APRIL 2009

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Giant Squid
By Benjamin Dancer, Feb 14, 2009

When we met Juan, he was in his Panga just off shore, exhaling into the fuel line of a 150 horsepower Yamaha outboard motor. He was trying to clear the line with the force of his lungs. His fifteen-year-old grandson was in the bow of the little fishing boat.

“¡Nos lleva la chingada!” The boy was frightened.

“No pasa nada,” the old man was speaking softly, “No pasa nada. Está muerta.”

“¡Nos lleva la chingada!”

“Está muerta,” the old man reassured the boy. His hunched back was to us. “Es una ballena muerta. No es nada.”

Neither the old man nor his grandson paid any mind to the approach of the Mystic.

The boy took the red ball cap from his head and brandished it as he disgorged, for the better part of a minute, an uninterrupted sequence of profanity. The old man put his leathery hand on the boy’s shoulder to calm him. The boy slapped the hand away with his cap.

“¡Nos lleva la chingada!” The boy put on his cap. He took it off and pointed with it to starboard, “¡Mira!”

I saw it. “Sarah, what is that?”

The boy put on his cap and looked at me from under the bill. The shirtless old man stepped carefully through the fish in the bottom of the boat. He stood in the stern of the Panga, appraising my reaction. He was amused. Then he looked at Sarah. That she had not seen it yet was obvious.

The boy pointed again to starboard.

Sarah gasped.

“No pasa nada,” the old man was watching her reaction, “Está muerta. Es una ballena muerta.”

It was colossal.

The old man and his grandson wore flip-flops and trousers rolled to the knees. They had been fishing all night and were on their way to shore with a disappointing catch when the wrapper in the fuel line starved the motor.

“It’s dead, right?” I asked Sarah.

“The old man thinks so.”

We watched it in the water. Much of its length, perhaps most of it, was submerged.

“It’s bigger than the Mystic,” I told her.

“Possibly.”

“Whatever it is, it’s dead, right?”

“I don’t know,” she said, “maybe.”

The boy had had enough. He grabbed the starboard lifeline of the Mystic. I took his free hand and pulled him aboard.

“Vamos,” he said.

“Está muerta,” the old man told his grandson. “Vuelve a la lancha. ¿No puedes olerla? Está muerta.” The old man threw a fish at the hulking gray mass. There was a thud. The fish bounced off the gray flesh and into the water.

It took another ten minutes to convince the boy that whatever it was beside us in the water, it was dead. The boy slouched in the cockpit of the Mystic and lit a cigarette.

Sarah stepped over the lifeline to board the little Panga. She was carrying a short length of cable in her hand.

“What are you doing?”

“I just want to see it.”

“Christ, Sarah!”

“Stay with the Mystic,” she told me.

When the boy realized what Sarah was doing, he came to starboard to watch. He leaned on the lifeline.

I introduced myself.

He said his name was Hector.

Sarah rammed the cable through the fuel line and cleared it. The old man started the motor and brought the Panga alongside the monstrous animal.

“We’re genna help Juan tow it to shore,” Sarah shouted.

“What?”

“It’s an enormous squid, Cal. I think it’s science worthy. We’re gonna tow it to shore.”

When Juan told Hector we were going to tow the squid, Hector threw his cigarette in the water and cursed.

Juan and Sarah secured two lines to the squid’s arms, which were submerged and only accessible near the head. They motored back to the Mystic. Sarah passed one of the two lines to me then boarded the sailboat.

We used the diesel engine. The Mystic was downwind, and the smell of decay was overpowering. We could see the waves breaking on the mouth of the estuary. The state of Nayarit was on the southern shore and the state of Sinaloa on the northern shore. The sandy beaches were lined with coconut palms.

“Qué feo,” Hector said, pinching his nose. He covered his mouth with the same hand.

The sterns of both vessels were low in the water.

“I figured it out,” I told her.

“Figured what out?”

“Where you’re taking me for our honeymoon.”

Calvin William Ramsey, my great-grandfather, was shipwrecked in a tropical hurricane in the same estuary seventy years earlier.

The Mystic surged forward with each wave. The breaking waves flooded the cockpit. Hector watched as his grandfather fought to keep the little Panga from being swamped.

The old man turned the bow into a wave as it broke. He pulled in the slack to keep from cutting the line with the propellor then turned and kept pace behind the wave while he let out the line. When the line tightened, he opened the throttle and spun the Panga around. The bow smashed up and over the next wave.

The water was calm in the estuary. We made slow progress and were soon at the center of a growing congregation of fishermen. They gathered around the floating spectacle in their Pangas.

In the cockpit of the Mystic, Hector was feeling heroic. “Es un calamar gigante,” he told each of the fishermen as they arrived.

The conversations followed a predictable pattern, “Es imposible. Es demasiado grande.” They told Hector, “Es una ballena.”

Hector waited until they were about to ask the question themselves then said, “Tiene brazos y tentacúlos.”

Their eyes widened. They asked, “¿Está muerto?”

Just before high tide Sarah uncleated the line to the squid and passed it to the fisherman in the Panga beside Juan’s. With their sterns nearly submerged, the two Pangas towed the squid at an excruciatingly slow pace until it was within the rock jetties. The lines were passed to a group of fishermen wading in the surf. They pulled the lines and beached the squid outside the iron bars of Cet Mar High School.

The tide was going out. We were on the beach when Juan put his hand over his nose and mouth and repeated the sentiment that accompanied any reference to the squid, “Qué feo.” The old man turned to his grandson, “Pero no es una ballena.”

The two were laughing.

Juan measured the length of the mantle and head with a fishing net.

“Do you want to know how big it is?” I asked Sarah. “I’ll tell you how big it is. It’s fucking huge!”

“Ocho metros,” Juan shouted.

“How many feet is that?” I asked.

Sarah said, “Twenty-six.”

“How do you know that anyway?”

“One meter equals three point two eight feet.” Sarah told me every country in the world, apart from Liberia, Myanmar and the United States, used the International System of Units.

“How many countries in the world have a squid like that?”

She said, “Very few.”

I’m six feet tall. The squid’s mantle rose to my chest. Two tentacles were folded under the mantle. They extended almost five meters behind the fins.

I looked to Sarah for the calculation.

“Sixteen feet,” she told me.

The fishermen gathered around Juan. They didn’t know what to do with the enormous corpse.

“By the way, Sarah, how far is it from Myanmar to Liberia?”

“I’d say it’s about anywhere between,” she paused, “ten and twelve thousand kilometers.”

“What’s the volume of the Earth’s oceans?”

“One thousand three hundred million cubic kilometers.”

“In cubic miles?”

“Three hundred ten million.”

“All right, but I’m going to look all that up when we get home.”

One of the tentacle clubs was missing. The other looked like a medieval weapon. The club was arrayed with hundreds of white hooks and razor-like rings. Small waves washed the club up and down the sand.

Juan asked, as he sharpened his knife, if we had been aware that such creatures swam in the deep.

Sarah shook her head. She said she had always imagined there were gargantuan creatures, but this was more than she imagined.

Juan stopped sharpening his knife. He waited for my response.

I told him the squid only confirmed my suspicion.

The old man nodded. About what?

I wanted to tell him what happened to Andromeda in my dream, about the Kraken. But I said the squid confirmed my suspicion about the sea.

The old man nodded his head and said: She is profound. There is no telling what she might have.

His statement struck me. In Spanish el mar is masculine. Juan was using the feminine pronoun.

When the old man put his leathery hand on my back, I felt as if he understood what I didn’t say.

Hector and another fisherman took turns trying to open the grayish orange hide of the mantle. The machete was buried halfway into the skin when they quit.

“Es duro,” was all Hector said of the effort.

Sarah asked if Juan had seen other giant squids.

Sure plenty, the old man told her, but they were little. He lifted the tentacle club out of the water and cursed.

“The mantle length of a giant squid,” Sarah told me, “is usually one or two meters.”

Juan sliced the cornea open, thrust his hand in the gooey eye and pulled out the lens.

“So this is our honeymoon?” I asked.

Sarah said, “Surprise.”

Juan wanted to cut out the beak. The mouth was encased by two tentacles and eight gargantuan arms. The old man used his fishing knife to cut off the first arm. He had to sharpen the knife before he could penetrate the coarse fibers of the hide, under which was a layer of yellow fat thicker than his palm. Juan sharpened the knife again and sliced into boneless muscle as red as that of any elk I had ever butchered.

“No hay huesos,” Juan said. He rinsed the sweat from his forehead with sea water.

The sun was setting. The fishermen took turns sawing off the other seven arms. They drug them up the beach and laid them in rows, shortest to longest, behind a coconut palm. They cut off the two tentacles and stretched them like elastic bands.

Using both hands, Juan opened the squid’s mouth. The white, cylindrical flange of tissue was enveloped by flesh that can only be described as labia. Recessed as deep as Juan’s hand in the canal was the black beak. I felt nauseous and looked away.

When I looked back, Juan was cutting out the mouth with his knife. Juan and Hector pushed against the squid’s squishy head with their bare feet and pulled on the flange with their hands. It popped free. The squid’s long esophagus came out with it.

Hector cut out the toothed tongue. Juan held the halves of the black beak before his face and snapped them shut.

It took four of us–Juan, Hector, Sarah and I–to push the cart loaded with: the day’s catch in two half-filled five-gallon buckets, the quarter-full fuel tank, machete and fishing knife, line and net, plate-size suction cups, an eye lens, a toothed tongue, a giant squid beak and a twenty-seven-foot arm. The arm was coiled twice around the cart; the spiny-hooked end was dragged through the dirt street where a score of kids were trying to carry it. It was dark when we entered the plaza and passed the church. We were sweating and stumbling and cursing. The priest came out. It was a parade. Juan stopped at the tortillería to buy a kilo of corn tortillas. The crowd waited while the tortillas were wrapped in brown paper and Juan received fifty centavos change. We pushed the cart to his blue, concrete house. Juan unloaded the fuel tank and set it inside the door.

Chita, Juan’s wife, came out of the kitchen. She stood in the doorway with her nose pinched. “Qué feo,” she said and swatted at the whole scene.

Juan, Hector, Sarah and I unloaded the arm. The thicker end was dropped in the dirt. The rest was coiled on the blue tiled porch. Juan handed the half-filled buckets of fish to Hector then took an empty five-gallon bucket from inside the house. He put the suction cups, lens, tongue and razor sharp beak in the bucket and passed it around the crowd.

Juan asked if we sailed from the United States.

It was so out of context with the squid arm at our feet and the monstrous beak inspiring an uneasy awe in the street that it took a moment to get my mind around the question.

“Sí,” Sarah told him. “De San Diego, California.”

Juan asked why we sailed, out of every place we could have sailed in the world, to Teacapan.

“Para la familia,” Sarah told him.

“¿Tienen familia aquí en Teacapan?”

Sarah explained that my great-grandmother was born on the estuary.

The old man nodded his head. His face was corrugated from a lifetime of fishing in the tropical sun. I couldn’t stop looking at the deep creases in his cheeks and around his bright brown eyes.

Cal’s great-grandfather, Sarah said, was shipwrecked in the estuary.

“¿Hace cuánto tiempo?” Juan asked.

“1924.”

Juan nodded.

“¿Se conocieron aquí?”

Yes, here, Sarah said. He was alone and lost in the estuary. He met her here, in a house on the water.

“¿Cual era su nombre?”

“Calvin William Ramsey,” I told him.

Juan nodded. He asked about the shipwreck.

I told him my great-grandfather built a sailboat to sail around the world, that he wanted to be like the great mariner, Joshua Slocum. A storm blew his sailboat onto the mangroves in the estuary.

Juan shook his head. No, he said, this mouth is not where he entered the estuary. He said he watched them blow open the mouth. The little mouth grew until it was like it is today. My great-grandfather, he said, must have entered the estuary in Nayarit, to the south.

Sarah told him that we were newlyweds. That we sailed to the estuary where my great-grandparents fell in love to celebrate our own love.

Juan nodded. He set the line, net, rusty machete and knife in a pile inside the house and turned the cart on its front end, against the outside wall. He patted me on the back and told me it took nine years for him to build this house. “Poco a poco,” he said. Then he introduced us to Chita and told her we were newly married.

Chita congratulated us, complained again about the smell of the arm and invited us to the table to eat pozole. Juan–carrying the lens, tongue, beak and suction cups in the white bucket–led us over the tiled floor–they were the same blue tiles as on the front porch–past the dining room table and into the small courtyard in the back where he opened the only tap on the property, a spigot coming out of the dirt. He used the water to fill an empty five-gallon bucket, poured the bucket into a concrete sink and implored us to wash our hands.

There was a crowd in the street looking at the arm and a dozen people in the house. Chita sat in the Queen Anne chair at the head of the cherry wood table and watched as Juan and Hector, on one side, and Sarah and I, on the other, ate pozole. We rolled the tortillas in our palms, used the scrolls of corn in place of spoons and drank tequila from a plastic Fresca bottle.

I could not put away the image of the black beak inside the canal of the squid’s mouth.

Sarah brushed her teeth in the backyard, pulled the curtain closed behind her and pinned me drunkenly to the mattress.

I told her I was feeling queasy.