The Closer Read online

  Did you know that fishing is the second most dangerous occupation out there, behind logging? a friend tells me. That it’s thirty-six times more dangerous than the average job?

  I did not know that, I reply. But I am not surprised. Then I tell him about the family friend who had his arm ripped right off his body when it got caught between two boats.

  There is another reason I am not keen on being a fisherman. I hate being away from Clara. Six days a week out at sea, and one day a week with Clara? Can we reverse the ratio?

  Right now I don’t have a choice, though. I need money and this is how I can earn it. Our nets are in the water, in the Gulf of Panama, and we are not having a good day of it. For hours we’ve been in one of our regular sardine hot spots, called La Maestra, but we haven’t caught anything and are heading back to our base island. We are about twenty minutes away, not far from the Canal, when the fish-finding sonar lights up.

  If the sonar is orange, it means you’ve come across a lot of fish. If the sonar is red, it means you have hit the fish lottery. The sonar is red. They are everywhere. We go all day with no action, and suddenly we’re right on top of the mother of all sardine schools. Even though we’re near the Canal, my father figures that at this hour—it’s after 11:00 p.m.—the boat traffic won’t be a problem. You only make thirty-five dollars for every one hundred tons of fish, so you don’t want any swimming away.

  Drop the net. Let’s go. The fish are waiting, my father hollers.

  We cast the net out in a huge circle, the idea being to surround the fish with it, and then quickly close it up with two massive ropes that get pulled in by hydraulic winches on either side.

  It takes a bit of time, but we have a huge haul, maybe eighty or ninety tons of sardines, the net just about bursting, our boat sitting so low it’s practically submerged in the water. We have so many fish, in fact, that my father radios for another couple of boats to come so we can transfer our haul to them and go back out and catch more. The other boats show up, and we unload the sardines and go back to the hot spot. It is now close to 4:00 a.m. It’s not normal to fish at such an hour, but we are not stopping now.

  Not when the sonar is flaming red.

  My father circles the spot again and we drop the net. He has a hard time maneuvering the boat in the strong current, but we get where we need to be. There is one guy in the back and one in the front working the ropes—huge hunks of interwoven line that do the heavy lifting, bringing the bounty up to the boat. The ropes are guided by a pulley system, and at the top of the pulleys there are flaps that lock into place so the ropes won’t fly out of control once the winch starts reeling them in. When the ropes start coming, they move at a blinding clip, like cars on the Daytona straightaway.

  We are working in complete darkness, the sun still two hours from coming up. Our deck lights are not on because lights would alert the fish to our presence and then they would swim away. We are about to close the net and fire up the hydraulic winches and bring the fish up. I am near the middle of the boat, about six feet from my uncle Miguel. It’s a bit tricky working in the dark, but we’re all so familiar with what needs to be done that it isn’t usually a problem.

  Except that one of the pulley flaps is not secure. In the daytime somebody definitely would’ve noticed. In the darkness nobody does.

  The ropes have to close the net in tandem, one after another, and when I notice that one rope is too far ahead, I tell the crew member on the second rope to let go of his rope. He lets go, but because the flap is not secure, when the winch starts reeling it in, the rope takes off, coming at us like a braided bazooka, ripping out of the water and onto the deck. It happens in an instant. There is no time to get out of the way. The rope blasts into my uncle at chest level, knocking a 240-pound man across the ship as if he were a palm frond. My uncle crashes face-first into the metal edge dividing a large salt-water-filled bin in the middle of the boat. The rope lashes into me a microsecond later, also hitting me in the chest, and I go flying even farther, but I don’t hit the metal edge, just the divider itself.

  I get a tooth knocked out and get scraped and bruised but otherwise come out unscathed. It has nothing to do with athletic ability or anything I do to minimize the damage; by the grace of God, I simply land in a relatively safe place.

  My uncle is not so fortunate. His face is split open, blood gushing everywhere. He is badly hurt. He is screaming in pain. It is the most horrific thing I’ve ever seen.

  Stop! Help! Miguel is hurt! somebody yells.

  Call for help! Quick! He’s hurt bad!

  Everybody on board is screaming. My father, who is at the helm in the cabin upstairs, races down to find his brother looking as if he’d taken a machete to the face. I keep replaying the nightmarish sequence of events. An unfastened flap, an out-of-control rope, and seconds later, an uncle I love—the man who gently explained to me why my father is so strict and quick with the belt—seems about to die before my eyes. I wish I could do something. I wish I could do anything. My father radios the Coast Guard, our first responders, and they arrive within minutes and take my uncle to the nearest hospital. The sun is coming up now. I can’t get the brutal images out of my head.

  My uncle is a diabetic, and that massively complicates his recovery. He seems better on some days, and on others slips back again. He fights for his life for a month. He does not win that fight. The funeral and burial are held right in Puerto Caimito. People show up by the hundreds.

  Miguel has gone home to be with the Lord, the priest says. We grieve for this loss, but we have to remember that the Lord has prepared a room for him and he has gone to a better place. There are nine prayerful days of mourning. It is the first time I remember seeing my father cry.

  We are back out on the boat a few days later, because the nets only make money in the water. We return for the final day of mourning. The perils of the job are nothing we can change. This is just what we do, day after day, week after week.

  Close to a year after my uncle died, we are supposed to be off on a Friday, only my father doesn’t know it because he never gets the message from the company that owns the boat. We spend the first part of the day repairing the nets and then set out in the direction of Contadora Island, in the Pacific Ocean, heading toward Colombia. The nets fill quickly and we start back toward our base island to unload our haul. We have not gotten far when the belt on our water pump stops working. We try a backup belt that we have, but it doesn’t fit properly. The pump is still not working.

  This is not good.

  The pump is what gets the water out of the boat. You do not stay afloat for long if your pump is not functioning.

  We’re carrying about a hundred tons of sardines and we’re sitting low and taking on water. Without the pump, we immediately begin taking on a lot more water. We are about two thousand feet off an island called Pacheca, which is next to Contadora. We are starting to sink.

  There is no time to deliberate. My father has an immediate decision to make—a decision no captain ever wants to make.

  We’re going to bring the boat into Pacheca, right onto the sand, my father says. There isn’t time to get to Contadora.

  He heads directly for the island and we are about halfway there, maybe a thousand feet away, when the belt mysteriously starts working again. Nobody knows why, and nobody is launching an investigation. Water begins to get pumped out and the boat rises in the water. My father is relieved, and you can see it on his face; he knows all about the risks involved with trying to pilot such a big boat onto shore. We could hit a rock or a coral reef, and the hull would get shredded like cheese in a grater. We’d take on too much sandy water, and the engine would be gummed up for the rest of time.

  We are two hours from our base, and with the pump back in commission, my father says we’re going back to Contadora. The wind is picking up and the swells in the ocean are getting bigger, but he is confident it will be no problem.

  We need to get back and unload the fish, he says. As long as
the belt is good and the pump is good, it will be fine.

  My father has been fishing these waters for years, and has keen instincts about what’s safe and what isn’t. Those instincts have served him well, but that doesn’t mean they are always right. He reverses field and pulls away from Pacheca. We don’t get more than fifteen hundred feet before the pump stops again.

  It is almost 9:00 p.m. now. The water in the boat starts rising, of course. The wind keeps getting stronger, and soon the swells are eight or ten feet, crashing over the sides of the boat. The conditions are worsening by the second. The boat is taking on water at a terrifying rate.

  Now there is no decision to make, because there is only one alternative.

  We’re heading back to Pacheca, my father shouts. He turns the boat around. The shoreline has literally become our only port in the storm.

  It is not going to be an easy or fast trip, not with the water on board and the seas so heavy.

  Let’s just get to safety, get to shore, no matter how slow going it is. I know this is what my father must be thinking.

  And then the engine knocks off.

  It doesn’t sputter or wheeze. It just dies. The engine is in the front of the boat and probably just got drowned by all the water.

  Now what do we do? I ask my father.

  We get down there and try to crank-start it, he says. He seems remarkably poised, given the circumstances.

  We clamber down the metal steps into the hull, through the wet and darkness, and I grip a thick metal handle and start cranking and cranking on a device that pumps air to generate power to jump-start the engine.

  Nothing.

  I crank some more. The engine is still not responding.

  Our ninety-foot boat is bobbing in the water like a cork now. It is sinking fast. There is no more time for cranking. We scramble up and out to the main deck, almost waist-high in water.

  Everybody onto the lifeboat, my father hollers.

  The lifeboat is made of iron, deep-hulled and fifteen feet long. We fight the wind and walls of water and finally wrestle the lifeboat into the sea, and all nine of us get in. It is supposed to be equipped with life jackets, but it isn’t. My father starts the engine and steers us slowly away from Lisa, waves crashing and cresting, tossing the lifeboat as if it were a bathtub toy.

  Behind us, I see my father’s boat—and our family’s livelihood—keel over on its side and then turn upside down. In minutes it disappears completely.

  Pacheca is off in the distance, maybe eight hundred feet away. It might as well be on the other side of the earth. I am on the right side of the lifeboat. It is sitting so low with all of us in it that now it starts to take on water, too.

  I look out toward the lights of Pacheca. I wonder if I am going to have to swim for my life. I wonder how many of us—or if any of us—will make it. The swells are one thing. The sharks are another. We have fished these waters many times. Hammerheads, reef sharks, tiger sharks: We have seen all kinds.

  There are sharks everywhere.

  The best hope for us is to get to shore via the back side of the island, where there is some protection from the wind and the seas figure to be much less rough. That is exactly where my father tries to take us. It is slow going. Up and down the swells we go. The big boat is already gone. Is this one going down, too?

  I can’t stop staring at the churning sea. It looks so angry. I don’t scare easily on the water, but I am scared. We are getting a little closer to the back of the island, but it still seems hopelessly far away. The wind and water continue to pound us. Nobody on the boat is saying a word. I am so racked with fear I can barely breathe.

  I can’t believe I might die because of a faulty water pump.

  I knew I wanted no part of being a fisherman, and this is exactly why. I think about my uncle, and what the fishing life has cost our family. I think about my mother and brothers and sister. Most of all, I think about Clara. She is my best friend, the person I want to spend my life with, even though I’ve never told her that. The thought that I might never see her again is almost too much to bear.

  A wave of water soaks me as I hang on to the side of the boat. Do I want to drown to death, or get eaten by a shark? Nineteen years of age, and these are my options.

  Somehow my father keeps the lifeboat creeping forward, plowing and dipping through the waves. I try to steer my mind away from the options. He is actually making progress somehow, even in a glorified dinghy that is far from the ideal vessel in such harsh elements. Maybe he will get us to the calmer water, after all. Maybe we aren’t going down.

  Is it five minutes later? Ten minutes? I don’t know. I just know we are much closer now, probably three hundred feet from land. The wind is subsiding and the surf seems to be in retreat. We pick up a little more speed. We are heading toward a sandy beach.

  We are going to make it to Pacheca.

  My father lifts up the motor and guides the lifeboat onto the beach. I jump out and shout with joy.

  Land! We’re on land. Land has never felt so good!

  We begin hugging each other. I even hug my father—that’s a first, as far as I can remember—and thank him for doing such a masterful job navigating us through. My father had radioed ahead, so the police and Coast Guard are waiting for us and check to make sure we are okay. They take us to a hotel—Pacheca is a tourist island, so it has plenty of nice places to stay—where they let our whole shivering and grateful group get a hot shower and dry clothes. It’s sad about the boat sinking, but this ending beats any scenario I could’ve imagined even a few minutes earlier.

  Eventually my father gets a new boat from the company he captains for, but for the time being, our fishing season is over. We spend our time repairing the net. It’s tedious and time-consuming, but I am in no rush to get back out on the water. And I am happy to be doing anything, alive.

  The near-calamity brings one other positive result: Without our six-day excursions on the boat, I get to play more ball with my team, Panama Oeste. I play ball all the time as a kid, but in a place as poor and remote as Puerto Caimito, it’s much more likely to be a pickup game on the shore than anything remotely organized. I am one of the stronger players from our village, and at thirteen I begin to travel around Panama as a member of our provincial team, playing teams from other provinces. I am a good local player, but it’s not as if people are touting me as the next Rod Carew or Rennie Stennett. When I reach eighteen, I am invited to play with the Panama Oeste Vaqueros (Cowboys) in Panama’s top adult league. I play whatever position the Cowboys want me to play. One game I am in right field, the next game at shortstop, and the next one after that I am behind the plate. I usually bat leadoff or No. 2. I can run and hit the ball in the gaps.

  My favorite position, though, is the outfield, because there’s nothing better in baseball than running down a fly ball. I am stationed in right field for an important game in the league playoffs. We have our best starter on the mound. We are sure he’s going to be dominant, but today they are all over him, smacking hits from here to the Canal, and we are getting into a big hole. The manager comes out to the mound, looks around for a moment, and then motions to me in right field.

  Why is he looking at me? I think. He can’t mean me. I am not even a pitcher.

  He points at me again. He waves for me to come in. He does mean me. I have no clue what is going on, but I trot in.

  I know you aren’t a pitcher, the manager says, but we’re in a bind, and all we’re looking for is for you to throw strikes. Don’t worry about anything else. You throw the ball over the plate and you’ll be fine.

  Well, I’ll try, but I really don’t know what I’m doing, I say.

  Throw strikes and you’ll be fine, he says again.

  Okay, I’ll do my best, I say.

  I’ve always had a good arm, a loose arm, and I can pretty much put the ball where I want. But I am far from the hardest thrower around, and I haven’t pitched since I threw a few innings for the provincial team when I was four
teen. It feels totally bizarre to have my foot on the rubber, to try to come up with some motion on the spot.

  I come on in the second inning and go the rest of the way. I do not allow a run. I am doing nothing cute. I have no curveball and sure don’t have any dipsy-do windup. I get the ball and throw it, probably no more than eighty-five miles per hour, but I am getting ahead of everybody, hitting corners, pitching quickly.

  We wind up winning the game.

  Great job, the manager says. You kept us in it and gave us time to come back. You saved the game for us.

  I do not think any more about it. As far as I’m concerned this is a one-day fling. Next time out, I will be back at short or left or wherever.

  I go back to fixing the nets and playing as much ball with Oeste as I can, vaguely figuring out a timeline for when I am going to enroll in mechanic’s school. About two weeks later, I spend a quiet Sunday afternoon at the beach with Clara and my family. At the end of the day we walk back up the hill to the house, and when we arrive, Emilio Gaes and Claudino Hernandez, the center fielder and catcher from Panama Oeste, are waiting for me. They want to speak to me, and, since we have no phone, showing up is the only way that will happen.

  What are you guys doing here? I say.

  We’ve arranged a tryout for you, Claudino says.

  A tryout? What are you talking about? With who?

  With the New York Yankees.

  The New York Yankees?

  Do you really expect me to believe this? I think.

  Yes, they want to see you pitch, Claudino says.

  We told them how good you looked the other day and they think you are worth checking out, Emilio says.