by Lester Dent
City Yacht Basin
(Originally published in 1936)
The fish trembled its tail as the knife cut off its head, then red ran out of it and made a mess on the planks and spread enough to cover the wet red marks where two human hands had tried to hold to the dock edge.
Sail put the palm of his own hand in the mess.
The small policeman came from shore. He had shoved through the small green gate with the discreet sign, Private Yachts — No Admittance, at the shore end of the swanky pier, and was under the neat green canopy, tramping in the rear edge of the glare from his flashlight. His leather and brass glistened in the light. He was cautious enough to walk in the middle of the narrow long pier, but did enough stamping with his feet to show he was the law.
When he reached Sail, he stopped. His cap had a cock. His lower lip was loose on the left side, as if depressed by a pipe stem that wasn’t there. He was young, bony and brown.
He asked, “That you give that yell?”
Sail picked up the hook and wet line. He held the hook close to his left palm. He grimaced at the small oozing rip in the brown callus of the palm. It was about the kind of a hole the fishhook would have made.
“Yeah?” the cop said vaguely. “You snagged the hand on a hook, eh? Made you yell?” The policeman toed the fish head’s open mouthful of snake-fang teeth.
“Barracuda,” he said, but not as if that was on his mind.
Red drops came out of the ripped palm, fattened on the lower edge, came loose and fell on the dock. Sail picked the fish up with his other hand. When he stood his straightest, he was still shorter than the small cocky policeman.
The officer splashed light on Sail. He saw the round jolly brown features of a thirtyish man who probably liked his food, who would put weight on until he was forty, and spend the rest of his life secretly trying to take it off. Sail’s hair might have been unraveled rope, and looked as if it had been finger-combed. Some of the black had been scrubbed out of his black polo shirt. Washings had bleached his black dungarees; they fitted his small hips tightly and stopped halfway below the knees. Bare feet had squarish toes. Weather had gotten to all of the man a lot.
The officer hocked to clear his throat. “They don’t eat barracuda in Miami. Not when you catch the damn things in the harbor, anyhow.”
He didn’t sound as if that was the thing bothering him, either.
Sail asked, “You the health department?”
The little policeman filled Sail’s eyes with light. He said, “If that was a crack—” and changed to, “Was it you yelled?”
“Any law against a yell when you get a hook in your hand?”
The policeman popped his light into Sail’s face again. Derision was around Sail’s blue eyes and in the warp of his lips.
Loud music was coming from the moonlight excursion boat at the south end of the City Yacht Basin, but a barker spoiled the effect of the music, if any. Two slot machines alongside the lunch stand at Pier Six ate sailor nickels and chugged away.
A hundred million dollars’ worth of yachts within a half-mile radius, the Miami publicity bureau said. Little Egyptian-silk-sail racing cutters that had cost a thousand a foot. A big three-hundred-foot Britisher, owned by Lady Something-or-other who only had officers with beards. And in-between sizes. Teak, mahogany, chromium, brass. Efficiency. Jap stewards as quiet as spooks. Blond Swede sailors. Skippers with leather faces, big hands and great calm.
The policeman pointed his flashlight beam at the boat tied to the end of the dock. The light showed the sloping masts, the black canvas covers over the sails, the black, neat, new-looking hull. Life preservers tied to the mainstays had Sail on them in gold leaf.
“What you call that kind of a boat?” the cop asked.
“Chesapeake five-log bugeye,” Sail said. “Her bottom is made out of five logs drifted together with Swedish iron rods. The masts on bugeyes always rake back like that. She’s thirty-four feet long in the water. You’ll have trouble beating a bugeye for knocking around shallow water, and they’re pretty fair sea—”
“Could it cross the ocean?”
“She has.”
“Yeah? My old man’s got the crazy idea he wants to go to the South Seas. He’s nuts about boats.”
“It gets you.”
“This one yours?”
“Yes,” Sail said.
“How old is it?”
“Sixty-eight years old.”
“T’hell it is! That’s older’n my old man. I don’t think he’d want it.”
“She’ll take you anywhere,” Sail defended.
“What’s she worth?”
“Seventy-five thousand dollars,” Sail said.
The policeman whistled. Then he laughed. He did not say anything.
Sail said, “There are some panels in the cabin, genuine hand carvings by Samuel McIntire of Salem. Probably they were once on a clipper ship. That’s what makes her price stiff.”
The cop did not answer. He switched off his light.
“All I can say is you let out a hell of a funny yell when you catch a fish,” he said.
He took pains to stamp his feet while he walked away. By the time Sail got the effects of the flashlight out of his eyes, the officer was out of sight.
Sail held his hands close to his chest, fingers spread, palms in. There was barely enough breeze to make coolness against one side of his face. The music on the moonlit sailboat stopped. The barker was silent. Over in the Bayfront Park outdoor auditorium a political speaker was viewing something with alarm. After he had felt his hands tremble for a while, Sail went to his boat.
The boat, Sail, rode spring lines at the dock end. She had a thirty-four-foot waterline. Twelve-foot beam, two-foot draft with centerboard up, seven with it down. She was rigged to be sailed by one man, all lines coming aft.
The interior was teak, with inset panels of red sanders, fustic and green ebony, all hand-carved by a man who had died in 1811. How Samuel McIntire panels came to be in the bugeye, Sail did not know, but he had been offered a thousand dollars for each year of age for the boat and was hungry broke when he turned it down. It was not a money matter. Some men love dogs.
Sail slapped the fish into a kettle in the galley and, hurrying, put most of his right arm through a porthole, grasped a line, took half hitches off a cleat, and let the line go. The line snaked quietly down into the water, following a sinking live-box and its contents of live fish and crawfish.
Sail looked out of the hatch.
The young policeman had come quietly back to where the fish had bled and was using his flashlight. He squatted. After a while, he approached the dock end, moseying. Too carefully. When his flashlight brightened the bugeye’s black masts and black sail covers, Sail was in the galley, making enough noise cutting up the fish to let the cop know where he was and what he was doing.
Sail waited four or five minutes before putting his head out of the hatch. The cop had gone somewhere silently.
Sail was still looking and listening for the policeman when he heard the man’s curse and the woman’s cry, short, sharp. The man’s curse was something of a bray of surprise. The sounds came out of Bayfront Park, between the waterfront yacht basin and Biscayne Boulevard. Sail, not stirring, but watching the park, saw a man running among the palms. Then the young policeman and his flashlight were also moving among the palms.
During the next five minutes, the policeman and his flash were not still long enough for him to have found anything.
Sail stripped naked, working fast once more. His body was rounding, the hair on it golden and long, but not thick. He looked at his belly as if he didn’t like it, slapped it and sucked it in. The act was more a habit than a thought. He put on black jersey swim trunks.