighten her meatballs and stuffed derma with bread crumbs, so the meal wouldn’t be too heavy and gassy for Grandpa. This news threw me into turmoil. Mother even mentioned which of the secretaries was the object of Grandpa’s affection, but I could not conceive of this office dynamo taking off her clothes and allowing him to touch her on his green leather sofa. I didn’t believe my mother. As usual, her boldest declarations seemed crafted to throw me off balance, to attack my deepest-held assumptions.