“Reel on him,” I said. “He’s hooked good. Put her ahead with all the machine!” I yelled to the nigger.
Then once, twice, he came out stiff as a post, the whole length of him jumping straight toward us, throwing the water high each time he landed. The line came taut and I saw he was headed inshore again and I could see he was turning.
“Now he’ll make his run,” I said. “If he hooks up I’ll chase him. Keep your drag light. There’s plenty of line.”
The old marlin headed out to the nor’west like all the big ones go, and brother, did he hook up. He started jumping in those long lopes and every splash would be like a speed boat in a sea. We went after him, keeping him on the quarter once I’d made the turn. I had the wheel and I kept yelling to Johnson to keep his drag light and reel fast. All of a sudden I see his rod jerk and the line go slack. It wouldn’t look slack unless you knew about it because of the pull of the belly of the line in the water. But I knew.
“He’s gone,” I told him. The fish was still jumping and he went on jumping until he was out of sight. He was a fine fish all right.
“I can still feel him pull,” Johnson said.
“That’s the weight of the line.”
“I can hardly reel it. Maybe he’s dead.”
“Look at him,” I said. “He’s still jumping.” You could see him out a half a mile, still throwing spouts of water.
I felt his drag. He had it screwed down tight. You couldn’t pull out any line. It had to break.
“Didn’t I tell you to keep your drag light?”
“But he kept taking out line.”
“So what?”
“So I tightened it.”
“Listen,” I told him. “If you don’t give them line when they hook up like that they break it. There isn’t any line will hold them. When they want it you’ve got to give it to them. You have to keep a light drag. The market fishermen can’t hold them tight when they do that even with a harpoon line. What we have to do is use the boat to chase them so they don’t take it all when they make their run. After they make their run they’ll sound and you can tighten up the drag and get it back.”
“Then if it hadn’t broken I would have caught him?”
“You’d have had a chance.”
“He couldn’t have kept that up, could he?”
“He can do plenty of other things. It isn’t until after he’s made his run that the fight starts.”
“Well, let’s catch one,” he said.
“You have to reel that line in first,” I told him.
We’d hooked that fish and lost him without waking Eddy up. Now old Eddy came back astern.
“What’s the matter?” he said.
Eddy was a good man on a boat once, before he got to be a rummy, but he isn’t any good now. I looked at him standing there tall and hollow-cheeked with his mouth loose and that white stuff in the corners of his eyes and his hair all faded in the sun. I knew he woke up dead for a drink.
“You’d better drink a bottle of beer,” I told him. He took one out of the box and drank it.
“Well, Mr. Johnson,” he said, “I guess I better finish my nap. Much obliged for the beer, sir.” Some Eddy. The fish didn’t make any difference to him.
Well, we hooked another one around noon and he jumped off. You could see the hook go thirty feet in the air when he threw it.
“What did I do wrong then?” Johnson asked.
“Nothing,” I said. “He just threw it.”
“Mr. Johnson,” said Eddy, who’d waked up to have another bottle of beer—“Mr. Johnson, you’re just unlucky. Now maybe you’re lucky with women. Mr. Johnson, what do you say we go out tonight?” Then he went back and laid down again.
About four o’clock when we’re coming back close in to shore against the stream; it going like a mill race, us with the sun at our backs; the biggest black marlin I ever saw in my life hit Johnson’s bait. We’d put out a feather squid and caught four of those little tuna and the nigger put one on his hook for bait. It trolled pretty heavy but it made a big splash in the wake.
Johnson took the harness off the reel so he could put the rod across his knees because his arms got tired holding it in position all the time. Because his hands got tired holding the spool of the reel against the drag of the big bait, he screwed the drag down when I wasn’t looking. I never knew he had it down. I didn’t like to see him hold the rod that way but I hated to be crabbing at him all the time. Besides, with the drag off, line would go out so there wasn’t any danger. But it was a sloppy way to fish.
I was at the wheel and was working the edge of the stream opposite that old cement factory where it makes deep so close in to shore and where it makes a sort of eddy where there is always lots of bait. Then I saw a splash like a depth bomb and the sword, and eye, and open lower-jaw and huge purple-black head of a black marlin. The whole top fin was up out of water looking as high as a full-rigged ship, and the whole scythe tail was out as he smashed at that tuna. The bill was as big around as a baseball bat and slanted up, and as he grabbed the bait he sliced the ocean wide open. He was solid purple-black and he had an eye as big as a soup bowl. He was huge. I bet he’d go a thousand pounds.
I yelled to Johnson to let him have line but before I could say a word, I saw Johnson rise up in the air off the chair as though he was being derricked, and him holding just for a second onto that rod and the rod bending like a bow, and then the butt caught him in the belly and the whole works went overboard.
He’d screwed the drag tight, and when the fish struck, it lifted Johnson right out of the chair and he couldn’t hold it. He’d had the butt under one leg and the rod across his lap. If he’d had the harness on it would have taken him along, too.
I cut out the engine and went back to the stern. He was sitting there holding onto his belly where the rod butt had hit him.
“I guess that’s enough for today,” I said.
“What was it?” he said to me.
“Black marlin,” I said.
“How did it happen?”
“You figure it out,” I said. “The reel cost two hundred and fifty dollars. It costs more now. The rod cost me forty-five. There was a little under six hundred yards of thirty-six thread.”
Just then Eddy slaps him on the back. “Mr. Johnson,” he says, “you’re just unlucky. You know I never saw that happen before in my life.”
“Shut up, you rummy,” I said to him.
“I tell you, Mr. Johnson,” Eddy said, “that’s the rarest occurrence I ever saw in my life.”
“What would I do if I was hooked to a fish like that?” Johnson said.
“That’s what you wanted to fight all by yourself,” I told him. I was plenty sore.
“They’re too big,” Johnson said. “Why, it would just be punishment.”
“Listen,” I said. “A fish like that would kill you.”
“They catch them.”
“People who know how to fish catch them. But don’t think they don’t take punishment.”
“I saw a picture of a girl who caught one.”
“Sure,” I said. “Still fishing. He swallowed the bait and they pulled his stomach out and he came to the top and died. I’m talking about trolling for them when they’re hooked in the mouth.”
“Well,” said Johnson, “they’re too big. If it isn’t enjoyable, why do it?”
“That’s right, Mr. Johnson,” Eddy said. “If it isn’t enjoyable, why do it? Listen, Mr. Johnson. You hit the nail on the head there. If it isn’t enjoyable—why do it?”
I was still shaky from seeing that fish and feeling plenty sick about the tackle and I couldn’t listen to them. I told the nigger to head her for the Morro. I didn’t say anything to them and there they sat, Eddy in one of the chairs with a bottle of beer and Johnson with another.
“Captain,” he said to me after a while, “could you make me a highball?”
I made him one without saying anything, and then I made myself a real one. I was thinking to myself that this Johnson had fished fifteen days, finally he hooks into a fish a fisherman would give a year to tie into, he loses him, he loses my heavy tackle, he makes a fool of himself and he sits there perfectly content, drinking with a rummy.
When we got in to the dock and the nigger was standing there waiting, I said, “What about tomorrow?”
“I don’t think so,” Johnson said. “I’m about fed up with this kind of fishing.”
“You want to pay off the nigger?”
“How much do I owe him?”
“A dollar. You can give him a tip if you want.”
So Johnson gave the nigger a dollar and two Cuban twenty-cent pieces.
“What’s this for?” the nigger asks me, showing the coins.
“A tip,” I told him in Spanish. “You’re through. He gives you that.”
“Don’t come tomorrow?”
“No.”
The nigger gets his ball of twine he used for tying baits and his
