nt discomfort to the
owners of those eyes. The two Americans, distracted by their sweating,
cursed the heat and the loggerheads of their situation. No flies or
bobos, as they were know here, added to their misery given their great
distance offshore. Their greater paralysis of the will lay in the low
horizon of the shore receding, then, appearing silhouetted against
blows of driven water. This, then, was the mainstay of their
indecision. All that blue--the blue of shining sky married with further
Wedgwood blue sea careening in a plaster paris water dish, bounced up
as if up from the shadows and made renewed fear inevitable. The
fisherman, quiet above all this, seemed content to let inertia make her
case. He knew heat held a silent, unassailable logic. Sooner or later
the water would call or repel its proteges. His task was no easier
whatever their final deliberation. A long toil with stubborn currents
lay ahead, whatever. The journey to shore was inescapable. And so he
sat, patiently content to provide that most meager of gruel--his slight
infusion of calm and warning to the strange fellows he knew only as
Touristas or more profitably, "amigo," Steve and Cliff. His lines,
staked for fish, would remain regardless and the thin fingers of his
existence remained coiled about a routine as numbing as that the two
men had pretended to escape.

Now, at first furtively, then with the fury of an immense belch only
the sea could muster forth, a school of porpoises broke about the
little craft. Baleful but expression-filled eyes of each beast broke
with water, then took in as only an intelligent creature can, the
mission of the three surface beings. Each in a return splash shimmied
the dinghy making for a resurgence of what, until now, had been a
barely muted panic. Yet most of that brief moment was consumed in
expectation and, as suddenly as it had begun, the pregnancy of the
incantation was dissolved. Slipping beneath the waves, these most human
of fish returned to nurse from the ocean's depths.

"Five of them," Steve was yelling--all at least twelve feet in length.
Incredible.

The Mexican was smiling. Apparently what had taken place was not an
everyday occurrence even for the likes of a grizzled seafarer as
himself. Steve was found announcing something, too. Something to the
effect the animals were benign or all three wouldn't be able to renew
the urgency of the dive.

Cliff, as if moved by the last events or his friend's l