Moby Dx: A Novel of Silicon Valley - Volume 1 Max Ebb

Chapter 17 Spearing

When Vladik had asked me if I was a diver, we weren’t yet speaking the same language. He meant free or breath-hold diving, sometimes just for fun, but usually hunting for food.

Murky Long Island Sound near Pot Island had great hiding places for bass and bluefish, but the visibility was never more than a few feet. Block Island’s waters were among the clearest on the East Coast north of the Carolinas, usually with visibility, or in the jargon, viz, near twenty and sometimes thirty feet. Bait collects there, as it does at any coastal feature, drawing larger fish toward it like a magnet. “Big fish eat little fish,” says the proverb. If you knew where to look, on a summer’s day you could find a camouflage-sandy flat fluke, a fat black tautog among the rocks, a gray stingray with three-foot wings and an eight-foot barbed tail, schools of bluefish traveling fast, or schools of striper, some more than fifty inches and as many pounds, circling slowly near the bottom, looking for something, maybe lobster, but they don’t tell us what. There are thick clusters of spiny dogfish less than four feet long. And then there are harmless twenty-foot basking sharks, and not-so-harmless threshers and makos. One reliable source says he saw a hammerhead in the pond in the 1960s. The great whites live nearby but don’t inhabit or visit the immediate waters.

Jay’s bait for Vladik was not only a few days on the Lucky Strike and its first-class service, but also spearing. Prime fishing spots were taken by the rod and reelers among the twenty thousand other island visitors on that Fourth of July weekend. We would have to pick our time and place very well if we were going to be in the water and avoid their hooks.

Vladik said he was so old that he’d been trained by the local Indians. He was, in fact, barely a decade older than I, so it wasn’t the Indians—long since eradicated—who had trained him, but other locals, or imports who had become locals, lured by the surfing, the fishing, the drinking, the off-season quiet, or the air of the nineteenth century that pervades Block Island. These devotees taught him how to fish the Block, and the secret, he said, with cryptic antecedents, was the same as Willie Keeler’s, “Hit ‘em,” meaning the fish, “where they,” meaning the fishermen, “ain’t.”

Not many hours later, my phone vibrated enough to wake me while leaving Lucy undisturbed. Tentacles of dawn suggested themselves but had not yet crept over the horizon when Jason, Vladik, and I put on wetsuits and loaded up the RIB with snorkels, masks, fins, dive floats and flags, floatlines, fish stringers, three Chekhov spear guns, a Froodblade for each of us to strap to a neoprene-sheathed calf, weight belts, water, bottles of 2Sweet electrolyte replacement, some foodish goo, and a big cooler half-filled with ice to preserve our catch. Jason, the little pisher who handled the boat like a pro, lit up the outboard, and it was still before first light when we were scudding along on flat water. We weren’t alone, of course. There were a few other early risers.

Vladik directed us to a secluded spot whose coordinates I’m not permitted to disclose. The water was shallow and two-foot waves almost washed us onto rocks, making conditions just tough enough that all the bigger boats stayed away. There were two smaller craft supporting divers. One belonged to a thick-necked owner of prodigious lungs, an infamous hunter of fish that had grown fat in deep, federally protected waters. Another belonged to a glamorous ballerina and cable channel celebrity. Both boats had their white-striped red flags flying, and divers were in the water, as it was light enough, if not after sunrise, to hunt without (much) fear of accidentally being shot by another diver.

Vladik held two guns and then we both rolled overboard backward. He loaded one, handed it over, and said, “Don’t shoot me, please.” We could have anchored and all gone in together, but Jason wanted to stay with the boat.

Big boulders broke the surface. Only twelve feet deep, we could easily see the rocks, sea stars, and baitfish below, even through the sand washed back and forth under wave action. “Try to settle on the bottom and wait,” Vladik told me. “There are fish here. Patience does it.”

Yes. Fish everywhere. We’d dropped into a school of small striped bass, all six to ten pounds, twenty-five to thirty inches long, hundreds of them—silvery streaks slowly circling around. Vladik moved in shallower water, where he signaled that there were bigger fish. The viz was worse, though. I would be satisfied with something smaller. I tried to calm my heart, relax, take a deep, deep breath, and plunge, but when I did, all I found down there was a place the fish had been. I had disturbed them. My observation pushed them away, like some gedankenexperiment by Werner Heisenberg. The game was, as it usually is, to observe without creating a disturbance, and then shoot.

As I was figuring all this out, Vladik swam by me on his way back to the RIB. There were two much bigger stripers, maybe forty-inches-long, secured to his float. “I’m going to dump these with Jason, and then come back to help you.”

His return was reassuring, although I was worried about putting a spear in him. My breathing slowed. On the bottom, with Vladik alongside, I wasn’t fidgeting like before, and the fish reappeared after the initial disturbance, circling again. I felt like my lungs were going to explode, making me want to quit and freshen them up top. Somehow, I found more air and more calm within. I waited longer. The surface was close and I knew I could go up at any time. The stripers were by now coming right up to me, six, even three feet away. I tracked them with my gun and finally decided my moment had come. Looking down the length of the spear, keeping it trained on my target’s head as it swam, I pulled the trigger and wham! A sharp metallic zing traveled in the water as the stainless steel spear pierced the striper’s bony gill plate and out its side. It went wild, flopping and trying to get away. The spear was on a short, tough line, its other end secured to the gun. Ten pounds of muscle and bone yanked and fought and swam away and up and to and fro and made crazy knots of everything, while I made a few hard kicks and was then breathing delicious marine air, watching the rising sun paint the bluffs red. I was puzzled, though, about how to conclude what I’d started.

Vladik’s gun twanged a moment later and he brought his third fish to rest under water, removed it from the line, and strung it up on his float, all so quickly done I couldn’t comprehend it. Vladik the Impaler. Technically, at that moment, he was Vladik the Poacher, inasmuch as the legal limit was two fish per day. I’ll leave it as an exercise to you, Agile Reader, to do the math and see that no agent of the Rhode Island’s Department of Environmental Management would find us, collectively, in violation.

“Heh, Lakshmi!” he yelled. “Let’s swap guns and I’ll clean up your catch.” I was happy to oblige. With his snorkel back in his mouth, he pulled my line in until the spear itself was in his hand. Walking his hand up the shaft, all the time keeping pressure on its barb so my trophy couldn’t get away, he then reached for the animal’s head. When Vladik put his thumb in one fish eye and his middle finger of the same hand in the other, the fish calmed down. Vladik grabbed the Froodblade strapped to his ankle and stove it hard into the piscean skull, stirring it around in the brains for good measure until the end came. The RIB had meanwhile motored up so close that Vladik tossed my one fish in, and we scrambled over the pontoon while Jason pulled in floats, guns, and Vladik’s number three.

As Jason led us back to the Lucky Strike, Vladik shouted over the sound of the enraged sewing machine that was our eighty-horsepower engine, and mocking the accent he’d often heard but had never had, offered the Russian reversal, “In America, we spear striped fish. In Soviet Russia, striped fish spears you!”

The chef would be happy to have fresh M. saxatilis on the table that evening and for her larder later. With three of us in the RIB, we could have brought home six, but four legal ones were plenty. No need to be greedy. It was not even two hours after sunrise when we pulled back up alongside the Lucky Strike with our haul. We took hot freshwater showers and the chef had breakfast ready for us when we were clean, dry, and clothed.