by Paul Watkins
I shrugged. ‘He told me he was in Vietnam.’
‘What else did he say?’
‘He told me his name.’ I looked across ‘at Franklin and then at Howard. ‘What does it matter?’
Kelley spoke quietly. ‘We don’t like him.’
Howard shook his head. ‘Don’t like him at all.’
‘Why not?’ I stirred the grits on my plate with a knife.
Franklin sipped at a mug of coffee. ‘He just gives us a funny feeling is all.’
I kept quiet, expecting them to burst out laughing and let me know I had fallen into the trap of one of their jokes.
After a while, Kelley looked up from his plate. ‘You waiting for more reasons why we don’t like him? Well maybe we don’t have any more reasons.’ He gave me a serious look.
While he was busy looking serious, Howard leaned across and stole his bacon.
I lay in my bunk, right arm hooked over my eyes, hearing a slight hiss as our bow cleared the water, then a thud as it struck the next wave.
A pot hit the floor in the galley.
Kelley laughed.
As I fell away into sleep, I listened to our engines, the constant storming of the huge Cats down below.
Six
I stood in the galley doorway watching the muddle of people who screamed at each other on deck. Franklin leaned on my shoulder, explaining what happened.
He said that Marco had tried to use the winch to raise a dredge on deck.
Pittsley smacked the fist of one hand into the palm of his other. His face was twisted with anger and he sucked his breath in through clenched teeth.
Gil stood between him and Marco, shaking his finger and yelling.
Reynolds shouted for everyone to calm down. He shifted from one foot to the other, waving his hands in front of him.
Gil barked at the mate. ‘Get the fuck up in the wheelhouse and drive this boat like I’m paying you to do!’
Reynolds let his hands fall to his sides. Slowly his feet stopped shifting. He turned on his heel and climbed up to the wheelhouse.
I felt a nudge against my shoulder as Kelley ran out half asleep from the bunk room, blinking in the light. ‘Are we sinking? Are we going down?’
‘Sinking fast.’ Franklin grabbed Kelley by the shoulders and shouted, ‘Hurry! Hurry!’
‘Oh my God! Oh my God!’ Kelley ran back into the bunk room.
Franklin and I sat under the deck canopy with our backs to the galley wall.
Kelley reappeared at the doorway. ‘We’re not really sinking, are we?’
*
‘Marco said he knew how to work the winch.’ Franklin pointed to the winch hook. It swung loose across the deck with the motion of the waves. ‘Bringing his dredge up over the side I guess Marco did OK, but setting it on the deck he brought it down too fast. The hook popped out of the bull ring. Pittsley was right underneath it. Dredge come down right over him, hit the deck so hard it left a dent. Only reason Pittsley isn’t dead is because he was standing inside the triangle part of the dredge. By the time I get on deck, he’s still standing there. Just standing there trying to figure out what happened. Then he goes over and nails Marco right on the nose.’
‘Bust it?’ Warm salt air blew in my face.
‘Well, it don’t look like it used to.’
Marco stood back from the tangle of Gil and Pittsley arguing. I led him over to the lazarette. I sat him down on the hatch, resting my hands on his shoulders and pressing until his legs gave.
He held his hands in front of his face.
I pulled them away, gently at first but then having to use force because he tried to keep them there.
His nose was swollen and pointing in the wrong direction.
‘I got to ask you something.’ He wiped tears from his eyes. Not from crying but from pain.
‘If you’re going to ask me if it’s bust, I’d have to tell you I think it is, Marco.’ I rocked back on my heels with the next wave.
‘No. I know it’s bust. What I want to know is if I let Gil take some money from my pay, will he go back into port and let me get off?’
‘If you ask him something like that, he may lock you down in the lazarette for the rest of the trip. Or maybe he’ll just tell you to go to hell. But he won’t go in. You ask him to, and he might not even pay you when we do reach port. You didn’t tell him you’d never worked a dredge, did you?’
‘I was watching Pittsley from before and figured I could do it.’
‘And now you have a busted nose.’
‘I know it.’
‘Just go back to work. Best you can do is lie low. Then go home and pretend it never happened. After something like this, I wouldn’t be too sure you’ll keep the job.’
Kelley stood over us. His shadow blocked out the sun.
Marco looked up to see who it was. ‘If I see land, I’m going to jump over and swim for it.’
Kelley sucked at something caught between his teeth. ‘You do that, chump, and you better know some things. There’s sharks out here, for one thing. And for another thing, you better make damn sure what you see is land. Sometimes you look at the horizon and think you see an island or the coast but it’s just your eyes playing tricks. And even if you’re right, you have to make it by dark, or else know how to read the stars. Because once you’re out there, some wave could pick you up and slap you down facing the opposite direction. Then you’ll swim straight back out to sea.’
‘So what am I going to do? Pittsley said he was going to kill me.’
Kelley shrugged and wandered over to see what Gil was still yelling about.
A wave sprayed across the deck. I tasted the salt. ‘Pittsley’s a glass-head. If he’d wanted to kill you, he’d already have finished the job. He wouldn’t be standing around talking about it.’
Marco looked at me. ‘We got to stick together.’
‘You find someone else with a broken nose and stick with them.’ Then I walked away and wished I hadn’t talked to him at all.
*
Marco’s face swelled up so much I almost couldn’t see his nose.
Pittsley kept threatening to kill him. Or not threatening. He aimed a finger at Marco and said nothing, only stared.
Once, Gil told us at the table, Pittsley walked up behind where Marco stood cutting scallops at his pen, and Pittsley whispered ‘I’m going to rip you in pieces and let God put you together again.’
‘And you know what Marco said?’ Gil let his head fall back against the wood panelling of the galley wall and laughed so the fat on his chest jiggled in two mounds around his nipples. ‘Marco said, “Please don’t.” Ah-ha-ha-ha.’
Marco stayed by himself at the far end of the scallop pen.
He worked too slowly with the scallops.
No one had the energy to help him because we were pulling six baskets of scallops a haul-back. It was hard enough for Nelson and Pittsley to keep up.
Marco stood cutting long after the others were taking a break on the ice hatch, sharing smokes with their eyes crunched up from the dazzle of sun on the water.
Sometimes he was still cutting when Kelley and Howard and I came out to start the next watch. Usually, by that time, he’d be getting in the way, and Kelley would tell him to stop.
Gil said he didn’t like the way Marco cut the scallop meats. Said he was wasteful, which was true, since Marco left half the muscle in the shell.
We tried being kind to Marco. Even Kelley asked him if he felt all right. But Marco looked so ridiculous, with his noseless face and black eyes, his voice a plugged nasal hum, that Kelley burst out laughing as soon as Marco opened his mouth.
Marco would walk over to me as I washed and bagged the scallops. After a while of stirring his hand in the meats, pretending to help, head hung low over the wash tank, he’d ask, ‘How’s it going, buddy?’
‘Good enough,’ I’d mumble, and walk over to the ice hatch as if I had another job to do.
I didn’t forget I was new. I tried to take not
hing for granted. Tried to please. But I kept away from Marco as if he was diseased, before his mistakes became my mistakes and before the bad feelings of the crew toward him became bad feelings toward me.
Reynolds sat with Marco on the ice hatch. Reynolds talked and Marco nodded, listening. Kelley and I watched them from the bridge, where we’d gone to sit in the sun.
‘See?’ Kelley whispered in my ear. ‘They’re meant for each other.’
‘They’re only talking.’ I closed my eyes and felt the sun warm on my face.
‘So how come he doesn’t talk to us? How come he tries so hard to keep out of our way and then sits there talking to Marco as if they’re pals or something?’
‘Maybe you didn’t give him a chance.’ Kelley slumped back and sighed hard with annoyance. ‘Everybody gets a chance.’
It was true that Reynolds stayed away from us. He had a stash of food, which he kept to himself and wouldn’t share. Chocolates and cheese puffs and gum.
I would have killed for a mouthful of cheese puffs.
Reynolds never told stories the way the rest of us did, giving each other something to think about when our daydreams began to repeat.
Maybe he was just another fisherman who swore to God he’d be out only another month or so to make the mortgage payments. And when those months were over, perhaps he told himself, he was going back to land for good. In the meantime, the farther he kept from us the better.
Reynolds must have worked hard to earn his captain’s licence and learn the skills it took to run a trawler. Otherwise, Gil wouldn’t have hired him as mate. But even with these skills, Reynolds left me with the feeling of a man who was just passing through. Out here by mistake. Who had no time for talk or stories or us.
Six hours on. Six hours off.
Six hours on. Six hours off.
I no longer remembered how many days we had been gone.
I worked from midnight until six a.m. and then from midday until six p.m. For each day that passed, I felt as if I’d been through two.
In the night on the moon-bright water, I saw a whale breach and go down.
If I stared long enough at the horizon in the afternoons, I could make out a thin strip of brown in the distance, which I thought might be an island or the beaches near Montauk.
Even if the boat went down, I told myself, I could still make it to shore. I didn’t like being out of sight of land. But the brown was only an image of the horizon, the hard line where it touched the sea, which my eyes had shifted and retained and made to look like solid ground.
At night I saw the lights of other boats, built up like Christmas trees on the water.
When another trawler passed close by, I saw men shuffling under deck lights in orange and yellow rain gear, the rest of their boat hidden in the dark. The men seemed to be in a capsule, a big busy bubble drifting past.
Sometimes the horizon glowed pink. I thought it might be the glow of a city’s lights. The glimmer of Manhattan in the sky.
If the dawn was clear, we often made out submarines on the surface.
Once Gil brought down a pair of binoculars and we took turns looking at men on the conning tower of a sub. They wore black and smoked cigarettes and watched us through their own binoculars.
I stood on deck between both dredges, swinging the hammer from one hand to the other. I waited for the signal to send the dredges down.
The Grey Ghost shuddered under me, gathering speed.
Two chains that held the pelican clips to the deck began to creak.
I listened for a click when Gil turned on the loudspeaker.
By the time I heard his voice, I was already next to the starboard dredge, legs braced as the Grey Ghost slid into the trough of a wave, ready to smack out the pin and jump back.
Kelley and Howard waited at the cable brakes, ready to set them loose, necks hunched down into their shoulders.
The starboard dredge chain creaked again.
I caught sight of the pin bending, heard a groaning sound and then fell back as the pelican clip sprang open. The chain flailed close to my head and down on to the deck.
The dredge disappeared and then crashed against our side. The cable brake was still on.
By now I was down on my knees, cowering from the other dredge, waiting for its chain to pop. Already I felt sick in my guts from the blame I knew would fall on me.
Kelley climbed the ladder fast up to the wheelhouse.
A moment later the engines slowed and then idled.
I stood, still gripping the hammer, not daring to raise my head as Gil’s shadow appeared on the deck.
For a while there was no sound except the idled engines.
I stood watching the deck plates, studying rust and trickles of sand gathered in dents and cracks.
Then Gil’s shadow went away.
I looked up. Only Kelley remained on the bridge. He shook his head at me and climbed down. ‘You didn’t have the pin set right. It wasn’t in all the way.’ Kelley knelt on the deck and showed me what I already knew. ‘Gil’s pissed off, all right. But I guess you know that already.’
‘I set the pin the way I always set it.’
Kelley nodded, and held out his hand for me to help him up. ‘That’s why Gil didn’t come down here and rough you up. He’s giving you the benefit of the doubt. Next time you won’t have an excuse. Even if it isn’t your fault.’
Each time Gil walked out on the bridge, as Kelley and Howard and I stooped over the rubble of scallop shells and sand and monks, I saw his shadow.
I never looked up.
Instead I began shovelling the scallops quickly into the basket.
When he climbed down to inspect, I worked even faster. When he stood behind me, I was shovelling so fast that I began to make mistakes.
‘You’re missing some.’ He picked a few scallops out of the pile I’d already been through. ‘You’re throwing away good money, Pfeiffer.’
I didn’t answer. I went back to the beginning of the pile and started again.
When we prepared to set the dredges down, I couldn’t take my eyes off the pins in the pelican clips. I shifted my head mechanically from port to starboard, panicking each time the chains creaked.
At the end of our watch I went to my bunk without food. I lay in the dark, my stomach turning over.
The boat was Gil’s house and I no longer felt welcome in it.
The air, cold from air conditioning, smelled of dirty socks and deodorant spray from the last watch getting dressed.
I pulled a blanket from the cupboard, rough olive-coloured wool with ‘US’ stamped in black on one side. I pulled it over me.
The door opened, letting in light from the galley.
Gil filled the doorway with his bulk. ‘You aren’t going to eat?’
‘Not hungry.’ I held the blanket to my throat.
‘I put a new pin on the dredge. The old one was bent.’
I sat up and banged my head on the roof of the bunk. ‘It was the pin! I knew it was!’
‘Maybe.’
‘Oh, it was, Gil! That old pin was bent and no good.’ I crawled out of the bunk and stood in front of him in my underwear.
‘Food’s there if you want it. Creamed chipped beef.’
Kelley yelled from the galley, ‘Shit on a shingle.’
I poked my head out of the bunk room and smelled the food. Then I pulled on my jeans, sat in my place at the table and stuffed my face.
As Kelley said would happen, my daydreams began to go stale. I followed the same paths of thought until I couldn’t stand them anymore.
A blackness welled up in my head as I moved from the dredge to the pile to the pen and back to the dredge. I no longer thought about what I did.
It was a comfortable blackness. I used it carefully, moulding its numbness inside my skull to keep bad dreams away.
Franklin never came out on deck except to peel potatoes or choose some fish for dinner.
He stood in the galley doorway and rolled his trouse
rs up over his knees. Then he walked very carefully in his bare feet over the junk of shells and rocks. If he saw a fish he wanted, he snapped his fingers at whoever was nearest and said, ‘Get me this one here. This one’s for supper.’
The rest of the time he spent cooking in the galley, asleep or up in the wheelhouse watching soap operas with Gil on a little television.
At five o’clock every morning, Gil called over the loudspeaker and told me to wake Franklin.
I walked to the galley doorway, pulled my oiler trousers down over my boots and stepped into the galley in my socks.
There was a hundred-dollar fine if Gil caught any member of the crew wearing boots or oilers inside.
The first couple of times, I woke Franklin by rapping on his head as if it were an old coconut. Then he ordered me to whisper him awake.
‘Franklin,’ I whispered over the murmur of air conditioners, ‘get up. Time to make breakfast. Get the fuck up, old man.’ If he wasn’t awake after that, I knocked on his coconut head again.
His food tasted greasy. The portions were big, like a Sunday dinner every day, and I overate on purpose at the end of a watch to help myself fall asleep. I became used to eating grits in the morning, stirring the white porridge paste into my bacon and eggs.
Franklin let us know when Gil was in a bad mood, so we could keep out of his way.
Franklin didn’t know any life other than doing what Gil or Gil’s father told him to do. He had no self-respect. Only the pride of a well-treated slave.
I wore out my rubber gloves at the rate of a pair a day. They tore around the base of my thumb, where I gripped the scallop shell as I cut out its meat. I bought ten pairs with me for the trip.
Marco had only one pair.
They shredded after a couple of days, and then he borrowed a pair off Nelson. When those were finished, no one had spares to give him. So he used ruined ones until the skin of his palm between the thumb and index finger was spiderwebbed with cuts from the sharp edges of shells.