Dead in the Water

by Dana Stabenow

  All too soon, a voice boomed out. “Goddammit, get busy, Shugak!”

  This time it was the captain’s voice, bellowing down at her from an open window on the bridge, and this time when she struggled to repress her initial reply she saw Jack’s face. Jack’s entire body in a cast. Jack’s tombstone, sans the Rest in Peace. She didn’t want Jack to rest in peace. She wanted Jack to burn in hell.

  Unable to summon up even enough energy to swear aloud, she called on every shaking muscle and pulled her way back to the bait table. The block of frozen herring was sliding back and forth with the heaving action of the Avilda, and she grabbed for it with one hand and for the big knife with the plastic handle with her other. On the first blow she brought the knife down too close to the fingers of the hand that held the herring.

  She caught herself. The deck boss might be an asshole, the captain marginally competent and the rest of the crew either untrustworthy or unknown, but that didn’t mean she had to behave recklessly herself. In fact, considering her reasons for being on board, it was imperative that she did not. She got a better grip on her temper and the knife and began to chop again, this time with more care.

  The chunks of herring went into perforated plastic jars. Andy Pence, hired on the day after she was and who had learned everything he ever knew about crab fishing during the last six days, seven hours and thirty-six minutes of his life, staggered across the deck and gathered up an armful of the jars and went staggering back toward the empty pots lined up against the railing. One at a time, he plunged head and shoulders into the pots, hanging the bait jars inside and tying the doors shut on each afterward with lengths of yellow plastic twine.

  Kate filled the last bait jar, tightened the lid down and waited for the deck beneath her feet to heave in the right direction. It did, but this time the swell was too big and she slid right past the stacked pots and into the pot launcher. It caught her just beneath her breasts, square across the diaphragm, knocking the breath out of her. Kate caught her breath just in time to hold it beneath the wave of spray that swept over the rail and poured ice-cold water inside her collar and down her spine. Gasping, she shook her head. When her eyes cleared she saw Seth Skinner grinning at her, his teeth a white slash in his bearded face. “Nice day!” he shouted. It was the longest sentence she’d ever heard him speak.

  “Couldn’t ask for nicer!” she shouted back, and fought her way over to where Andy was baiting. Together they baited the last pot, and Kate began coiling the twenty-five-fathom shots of five-eighth-inch polypropylene line while Andy checked the buoys. Each pot had three, one Styrofoam buoy and two air-filled plastic buoys, all painted a painfully fluorescent orange and each with the boat’s name and registration number lettered on it in sloppy but legible black paint. Finishing with the buoys, he set his shoulder to the pot at the end of the row and reached around for the line fastening the pot down.

  “No,” Kate shouted, “wait for the next swell.”

  “What?” His usually fresh face was exhausted and uncomprehending.

  He bent to shove and she grabbed his arm. “No,” she shouted again, “wait. Wait.”

  The word penetrated, and dumbly, he waited.

  The next swell was a big one, the biggest one yet. When she’d rolled as far as she was going to, the Avilda’s portside gunnel was again awash, the water boiling over the railing. She hesitated there for a long, long moment. Kate knew enough of the old girl’s construction to know that they’d loaded enough crab so that the Avilda was carrying sufficient ballast. Kate hoped. Just the same, she strained against the list of the deck, as if by pulling hard enough against the pot she could right the boat by her efforts alone. It was entirely involuntary, a human rebellion against this unnatural tilting of the world, and if she’d been able to look around she would have seen the rest of the crew, their faces screwed into similar fearful grimaces, straining just as hard against the nearest available surface.

  The Avilda hesitated a moment longer, and then the swell passed beneath her keel and she heeled over with a rush. “Now!” Kate shouted. “Shove! Hard!”

  Together, she and Andy shoved, hard, and the pot screeched across the deck, to be caught by Seth, who in a few deft movements had it attached to the hoist. He raised it to the pot launcher, Kate fastened off the shots of line and Andy lined up the buoys. Ned craned his neck and caught the nod from the bridge, and shifted the lever that tilted the pot launcher so that the pot slid over the side to crash into the heaving sea and begin its rapid journey to the muddy ocean floor some three hundred feet below. Kate heaved the coil of line after it, Andy the buoys. The process was repeated with the remaining five pots. After thirty—or was it forty?—straight hours of practice, the crew was moving well together, more of a team now, working about eight pots per hour. In good weather the really good boat crews worked between fourteen and eighteen pots per hour, but she didn’t think this was one of them, and it sure as hell wasn’t good weather, so they had done pretty well. She was almost proud of their performance. Just not enough to make a vocation out of it. She stretched, barely repressing a groan. Her body felt like a hockey puck after a sudden death play-off.

  The skipper, a short, broad man with a short, broad face drawn into a perpetual scowl, appeared on the catwalk outside the bridge. He shouted and the deck boss looked up. The skipper made a circling motion with one forefinger.

  The deck boss stuck up his thumb in reply and went aft, where he tossed out a short line with nothing on the end of it, letting it dangle down the side of the boat and trail in their wake.

  It was the signal they had all been waiting for. On the bridge the skipper took a couple of turns on the wheel, and plunging and rolling as she came crossways of the heavy swell, the Avilda began to come about. Kate began gathering and coiling lines as the others stored the rest of the bait, secured the pots that needed mending, and replaced the hatch cover.

  Dinner that night was whatever came to hand first. Kate, choking a little on the last bite of her peanut butter and grape jelly sandwich, stumbled through the door of her stateroom, feeling her way, eyes already closed in anticipation of hitting her bunk. Her foot tangled in something and she tripped and nearly fell. “What the hell?” Her bloodshot gaze peered around malevolently and encountered something that looked like a tent made out of a bedsheet, draped over three lengths of welding rod tied together in a kind of teepee frame.

  Andy’s sun-streaked mop of blond hair poked out of a fold of cloth. “It’s okay, Kate, it’s only me.”

  She stood where she was, swaying. “What the hell are you doing pitching a tent in the middle of the goddam floor? What’s wrong with your bunk?”

  He crawled out on all fours and rose to his feet. “It’s not a tent, it’s a pyramid.”

  “It’s a what?” she said stupidly.

  “A pyramid,” he repeated. “I was reinforcing my prana.”

  “Reinforcing your what?”

  “Reinforcing my prana.” Andy picked up the top of the tent and it collapsed into a limp cylinder of linen and rods. “It’s got the same ratio of structure as the pyramid at Giza.”

  Kate was very, very tired, or she never would have asked. “What’s prana?”

  He set the pyramid in a corner and looked at her, very solemn, very earnest. “Prana is the universal life force. All energy derives from it. It brings together East and West, the spiritual and physical. The pyramid concentrates that energy, and I meditate beneath it, thus enhancing my own personal prana.” He stretched and yawned. “Long shift. Think I’ll turn in.” He climbed into the top bunk and burrowed beneath the covers. “Get the light, would you?”

  Two

  THE SMELL OF BACON frying brought Kate wide awake the next morning. For a moment she lay listening to the throb of the engines and the rush of the Avilda’s hull through the water. It wasn’t necessary to hang on to anything to stay in her bunk. Of course. Now that they were no longer picking pots and hanging their asses out over the water, the high seas had abate
d. Naturally. Raising up on one elbow, she peered out the porthole.

  All there was to see was fog and gray seas slipping rapidly past beneath it. It figured. This was the Aleutians. If it wasn’t foggy, it was windy. If it wasn’t windy, it was foggy. After the last week, Kate would take a nice, peaceful, impenetrable fog any day.

  The tantalizing smell of bacon eventually proved impossible to resist. Abandoning the contemplation of things meteorological for things hygienic and things culinary, she showered and dressed, tied her still-wet hair back into a single braid and beat feet down to the galley. There she was greeted by the dizzying sight of eggs over easy, bacon fried crisp and a huge mound of buttered toast. It was the first hot meal she’d seen in four days. She piled her plate high and sat down next to Andy.

  “Oh, no,” he said, looking at her plate, “not you, too.”

  She reached for a slice of bacon. “I beg your pardon?”

  He waited until the bacon was well and truly in her mouth. “Oink, oink, oink, oink.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Meat eater,” he said, in the portentous tone of one crying “J’accuse!”

  She looked down at her plate, and was aware, not necessarily of things coming to a halt around her, but of attention being shifted to the two of them in an almost palpable way. “And proud of it,” she agreed cheerfully, and forked up some egg.

  “How can you be? Animals have souls,” Andy told her, as earnest and as solemn as he had been the night before holding forth on prana, “the same as humans. Did you know that after death an animal may be reincarnated as a human, and vice versa?”

  “Yes,” Kate said calmly, taking the wind out of his sails and causing the other two men in the galley to look askance at each other and warily at her. Aleuts believed all things, animate and inanimate, had souls. She had learned that at her grandmother’s knee, almost before she learned to walk, but she saw no reason to explain this to Andy.

  “Well, then,” Andy said, recovering, “don’t you agree that it’s wrong to kill animals unnecessarily? It interrupts their spiritual journey. It forces them to suffer another rebirth.” Kate bit into a second slice of bacon and Andy, his voice rising slightly, said, “It upsets the cosmic scheme of things!”

  Kate swallowed and said, “Define ‘unnecessarily.’”

  “What?”

  “Define ‘unnecessarily.’” Nonplussed, he didn’t reply, and Kate said, “It’s necessary for me to eat.”

  “But not meat,” he said quickly.

  “No?”

  Her tone was mild. Andy sensed a potential convert. “You can get everything you need, every essential vitamin, every mineral, all the nourishment your body requires for health and a long life from a vegetarian diet.” Kate chewed bacon. “And without the senseless and wasteful slaughter of other living creatures!” Andy looked at her, his face expectant. If he’d had a tail, it would have been wagging.

  Kate regarded him for a moment without expression, and returned to her bacon. He sighed, a gusty sigh of disappointment. He oinked once more but his heart wasn’t in it. She ignored him, eating her way placidly through the rest of her bacon and eggs, watching him from the corner of her eye as she did so.

  A little over two years back, in another life, when she had worked full-time instead of part-time for Jack Morgan, Kate’s throat had been cut almost literally from ear to ear in an altercation with a gentleman caught in the act of abusing his four-year-old daughter at knifepoint. The gentleman was now deceased, and Kate’s voice was now as scarred as her throat, a low husk of sound ranging anywhere from rough to rasping, and, when she chose, from harsh to horrifying. This morning she chose. Andy’s mouth had barely closed on a heaping spoonful of granola when her scream ripped across the peaceful breakfast scene with all the soothing quality of a grizzly’s claws ripping through flesh.

  The eggs Ned was in the process of flipping had the frying pan jerked out from beneath them and they splattered across the stove top, and the rest of Harry’s coffee splashed across the front of his shirt.

  “Jesus! What the fuck is wrong with you?” Harry roared at her. Ned was cursing slowly and steadily over the charring mess on the stove. “What’s going on?” Seth called down from the bridge.

  She ignored them, watching Andy mop milk and cereal out of his lap with a shaking hand. He looked up and she caught his eye. She leaned forward and said in an oh-so-gentle voice, “Were you aware that scientists have recorded the screams of plants as they are picked?”

  Andy’s jaw dropped. He stared at her, speechless. In the ensuing silence, Ned turned away to hide a grin. A deep, rusty chuckle rumbled up out of Harry’s chest.

  Andy bent back over his cereal bowl without another word, and Kate bit into her last piece of bacon with relish.

  *

  After breakfast it was Kate’s watch and she went up to the bridge to relieve Seth, who gave her a quizzical look, or as near to it as those bland gray eyes could produce. She responded with an equally bland smile.

  Not five minutes after her butt hit the seat of the long-legged chair bolted to the deck next to the steering wheel, Harry Gault appeared on the bridge. He came to a stop next to her and waited, obviously expecting her to move so he could sit down.

  She didn’t budge. “Harry,” she said calmly, “it’s my watch, and I’m standing it. If you didn’t trust me to steer this bucket, you should never have hired me on.”

  His answer was almost a snarl. “Like I had a say.”

  That was true enough, but Kate forbore to belabor the point. The fog was lifting a little, far enough to see a flat sea the same color as the fog rolling out in every direction. The automatic pilot was on, and all Kate had to do was mind the compass and watch for deadheads.

  Harry stood there for another minute, his glower gathering in force and ferocity. Kate glanced over at the radar, found a clear screen and began to hum a little beneath her breath. After a moment or two and another near snarl, Harry stamped back down the stairs into the galley. The slam of his stateroom door reverberated all the way up to the bridge, and Kate broke into song.

  “‘’Tis a damn tough life full of toil and strife we whalemen undergo.’” She leaned forward to get a better look at a spot on the endless plain of water that turned out to be an Arctic tern, starting his 22,000-mile trip south a little late in her opinion. She sat back, hooked her toes over the top rung and thought about her skipper.

  “‘And we don’t give a damn when the gale is done how hard the winds did blow.’” And then there were three, and the third was Harry Gault, skipper of the good ship Avilda, now and six months ago, when Alcala and Brown had disappeared. He was short, bulky and obstreperous, one of those men who took his lack of height out on every moving target that came within range. That and the fact that his seamanship was borderline competent were the only two things she knew about him. So far. Finding out more was why she was on board.

  “‘Now we’re homeward bound ’tis a grand old sound on a good ship taut and free, and we won’t give a damn when we drink our rum with the girls of old Maui.’” There was a tentative noise at the top of the stairs and she turned to see Andy Pence standing there, his expression indicating he had yet to forgive her for the scene at the breakfast table. “Hey there.”

  He directed his gaze at a point two inches above her left shoulder. “I was just on my way into the chart room.”

  She waved a benevolent hand. “Be my guest.”

  Fourth on the crew roster was Andy Pence, fresh off the beach of Ventura, California, seeking true adventure in the Far North, high as a kite on anything and everything Alaskan, and Kate’s bunkie. Thus far, she had discovered that he meditated beneath a percale pyramid and didn’t eat red meat. Last and most important, Andy Pence had been hired on after Kate, when the deckhand who had replaced Alcala had quit, and probably had nothing whatever to do with Alcala’s and Brown’s disappearance. At best, he was harmless; at worst, a hindrance. She thought back to the galley and grinned
to herself. He was also, she hoped, a fast learner.

  The rustle of stiff paper came from behind her. Curious, she checked the horizon and the autopilot and went back to see what Andy was up to.

  The chart room stood aft of the wheelhouse. Andy was leaning his elbows on the tilted surface of the chart table, mooning over a marine chart. Kate stood up on tiptoe to peer over his shoulder. “What’re you looking at the Shumagins for? That’s a tad north of our heading, isn’t it?”

  Still very much on his dignity, he did not deem the question worthy of a civil reply. She smiled a little behind his back. He was so very young. The smile faded. As young as Stu Brown and Chris Alcala. She returned to the wheelhouse and hoisted herself back into the captain’s chair, resuming her scan of the horizon. It was almost noon, and the fog was beginning to burn off.

  It was one of those still winter days when the Cradle of the Winds lay calm and deceptively quiescent, gray sky and silver sea melding into a luminescent horizon without color or definition, a day handmade for dreaming. Old Sam Dementieff had shown Kate a picture of a very old map once, drawn when people thought the world was flat and square. On each edge the mapmaker had written “Beware—Heare Bee Dragons and Diverse Monsteres of Ye Deepe.” It was that kind of day, a gift of a day, a day with dragons just over the next swell, a day when she didn’t wince away from the thought of her father, or worry at the task that lay before her. The sea and the sky and the throb of the engine was all there was, and she settled back and gave herself up to it.

  The knots rolled by. She heard the sounds of a chart being rolled and stowed. A moment later Andy appeared, still very much on his dignity. “Have some coffee,” Kate said amiably, pouring him a mug from the thermos she’d brought topside with her.

  “I’m not thirsty,” he said stiffly.

  “Have some anyway.”

  He took the mug because she might have dropped it on him if he hadn’t. She jerked her head. “So what’s with the chart on the Shumagins?”