Some Faces in the Crowd by Budd Schulberg Page A

needling her with a sharp minute hand from the time he awoke. It was her bitter knowledge that an appointment with a fishing boat was the only thing he took seriously. He had had his picture in quite a few magazines as a master of giant game fish. It was the best thing he did.
    The boat wasn’t a clean boat, not even by Mexican standards, and the native skipper merely muttered something without smiling when they came aboard. “He’s sore because we’re late,” Brad said. “They like to get out there before the sun’s up too high.”
    Martha didn’t say anything. She really didn’t care what effect the extra time had on the moods of his pockmarked Mexican. She was watching the mate. He had a cadaverous face covered by an unkempt beard. Normally he should have been about five feet tall, but a slight hump, or rather a ridge running between his shoulders, bent him over until he was hardly more than four feet high.
    They went out past Hornos, the beach that the Acapulqueños frequent at sunset, and Martha could remember her first swim there with Brad when the flaming red sun lit the waters around them with cool fire and the palm trees behind the beach stood out in brilliant silhouette against the purple sky. Had she loved him that evening long ago? She tried to remember: yes, she had, for his Irish good looks, for his gaiety, and for the elaborate charade of romance he had practiced on her.
    She looked over at him now, as if to compare the sham she had briefly loved five years ago with this solid reality who was carefully unwrapping his fishing gear—the Hardy reel he had picked up in England and the O’Brien rod bought two seasons ago in Miami, the rod that had conquered yellowtail off Enseñada, tuna near Guaymas, marlin in the Caribbean, and tarpon in the channels through the mangrove swamps that lie off Key West. He was careless about most of his possessions, but not about this rod.
    The boat slowed to trolling speed and Brad paid out his line. The hunchback had a pole for Martha and fixed the base of the rod in the socket of her chair.
    “Well, muchacha,” Brad said, “better get the big gaff ready. I feel lucky today.”
    If the hunchback heard the feminine ending, his face gave no sign. They had spent nearly all their winters in Latin countries, and Martha’s Spanish was good enough to cause her to flinch from Brad’s linguistic slips. But Brad took pride in his inability to speak foreign languages. And he was in too good a mood at the moment to care whether he called this deformed native a boy or a girl. There were really only a few occasions, Martha was thinking, when Brad’s humor was so high—when he was starting to fish, when he came in with a fish bigger and gamer than anyone else’s, when he had had more than two drinks but less than six, and when he was undressing for his pleasure before dinner.
    “Come on, get on there, baby!” Brad was talking to them somewhere under the sea. “Let’s get a big one for Uncle Brad.”
    When nothing happened for a while, the hunchback threw out some chum, live bait of fairly good size, to draw the larger fish. In a few moments a sea gull appeared, maneuvering in over the wake of the boat to dive for the small fish.
    “Gaviota,” the hunchback muttered. “Damn gaviota.”
    A second gull came in overhead, and then another, coasting or winging easily over the stern. They were a small variety, very white, and Martha enjoyed their grace as they floated overhead.
    “Damn gaviota,” the hunchback muttered again. He reached into a paper bag for a small stone—Martha realized that he must have brought the stones along for that purpose—and tossed it up at them. It fell short of the birds.
    “Come on, muchacha,” Brad laughed. “Where’s the old pitching arm?”
    The hunchback threw again, but his physical disability limited his throw. “I get hands on gaviota” —his English was almost unintelligible—“I—” Instead of a word here, he substituted a