The Sinking of the Angie Piper

by Chris Riley

  I stared at my friend. And I didn’t say anything for a while. We consumed our halibut, scalloped potatoes, creamed corn—our meals fit for Poseidon. Danny had lost his mother, and now he worried about losing his dad, because hell, what would he do then? Where would he go, and who would take care of him? His sister, Mary, living in Seattle with her husband and two kids? Maybe … but maybe not. Shit, Danny might have to go into a “home.” I think he was aware of that, and it scared him to death.

  I could have said it just then, there in that galley. Don’t you worry, Danny. You can always live with me. I’ll take care of you. I could have said that, but I didn’t. For my entire life, it seemed I had walked a path of psychological dormancy, of mental retreat, and even now, when I needed desperately to wake the fuck up because my best friend needed me to, I couldn’t.

  So I ignored Danny’s question. “I think that chicken might be ready now,” I said, walking over to the stove. The chicken smelled good, and I said as much as I turned off the heat, shoveled a few pieces on a plate, and walked back to the table. Danny wasn’t as dumb as most people figured him to be. He dropped the subject about when his dad would die. More accurately, the subject of who would take care of him once he was alone in the world.

  We ate our food, then headed for our racks and fell right back to sleep. Seven hours of gorgeous rest passed before I woke to the sound of waves lapping against the sides of our boat, and a heated exchange amongst a flock of seagulls somewhere outside. We were anchored down off the shores of Tugidak Island once again, and I wondered who was awake. Danny was still sleeping below me, snoring as usual, so I climbed down, dressed, and left our stateroom with as much care as possible, hoping not to wake him.

  The rocking of the boat was peaceful, almost non-existent. I heard the sounds of a movie from the television in the galley. Proceeding down the dimly lit hall, I almost made it into that room. Loni was in there, watching Aliens, eating cold chicken and leftover scalloped potatoes. Curiosity turned me toward the other sounds I had heard—another heated exchange, this one coming from the wheelhouse. I stopped halfway up the stairs and listened.

  “At this point, Dave, I don’t give a rat’s ass anymore!” Fred Mooney was a different breed in the world of boat captains. Unlike most, he kept himself steady and cool, rarely raising his voice to the crew. But now, he was outright pissed. And I presumed it had something to do with that “talking to” he had told me about, the one planned for Dave.

  “He’s supposed to take shit,” Dave said. “He’s the fucking greenhorn, for Christ’s sake! That’s his job.” Not surprisingly, Dave had been attempting to disguise his intimidating attitude under the veil that all greenhorns had it coming, and that they were destined to be treated like shit. However, Dave had crossed the line on more than one occasion with both Danny and me. And now Fred was calling him on it.

  “This is about way more than him being a greenhorn, Dave. Don’t you fucking kid around with me!”

  “Oh, give me a break, Fred! It’s a matter of common sense, that’s all. Speaking of which: what kind of sense puts a fucking retard on a boat where one mistake can get a man killed?”

  “Why, you son of a bitch! You let me worry about that!” I heard a dull thud, a fist smashed onto a table perhaps, and then a brief silence, followed by, “You need to let it go, Dave. Just let your past go. It’s eating you up inside, and the whole world sees it.”

  “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

  “Oh, yes you do. The drinking. The bar fights. You’re letting your past tear a hole inside you.”

  “My life is my business, Fred. So do me a fucking favor and stay out of it.”

  More silence. Then, with a castigating voice, the captain replied, “All right, Dave. I’ll stay out of it. But remember: this is my boat. And every goddamned thing that happens here is my business. So change your fucking tone with our greenhorn, or you’ll be finding yourself a new job.”

  Dave went out through the side door with a slam, most likely to cool off, get some fresh air, and compose himself. And while standing on the steps, slightly alarmed, I heard the captain mutter a few curses under his breath. I remained frozen for a while, wondering, attempting to process all that I had heard. But it was several minutes later, while sitting next to Loni in the galley, watching a man get ripped apart by an alien, that it dawned on me. The captain … he had something specific in mind when he told Dave to let his past go.

  Chapter 15

  Relentless are the waters that own our world—from the seas, mountain rivers, and alpine lakes, to every single drop of rain that casually falls on the planet. The force of water is ancient by its own right, timeless, and only temporarily yielding to the other forces of this world, for it is also ravaging with its transient ways, and a master in the art of deception. Water is yielding only long enough for a man to stare at it from the other side of a steel rail. If even for that long.

  That’s where I was, on this day when the water seemed sparse and dry. A light rain sporadically swept my cheeks and lips. For fourteen hours we sat at anchor, resting away our weariness. And for fourteen hours our pots sat underneath all that ancient water, baiting crab. Or so we hoped.

  Looking out across the rail, I spotted the two orange buoys that marked the first pot we’d left since our anchor point near Tugidak Island. The buoys swayed in the tide listlessly as I held hook and rope, took aim. I’d worked long hours hooking pot buoys in the past, but Loni mostly did the honors now, since he almost never missed.

  “Be quick on the hook. Don’t think about it,” was Loni’s advice. I stood at the rail, “thinking about it,” and tossed that damn hook three times before the captain cursed me over the loudspeaker. The crew burst into laughter, Dave shook his head in disgust, and Fred worked the Angie Piper into a wide circle. We had one hundred and sixty pots sitting out there, which meant another forty hours of work ahead of us. Even more if those pots were as full as we expected them to be. But for every pot missed with the hook, that was another ten minutes added to our day. Just don’t think about it, I told myself.

  Danny had been standing next to the sorting table when I failed to retrieve those buoys. He was toying with a measuring stick and seemed amused by my blunder, but mostly, he was eager to sort the crab. Damn if my friend wasn’t meant for the sea. This observation stuck in my head for the entire time it took to make our second pass on that first pot. Afterward, I took slipshod aim, tossed the hook, and snagged the buoys dead center—the payoff for not thinking about it.

  The hook-man’s second responsibility is more crucial than the first. After hooking the buoys, I pulled them onto the deck as quickly as possible, careful not to let them sweep along the side of the boat and catch up in the engine prop—a catastrophic mistake. Once the buoys were over the rail, I tossed them to the side and fed the crab-pot line through the block and the winch, beginning the process of pulling over a thousand pounds of steel, and hopefully crab, up from the bottom of the ocean.

  With roughly a minute before that pot broke the surface, there was little to do other than wait. I thought about it now, the entire job of working a crab boat. It was a horrible lot. Always cold, wet, and seasick, your body getting tossed around the deck by waves four stories high—just another day at the office. With this job, a deckhand’s life was not unlike bait at the end of a hook, luring grim reapers from the bitter shadows below. Each breath was in constant danger of becoming doused by the coldest death one could imagine. What kind of friend was I to bring Danny into this hell?

  The hard truth is that for some people, fishing is the only occupation that makes any sense. For them, it is the “land” that feels foreign and dangerous. On land, there are too many shark-like forces—human and otherwise—roaming about: scary, callous, harmful in the most unimaginable ways. And on land, ironically, there are few places to run or hide, unlike the vast horizons of the open sea.

  The winch squealed madly on this first pot of the run, sending my hop
es in flight like gulls to the wind and erasing my reflections. “Money” was on my mind, as I watched that steel cage rise from the depths. Tanner crab, clean and plentiful, twisting in a cage that bulged out from all sides, produced a clamor of cheers from the crew—smiles all around.

  Danny pushed the sorting table up to the launcher while Loni snagged the pot bridle with a gaffing hook. Dave and I joined in to manhandle the heavy cage into position. Once we lowered the pot down onto the launcher, Salazar tossed a switch at the hydro station and sent the dogs in. The crab pot now clamped down hard, we opened the door, and out spewed several hundred dollars worth of squirming bounty.

  “Might be a short season!” hollered Loni. “Tons of crab. We gonna go home soon!”

  For the duration of that first half of the string, that was what most of us believed, even joked about. Twenty pots later, Salazar broke character by dancing on the deck, his asinine grin clamped down on a smoking cigarette. He looked like a leprechaun dancing a jig, and I almost cracked a rib, I laughed so hard. Each of those pots contained on average of four hundred legal crabs. And with twenty more pots to go with just this first string, it was likely that Danny was the only one on the boat not doing the math.

  But then, up came crab pot number twenty-two. None of us even realized the first sign of our misfortune, hidden in the vague sound of the winch. It was a dead, hollow sound, unrestrained by a mere thousand pounds. In rapid shift, that pot broke through the olive-colored sea, pronouncing boldly its vacant core, salty rivers sluicing clean through steel and mesh, effectively washing away our current elation. Goddamn, nothing lasts forever. Not a single crab in the pot, and it struck each of us as both alarming and peculiar. Our previous pot contained five hundred and ten tanners. Could it be that our string was suddenly “off the crab”?

  In the world of crabbing, there are two distinct ways to rob a crew of their catch. The first, and most common form is a practice known as “potting down.” Despite the enormity of both the Gulf of Alaska and the Bering Sea—the two greatest fishing grounds the North Pacific Ocean has to offer—it is still entirely possible and likely to create a boat full of enemies when a captain decides to drop his pots within a few hundred yards of another vessel’s string. This happens on occasion, mostly perpetrated by rookie captains. Such an incident, more often than not, is “settled” via a distressing confrontation at a bar such as McCrawley’s, or even over the radio.

  The second form of robbery is not as common and more sinister. It is the simple hauling and taking of crab from another crew’s pots. And that’s what we encountered halfway through that string, beginning with crab pot number twenty-two.

  “Son of a bitch!” shouted Dave, smacking the pot door against the sorting table. Our telltale sign, other than the lack of crab, was that the door ties of that pot had not been wrapped the same way we’d tied them. Dave made a quick reference to Danny, wondering, but then Loni dismissed it by reminding him that our greenhorn hadn’t tied any of the doors. “Fucking bandits!” Dave concluded, smacking the door on the sorting table once more.

  “Pirates in the Gulf,” growled Loni, coiling rope to the side.

  “What happened?” Danny asked. He was at the table, sorting the last of the crab from the previous pot.

  “Another crew ripped us off, Danny,” I said. “Got here before us and took the crab.” Danny looked away then, perturbed, at once cautious. He didn’t say anything else, just went back to work. I could tell he was thinking about it, though.

  The news was unsettling, and Fred came down from the wheelhouse to examine the pot himself. “Well, shit,” he said, working his hands over the door, the bait jars, even the pot bridle, presumably searching for clues.

  “I’ll bet the rest of this string is empty too,” replied Dave.

  “Yeah, probably is.” Fred gave a shrug and ran a hand through his hair. “Not the first time it’s happened, that’s for sure. Go ahead and set her back down, boys. They’re not coming back.” Fred said this as if he knew the tactics of crab thievery firsthand. His experience as a captain was speaking. Throughout his years, he had seen just about everything in the world of fishing. Minutes later, he was up in the wheelhouse, sending out a warning to all the other fishing vessels running gear. For now, this was the only way to deal with the culprits, as the thieving captain would most certainly hear Fred’s announcement and scoot on out of the area.

  From then on, work felt like someone kept driving a finger into my eye. We pulled nineteen more empty pots up from the sea, re-baited them, then sent them right back down again. Danny did his job without complaint, as usual, clipping bait setups and retrieving crab-pot lines. I noticed how fluidly his feet moved about the deck now, and how he stayed clear of the danger spots such as wayward rope, crab-tank holes, or the picking crane used to transport our crab pots. Any one of these components of the vessel would quickly cause a man writhing pain if he were careless around them. To my relief, Danny had a “routine” dialed in, and it was the one small thing during those moments that actually put a smile on my face, as we turned our “pillaged” gear for the next hour.

  We finished that string and then took a three-hour break in the galley while the boat motored off toward our last three strings. Fred gave us the option to take a short nap, but we were all too wired from coffee and the agitation born of having our full pots violated. I sat in the galley. Consuming more coffee and more candy bars, I wondered who had stolen our crab, and how they’d done it.

  Without a doubt they took our catch during the smallest hours of the day, shrouded in darkness to protect the identity of their boat. Their captain, paranoid over thoughts of being caught, probably never took his eyes off the radar. Or perhaps he didn’t care. There were plenty of young skippers out there who thought nothing of stealing another man’s livelihood. I imagined this man’s crew on deck working the pots, handling crab, the very image of us, excluding the rounds of snickering they must have shared. I even considered that they knew about me, and Danny, and that perhaps their intentions extended further than monetary gain. Maybe they were in cahoots with Dave, and stole our catch to help support his argument against having Danny on board.

  That last thought was farfetched, but when a man gets too tired, his mind starts to play tricks on him. He starts to imagine things. I knew that before I became a deckhand, and realized the true meaning of “tired.” But shit, it was too early in the season for me to feel that way. It was too early in the day, for that matter. We hadn’t been away from Tugidak Island for more than six hours, and even though I might have been imagining things there in the galley, I found the notion unsettling. I guess I expected more from a young man like myself.

  “Just the first sign of more bad news to come; that’s all it is.” Dave’s sudden pronouncement prophesying our future shook me out of my dark thoughts. I stared at the man leaning against the fridge, drinking from a can of Mountain Dew. We all knew what he was thinking, who he was referring to, and for a split second, there in the recess of my “tired mind,” I thought I might tell Dave to fuck off. It would have come as a complete shock, of course. Not just to Dave, but to the entire crew, including myself. It probably would have resulted in a smack across my face, never mind Fred’s strict intolerance for fighting aboard the Angie Piper. Probably. But of course, I kept my mouth shut.

  I looked over at Danny and Loni, both sitting next to Salazar, all three of them squeezed into the booth of the dining table, drinking an assortment of beverages, and eating chips and salsa. They each had blank, tired stares, and seemed indifferent to Dave’s comment, until Loni casually said, “Fuck off, Dave.”

  In response, Dave simply shrugged. Downing the last of his Mountain Dew, he crushed the can in his hand, tossed it into the sink, and grumbled, “Mark my words … you will all see.” Then he left the room.

  Something about those last words, or the way he left, or perhaps the entire short exchange, sent an icy shiver through my body. I wrapped my coat more snugly around my shoul
ders, gripped my coffee tighter, and tried to close my mind to the foreboding born of Dave’s comment.

  Chapter 16

  “Look out! Look out!” Salazar’s scream rode the top of the forty-foot wave that slapped over the deck. The seas were high and came up on us almost without notice. Our last string of this run, and we were nothing but shivering men on a steel slab in the darkest of nights. The wind howled down from the north at sixty-plus knots. Rain pelted us like bullets. We were all eager to get inside the boat. But damn if there weren’t ten more pots left in the string.

  “Look out!” Salazar screamed again.

  From the sorting table I’d been clinging to, I swore in disbelief at what was now transpiring before us on deck.

  “Everybody, take cover,” shouted the captain, over the loudspeaker. Apparently he had seen it too, and it sure as hell wasn’t a wave.

  Loni pitched his body to the side. Dave tucked under the rail, the swells of a black ocean pouring over him like a waterfall. An errant crab pot swung madly across the Angie Piper’s deck. The pot was attached to the picking crane. Salazar was in the process of transferring it to the main-stack for chaining down when our boat abruptly careened portside.

  Every deckhand’s fear had become a reality. The thousand-pound cage swept past me, nearly clipping my head as it crashed into the stack of pots to my left. With almost all our gear onboard, there was little room to evade the monstrous block of steel. And if it nailed any of us, we’d certainly be dead or messed up beyond repair.

  “Drop it!” shouted Dave, from under a curtain of rushing water. He had a point—releasing the pot could possibly help stabilize it. But then the thought occurred to me: who would be in the way once that thing came down? Like the weapon of an angry giant, it smashed haphazardly across the deck. Salazar worked madly at the hydro controls in hopes of ending the chaos, but twice he had been knocked down by the surge of saltwater that had turned our deck into a small pond.