The Forty Fathom Bank and Other Stories by Les Galloway

pot of coffee. While I waited for the water to boil, I sat down at the table and lit another cigarette. After a couple of drags I stumped it out, scraped off the burnt end, and lit it again. The smoke felt hot in my throat and besides, it was making me sick. But since I didn’t want to put it out again, I just sat there holding it and flicking off the ashes. From up forward came the soft thump of a wave against the hull. The
Blue Fin
lurched a little, then righted herself. I glanced up through the open scuttle. A small cloud bundle, crossing under the sun, turned the sky as dark as a winter twilight.
    May’s sheet of writing paper lay where he had left it on the table. I pushed aside the box of hooks and studied the big, carefully printed letters that filled the entire space between the guide lines. It looked like the efforts of a child learning to write, simple, diligent and unsuspecting. Yet at the same time I could feel there something ultimate, something just beyond my reach but in some way discernible. And looking at it, at the child’s simple efforts, I could see May’s strong fingers working away, his pale green eyes concentrated and serious, yet neither shadow nor flame. And then I saw him all at once, a composite of remembrances. And seeing him that way, with the mid-afternoon sun fading and brightening and the
Blue Fin
lifting and falling more and more sharply gave me such a quick and poignant feeling of sadness that I had to wipe my eyes with my blood stiffened sleeve to clear away the start of tears. In a moment, the whole feeling passed. Yet I continued to sit there, puzzled and at the same time embarrassed, still flicking the ashes off my unsmoked cigarette and I could only explain my strange melancholy away by the fact that I was probably getting a little hysterical.
    The coffee came to a boil, foamed over the sides of the blackened pot and, before I could reach it, put out the flame. I poured in some cold water to settle the grounds and was fumbling around cleaning up the mess when May came below. His face was as placid as ever. He had washed off his sea boots so that the black rubber glistened. Even the fabric lining of the rolled down tops had been well scrubbed.
    He took off his skull cap, folded it neatly and slipped it into his trouser pocket before he sat down. There was nothing left in the locker but a half box of salted crackers and the remains of some peanut butter. I put these out on the table along with a couple of cups of the steaming,iodine-colored coffee, and sat down opposite him. But again, as at breakfast and on deck a little while before, I could not look up at him.
    By the time I got back in the wheelhouse and May had taken his position aft by the stern roller, the entire aspect of the water had changed. The sea had become the ocean with its cool smell of distance and its vast, curving emptiness. I swung the
Blue Fin
about as the little wind that had picked up came in off the starboard bow. Through the windows that had already caught some spray, I could see here and there along the crests of the dark hills rolling up from the southwest, white tongues snapping skyward with sibilant whisperings, eerie in that big silence, then falling off, making white foam patches down the lee slopes. Though it was still early afternoon, the sun seemed to have gotten smaller and the sky darker. And just above the horizon to the south and west, a low cloud bank, like a weld on the seam between the sky and the water, was now visible.
    The area May had cleared was so cluttered from gear that he was forced, in order to keep from stepping into the tubs, to stand with one foot on the gunn’l and the toe of his other foot in one of the scuppers. Since we had but one buoy keg left, he picked up the anchor that was made fast to the end of the set line and, motioning me ahead, tossed it out over the stern with no buoy line. The heavy iron stuck with a soft clunk, the line snapped taught, and then the