Royce, Royce, the People's Choice

by Peter Hawes

  COP CAR HAD purred up a coupla minutes ago and stopped behind the spare craypots. Bloody Alf Cotterel. Dooley’d given him a big groper one day, just to make sure the law stayed bent in his favour, then he’d got done for speeding that same friggin’ night by Harry Reynolds the traffic cop. Who was a friggin’ vegetarian, wasn’t he? How do you keep in justice when the law doesn’t eat fish?

  Constable Cotterel is leaning on his black-and-white car. ‘Cocaine run’s not till Tuesday, Alf, you dozy bugger,’ says Dooley.

  Sticky comes up the ladder first, throws his shore bag ahead of him and pommels off the ledge of the wharf like a gymnast. His face is glazed with violent thought and he goes past Dooley like he hasn’t seen him.

  ‘Yeah, gidday to you, too,’ calls Dooley after him.

  ‘You can get fucked like the rest of them,’ snarls Sticky, not looking back. He goes into the shed, gets his sack of shore clothes and heads off down the wharf like a bad John Wayne. Charming.

  Dooley leans on the yellow crane, then flinches. Shit, he’d put weight on his sore hand. Bob’s tarping the rig and bawling orders to the kid in the hold. Cripes ole Bob looks a dag from up here. Sight fer sore eyes at the best of times with his no teeth and round body, but foreshortened down there he looks like a big and little spud balanced on top of each other.

  ‘You’re gonna have to bend your arse unloading, Bob,’ Dooley calls down. ‘Stuffed me hand – can do bugger all lifting.’

  The little potato on top rolls round to look up at him; ‘Since when did you do bugger all lifting anyway? Whadd’d you do?’

  ‘Put a bloody industrial staple through it and it went septic on me.’

  ‘Hard cheese, going for compo?’

  ‘Not worth it, I’ll save that fer the day Lew Hughes shoots me.’ Bob’s mouth opened to laugh, like an eye in the potato. ‘I’m not as bad as Barry Sergeant, but. You know Barry – works outa Nelson?’

  ‘Yeah, know the name,’ says Bob, standing by the forward hatch to guide in the first skip from the crane.

  ‘Just heard on the RT; crewing for some bugger up there and puts a boning knife through his hand. Right through – sticking out the other side. Well, goes up to the skipper and says: “Skip, you’d better get me back to hospital.” Well, skipper looks at this knife sticking out Barry’s hand and faints. Faints dead away. Ole Barry has to steer himself home one-fucken-handed.’

  THE KID IS in the hold pouring trays of fish into the gurry-streaked skips that the bizarre bloke on the wharf is sending down on the crane. From the safety of the cabin she can see the rise and fall of marine commerce through the window. The cretinised crane driver is good; he wields that crane cable with the easy grace of a fly fisherman. He’s obviously not the cop, and she can now risk a study of him. Jesus wept, what a sight! A sort of thick-lensed, stiff-haired Jerry Lewis look-alike with constant talk coming out his mouth at about the same rate as cigarette smoke. He had a dirty bandage on his right hand.

  Another head sticks out over the wharftop. She sees blondeness and good-looking stupidity before she wrenches her head away from the window.

  ‘This all you got, Bob?’ said a light, piping voice.

  ‘Yeah, few more flats, bit of skate and that’s it, Alf.’

  ‘No groper, then?’

  ‘Nah. Hen’s teeth is groper these days, Alf.’

  She watches Bob’s upturned head until it lowers back to business at deck level. The cop may well have gone. This is confirmed by a ‘Good riddance,’ from the freak above.

  ‘Drugs surveillance,’ muttered Bob. ‘He’d be the only cop that thinks narcotics come with scales on. May as well go up; the bloke up there’s Dooley Morgan, he runs the show. The girl, if she’s still there, is Marjorie. Works for the opposition – Merlord – but she’s a good sort.’

  THERE WAS ABOUT an hour’s light left, which’d be plenty. Bob had had about one-point-three ton and most of that was out by now. Then time fer a couple of quiet beers and find out what the fuck’s up with Sticky. Probably something to do with the kid. Nice kid, really nice except for … well, except for just about everything, really. Jesus! Dooley gave a sort of lurching gasp that just about blew his cigarette over the side of the wharf. Holy hobs, what’s that? Something had come out of the wheelhouse. A person – from this angle about half woman and half nightmare. She was climbing the ladder.

  Bob calls up to him. ‘Dooley! This is Betty. We rescued her from a Jap squiddie.’

  She arrived at wharf level and scrabbled about, trying to clear the beam. He should have helped, but he couldn’t. He was transfixed. He stared in bad awe as she righted herself and approached. She was nugget black with a flat face and a thin nose that stuck out of it like a centre-board. And pale eyes. And Jesus, as the sun filled them, they reddened, until by the time she reached him they looked like eggshells of blood.

  ‘Hi, Dooley,’ she sort of quacked in American. ‘Guess you’d better call me Betty the refugee.’ She put out her hand; it was aimed smack at his heart. Even as he reached out to take it he knew there would be an electric shock when they touched. Her grip was firm, which was just as well. If it hadn’t been he’d have turned and run.

  WITH HIS BACK to the sun he was in semi-silhouette, which gave him this uncanny appearance of just being a big pair of eyes hanging in the sky. And it was an impression that never faded, because everywhere she went after that, she could feel those magnified goggle eyes following her. Damn. He was suspicious. She opened her tanjian eye and looked inside him. The usual jumble of hernia, haemorrhoid, erratic testosterone and bricky liver of heedlessly sociable men. And across the centre – kokoro – of his soul rolled the usual clouds of evil, selfishness, heroism, shrewdness, avarice, fear, rage, shy ecstasy and doubt. Doubt about almost everything, but most of all about her. She blinked back into monochromatic normality and appraised her first New Zealand enemy. Damn. Everything depended on this goddam guy. Dooley Morgan was obviously the Man. Things round here were done through Dooley. He’d be registered; you’d get your FLD off Dooley. This was gonna be the most delicate part of the enterprise by far. She tried another tack.

  ‘You a married man, Dooley?’ she asked lightly.

  ‘Depends,’ he replied. ‘In your case I am.’

  Damn.

  ‘Hey, Marjorie!’ Bob was calling to the girl in the fuck-you jeans. ‘We got something you might like to see. Show Marjorie, kid.’

  The kid pulled the tarp off the slurrybed to reveal the fish. For some reason, they’d all instinctively conspired to hide it from the cop. It lay on the deck, radiant in the redness of the low sun, huge, perfect, divine.

  ‘Holy shit!’ said the tall girl, arms folded under her breasts. The kid beamed up at her, taking all the credit for the vision. ‘It’s beautiful. What is it?’

  It was Dooley Morgan who answered. ‘Bluefin tuna!’ he splurted, staring down at it through his tobacco haze. ‘What the fuck’s it doing here?’ He sounded almost accusing.

  ‘We caught it. Kid’s line – me and Betty’s expertise. You can put the FLD in the kid’s name. Apparently he’s gonna break more records than a goat can shit.’

  She watched Dooley. He was agitated. ‘You didn’t catch it out there, in the sea off Westport?’

  ‘So where did we catch it, Dooley, you dumb bastard?’ chortled Bob.

  ‘Well bugger me,’ muttered Dooley. Then he lifted his eyes from the fish to her, and he was seeing the whole goddam plan.

  She must find the change. Often the change had come when she had willed it. The wind would shift, the current deepen and her mother would cry: ‘Sailfish! A hundred!’ Had she effected the change herself? Statistically it was possible, it had happened often enough. She opened her every sense to the air and willed the change.

  Dooley smiled – now there’s change for you! But it was a smile of triumph. He was onto her, he knew the game. There was no change there. Then he said: ‘Well, we’d better drink a toast, hadn’t we?’ and set off for this little b
lack tin shed surrounded by old anchors, timbers, crawfish traps and other bits of the usual marine rubble.

  The change came while he was away. The girl spoke some words that turned into mana from heaven as they reached her.

  ‘Hey, Bob – while Dooley’s away – you want an FLD from me for it?’ she said and laughed. ‘Come on, bloody Dooley’s double-crossed me often enough. I give you the FLD, you keep all the profit – I just want to see the look on his face when he finds out it’s now a Merlord fish.’

  She was offering him an FLD. Missy Long-legs here was registered! She had authority of issue, too!

  The girl and Bob laughed and joked a bit, but it was obvious it wasn’t going to happen. No matter; Betty’d effected the change.

  Dooley came back with a bottle of Johnny Walker Red. ‘To clever little shitbags,’ he said and swilled. He wiped the top and handed it to Bob. When all those on the wharf had drunk from the bottle, he unhesitatingly dropped it down to Royce on the hard steel deck. Who caught it in one hand – then spoilt the effect by coughing after his quaff.

  The atmosphere lightened after that – as it often does after a drink or two. But mainly because Dooley thought he had the situation in hand.

  MEETING BETTY HAD somehow put Dooley in a weird mood. He didn’t say much about it while they were getting the fish up from the deck and he did his bit, sore hand and all. But there was this bitchy little bickering going on between them all the time – like when they’d got it onto the wharf and were talking about transferring it from the slurrybed onto ice.

  ‘Seven-hundred-pound fish,’ says Dooley, ‘you’ll need, oh, eighty pound of ice.’

  ‘Eighty-five,’ says Betty.

  ‘Okay, if you want to get down to brass tacks,’ grits Dooley, nursing his bandage that seemed to have got stained by blood from the strain of lifting, ‘heat needed to melt a pound of ice to fifty Fahrenheit is one-forty-four Btu, so that’s seven hundred times fifty minus freezing point, which leaves eighteen, so that’s 12,600 divided by a hundred and forty-four, which is …’

  ‘Eighty-three,’ said Betty.

  They glared at each other like gladiators.

  ‘Plus sixteen left over, so sixteen over one-forty-four is …’

  ‘A ninth.’

  A longer, more strangled pause.

  ‘Plus the specific heat of the fish, which is one, so you’ll need eighty-four pounds one-point-seven-seven ounces of ice,’ said Dooley with triumphant finality.

  It was dumb and impressive at the same time; squabbling like schoolkids but doing it in humungous big sums like Einstein used to. Then when they got it on the scales at last, Dooley bursts out:

  ‘Seven-hundred-and-sixteen pounds. You’ll need another one-point-three-three pounds of ice.’ Holy shite, so clever and so childish.

  They’d all been puffing like forwards when they got the fish to the scales, even though the forklift had done most of the work. But you had to balance it and steady it and with Dooley’s crook hand he wasn’t up to much. Even Marjorie had come over to lend a hand, despite being the opposition.

  So there they were, gathered round the big red scales when Betty said: ‘Say, Marjorie, you gotta camera?’

  ‘Yeah, we keep one in the office.’

  ‘Well, hey, this is a big moment for the district; reckon it should be immortalised, don’t you?’

  Everyone thought the moment should be immortalised, so Marjorie ran off to get the company camera – giving a very nice display of jeans-running as she left.

  She returned with an instamatic.

  ‘You don’t want a photo of me,’ says Bob, ‘but get me one with the kid next to it. I’ll use it in court as evidence of the danger he put my boat in.’

  ‘Of course we want a photo of you, Bob,’ quacked Betty, ‘we gotta get this moment for posterity; you all gotta be in it. Come on, gather round.’ And rather in the way she’d taken over the line, she took over the photographic session. Dooley got herded in in the end, but he wasn’t enjoying himself. Frowned like an Apache through all the pictures.

  ‘Now, you all need one for your mantelpieces,’ orders Betty. ‘Royce stand up there with it.’

  And she took a photo of him smiling fit to bust, alone with his fish. Then Bob, after a boring five minutes of modesty, got his photo taken with it. Then Dooley. But when it came to Marjorie, Dooley suddenly kicked up. All the tension he’d built up against Betty suddenly flooded out against poor old Marjorie.

  ‘Like stink you’ll take a photo of the friggin’ opposition with that fish!’ he bellowed, and his face had gone bright tomato.

  It was a bit stunning, and not at all like Dooley. It was a bit sad, too, because, for the first time, he was showing this mean streak no one had known he had.

  ‘With respect, Dooley,’ said Betty, ‘that’s a bit dog-in-the-manger, innit? Can’t you forget rivalry for one minute? There’s a little bit of history being made here, and surely everyone involved should be allowed to share it?’

  ‘Yeah, come on, Dooley, grow up, mate,’ growled Bob, embarrassed. ‘We all get a photo – no reason why Marjorie should miss out.’

  ‘Me grow up?’ snarled Dooley. It looked like he was going to walk away from them then suddenly he swung to Betty so fast his glasses jerked outwards from his nose with the centrifugal force. ‘Where you from, Betty? Huh? Turn up from a Jap fishing boat with the first bluefin ever seen in the sea off Westport. What are you, a witch?’

  Jeezas! All that voodoo and so on – Dooley was saying more than he knew.

  ‘I’m a Santo Dominican, Dooley,’ she replied gracefully, ‘who was rescued from the Japanese squid fleet by these guys. I know a thing or two about tuna so I showed them how to keep their fish in the best condition.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘Well, preferably for a trophy, but if you want to sell it I suppose you’d get six US a kilo. Be one hell of a waste.’

  ‘I know a bit about tuna, too,’ sneered Dooley. ‘Worked the purse seiners off Hawaii a few years back. Tuna’s a shoaling fish. So if there’s big schools of them out there, how come no one’s ever seen hide or hair of them before?’

  ‘Cripes, Dooley,’ muttered Bob, ‘whadderyer trying to prove – that this bloody fish doesn’t exist?’

  ‘No, that somehow this fish has got something to do with her and the Jap fishing boats. Probably keep them alive in nets for preservation – they used to do that off Hawaii – and this bugger escaped.’

  ‘Purse seining, huh?’ said Betty, ‘so that’d be albacore, skipjack? Well they shoal, sure – but you ever heard of a school of marlin, Dooley? Or swordfish? Huh? No, you haven’t, because they don’t shoal. Nor do their big cousins the bluefin.’

  Dooley sighed, probably to use up the space he couldn’t think of words to fill. He was tramping up and down on the spot at the same time. ‘That’s as well as maybe,’ he said, saying nothing. ‘Right now I reckon the best thing to do is get some Ag and Fish people over here. They can check out how it got here while we get on with the certification.’ And he stumped off to his hut.

  ‘Where’s the nearest Ag and Fish?’ asked Betty mildly.

  ‘Oh,’ said Bob, ‘Nelson, Christchurch.’

  BERNIE DOWNIE HAD pulled up in a smart black combi van that Betty noted had the faint overtones of a hearse. He was a big, grim, steep-faced dude in a dark tracksuit – sort of the off-duty version of his professional kit. He stepped down with a grunt and pulled down his cuffs. The slight evening wind lifted the phoney, brush-over hair cover of his bald pate like the lid of a foot-activated trashcan. His skin had the trademark pasty unhealth of poolsharks and morticians. Almost inevitably he wore wet, saggy lips like Alfred Hitchcock’s.

  He said, ‘How’s things?’ to Bob, Dooley and Royce, hands clasped over his fly as if they sexually excited him. Mortician’s salute. Then he came to stand in front of her, palms respectfully over balls.

  ‘You’d be the person who ordered the coffin? It was certainly an American ac
cent, although we never got down to names?’

  ‘Yeah, Betty. How do you do – Mr Downie?’ Bernie Downie the Chinese arsonist. She smothered a giggle; her nose squeaked.

  ‘Yes. And associates. It’s this way,’ and he walked to the rear of the van and opened it. Inside was a tawny, light-grained coffin of great size. Well made; some sort of local timber rather than particle board. Handles. Holy shit, there were mock silver handles!

  ‘I hope this was what you had in mind?’

  ‘It looks great.’

  ‘Yes, it was interesting to make,’ said Bernie Downie. ‘Surprisingly, it didn’t really take us out of the template. We found that the lateral dimensions you desired almost exactly accorded with those of our largest ever … recipient.’

  ‘That’d be Dan Hill, then, was it, Bernie?’ said Bob.

  ‘Yes, you’re absolutely right, Bob,’ chortled Bernie Downie. ‘Dear old Dan himself. Of course we had to add several feet in length – and make provision for the tail. Ha ha. We’ve never had a tail on a coffin before – quite the talking point around the district, I’ll tell you!’

  ‘Hey, Royce,’ Bob called down into the depths of the unseen fishing boat where Royce was repacking the polybins, ‘your grandfather was the same width as a bluefin tuna.’

  ‘Guaranteed waterproof?’ Betty asked Bernie Downie.

  ‘Oh yes. Even without any sort of lining. We guarantee that. There is no seepage in our products until the very last moment of organic decomposition. And that’s at least two years down the track – barring heavy metal run-off. Fearfully corrosive – and not covered by insurance, I’m afraid. All care, no responsibility.’

  ‘I’m not burying it,’ said Betty, ‘I’m carrying it. “Coffin” in the tuna industry is a means of conveyance.’