Chuck, tall and sinewy, knew only enough Spanish to tell waiters and cab drivers that he had a case of the crabs, that the crabs were very bad today, and that they were like big, tiny crazy little chickens. He also could insist to the cashier at the drugstore across the street that he was "El Hombre Perfecto," to which she would invariably reply, with a schoolgirl grin, "You are not El Hombre Perfecto! You are the man with the crabs!" His reputation thus began to precede him.

His counterpart was Damien, also tall but of a more burly, barrel-like structure, long-haired and generous with his white smile. Chuck seemed designed for the fashion runway; Damien was more suited to the bouncer’s stool at a topless bar. His glassy eyes and habit of arching his eyebrows and squinting when he listened to anyone combined to belie his intelligence. He sat at our white fiberglass table, gazing at the late afternoon sheen of the Pacific. A look of profound serenity settled over his tanned features.

As for me, I felt pretty damned serene too. It had been a seventeen-hour journey from the Mexican border by rickety train, crawling through the bowels of the Sonoran desert, trapped in a sleeping cabin the size of a walk-in closet with the sullen, nervous Marlin and the two drunken hulks. Rookies had consumed too much booze too quickly, and the aisleways of the passenger compartments were slippery with vomit by the time we arrived. Now that we had actually survived the ordeal, had checked in, eaten, and were staring placidly at the sunset, only now could I begin to gently lower myself into the depths of a week-long debauch.

Marlin, however, refused to adopt my mellow mind-set, despite my repeated urging. He was the only one who hadn’t slept on the train ride. He usually stood in the vestibule between cars, anxiously surveying the moonlit desert, chain-smoking and cradling a bottle of gin.

Now, he seemed wired after the long journey. He gulped his beer while we sipped, glanced around at everyone and everything while we just gazed out at the golden ocean.

"Well, guys," Marlin broke the plate-glass silence. "If we’re going to make that cocktail party, we best go shower and get ready."

"Shit, Stace, what’s your hurry?" I protested. "Let me have a couple of these Mexican beers and relax, man. This is supposed to be a frenzy, I know, but if we’re half-an-hour late for that schlock party, it’s not going to kill us. Settle down." For emphasis, I gave the bartender four thousand pesos to grab Marlin by the neck and pour harsh white tequila down his throat, a ceremony he performed with alarming vigor.

Chuck was even less gentle. He mocked Stacy Marlin whenever the opportunity presented itself, and he had been at no loss for words so far. "Ooooh, does the little girl need to take a bubble bath?" He oozed sarcasm.

Damien interrupted the laughter, squinting through Marlboro smoke. "Yeah, the cocktail party’s not that crucial," he began, "but we gotta feed that goddamn dog again. And we can’t do it out here." Damien was a master of euphemism—we didn’t, of course, have a dog with us, but we did have a bag of marijuana, re-imported now to Mexico, that needed to be disposed of one way or another before we crossed the border again. "Time to feed the dog" meant that, in the interest of not leaving any contraband behind, our schedule demanded consumption.

So we quaffed our beers and wandered up to our room, Marlin walking briskly ahead. Damien clapped his hands and called out in a shrill voice, "Come here, Spliffers! Come here boy! Spliffers!" He whistled and slapped his thighs, calling the imaginary dog he had named after his favorite word for a half-smoked joint.

Marlin got in the shower, and the rest of us stood out on the balcony, watching the parade of paunchy businessmen, drunken students, and starry-eyed newlyweds filing up to their rooms after a long day by the sea. It was time for pre-party cleansing, time to prepare for the steamy Mexican night, though none, save Marlin, seemed too hurried about it.

We fed the dog. Stacy came out, wrapped in a towel, and helped us. It was the first time he had helped us feed the dog so far, and I hoped it signaled a change in his attitude.

Neither of us could move his head more than forty-five degrees in either direction without releasing a torrent of blood to the temples. It hurt to laugh.

Chuck and Damien, by far the tough guys of our foursome, were lively. They frolicked in the surf and tossed a football around. Neither of them seemed hung over in the slightest, but the night before they had been right up there with Marlin and me on alcohol consumption.

A waiter came by and nipped at my Achilles heel. "You would like a Bloody Mary this morning?" he asked coyly.

I glanced briefly at Marlin, then nodded my assent. Marlin blinked hard and looked off at the sea. "Okay, make it two." The waiter was off, though not exactly in a flourish.

A beach beggar came up to us, her four kids in tow, selling Chiclets and collecting coins in a dirty Styrofoam Coca-Cola cup. It had been hard to resist the hungry, old-looking women and their obligatory gaggles of brown-eyed children at first, but a couple thousand pesos here, a couple thousand there—it added up. Besides, I was convinced that at least some of the hunched forms selling gum on the beach made a pretty good living at it, comparatively speaking, and needed no more foreign aid from the likes of me.

"No me gusta," said Stacy ("I don’t like it."). That had become a standard retort for the persistent vendors, who hawked everything from jewelry to iguanas. They were coming at a rate of about one every four minutes now, and some required more than a subtle sideward jerk of the head to get the brush-off. The woman now in front of us fell into that category.

"How are you, Satan? Would you like a cup of tea?" I asked her in butchered, unconjugated Spanish. She briefly lowered her eyes to mine, and on seeing little but the color of blood, she fled. Maybe she thought I was an agent of the Devil.

"That’s it! That’s how you do it! That worked much better than ‘No me gusta,’" exclaimed Marlin, a little too loudly. Both of us grabbed our temples after he spoke.

"It was only a joke!" I quietly called after her, again in Spanish so bad it could have come from Hell.

Marlin and I managed to sit up after that exchange. The young, pimply waiter returned with our Bloodies. I threw him fifteen thousand pesos and told him to get a haircut. The waiter smiled, uncomprehending, and ambled off.

Soon Damien and Chuck abandoned their game of catch, which was above all designed to make them visible to the crowd gathering along the El Cid’s frontage to the beach. The larger the beach population got, the more our two friends stood out. They were the Big Men, the Steroid Eaters. Never the vanquished, always the vanquishers. Possessed of an infinite capacity for liquor, a marble-smooth rap, and a larger-than-life presence, the two were much better suited to the atavistic dance just getting under way than were Marlin and I, the flabby, the hung-over, the ones whose eyes were bloody holes.

Marlin groaned cathartically as he leaned back again, shading his eyes. The bodybuilders sat down, one on either side of us, enthusiastically praising the tanning efficacy of the Pacific sun.

Just then a loud, distinctively American voice demanded our attention, but we couldn’t pinpoint where it was coming from. A Minnesotan just emerging from his suite to bask as a lizard in the sun? A strung-out Floridian, cursing the farmacia for refusing to deliver codeine to his room? Or just another drunken student calling down from the fourth-floor balcony?

The loud drawl was coming from a huge man in stained gray shorts about fifty yards down the beach to our left. He stood calf-deep in the surf, gesticulating expansively with the blue binder he carried. A curly-haired young man and his very pale woman companion listened, smiling and nodding, then waved their good-byes and moved on, even as the huge man continued to shout after them.

The man ambled our way, undersized cowboy hat gripping his volleyball-sized head, kicking up Pacific froth the entire way. He approached us, reaching in his binder and producing a laminated photo.

"Tony Elmore," he boomed, "Texas ex-patriot and sport fisherman. Damn glad to meet you." We stared at him dumbly. "You fellas ever been Marlin fishin’?" The words boomed out of the side of his mouth like cannon-fire, slow, heavy explosions. He handed Chuck the photo. In it, five pasty, presumably American businessmen stood in front of four large marlin that hung spear down from a wooden frame. Chuck passed the photo to me and grunted, "I heard you don’t catch shit on those trips."

"Listen, my name is Marlin!" Stacy said to the "ex-patriot," ignoring Chuck.

"Well, listen, Marlin, we’ll go out tomara mornin’ early for your namesake and distant relative the marlin. Now how’s that sound?" Elmore chuckled at his joke and so did I. His absurdly small hat bobbed up and down.

The smell of Elmore recalled the glory of angling, the man vs. nature experience that had been one of my initiation rites as a boy on the Snake River. We went for trout those times, fish that weighed maybe four or five pounds. This guy was talking about marlin, the quarry of serious sportsmen. I guessed an average marlin went about a hundred pounds or so. If nothing else, we would go out to sea, where no land was in sight—a rare thing indeed for a desert city boy. It was intriguing.

Marlin listened intently. "How much money are you talking about?" he asked Elmore tentatively.

"It’s two-fifty U.S. for the day," he answered. "That works out to 525,000 pesos, and that includes your bait, your beer, fuel, everything."

I looked at Stacy, who raised an eyebrow. I told Elmore to come back a bit later, that we had to talk about it.

"Well, OK, that’s fine," he said, his voice booming over the sound of the surf. He ambled down the beach away from us, pushing his stout legs through the water like an aquatic fullback.

Chuck glared at Elmore as he slogged through the waves, then admonished me for inviting him to come back later. "We don’t want to go fishing, jackass! I talked to some guys last year, and they said they spent eight hours on one of those goddamn boats and didn’t catch shit!"

I glanced at Damien. He tugged on his chin, deep in thought. Marlin and I consulted our wallets to see how the traveler’s checks were holding up. Chuck, disgusted by the tacit dismissal of his advice, scoffed. "All right, that’s fine, go on your little fishing trip, ya damn fools. Meanwhile, I’m going to get ready for the Best Tan contest, and work on getting laid. Anybody remember getting laid? Man, I gotta get some new friends."

Elmore returned about an hour later, about when Marlin and I had achieved the hue of fresh-cooked shrimp. Chuck set off on a long walk down the beach to investigate a small cliff-bound bar. The rest of us had already gone, one at a time, to cash traveler’s checks so Elmore could scratch our names in his waterproof ledger.

"What’s it gonna be, fellas?" he bellowed. Our morning hangovers, temporarily suspended by the Bloody Mary’s, were beginning to turn into afternoon migraines. That the misplaced redneck fisherman shouted every time he opened his mouth did not bode well. Still, we didn’t hesitate to count out 525,000 pesos, which Elmore wadded up and stuffed in his pocket. .

So the deal was done. We had a business card and his address (1134 Avenida Sabalo Cerritos), and a reservation on the good ship Jigger Dawg at six the next morning.

After we cleaned up and fed the dog, the three of us (Chuck was still questing, apparently) went to a restaurant and watched the sun set behind the small rock island in the harbor. We ate marlin enchiladas and gulped Pacificos in giddy anticipation of the next day’s trip.

The phone rang inches from my head, an unfamiliar staccato ring, and my heart pounded. Federalos? The hotel manager, having learned of our late-night antics from the night watchman? Tony Elmore, in the lobby, waiting to take us now, while it was yet dark?

"Good morning," intoned a cheery Mexican voice, "It’s fife-fifteen!"

A very dim spark reminded me then of the request for a wake-up call, a request I had made late last night, when I was full of drunken ardor for the concept of battling Stacy’s namesake and distant relative, the marlin.

I thanked the operator, told her to give me a haircut, and hung up the phone unstably. I flicked a bedside switch, hoping for light, and instead got the radio, blaring a love song in Spanish. All three of my roommates, thrust into an unwelcome consciousness, swore and threatened while I scrambled upright to turn it down. I suffered a mild aneurysm in the process.

Marlin groaned and looked up at me pitifully. I thought of early winter hours a thousand miles to the north, desperately scrambling, reaching for excuses and ways to miss that 7:40 class again. I was reminded of Marlin looking up at me pitifully on those mornings. Usually a way could be found to miss that class again.

But wintry drives to school and springtime fishing trips in Mexico are two different things, and the 525,000 pesos made our commitment much deeper than it was for attending any given class. The sun would soon be up, the Jigger Dawg would be pointed seaward, and we’d have any regrets washed away by sea spray and beer.

Damien had quickly resumed snoring, though. Stacy roused him, incurring a cryptic string of profanities. "Fishing, Damien," I said. "Let’s go fishing." So we tenderly extracted ourselves from bed, donned shorts and t-shirts and baseball caps, and tip-toed out. I couldn’t resist turning the radio back on, low enough to permit a bit more sleep for Chuck, but loud enough to awaken him soon. A well-deserved time bomb for him.

We hailed one of the ubiquitous open-air cabs, negotiated a fair price, then got in and held on. Stacy Marlin rode shotgun in the little go-kart cab, copping one of Chuck’s lines about his crabs "burning like charcoal briquettes." The cab driver nodded empathetically, and, smiling a third-world smile, made a furious scratching gesture on his forearm. Damien and I rode in the back, speculating on what the day might bring.

"This is gonna be pure gravy, pal," he assured me, nodding slowly and squinting. "Deep-sea fishing, man, the real thing. I’ve always wanted to do this." Damien again seemed to have shed his hangover the moment he stepped out of bed. I, on the other hand, was beginning to feel the hollow detachment that comes from too many party days and nights piled together, a feeling that I had been robbed of all my human abilities, left only with my hyperactive senses.

Our driver swung away from the resort and tore off down Avenida Insurgentes, where a normal Mexican Monday morning was taking place. Children looked up sluggishly from their morning chores, sullen wives ground corn, a cab driver poured murky water into his radiator. Our driver whipped through the partially paved streets, slalomed through a handful of savvy chickens, and then we came again to a fully paved road that ran parallel to the sea. The sun was well up now, and despite my physical malaise, my reluctance of an hour before withered away beneath the miracle of the Pacific sunrise.

"Come on, come on, we’re runnin’ late, let’s go," he said, leading us to an ancient GMC bulging with gear and supplies. "We’re all set, we got our bait, we got our gear, we got our—beer!" He laughed aloud at his rhyme.

We drove another five minutes to the marina, where the Jigger Dawg, his homely old boat, waited for us. It was about thirty feet long, painted bright yellow. Its most salient features were a towering bridge and a strong smell of fish. Of marlin. We boarded rather too daintily and Elmore chastised us: "Come on, come on, we’re late, I said." He climbed the aluminum ladder to the bridge.

Damien arched a disapproving eyebrow at our captain’s annoyance; we were only a few minutes late, after all. I took it to mean the guy was serious about the day’s proceedings, so I didn’t mind.

The big diesel engine fired up, with some reluctance and a can of octane booster to supplement the watery Mexican fuel. Elmore stood on the bridge and wheeled the Jigger Dawg out of the sleepy harbor. Soon we hit open sea, the throttle opened, and the boat coughed and jerked to maximum speed, such as it was. Marlin climbed up to the bridge to look over Elmore’s shoulder; Damien and I stayed on the deck below, breathing in the cool morning breeze, the ecstatic glow of an ocean-going sunrise, sipping the first cervezas of what would be a very long day.

Marlin was trying hard to look nautical and regal. He had his hands clasped behind his back, his face contorted in a pinched, crab-like grimace that surely meant he was contemplating the mystery, the danger, the womb that was the sea. Damien and I glanced at each other and laughed.

I thought deep-sea fishing was fun just for the fact that it wasn’t toading around the hotel, and that I hadn’t done it before. I knew from conversation that Damien’s thoughts, though more hyperbolic, were along the same lines. Chuck, obviously, had no respect for the idea of spending one-fifth of the Mazatlán afternoons on a boat, chasing fish of all things. But to Marlin, it was something on a much higher plane than any of us could realize at the time.

Marlin’s family kept a place in northern Arizona, not so much a cabin as a house, where they went to escape the violently hot Phoenix summers. Above the fireplace, a giant stuffed marlin stood as a reminder of a past fishing expedition, when Grandpa Marlin had hooked a marlin. The one time we had been allowed to use the cabin as a ski-trip staging platform, Stacy referred to the trophy no less than half a dozen times.

They were hunters and sportsmen, the Marlins. Grandpa Marlin and Stacy’s father had both roamed the swamps of Louisiana in their youth, and the family spoke of those times in tones of glittering nostalgia. Stacy himself had spent the first decade of his childhood there. The suburban Phoenix of Stacy’s adolescence had smoothed his deep Southern accent as it cut off his chance to satisfy his atavistic yearnings to hunt and fish.

Elmore eventually relinquished the wheel to Marlin. Elmore instructed him to keep the wheel straight and not to touch the throttle, but Stacy still looked as though he imagined himself the captain of some magnificent old Yankee whaler.

Elmore lumbered down the ladder to join us on the cracked white vinyl seats of the stern. He grabbed a beer, cracked it open with a nonchalant snap of his wrist, and tossed the cap overboard. He was shirtless, and his huge tan belly looked so capacious that the boat couldn’t possibly hold enough beer to fill it. He gazed astern at our foamy wake, then sat on the starboard side next to Damien. The Jigger Dawg listed slightly from their combined bulk. The sun began to warm us all, and soon none of us wore shirts.

Four cervezas later, Elmore again ascended the ladder to the bridge and brushed Stacy aside. He idled the engine, then came back down to prepare the lines that would be extended through the outriggers over either side of the boat.

After that, we trolled, Elmore steering, the boat gently slicing through the deep blue Pacific water. We must have been about ten miles out; land was long behind us. The sun was getting genuinely hot, and its reflections off the water were far more powerful than any fake bake.

We tooled around out there for about three hours, long hours, though I had no true perception of time. No one had a watch. It didn’t feel like fishing, except for the sun and the beer, because we weren’t holding poles. We just lazily watched the tips of the outriggers for some indication that we weren’t the only life in that part of the ocean. I thought of Chuck, of his ominous forebodings of "not catching shit," and hoped he wasn’t right. If the only Marlin we brought back to the El Cid was Stacy, Chuck would dwell on it caustically for the rest of the trip. He’d bray endlessly about wasting money, throwing away hours of beach time for nothing.

Marlin stirred me from my thoughts. "Isn’t this great?" he exclaimed. I couldn’t see what he was talking about. His enthusiasm jarred with Damien’s restlessness, Elmore’s grim determination, and my own silent brooding. The sun was high in the sky now, the sharp smell of stale marlin having risen with it. Was it marlin, I wondered, or something else? Some cheap, inedible, harbor fish, was that what the boat reeked of? Had our captain ever hooked a marlin in his life, besides the one that gave him all those pesos for a mere boat ride?

Suddenly the engine went silent, and we were drifting. Elmore had cut it, and he again joined us below. "Well, boys," he started loudly and slowly, "I was kinda afraid o’ this. This time o’ day, the fishies go deep," He motioned downward with his thick, extended thumb. "They like to get outta this heat." He removed his tiny cowboy hat to reveal a head fully covered in tightly curly, slightly graying hair, and wiped his sweaty forehead. "We’re just wastin’ gas if we keep tryin’ now. We’ll fire her up again in about an hour."

"Oh, don’t worry about it," said Stacy, mistakenly thinking Elmore was apologizing. "The boat ride itself was worth the money."

Damien and I exchanged shocked glances. Marlin was an accounting major, a notorious stickler for financial details, a collector of receipts and master checkbook balancer. He was rarely satisfied with a deal, even a good one. Now he was saying, incredibly, that he was already satisfied with what he had gotten for his money. And we hadn’t yet had strike one from any aquatic creature.

I, on the other hand, was regretfully calculating how many empty margarita glasses would have been on my table after spending my part of the 525,000 pesos.

Elmore apparently sensed that Marlin was the only one enjoying himself. "Now I know all about you college fellas." He talked so slowly, one was either mesmerized by his speech or wanted to leap down his throat and rip the words, kicking and screaming, from his craw. "I know you guys’ll enjoy this." He produced a battered old Sucrets case, opened it, and pulled out a thick joint from a stack of about ten.

"MO-tar!" he shouted, drawling an "r" on the end of the Spanish colloquialism for pot, "mota." He passed the unlit number under his huge, hairy nostrils and grinned approvingly.

"Haw! Yeah! Feeding the goddamn dog onboard the Dawg!" Damien shouted, slapping his thigh. The question of whether or not to bring "dog food" on the fishing trip had stirred a heated debate the night before. Did Elmore have any connections with local law enforcement? We hadn’t thought to feel him out when he’d approached us on the beach. Would he be tolerant to the idea of us passing the sunlit hours passing the proverbial peace-pipe? Marlin finally convinced us against the idea of bring contraband, even though to bring none would wreak havoc on our smoking schedule.

Now I wished I could see us from afar, the four Americans drifting aimlessly off the coast of Mexico, passing a finger-sized doobie and aware only of the sun, the sea, and the absolute lack of black-shirted Federalos who would as gladly throw us in prison as look at us. To pass the time, Elmore spun a ribald tale about a wealthy old gringo and his randy Mexican bride. The story took a good fifteen minutes for him to tell, and by the time he was finished, we were reeling with laughter. Our noise rolled out across the ocean’s swells, irritating no one, ultimately private, privileged. Then Elmore waxed serious about the fate of our expedition.

"Shit, man," he started easily, eyes gazing fixedly at the horizon, "I still don’t know what it is about these goddamn marlin. I’ve brought folks out here, good ol’ boys, experienced sportsmen, and we’ll float aroun’ out here from sun-up till past dark, without a goddamn nibble. Nada. Then, I’ll get a group like you guys, city boys, desert rats, and they’ll catch a marlin apiece before we’re done. I guess that’s cause they travel in groups, and there’s just no telling where they’re going to show up. It’s a tricky bidness."

I was encouraged by what our Captain had said, for none were more tightly bound to the conveniences of urban life than we, and none more alien on the sea than Damien and I. Perhaps we’d get a piece of the beginner’s luck that our captain had just mentioned.

Stacy, however, didn’t look out of place. I’d never thought of him before as someone of the American South, as someone of Cajun blood. But hunched over, elbows on his knees, entranced in Elmore’s oratory, I could easily picture him in overalls and straw hat, happily beating his feet upon the Louisiana mud.

Marlin had undergone a visible and dramatic change since we had last seen land. Gone was the nervous, hurried, would-be accountant who nearly sprung an ulcer on the train ride down. In his stead, puffing on a joint, was a man glimpsing a different kind of life on the Mexican sea. He sat there chuckling, unfazed by the fact that there were no clocks or telephones or ATMs nearby. Marlin’s wristwatch, I noticed, had disappeared from his arm.

What it was about the this brown and steamy land to the south that made people so slow and relaxed, so contemplative, natives and gringos alike? Marlin had certainly felt it, and so did I. Out on that boat, with no land or landlords in sight, no traffic, no textbooks and no deadlines, I achieved for a moment a degree of relaxation that I hadn’t known before and that I haven’t known since.

Later, Elmore cursed loudly below decks, fumbling for tools as he tinkered with the engine. There was no more octane booster, and the Jigger Dawg would only hack briefly on the bunk Mexican gas. Worst of all, he believed the marlin were running, but the boat wasn’t.

We three would-be fisherman stood by looking stupid, knowing we couldn’t fix the engine. College students, book-smart punks as far as Elmore was concerned, none with even fundamental knowledge of diesel mechanics. Time was only crawling along, but still the thought occurred to me that after the sun had set, there would be no more marlin fishing; our big adventure would be over, as the Mexico trip itself would soon be over. The specter of time haunted me, even where there were no clocks, no calendars.

The beer was holding out nicely, though. We each had already taken our turns at relief off the bow while Elmore fought the engine. The Captain himself had taken one long turn to empty his enormous bladder. Yes, we were getting drunk. Mexico drunk. Again. Could we catch fish from a motionless boat? Did it really matter?

Finally, Elmore emerged, arms and face streaked with grease, grinning fiendishly. He climbed to the bridge and kicked the old creature back to life. Marlin ascended the ladder, less sure-footed this time, wanting to pilot the boat again. Elmore reluctantly consented.

"Listen, watch my hand," boomed Elmore, "We gotta go beside ’em, not at ’em. You watch the plane of my hand, and point the bow of the Dawg that way. And be of good cheer, m’boy, I can smell the bastards nearby!"

Marlin’s red eyes lit up as he dared to yank the throttle back. The boat lunged forward, then sank back again as the engine sputtered. The ocean threatened to spill over the stern and flood us.

"Easy, man, easy on the goddamn throttle!" shouted Elmore. "Mind you don’t stall us. She’s a bitch to get goin’!"

Marlin nodded sheepishly and eased the boat to trolling speed. Elmore came down for a beer.

We spent about forty-five minutes zig-zagging to Elmore’s mysterious hand signals. One moment his hand was pointed forward, rigid as a duck’s bill; the next, it was twitching laterally, urging Marlin to port or starboard. Finally, one of the fishing reels exploded with the whine of high-test line jerked out to sea by a fighting fish—our first strike. "Strap yourself in, kid, we got a taker!" shouted Elmore. He shoved Damien into the "fighting chair" that was bolted in the center of the deck. Damien looked briefly at me, as though he were sorry he’d taken the first fish without even politely offering it to me. There hadn’t been time.

Elmore rushed to port, and after donning a thick canvas glove he detached the heavy line from the outrigger. The tension from the line was transferred to a thick fishing pole Elmore had in his other hand, and its tip bent sharply. Elmore jammed the pole into his navel, supporting the fight of the fish with both arms and the vast cushion of his gut. He then planted it in the cup of the fighting chair and let Damien take it.

"Pull it up, then reel as you let it back down," Elmore bellowed. Damien’s pipe-like biceps bulged as he pulled back on the great pole. "Up and down, up and down," Elmore repeated. He looked up at Marlin. "You watchin’ the goddamn fishy, boy? Keep beside him, at all costs!" Marlin flushed with confidence as he backed off on the throttle and out-maneuvered his namesake and distant relative. He was making subtle cuts and drifts to stay with the erratic jerks of the line. It had to be a marlin Damien was battling. The line was still out in the water about fifty yards away, but Damien was reeling rapidly on his downstrokes. It was an epic battle, the musculature of Damien’s arms, chest and back against the marlin’s entire being. At one point, the marlin emerged and performed a stunning tail walk. Several other times, the fish went airborne. Damien made steady progress as he strained and sweated beneath the afternoon sun, and after about forty minutes, the line was close enough that Elmore told Marlin to put the Dawg in neutral so that the propeller wouldn’t sever the line we had on the precious sportfish.

Damien bulled the marlin to the edge of the boat where Elmore, still wearing the canvas glove, grabbed its fantastic spear-nose with one hand and with the other sank a gaff deep in its side. The marlin was about six feet long, writhing so violently that I bolted for the bridge, where I watched the end of the drama. "That was some pretty fancy driving there, pal," I said to Marlin. We both watched Damien inspect his catch, whose vertical stripes now glowed iridescent, a haunting finale to its life. Elmore cut the hook from its mouth and wrestled the still-frenzied fish into the below-deck compartment, and latched the hatchcover. The thumping of the marlin against the underside of the deck would continue, gradually diminishing, for hours, arousing feelings of pity and remorse in me (and me alone).

That turned out to be the only marlin we caught. I wasn’t particularly bitter about not having reeled in one myself—the one we had belowdecks was symbolic of a team victory. Marlin was ecstatic about the catch, giving himself perhaps too much credit for it.

Elmore, I think, sensed that we would be satisfied with our trophy, and the day was nearing its end. We trolled for another hour, then finally cruised back to the marina with our backs to the setting sun. We were sunburned, pleasantly drunk, and ready to celebrate our triumph.

I stood wobbly next to Marlin on the bridge as he steered us toward land, equally conscious of his seriousness and the presence of cotton in my mouth. "So, what are we going to do with the fish?" I asked.

"Let’s get it stuffed."

"I can’t really justify spending any more money on this adventure," I whined. "We’ve still got a few days to go down here."

Stacy Marlin thought for a moment, then said, "I’ll slap it on my dad’s American Express card. Yeah. That’s exactly what I’ll do."

I couldn’t believe it. Stacy lived in mortal fear of his very conservative father’s disapproval. He had been allowed to take the credit card only for use in case of a dire emergency, something that involved blood, something that involved bail. Now he planned to stuff a fish with it. I’ve always lived by the motto that "a fool and his money are some party," to be sure, but my concern grew. Marlin was now altogether out of character. His facade of responsibility was rapidly melting in the glow of the Mexican sunset. I wondered silently what Mr. Marlin would say (shout) when he got the bill from Taxidermy Mazatlán.

Stacy competently wheeled the boat into the dusky calm of the harbor, and we prepared to disembark.

"Hey, Tony," said Stacy familiarly to our Captain, "You know a taxidermist around here?"

"Well, I’ll do it myself for free, if you guys’ll let me keep the meat." Elmore’s eyes flashed and he rubbed his enormous gut. "After all, that’s damn tasty eatin’!"

"Alright, great, when will our trophy be ready?" asked Stacy.

"Come back on Wednesday."

We hailed a passing cab and were off to the El Cid again.

"Hey, hey, hey," Chuck’s style was purely confrontational. "Where the hell’ve you been, Marrrlin?"

Stacy no longer shrank from Chuck’s exaggerated, silly putty form. He just stood there, holding the heavy hotel door open, grinning broadly. It had been hours since the sun was last up, but Marlin was still wearing a beige "El Cid" sun visor and squinting. His sunburn was becoming suntan; he seemed to glow.

It truly looked this time as if he had been bleeding from his eyes, so red were they. . .as if "bloody eyes" were as commonplace as a "bloody nose," and Stacy were just prone to them.

"Wellll," Marlin started slowly, "Red Dragon! That’s where! Have you heard? About it?" His eyes were hopelessly out of sync with his hands; he looked over his shoulder at me and gestured to Damien. A hint of his long-suppressed Southern accent was returning.

"Red Dragon? Isn’t that where the whores hang out?" said Chuck, newly intrigued by Marlin’s testimony.

"Whores. . .ah, well, strippers. Oo, yeah. . . ." Marlin cast his eyes skyward, as if possessed by a celestial spirit. Still, though, he was unable to compose a fluid sentence. "Live sex on stage. . .chicken, uh cock fights. . .that, goddamn! that was crazy." Marlin chuckled, uttered the word "loco" two or three times and chuckled again. He wasn’t chuckling evilly, or perversely, but still his chuckle made Chuck, Damien and me uncomfortable. Those bloody eyes had lost the laser focus of the Marlin eyes we knew.

He seemed drowsy, so we placed him on a spot on the bed that was nearest the soothing, therapeutic ocean, the sea whose sounds still crashed through the open window of our room at the resort.

The next morning, Stacy was gone early, before the sun rose, but not before I had made a half-dozen mad dashes to the bathroom. It had turned out that my system was a bit too delicate to withstand gallons of white tequila, buckets of salsa and four hours of sleep per night. It pained me to admit it, as I’d always fancied myself "el hombre con el estómago de hierro" ("The Man with the Iron Stomach").

I raised my head briefly from the toilet and caught Marlin on his way out. "Where you going, you son-of-a-bitch?" I slurred, wiping the sweat from my forehead and the vomit from my jaw. I leaned hard against the cool tile of the bathroom wall.

"I’m driving the boat today," he said, a man completely transformed from a few hours ago—chipper, lively, feeling his oats. "We’re going out for marlin again today, with a group of Canadian industrialists. And," he intoned with special, secret emphasis, "we’re also taking three cheerleaders from a Canadian football team!"

I went back to my vomiting, and he was off.

"What time does that goddamn train leave tomorrow?" asked Damien, dreading the answer. "What time are we scheduled to be penned up like domesticated animals on the goddamned train, huh, someone tell me?"

The big man was starting to frighten me. Was I prepared for the horror of the return trip? The prospect of another seventeen hours on a Mexican train destroyed all my thoughts of the trip as having been "good" and "pleasant." It would be a harsh re-entry to normalcy; and my homework remained in a pile on my desk, unstarted, imminently due.

"I’m not getting back on that train," Stacy Marlin announced.

"You gonna use your old man’s plastic for an airplane ticket?" I asked. The idea gave me a vicarious thrill.

"Nooo. Huh-uh. I’m not going back with you guys." His words were slow and deliberate.

Even Chuck was reduced to silence. Was Marlin kidding? The lips stayed taut, unsmiling, the eye-sockets remained fixed, uncreasing.

"Stace, hey," I started. "Don’t lose yourself in a dream world here." His gaze wandered to the bright red parrot that guarded the entrance to the restaurant. The bird cursed loudly in Spanish, and I struggled to be heard above it. "This is Mexico, man. You live in the United States. The United States is better than Mexico. You’ve got a whole thing going there, a whole life, remember? Two more years to the accounting degree, right? To get back there, you have to endure a very long, sweaty train ride. All of us do. None of us is happy about it. But it’s inevitable."

I knew as soon as I uttered the words that they had no effect on Marlin.

Elmore was going to keep him in a small amount of pesos and a large amount of seafood, in return for piloting the Jigger Dawg. "I’ve got a talent on the water, man, and God, I hate accounting. I couldn’t sit through one more lecture knowing I could have this. The sun, the sea, the freedom. You know what that degree means? Forty years in an office, balancing ledgers. No way, it’s over; my decision has been made."

And so it had.