Stormin’ Norman’s Ferry
Fiction by Matt Knutson
Fall 2024 Fiction Contest Winner
Stormin’ Norman, broad of chest and red of neck, fished off the Mexican coast when he felt a great punch on the line. This jolt from the sunken world roused him from lassitude, from a floppy-hatted contentment atop the Sea of Cortez, barely within sight of the town of San Felipe. His noonday blood set to circling. The sky was a cloudless and gracious blue. To the north, the white tooth of Isla Consag jut from the sea, its colonies of birds flying together in spirals resembling volcanic smoke. Norman steadied his pole against the fiberglass and began heaving. The laugh lines of his bronze cheeks strained taut.
“Just where are you off to?” he asked.
Something huge savaged his nugget of bait squid, something he hoped to mount above the mantelpiece. Norman was alone that day and felt it, the freedom and the ache. Deb and Esperanza, his wife and her best friend, lounged together back on shore, their tequila snores synchronized amid gardens of flowering yucca. It had been Deb’s idea to bring Esper to Baja, such was her belief in the restorative properties of Mexican sunshine. And why would Norman stay moping with his wife away? A man must fish when he can.
“Easy now,” Norman said, working the line.
It would please Deb, his catching the fish. Or so he hoped. She’d become harder to please.
He’d been so excited for this day. He’d woken early, negotiated a good price on the boat, rented gear. This was the most passionately he’d felt about anything in months. What had happened to bring him low? He worked, he loved his wife, he paid debt. He supposed, ultimately, nothing had happened, and this was the problem. Every day he’d climb a mountain only to find more of the same at its top. Drink never helped. That became clear afterward. Deb’s concern for him, and she was concerned, became a kind of condescension. Her love would exhaust if he kept circling, and then what? Nothing he’d like.
“C’mon baby,” he whispered to the fish. “I need you now.”
Norman wrenched on the line. The boat began drifting. Somewhere below the water, the fish churned fin, and Norman’s breathing changed. Through the rod’s handle, the creature’s every move reverberated into his palms, thrumming like the beat of a strange heart. He squinted into the depths. The shape of it, slick below the water, thrilled Norman.
“Deb –” he howled toward the distant shore “– You’re never going to believe this!”
He wasn’t seeing things. There was an absolute behemoth on the end of that hook.
His pole bent wildly then, the droning reel becoming a piercing whine. The fish neared the surface and speared out like a knife. Norman worried that it would jump, and if it jumped, the hook would loosen. All proof of his great skill would shimmy back into the sea.
It was so powerful. It could pull his little boat like a tug.
And what a sight that would be, Stormin’ Norman returning to shore behind such a legendary catch, the water stirred into foam behind him. He’d seen the USS Midway tugged into San Diego Bay like that, after Desert Storm, the sheer majesty of it, rose petals bobbing on the chop.
All at once the fish rushed beside the boat and Norman reached frantically for his spear while the creature began launching heavenward. He lanced at it like an outrageous hero, trying somehow to pierce what was all happening too quickly, much too quickly. The enormous swordfish flashed toward him, emerging from a prismatic spray of seawater, its tail arcing as it smacked the boat’s side. The swordbill skewered Norman’s chest, just below the collarbone, and the creature’s momentum carried it over the rail and down into the hull.
Norman was knocked from his seat and into the boat’s puddly bottom, where, for some delirious moments, he stared into the sun, breathing ragged, struggling even to inhale. He was aware of his own heart beating. A flock of seabirds passed overhead. Blood pulsed from the wound to his chest. He watched the beautiful swordfish he’d angled, flopping in the boat’s fiberglass bottom, the spear stuck into its tailfin slapping at the rail. It gasped at the midday air, its flops slowing, its gulping maw opening longer then, and longer.
***
At the timeshare, Deb brewed a pot of coffee and drank too much of it. By the time Esper shook off her own hangover, Deb was on the patio smoking a cigarette.
“Sleeping in?” Deb asked. “On vacation? Unforgivable.”
Esper sipped her coffee. “You’re waiting for Norman,” she said, “before making the margaritas?”
“You should at least try waking up before you start boozing,” Deb said, stubbing the cigarette before slipping back into the kitchen.
“And where’s Norman gone?” Esper called.
He’d left early that morning, while they slept. He’d talked about going fishing for weeks, but Esper had talked about these margaritas even longer. Neither would be waiting for the other. Deb emptied a sack of limes onto the counter and selected the sharpest knife, a task which seemed too difficult. There was an acute fuzz in her head. She’d have to shake it off if she hoped to have any luck in the market later.
But of course they needed drinks first.
This trip across the border, to San Felipe, was a concession of quiet misery by the three vacationeers, a healthy and unspoken compromise to the fact that each of them felt outside previously comfortable lives.
The day before, they’d driven a ragged motorhome south across the deserts of Baja. Not knowing, apparently, what else to do, Norman attempted playing a damaged Jimmy Buffett compact disc, though neither of the women allowed this to continue for very long. They arrived at sunset outside their adobe timeshare, ten minutes beyond town among arroyos funneling sporadic rainwater from the hazel crown of Picacho Del Diablo into the sea. A country of stone and sharp plants. San Felipe hugged low on the horizon, swollen with late spring tourism, a brightly huddled place beside the bay: lighthouse, flag-draped chapel, seabirds. Somewhere, underground streams pulsed with briny water. The tile floors of their rental were painted the color of carrot bisque.
For months, Norman had been cheerless: eating poorly, neglecting friendships. His lovable complaining over decades worked in aerospace manufacturing had dropped neatly away. He still returned home greasy-handed, but lacking vigor. The empties piled up. Deb wasn’t sure what was wrong but imagined a snapping to come. He looked bad. He spent many hours watching televised depictions of offshore fishing. Sometimes he mimicked their reeling, his eyes glassed.
Deb was concerned Norman was entering that dreaded phase, the midlife crisis, and that he would return suddenly from many days away with a bespoke convertible, a ditz girlfriend, a visible tattoo. Perhaps, she’d thought, some time in Mexico would help.
She dreamed of finding some way to mark a new phase in her life’s journey: her dignified second act. Maybe she could manifest the new golden days, and imagined an object for sale in San Felipe’s market. A painting perhaps, or a handcrafted item of folk art: some woven basket, or a mounted gull, tanned and stuffed, its beak forever open.
She’d finished cutting the limes and stirred the margaritas. “Thank you,” Esper mouthed as she took the chilled glass. Together they watched the palms sway until noon. Drinks in hand, they began wandering toward town.
“Maybe we’ll see Norman at the dock,” Deb said.
Esper sighed at this.
They neared an old cemetery. Flowering nightshade the color of pale linen ran parallel to the ancient wooden fence. All of it seemed ready to spill down the bluff. From this ridge they gazed upon the Gulf, and Deb squinted at each speck sailing the blue expanse, shielding her eyes from the sun.
“You think one of those little shapes is Norman?” Esper asked.
“Of course,” Deb said.
“We can use the process of elimination.” Esper pointed at a sailboat far to the south. “That can’t be him, the ship’s too big.” She pointed to another. “And that one over there, it’s moving too fast.”
Deb crossed her arms.
“There’s a little group of the smaller boats, closer to that island. Maybe he made some fishing buddies?”
“I doubt it.”
“You don’t think he made any fishing buddies?”
“Okay,” Deb said. “What about the boat over there, closer to the jetty?”
“Maybe,” Esper said. “It does look like it’s going in circles.”
Deb drained a long gulp of margarita. She hadn’t made them strong enough.
They stood for a long time outside the cemetery’s rough wooden gate. There was a pair of footprints running inside, circling the graves. They were still perfectly intact, little craters in the sand. Deb nudged a quartz pebble in the dirt. The ice in her margarita had melted.
“I’m ready to get into town,” she said. “I’m looking for something.”
“Do you know what it is?”
“I’ll know when I see it.”
***
Lying in the boat’s bottom, Norman’s heart thudded against its cage. His skin was pale, damp with sweat. His eyelids fluttered, and minutes passed, maybe hours. His mind moved into ethereal regions, halls lit by distant lamps, where the overwhelming sensation was one of calm dispersal, as if the boat were sinking, gently, into a warm sea, the water rising around him. A ringing came to his ears, bells in a faraway place. A lone seagull passed overhead. Eventually, Norman lost consciousness and remained sprawled across the fiberglass, unmoving as a corpse.
In this position he awoke after what seemed like eons, groggy and stiff, as if coming alive after anesthesia. The throbbing in his chest had ceased, as had the blood flowing from his wound, and he knew the injury had begun clotting properly. Above him, clouds sailed across the sky at an alarming rate.
He rubbed his eyes and scanned the boat, searching for the swordfish. His lance was there, its tip bloodied, but the prized catch was missing.
“What in hell…” he said.
He mounted the bench seat, wobbling the boat as he did, and leaned over the side to splash water on his face. Dipping a cupped palm into the sea, his fingers left behind a wake. Norman glanced around and noticed two odd details: that the vessel was now moving at a steady pace, and that his fishing pole was still leaning on the prow, its nylon line stretching into the sea. Some force tugged the boat onward, as if it were a chariot.
His sunburn must have been devastating, certainly cancerous. Deb always warned him about melanoma. But where was the sun? The sky was a strange virulent red, shot through with veins of blackening cloud. A twist of fear rippled his gut.
Where is Isla Consag? he thought. Where is the shore?
The Gulf could draw far upon its tide, and quickly. The night before they’d seen water receding so far from land it disappeared completely, leaving behind a vast plain of mud and starfish. He could be miles from anything.
For a moment Norman wondered if the world had ended, if he was the last man returning now to rebuild civilization. Often this thought came to him in times of duress. He was intrigued by the idea of a hard restart. He would like to do things right for once. He sniffed at the air, testing for any residual tang of nuclear holocaust. What would a mushroom cloud smell like? He didn’t know, though he noticed a faint waft of something burning.
He followed the nylon line and noticed how it bent his fishing pole, how it went taut between boat and water, and how, ten feet below the Gulf’s surface, the hook was lodged, still, within the jaw of a great silver shape, what could only be the enormous swordfish. Norman watched it twisting forward, swimming with great steady motions, the spearbill wriggling as it propelled itself. He hadn’t truly appreciated its size and strength. An apex predator, it reminded him of some kind of muscular submarine, iron-willed as it traversed great sunken tracts, diving deep and pulling hard its entire life.
His gaze passed from fish to sea and finally to the far horizon, where something was wrong. If there were thunderheads, he would have thought it an ominous storm. But there were no clouds, no lightning, not even the blur of rain falling. Only a growing and enveloping darkness, as if deepest night emanated from that part of the world, with Norman chugging steadily on. It sat on the horizon like a hole in the sky.
“Where are you taking me?” he asked.
Norman remembered the boat’s motor. He reached for the engine’s draw cord and pulled with all his might, bracing his feet on the stern. Without turning the crankshaft, the cord popped in half like a joke prop, and he flopped onto his back as the other half rubberbanded into the water. Had he been out long enough to sun damage everything?
Norman’s tiny boat was likely to capsize in rough water. And even if he was lucky and remained afloat, then the fish, with its tenuous hook, would certainly escape when the waves began chopping.
“You can’t take us any closer to that storm,” he said to the fish. “I need to get back to Deb.”
He began tugging on the fishing line. He had to do something. Maybe he could get near enough to spear and recapture it again.
“Maybe,” he said, smiling to himself, “I could even steer this thing.”
He began pulling, trying not to dislodge the hook from the creature’s jaw. He was hesitant at first, wincing at the cruelty of digging metal deeper into flesh, but the hook remained steadfast. After tugging and tugging, without success, he leaned back, heaving with all his might, really wrenching.
“If I could just get a little closer…” he said, exhaling through gritted teeth, “things would get so much easier.”
As he yanked to the right, the swordfish arced its trajectory, towing to the left instead. Norman attempted pulling back to the left. Maybe switching to-and-fro would help close the distance? But the fish alternated in response, bowing sharply right and taking the boat with it. The whole enterprise, Norman tugging one way and the fish swimming opposite, shaved across the sea in long, S-shaped curves.
He’d figured out a way to steer.
“Now we’re getting somewhere,” he said.
He relaxed, holding the line as a coachman might. Now that he could control the fish, he needed to find his way back to the bay of San Felipe, and his worried wife. He glanced over his shoulder at the ominous storm that seemed to have already grown larger…
He travelled for what seemed like miles. The water grew rougher, and the boat began bouncing on the chop. Eventually, very far away, the shoreline appeared as a hazy bronze line, and Norman settled in for the ride. He couldn’t stop thinking how impressed Deb would be, seeing him cruise into town like this.
It was surprising how barren the shoreline appeared as Norman approached. He guided the boat perpendicular with the harbor, scanning the empty market. The evening previous he’d seen cantinas and fruit carts, cloth and leather merchants, shops selling wormed mezcal and sugar skulls. But all was empty now. The doors were shuttered, the umbrellas closed. He squinted, and for once was thankful the sky turned such a baleful shade of crimson, because he wasn’t blinded by sea glare. Nobody. No cars, no other boats. The streets stretched in even rows until parallax, all empty. Perhaps it was some tourist function he didn’t anticipate, maybe one of those yelling spring break parties, or a religious ritual the entire region observes, unknown to folk from elsewhere.
The storm was sending wind. Seaweed along the beach fluttered. A ribbon of pink neon lettering sparked up along the market. At first it was too bright for Norman to discern the name of the establishment, but he was relieved something opened. Some club deciding to spurn tradition. He could really go for a cold one.
He glanced back to see how long before the storm broke. The seaweed kept flapping. Looming behind him, the great black sky had followed. Ominous shreds of cloud blew in with the wind. To his surprise, he found himself interested in that darkness, and was curious to know what it held. He squinted, failing to see anything at its core, and turned away. He had other places to be.
“It’s too empty onshore,” he said. “Deb and Esper won’t be here. They go where the life is.”
Now the neon sign flashed lime green. The Last Call, it read, now pink, now green again. The Last Call. Norman swallowed his thirst. He would have to come back for that drink. He set the fish swimming up the coast and did not look back.
The beach slid by. Straw palapas swayed and rustled as gusts blasted across the sand. There were homes with empty windows, some distance from the water, one and two and three stories, surrounded by swinging palms and tall sedgegrass. There, the skeleton of an old van, here, the mouth of an upcountry arroyo, leaking rainwater into the basin; and up ahead, a low promontory with a naked rock face. Waves slapped its bottom. Norman was beginning to wonder about these empty regions. He hoped the timeshare and motorhome were close.
He shielded his eyes from the salt spray, and the wind lashed his passing. Now the coast arced toward the Colorado River’s delta, the apex of the Sea of Cortez. Rocky inlets slashed across tracts of silt and pumice. Up a reedy passage, the adobe timeshare waited. He was getting closer.
On a desolate stretch of beach beyond the town of San Felipe, Stormin’ Norman spied a shabby motorhome, and beside this, Deb and Esper, carrying something together. It looked like a heavy rug. Between the two of them, they hauled this object up the motorhome’s rear ladder and set it atop the roof. There was another boat, a fiberglass vessel like Norman’s, resting at the water’s edge. It was steady there, in the surge. The women embraced before climbing back down the ladder and taking their seats in the cab. Norman yelled and waved his arms. The motorhome’s tires spun in the wet sand before catching traction.
“Hey,” he yelled. “Over here! Wait!”
The vehicle sputtered back up the beach onto a dirt road. Norman had no choice but to follow. He flicked at the line, urging the fish onward.
Had there been trouble? Could they be fleeing? Perhaps they’d angered the wrong person or failed to pay for some favor? Things like this happened in tourist towns, Norman knew. But it was all so strange. Had they been getting into dangerous situations and keeping them from him? It was worrisome to think about such a rift growing. What did they know that he didn’t?
The mouth of a tributary yawned beside the road. He guided the boat into this brackish channel, avoiding sandbars and the pilings of long ruined structures. He pulled on the line, urging the fish onward. It began leaping as it swam, launching from the water in the manner of river dolphins, its swordbill lancing cleanly through the stream. Norman stood with his foot upon the prow, one hand gripping the line and the other shielding his face from the thrashing wind. He would not lose them.
The miles grew longer. The road stretched across a vast bottomland. Norman kept the vehicle in sight, the channel running parallel to the highway. The landscape changed, the mountains grew sharper. He’d been at this for hours. He expected eventually to come into the agricultural plain south of Tecate and Mexicali, where the All-American Canal seeped into fields of lettuce and cotton. How far was he from the border? Streaks of blue lightning snapped at the edges of the sky.
On a certain long passage reaching into the hazy distance Norman finally caught the speeding motorhome. He kept pace beside them and began waving frantically.
“Deborah!” he called. “Esperanza!”
He leaped like a fool.
“It’s me, Norman!”
The boat began slowing. The road dipped, he was at eye level. Norman waved and waved, but they didn’t see him. They stared straight ahead, hand in hand, their images divinely clear in a world growing dimmer by the moment. Losing pace, Norman took the spear and, with everything he had left, hurled it toward the motorhome. It pierced the spare tire above the rear bumper and wobbled there, a pole without a flag. The motorhome continued, but his boat floundered in the remnants of its own wake.
They would return eventually. They wouldn’t forget about him. How could they? His chest began aching again. With one hand he compressed the wound and with the other he tugged on the nylon line, but the fish seemed, finally, to be exhausted by its task.
***
Deb was disappointed. Earlier that day, they’d left San Felipe’s crowded market for the shadows of a cobbled alley. She’d pawed through paintings, examined pottery and wickerwork, and briefly considered buying a stuffed iguana, but no treasures had revealed themselves to her. It was as she feared, there was no center to this moment. She’d always known what she wanted, but her future, with Norman, was becoming difficult to imagine. She’d lost the way.
Esper took Deb’s hand and pointed to the door of a dim and dusty shop: a fortune-teller. The open palm with its open eye stared them down.
“No,” Deb said. “I would believe it too much.”
Instead they found another bar and continued drinking, cold beer with lime; it was too late in the day for the sugary stuff. From a patio they watched the sky deepen into a rich and nostalgic blue, the street thickening with people. It was like a dream, all the faces. After a long time they walked to the beach and turned left at the water’s edge, heading north. The coastline stretched for miles. Here and there palapas dotted the sand, the shore creased by paths winding into the desert or up the mouths of canyons.
Rounding a sandstone bluff, they came upon a lonely beach where a single boat lay. There was nothing else around, no vehicles or structures, no tackle boxes or ice chests. The boat was still partially submerged in the water and rocked gently with each wave. From afar they couldn’t see if anything rested within.
Both Deb and Esper peered in together.
It was Norman. It looked like he’d been struck by the sharp end of a swordfish and floated in with the tide. They were both dead in the bottom of the boat, man and fish together, rocking gently with the waves.
Deb stared. She stared so long the tide was to her ankles when she finally heard Esper’s voice. Deborah. Deborah!
Deb’s mind kept circling. Where was she? What had happened? The horizon was so bright she could barely look up. Shapes on the water, shadows on the land. She shook her head. It really was Norman in the boat. He really was gone. She kept looking at his face. It really was him.
“We have to take him back,” Esper said.
Deb wondered about that.
“It’s not practical,” Esper continued, “dying in another country. Think of the transportation fees alone. I had a friend who snuck their uncle back by tucking him in the spare tire cubby. Just folded him up. Once we get Norman to the border, everything gets a lot easier.”
“Are you sure?” Deb asked.
“I am sure,” Esper said. “I think it’s what he would have wanted.”
They talked it over, the pros and cons, the steps along the way. The time to mourn would come later; they couldn’t delay. Something became clear to Deb: not only did she agree with Esper, but she felt an unmistakable surge of focus with this new plan, a tension in her core. They needed to get Norman home. So, before anyone else found out, they fetched the motorhome, wrapped him and his final catch together in a sleeping bag, and lashed the two of them to its roof.
The drive north felt like a transition between divergent dreams. Deb didn’t recognize anything she’d seen on the way down. The spiny ocotillo looked like plants in postcards, the mountains like oil paintings. She thought about Norman, up there on the roof, and she wondered how long they struggled, he and the fish. She decided, ultimately, that it must have been an epic showdown, one for the ages. She’d wanted life to change after this trip, and it had. There would be much to do. Her first task would be mounting the swordfish above the mantelpiece.
The first thing the border agents asked was how a fishing spear ended up stuck in their spare tire. Deb and Esper had no idea what to say.
***
The swordfish finally freed itself from the hook and began swimming back the way they came. Norman watched it go. He knew he’d done everything he could to catch it.
The boat rest mid-channel, at a crossroads. A single low building sat beside the intersection of two tributaries. To the north, where California should be, the sky was burning. The land behind him grew dimmer, more skeletal. Crackling blue licks of lightning illuminated barren plains and broken mountains.
A neon sign above the building buzzed to life, and the crossroads flashed pink, then green, then pink again. The Last Call, the sign read. The rusty door squealed open. Echoes of an old jukebox, of bottles clinking, wafted across the plain. Norman really could go for a cold one.
Matt Knutson is a graduate of the University of New Orleans Creative Writing Workshop. He’s been a resident at the Sundress Academy for the Arts and his work has appeared in Cola Literary Review, Expat Press, Bat City Review and elsewhere. His manuscript “Quiet Homes in the Hills” was a semi-finalist for Iron Horse Literary Review’s 2024 Chapbook Contest, and his story “So Far Behind I Thought I Was First” was a finalist for Bridge Eight’s 2022 Summer Short Story Prize. Originally from San Diego, he now lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife and cat.
