“I'll try to get him to work far out,”the boy said.“ Then if you hook something truly big we can come to your aid.”
The boy did not know whether yesterday's paper was a fiction too.But the old man brought it out from under the bed.
“No,”the old man said.“ But we have.Haven't we?”“Yes,”the boy said.“Can I offer you a beer on the Terrace and then we'll take the stuff home.”
The old man was thin and gaunt with deep wrinkles in the back of his neck.The brown blotches of the benevolent skin cancer the sun brings from its reflection on the tropic sea were on his cheeks.The blotches ran well down the sides of his face and his hands had the deep-creased scars from handling heavy fish on the cords.But none of these scars were fresh.They were as old as erosions in a fishless desert.
“He hasn't much faith.”
“Have faith in the Yankees my son.Think of the great DiMaggio.”
“But remember how you went eighty-seven days without fish and then we caught big ones every day for three weeks.”“I remember,”the old man said,“I know you did not leave me because you doubted.”
He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.In the first forty days a boy had been with him.But after forty days without a fish the boy's parents had told him that the old man was now definitely and finally salao,which is the worst form of unlucky,and the boy had gone at their orders in another boat which caught three good fish the first week.It made the boy sad to see the old man come in each day with his skiff empty and he always went down to help him carry either the coiled lines or the gaff and harpoon and the sail that was furled around the mast.The sail was patched with flour sacks and,furled,it looked like the flag of permanent defeat.