The reef was inviting, her languid coral nudging the breakers as they returned from sea. From the instep of the dingy, the fisherman in his broken English was advising the seated men of dangers indigenous to these waters.
"None of that hostile marine life business, Steve - keep it simple - use words he's familiar with," the man with a razor lip, Cliff, muttered to his companion. The other was busy going through the motions in heavily accented Spanish broadly emphasizing common words that lead to nods and ballyhoo, those expected currencies of behavior.
"I'm getting through," came the reply. "Seems beyond the reef, dolphins and the occasional shark gather. Good fishing, though - red snappers and groupers with anemones along the bottom - the Mexicans eat those you know - call'em seaeggs."
Cliff, only vaguely interested, beckoned Steve's attention back to that one inescapable query - was it safe to dive.
Another brief flurry of words were exchanged with the fisherman raising a bronzed arm to touch the crown of his cap. Some indecipherable Spanish mutterings followed and another burst of loud exclamations before Steve halted his forays into that basic issue of logic and pernicity. Cliff eyed the two and then spoke again.
"I don't have to catch every word of his conversation to understand the general drift of his speech. He feels some danger exists, so why chance it? Why soften his warning with your doggerel translations. Your Spanish is at least good enough to surmise what I'm instinctively feeling. Let's quit and go ashore."
"Not so fast. The water's calm here and the visibility rings like a bell. He mentioned sharks have been sighted here not that there's ever been an attack."
"Yeah, well if there's never been a problem it's because this spot is so isolated. Remember this area is no regular mecca for divers of any type. Consider its remoteness and then do a little basic thinking as to why no one has reported an aggressive White, let alone one barracuda incident. I say it's not worth chancing and I can tell by his face that even despite your bundle of pesos something has been set registering."
Steve feigned disinterest. Buckling his tanks, every nodule of perspiration shone like beaded stud marks across his back. The salt on their skins was razor sharp and the wind's jerky movement caused incessant choppy movements about the breadth of the boat's rhythm. A cross-section of moods was close to enveloping them. For one, the afternoon sun was like a bayonet shoved through the thin sky. Obtrusively red, it fumbled renewed sweat beads across each man's brow like an eager dresser's haste with an awkward button. No sooner was one silenced than another plodding moisture bead appeared. Only the Mexican could remain unmoved to droplets skidding toward the vicinity of his lower eyelid. It conjured up tales of flies crawling into the eyes of aborigines in the Outback but without any apparent discomfort to the owners of those eyes. The two Americans, distracted by their sweating, cursed the heat and the loggerheads of their situation. No flies or bobos, as they were know here, added to their misery given their great distance offshore. Their greater paralysis of the will lay in the low horizon of the shore receding, then, appearing silhouetted against blows of driven water. This, then, was the mainstay of their indecision. All that blue - the blue of shining sky married with further Wedgwood blue sea careening in a plaster paris water dish, bounced up as if up from the shadows and made renewed fear inevitable. The fisherman, quiet above all this, seemed content to let inertia make her case. He knew heat held a silent, unassailable logic. Sooner or later the water would call or repel its prot'g's. His task was no easier whatever their final deliberation. A long toil with stubborn currents lay ahead, whatever. The journey to shore was inescapable. And so he sat, patiently content to provide that most meager of gruel - his slight infusion of calm and warning to the strange fellows he knew only as Touristas or more profitably, "amigo," Steve and Cliff. His lines, staked for fish, would remain regardless and the thin fingers of his existence remained coiled about a routine as numbing as that the two men had pretended to escape.
Now, at first furtively, then with the fury of an immense belch only the sea could muster forth, a school of porpoises broke about the little craft. Baleful but expression-filled eyes of each beast broke with water, then took in as only an intelligent creature can, the mission of the three surface beings. Each in a return splash shimmied the dinghy making for a resurgence of what, until now, had been a barely muted panic. Yet most of that brief moment was consumed in expectation and, as suddenly as it had begun, the pregnancy of the incantation was dissolved. Slipping beneath the waves, these most human of fish returned to nurse from the ocean's depths.
"Five of them," Steve was yelling - all at least twelve feet in length. Incredible.
The Mexican was smiling. Apparently what had taken place was not an everyday occurrence even for the likes of a grizzled seafarer as himself. Steve was found announcing something, too. Something to the effect the animals were benign or all three wouldn't be able to renew the urgency of the dive.
Cliff, as if moved by the last events or his friend's logic, also appeared to have altered his position.
"See, that settles it. Porpoises are the natural enemies of sharks. A school surrounds nursing calves and will, on occasion, rupture an intruder by butting the offender's abdomen. We have no more reason to fear. Any shark is long gone."
It was now Steve's turn to renew the apprehension. The size of the animals and the crash of their drift against the boat, was sobering reality of this stretch of water's potential for the unexpected.
"Cliff, I have all the makings of a complete smart ass. All this talk of being an experienced diver - that's all armchair politics at this point. Sure, I've done my bit in pools and their like. But the immensity of this place terrifies me. Just staring down through the shades of colour, seeing the breadth of that reef, what with all this salt and heat, is taking its toll. I've lost my sense of the dramatic. The rapture of the deep has been displaced by a chilling realization we don't know the state of any conditions normally common knowledge before a dive - drop-offs, undertows, further hostile marine life, the ...."
"Hostile marine life," back to that eh, chickenshit. Hey, where's your wings, boy? That little show whetted my appetite. I'm all for seeing what's below. Yet I'll give you this much. I'm sick of the confidence racket we've been pitting against ourselves. What's more, my body fluids are near depleted. I'm numb with heat - I can imagine myself thirsty for disaster drinking seawater and thinking there's a spring nearby. And that sun grows more forbidding the lower it drops. And, as you say, I am also angered at ourselves for our naivet'. No one can appreciate how enervating it is just watching our skin sear and peel displaced of its water. That's been the real experience out here today - seeing what this world does to an outsider. I imagine an odour growing from my arm by the moment. All I can see is yours and his face swimming before my eyes. I don't want to get punch drunk. I fear the prospect of going down into whatever awaits us and struggling to re-enter a little boat with a fisherman whose so hazed he's beyond understanding what turmoil comprises our lot. I move we do go in, but only at the insistence we ponder a little more firmly what the words, "devil fish," moray and danger mean to cock and bull swaggers like ourselves.
"This is no Keokuk, Iowa venture into the tristate area on a licensed Mississippi riverboat. This is as bitching as blood can seem."