Cayos in the Stream Read Online Free

in the fighting chair and see how your luck runs. The day is warm and muggy. You can have someone fetch you a bottle of beer from an ice chest.
    The American ambassador and the FBI man in Havana will not like to hear you are fishing for marlin while you are patrolling for U-boats. Well, obscenity on what they will not like. If you catch one, you and your crewmates will eat like kings. Nothing tastes better than a fish you have just pulled out of the sea yourself. Nothing. Obscenity on all the cans in the galley, too.
    You do hook one, not half an hour after you take your place in the chair. He is not the monster you dream of. Life has a nasty way of not living up to your dreams, or why are you on your third wife and squabbling with her? But he is longer than a man is tall. He has to weigh as much as you do. And he fights for his life like the free, wild thing he is.
    Line smokes off the reel. The marlin is furious and strong, so strong. You have a thick chest and muscled arms, but it is not the same after you pass forty. You shout and roar so you do not have to look at that, but it is not the same whether you look at it or not. You have the rod and the reel and the line and the hook. You have the fighting chair to brace against.
    What does the fish have? Only himself. Yet you soon feel like an old man on the sea. But the marlin also feels it. Let him dive. Let him jump. Hook and line and rod still link him to your arms. You work the reel as you can. Sometimes the line pays out when he runs. More often, now, it comes in. You gain. Little by little, you gain.
    “Come on, God,” someone behind you says. “Keep the stinking sharks away. Give us a whole marlin, not one all chewed to hell and gone.”
    You are so wrapped up in the fight, you did not know someone stood in back of the chair. Neither do you know about God. If He is inclined to answer prayers, though, you hope He answers that one. You hate sharks. And a hooked, exhausted marlin is a feast at Maxim’s for them.
    You keep on reeling in the fish. What else can you do? If a shark comes, he comes. That is the long and short of it. After most of an hour, you have beaten the marlin. He lies by the stern, spent but beautiful. No shark has torn that blued-gunmetal hide.
    A gaff goes into the marlin. Eager hands pull him up over the roller. His mouth gapes wide. He cannot breathe air, but he does not know that, poor thing. “Watch the bill!” you say sharply. The marlin may spear someone even with his dying thrashes.
    An iron pry bar comes down on his head, hard. Once, twice, three times. Eyes and skin dull. It is over.
    You draw a knife from a sheath on your belt. You feel the soft yet firm resistance of flesh as the blade goes in. When you yank the knife from the gills down toward the vent, offal spills on the deck. You and your crewmates push the guts into the water.
    Sharks now! The ocean behind the Pilar boils as they tear into the gift. A small stretch of sea briefly goes from blue to red.
    “Holy cow!” one of the men says. “A big bastard just swallowed one of the little guys.”
    “They might as well be people,” you say. “Give them shirts with collars and neckties and they will be running for Congress in the next election.” Your crewmates laugh. You are kidding, but kidding on the square.
    You hack big, thick steaks from the marlin’s flank. The meat has almost the texture of beef. Grilled and seasoned with lime juice and salt and cayenne, it will be fine. The Japs eat their fish raw. You like it fresh, but not that fresh.
    You haggle off another steak. Plenty of people want to stick knives into politicians after they lead them astray. They do not get the chance often enough. That they do not is another of the world’s sorrows.
    Now you are well into the Archipelago de Sabana. Sometimes Josep takes the Pilar between two cayos through a channel so narrow you can piss on the beach to port, then go to the starboard rail and piss on the mangroves there. The