OCR Text |
Show fit, this giant fish. He barely fit on the deck. Even now his tail bent up the side of the boat and we had to move the cooler so that his head could rest on the floor. I looked into his large, flat eye, and wondered what he had seen in his lifetime under the sea. Then the captain bludgeoned him with a thick club that had been conjured from the air. He pounded and pounded on the fish's body, mostly at the head and eye but also the sides and heart. The marlin did not have time to gasp or flop before the club moved against him again. Bloody scales flew off his body and stuck to my legs and arms. Pieces of marlin, translucent, uncolored, visible only because of the blood, spattered my shins, the boat, the club, my brothers. Rivers of blood mixed with the deck water and rushed back into the sea, red lines running down the sides of the boat. His eye was fractured into pieces and filled with blood. All color save red was gone from his skin. Like a fish at market, he looked cold, dead. Moments ago he was dancing and now, because he was too big for the cooler, he was crammed into a semi-circle on our fishing boat deck. There was no longer any room to move. I will not attend Mr. Kaup's funeral. He will be buried in Rosecrans National Cemetery, the same military cemetery that will hold the veteran body of my grandfather several years later. Perhaps the mourners sang the Submariner's Hymn, the words of my childhood weaving through the fog that engulfs early morning San Diego. Perhaps guns cracked the sky in a final salute. Perhaps his absence felt familiar to his family, more like temporary duty and less like mourning. I was not there to know what loss looked like that morning on a hill above the sea. When I visit his grave years later, I find tiny 178 |