I was tired from working so many fish and I felt like going to bed. I looked out the window at the roofs of the old part of town and across at the harbor and watched the Orizaba go out slowly down the harbor with all her lights on.
#PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS SONG STORY WINDOWS#
My room was on the northeast corner and the trade wind blew through the windows and made it cool. So I walked up the cobbled street that was a shortcut to the Ambos Mundos Hotel and checked if I had any mail at the desk and then rode up in the elevator to the top floor. But that was an ugly and bad year ashore. The day we came in with five flags, the police had to charge the crowd with clubs. The fish was worth from eight to twelve cents a pound that year to a fisherman and twice that in the market. We were very popular along the waterfront because we butchered all our fish and gave them away, and when we came in past the Morro Castle and up the channel toward the San Francisco piers with a marlin flag up we could see the crowd starting to run for the docks. But we had not raised one of the huge marlin, although we were catching, or losing, white marlin each day and on one day I caught five. There was a dark, heavy stream close in to the Morro-sometimes there would be acres of bait-and there were flying fish going out from under the bows and birds working all the time. We had forty-two marlin by then and still the big ones had not come. “All right,” I said, and we fished another month. If we get bad weather, you can write something.” You got good credit with the Standard Oil Company at Belot across the bay, and when we get the bill I can pay them from last month’s charter money. “If you want to stay, I can cut her to nine dollars.” The standard charter price then was thirty-five a day. He owned the Anita and was chartering her for ten dollars a day. “Do you want to try her another month, Cap?” Mr. Josie asked. The thing to have done then would have been to buy some presents to take back to Key West and fill the Anita with just a little more expensive Cuban gas than was necessary to run across, get cleared, and go home.
The month started the tenth of April and by the tenth of May we had twenty-five marlin and the charter was over. That year we had planned to fish for marlin off the Cuban coast for a month.
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