Pescador Libre

I don't know why I feel the need to share half-written work on here---I guess I crave justification, even if not a one of you reads this.

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One day on the broad white sands of the western Mexican coast there is a man. He is stoop-shouldered but sturdy, and perched buzzard-like on the overturned hull of a dugout canoe. His face is limed from the steady beating of the salt air and the thundering of the waves that have pulsed always in his thoughts and on the horizon of his dreams. Mostly he is still. But his leather hands move regularly and all of his eyes are on them as they repair the broken meshing of a cast net, which has been without fish for one day and already one day too long. He is the man from Teacapan.
Now a second man approaches from the mangrove forest up shore. He is the traveler. Carrying a tin box with one hand and a fishing pole in the other, he comes out of the shadow-leaf canopy and onto the sand. The box he carries swings like a dull hunk of lead at his side. His pole pierces the milk-glass sky like a stalk of goldenrod and sends the sunlight sprinting across its length with each jostling step. The man walks with a heaviness that defies his lean frame, as though his shoes are full of mud and his legs logged with saltwater. Though, even such a clumsy gait is absorbed by the dunes and the break, and his passage takes on the quality of a ghost or a whirlwind moving slowly across the sand. The man whistles as he comes, and in his bone-khaki clothing and red bandana he looks like something washed up from the Iberian coast. But as he draws nearer, the illusion of his cloth escapes into the air above his sunburnt features, ushered off by the decidedly American melody blowing across his thin lips.
Unabashedly, the traveler walks up to the canoe, shedding the hunk of lead and leaning against his fishing pole like a winded and colorful frontiersman. All of the man from Teacapan’s eyes roll over to the man in white and then slide back to the cast net like two obsidian marbles.
"Have you got any water, friend?" the traveler says, surveying the rim of sea foam.
The man from Teacapan stitches the net with his eyes.
"Good damn, it’s hot. The sun’s liable to bake this whole ocean to a crisp and all the fish with it," he says with his hand on his hip. "But that wouldn’t be so bad. Make catching them a whole of a lot easier. Know what I mean?"
The man from Teacapan works the net.
"How about that water, friend?" he says, waving laggardly at the man on the canoe. "Hello?" he says. "Hola. Water?"
The man on the canoe looks up, then reaches into the shadow beyond the gunwale and produces a swollen brown bladder. He unscrews the neck and passes it to the man in white, who accepts it eagerly and looses a fat trail of quavering droplets to the hot sand before settling the stale water to his lips. The spill is gone before he has a chance to notice. The man on the canoe watches the spots dry out.
"Thank you much," the traveler says, handing the water back. "Been a while since I had a drop. Good damn, it is warm," he says while stooping to open his tin box. He pulls out a bundle of bandana and unfolds the ragged cloth to a fillet of dry red meat. It flakes apart as he picks through it, and he holds the red fish out in the palm of his hand like a tiny dinner tray.
"Have a bite," he chews. "It’s snapper, and damn good too."
The man from Teacapan shakes his head, all of his eyes on the net, stitching.
"Yes" he says. "Come on and have some. It’s the last of it."
The man from Teacapan lets the net droop between his bowed legs. Accepting, then, the situation, he pulls off a petal of red fish and pockets it against his gum. The man in white seems to be smiling as he squints across the sun-bleached sand, first down shore, then at the man on the canoe, then out onto the water. In the shimmering distance, a pair of grassy discs buoy with the tide, their navigation unclear and arrested against the staid horizon. Closer, a pair of discs track southward. Beneath them, the deep brown length of a boat creeps like a wooden shadow. The traveler finishes the snapper and looks down shore, and the man from Teacapan studies the patching of his net with serious hands and expression. His lips purse in thought. The waves break four or three times.
"Where you from, friend? Down south?" the traveler stands and brushes his knees. "There hasn’t been a single sign nor spirit since I left Escinapas about six days ago. Thought I’d fished myself over and beyond the edge of civilization."
"Si," the man from Teacapan says. "From the south. Yes."
"Far?"
"Yes."
"Figure could I make it in the day?" he says, rattling his fishing pole. "I set against something heavy a few days back and snapped my line."
"By night, I think," the man on the canoe says. "But then you do not want to go. Dark."
"No," he says. "I guess not."
For a time nothing is said, and the damp echoing of a seabird dips out of the trees and dies fast against the pillows of quiet sand. Somewhere in the canopy, invisible wings whip up a torrent of leaves. The traveler sucks his cheeks. Then nothing.
"That’s a serious piece of meshing you’ve got there, friend. I don’t imagine you would have an extra length or two of line, would you?" searching his pockets. "Not for nothing, of course. I’d pay you for it," he says, and he produces a gold clip of bills. Fanning it out, he pulls two green notes and then pockets the rest. "This ought to be more than generous."
The man on the canoe stares dully at the man in white.
"No," he says, waving a slow hand. "No money."
He reaches around in the shadow and pulls out a loosely raveled weed of clear line.
"Here," he motions. "Here. No money."
"Are you sure?" the traveler says. "It’s nothing really."
"No. Is okay." He spools off a length and cuts it free. "Is okay. No money."
"Thank you much, friend."
"Si."
The traveler threads the line through the eyes of his rod and winds the reel. The pickup ticks and spins slowly like the neck of a wobbling steel top, and he watches the thread feed. Out on the water, a staggered school of dark bodies roll up in the spun-glass curl of a wave and then vanish below the mounting crest. Closer in, the wave leans and crashes white. Then again, the shifting, shapeless dark appears in the depths, twirling for a moment just below the surface, then diving like a child beneath the swell of the tide. The wave breaks and the traveler catches his line just before it slips through the last eye. With a quick knot, he affixes a pounded-tin minnow at the end of the rod. The lure dangles for a moment and twists in the breeze like the ball of a wind-chime, the sunlight throwing off of it in tiny racing arcs.
"There," the man in white says with a tired satisfaction. "Better."
Beneath the break, the dark swells up and sinks back. The traveler looks in time to see the green-black shapes go under.
"Good damn," he says, as the man from Teacapan spreads his net out on the ground. "Did you see those fish?"
The man on the ground squints up at the traveler and the sun, then out at the ocean. The dark rises and falls.
"Dead Man’s Fingers," the man from Teacapan says.
"What?"
"Seagrass," wiping a backhand across his brow. "Is called Dead Man’s Fingers."
He sits up.
"In the storm, the tall waves, these boats take on water," he says, tapping on the hull of his canoe, "not so good. Just solid, you know. Can pull down pretty fast beneath the wave. Drift too. Sometimes the boats, they no come back up," he buoys his hand. "Here is bad, you know. Out there."
"By those boats?"
"No, closer," he points. " Reefs come up beneath, you know. Is good for fish but bad for fishermen."
"Right," the traveler says, watching the dark of the waves.

(etc.)