Estrellita

Estrellita, a deep-sea-fishing boat hired off Acapulco, becomes the setting for a rare interval of ease in Perry Smith and Dick’s flight through Mexico. With Otto and the Cowboy aboard, it carries the four men out along the coast for fishing, conversation, and an afternoon in which Perry lands a sailfish. The trip offers a vivid counterpoint to the fugitives’ dwindling money and uncertain plans: for a few hours, the boat holds them in a world organized around sun, water, and the catch, before the practical demands of their journey pull them back toward Mexico City.

Identity and Place in the Journey

After a week in Mexico City, Perry Smith and Dick had driven south through Cuernavaca and Taxco to Acapulco. There, in a jukebox honky-tonk, Dick met Otto, a wealthy, middle-aged German vacationer and lawyer from Hamburg. Otto already had a young Acapulcan companion, the Cowboy, whom Perry later described as both funny and quick on horseback, and the four men got along. The Cowboy found Perry Smith and Dick a room in his uncle’s house and helped Perry Smith improve his Spanish; Otto’s company also brought the fugitives meals, drinks, and other luxuries at his expense.

Each day Otto hired Estrellita, and the four went trolling along the coast. The boat gathered people with sharply different investments in the outing: the Cowboy skippered, Otto sketched and fished, Perry Smith baited hooks, daydreamed, sang, and sometimes fished, while Dick mostly lay about, complained of the motion, and felt ill. The division makes the boat more than a backdrop. Its daily excursions temporarily place the fugitives inside Otto’s holiday, but the arrangement depends on his money and cannot last once he leaves.

The Sailfish and the Day at Sea

Perry Smith regarded the outing as the way life ought to be, but understood that this ease was about to end. Otto would return to Germany the following day, while Dick insisted that he and Perry Smith go back to Mexico City. Their money was nearly gone. They had sold much of the property acquired in their Kansas City check-passing spree, including a camera, cuff links, and television sets; Dick had also sold binoculars and a gray Zenith portable radio to a Mexico City policeman he knew. He proposed selling their old Chevrolet and finding work, while Perry Smith anticipated that Dick would quickly spend the proceeds on vodka and women. The boat’s floating interlude thus takes place within a journey already shaped by exhaustion of resources and disagreement about what comes next.

On the outing that would end their time with Otto, the sun blazed over a mild sea. Estrellita was anchored with all four men aboard; when Otto shut his sketchbook and Perry Smith put down his guitar, the Cowboy raised anchor and started the engine. They were ten miles out, and the water was darkening. Perry Smith urged Dick to fish, saying they might never have another chance to catch a big one. Dick, suffering one of the severe headaches he associated with his automobile accident, wanted quiet and initially refused.

Then Perry Smith hooked a sailfish. The fish leaped, plunged, and pulled the line taut as Dick, Otto, and the Cowboy shouted; Dick had forgotten his pain and was on his feet with excitement. The struggle lasted an hour and part of another before Perry Smith, soaked with sweat, reeled the fish in. The scene turns Dick’s earlier passivity into collective exhilaration, while making Perry Smith—not the more boastful Dick—the fisherman who brings the catch aboard. Estrellita holds the group together through this prolonged contest, its motion and the taut line setting the pace of the event.

Portraits, Bodies, and the Afterimage

Otto had sketched Perry Smith singing on the boat, producing a likeness that caught a mischievous, babyish malice in his expression. Perry Smith was bare to the waist, and Otto drew some of the tattoos on his heavily muscled chest and arms, as well as on his small, calloused hands. Otto’s sketchbook also contained several nude studies of Dick, and he gave the book to Perry Smith as a parting gift. These drawings make the outing persist beyond the hours aboard Estrellita: the boat trip leaves behind a record of its passengers as Otto saw them.

That record also preserves a limit Perry Smith could not escape. He was ashamed to remove his trousers or wear swimming trunks because he feared that people would be disgusted by his injured legs. Although he daydreamed about being underwater and talked about skin-diving, he had not gone into the water. The sea surrounds the excursion, but does not become a place he can enter; his body sets a boundary within the apparent freedom of the holiday.

When Estrellita docked, Otto commissioned an old man at the Acapulco harbor, who used an ancient wooden box camera, to make six portraits of Perry Smith beside the sailfish. The photographs came out brown and streaked, technically poor but remarkable for Perry Smith’s expression of complete fulfillment. The narration compares his look to the dream image of a tall yellow bird carrying him to heaven. Beside the catch, the fugitive appears momentarily lifted out of money worries, bodily shame, and the road ahead. But the portraits belong to a departure: Otto was leaving, and Perry Smith and Dick would return to Mexico City. Estrellita’s lasting significance lies in that contrast between an intensely realized moment of happiness and the brevity of the refuge that made it possible.