The Forty Fathom Bank and Other Stories

AND OTHER STORIES

Les Galloway

Afterword by Jerome Gold

The Forty Fathom Bank

Where No Flowers Bloom

Last Passenger North, or The Doppleganger

The Caspar

The Albacore Fisherman

Death of a Hero

Afterword
by Jerome Gold

And when he finds that the sum of his transgressions is great he will many a time like a child start up in his sleep, and he is filled with dark forebodings
.

~
PLATO
,
The Republic

For the first few months I felt nothing, really, except now and then a vague feeling of uneasiness like the after-effect of a dream whose full meaning has escaped in the dark fragments of its own confused scenes. Beyond that, it seldom crossed my mind, and when it did I would tell myself that it was an accident, an accident at sea. I would say it over and over again, like an incantation, and try not to think of anything but the words. That way, I was able to keep it locked up inside me, concealed, so to speak, from my conscious thoughts. And too, I managed to keep myself quite busy, much busier than I needed to be, so that I had little time for reflection.

But one night after all my business was done, when everything was in perfect order, I woke up out of a sound sleep. I just opened my eyes and was wide awake in the middle of the night. After that, nothing did any good.

Now all this was a long time ago, so it would seem only natural that the whole experience, as terrible as it was, should eventually have faded from my mind. But nothing has changed. The old feelings of uneasiness have settled in permanently. Though I have tried a thousand devices to keep them at bay, they slip in without any warning, anywhere, anytime at all, but especially when I happen to be around the docks or small boats or whenever the dank low water smell of the Bay or the ocean catch me off guard—feelings that have gathered a kind of cloudy horror about them as the years go by. And every now and then the memory of Ethan May, faceless as in a dream, slips like a shadow across my
mind.

We were living in San Francisco at the time. We still live here. In spite of everything, it is a difficult city to leave. Yet sometimes I think I should have taken the family and moved inland, away from the coast and the water and all the associations: the unpredictable reminders that unleash the hordes of silent apprehensions hidden away in the deepest recesses of my consciousness.

But decisions have always come hard, mainly I suppose because I've never been sure of things. Nor of myself. I was twenty-eight then, nervous, thin, tired all the time and suffering from a kind of hopelessness of spirit I firmly believe came from having been reared by a godfearing grandmother. Her countless tales of fire and damnation, along with a very realistic and abiding fear of poverty had, since my earliest childhood, filled me with gloom and confusion. I learned very young to be afraid of both God and his inscrutable wrath, and of the struggle to survive without money. Goaded by threats of punishment, I recited my prayers, but always with the hope they'd be answered not with guidance or forgiveness, but with money, which even as a child I found more effective in exorcising the evils of this world than the whispered appeals for divine approval.

My grandmother died at eighty-two, sustained to the last by fantasies of eternal bliss in the Four Square City of Gold and a life-long confidence in the Second Coming, but leaving me with nothing but a legacy of self-doubt and confusion to face the worst years of the Depression.

I had nothing, and as I look back it seems that I must have accepted this fact as my way of life, though resentfully and with considerable fear. And being afraid, I took few chances. I clung to things, to the status quo, to my wife, my jobs, and I avoided changes.

Yet sometime before the war, I did something quite unusual for me. I acquired an old fishing boat. I say acquired because no one in those days, or certainly no one I knew, could afford to buy anything but essentials. It was a big boat, nearly sixty feet long and quite seaworthy despite its weathered look, with a fifteen-ton hold and deck space for a good many tons more. The capacity of the boat, however, had little bearing on its value, for fish at that time brought such a low price that it hardly paid to go out after them.

The boat, called the
Blue Fin
, was part of an estate, and since no one wanted it, I came by it for something like five hundred dollars, to be paid over an indefinite period of time. My intention was to put a railing around it and take out fishing parties on weekends to augment my twenty-five dollars a week income in a real estate office which was always about to go out of business.

Of course, I had another idea in buying the
Blue Fin
, and that was to move aboard with my family on that inevitable day when I couldn't pay the rent on the tiny apartment we were squeezed into, that little prison with its dark, unventilated rooms, its lines of damp clothes in the kitchen and where my two kids woke up to life playing on the bare floors, or outside on the dirty street beneath the endless gray of our San Francisco summers.

As it turned out, the real estate office did not go out of business, but for some reason I was let go anyway. However, by the time I received my last check I had managed, with energy born of desperate necessity, since I knew nothing about boats then, to get the
Blue Fin
in shape and was already running a few fishing parties to partially compensate for the loss of my job.

And this was my life for more than three years, shivering
on the dock at two and three o'clock in the fog-wet mornings waiting for a party of firemen or policemen or office workers who sometimes showed up and sometimes didn't. And on the days, and there were more than enough of them, when the boat lay idle I would clean or paint or work on the engine or go around to the bait shops drumming up business.

It was on those no income days as I used to call them, depressed and tired, I would often watch the husky, leathery-skinned Sicilians returning—laughing that good, high-pitched, prolonged laughter that came up from their guts, shouting and cajoling each other from their little blue and white clipper-bowed crab boats—those crafty, warm, loud, strong people who could eke a living from the sea and prosper because they were born to it, because their blood and bones and muscles and stomachs and temperaments were adapted for centuries to it. And comparing myself to them I began to believe that my physical frailness—I was five eleven and not much over one hundred and forty pounds—was bound up with our continued poverty.

This thought obsessed me so much I began to have fantasies of doing something wild and dangerous like running Chinamen in from Mexico at five hundred dollars a head or smuggling jewels or even heroin.

Probably I'd still be at it, or something equally profitless, had it not been for the strange and fortuitous business of the sharks that struck the California coast in the fall of 1940 and that, in little more than a year, found me richer than I'd ever dreamed possible.

I said it began in 1940. Actually, that whole dreamlike affair that changed the lives of so many of us, had been building up for some time, ever since the Nazis had invaded Scandinavia and cut off the exportation of North Sea fish and especially of fish liver oil—a vital source of Vitamin A which, at the time, could not be made synthetically. With the threat of a global war hanging over us, neither the cod fisheries in New England nor the halibut catch off the North Pacific coast could begin to fill the demand.

Now all this, it might seem, would have had little bearing on the fishing industry along the California coast where cod are not plentiful and halibut even less so. And since there were no other known fishes which could supply the needed vitamin, it should follow that a windfall from the sea would be highly unlikely.

But one day in the late fall, a small boat pulled up to the Acme Fish Company dock at Fisherman's Wharf. The fishermen had been set-lining for rock fish, but, unfortunately, had run into a school of small gray nurse sharks locally called soupfins because the Chinese use the fins for soup. Aside from that small market, the fish were worthless and considered a pest. And it was only out of sympathy for the fisherman that the buyer contributed five dollars a ton for the catch. His intention, no doubt, was to recoup his loss by selling the carcasses for chicken feed. Two days later that same buyer called the fisherman and offered him fifteen dollars a ton for all he could bring in.