by Paul Watkins
I lay in my bunk with two eyefuls of mashed potato, hearing the crew return to the boat. The engines fired up. Then the Grey Ghost swung away from the pier.
When I woke later, the pain was gone.
Waves thudded on our bow.
I knew we were far out to sea.
‘Where’s the mate, Franklin?’ I sat at the galley table, feeling a faint rustle of seasickness in my guts. ‘I didn’t see him today.’
‘How come you want to know about Reynolds?’ Franklin didn’t face me when he spoke. He stayed hunched over the stove, stirring soup in a pot for Gil’s supper. ‘Well, he’s gone. That’s where he is.’
‘Gone where?’
‘Never you mind, boy.’ He tasted the soup, still facing away from me.
‘What’s wrong, Franklin? Is Reynolds dead or something? Should I just go ask somebody else or is this some kind of game you’re playing?’
Now he turned. ‘No game at all. Now I’m going to tell you something and then I want you to shut up about it. Understand?’
I shrugged. ‘I guess.’
Franklin told me that the night before we left, he had seen Reynolds and another man walk out of a bar near the dock. Since Franklin had nothing else to do and since he was a nosy fart, he followed them to see where they’d go. He hadn’t seen the other man before.
Reynolds and the other man walked up an alleyway between two cafés.
What Franklin saw when he walked past was the mate pushing the other man up against the wall and kissing him for a long time. The other man had his hands around the mate’s neck, his thigh set against the mate’s groin.
Franklin beetled over to Gil at Mary’s bar and told him. Gil made Franklin promise not to tell anyone about it, then he left the little red and white table where he always sat and walked out into the dark.
Reynolds just disappeared.
Pittsley took his place in the wheelhouse. Franklin worked on deck with Nelson in addition to cooking the meals. Howard and Kelley and I often stayed out after our last haul-back to help with the cutting. Gil didn’t need to hire a new man.
No one talked about Reynolds. A nervousness sifted through us, which died only after a couple of days. It became an unmentionable thing.
Nine
The dredge came up filled with bones. I stared at the hard tangle of white in the dredge bag. A second later, a smell blew across the deck that made me breathe through clenched teeth.
It was dark. The lights of Martha’s Vineyard showed on the horizon.
Whale bones. They fell from the dredge, rattling across our deck. The stench cut into my windpipe and left it raw.
I shuffled through huge pieces of rib and finned blocks of the whale’s spine.
The ribs were like curved oars with tatters of gristle at the ends. Their surface was not smooth but patched with the remains of flesh. Each joint of backbone was almost a foot across at the solid centre. Fins stretched out at least a foot on either side.
I searched through the pile but found no other kind of bones.
Howard and Kelley didn’t mind the smell. They picked up ribs and beat each other over the head. Then we piled the backbone sections one on top of the other. Kelley said the whale must have been as long as a school bus.
Kelley thought we could sell the bones to a scrimshaw man in Newport, but after a while the reek of bad meat got to us and we heaved most of them over the side.
I watched the great arcs of rib twisting over and down into the dark water.
We each kept a section of backbone to use as a seat on our rests between work.
Somewhere in the darkness of my daydreaming, I realised Howard was tugging at my arm.
‘What do you think the skull of that whale looks like?’
For a while I only stared at him, still swallowed in thoughts, my hands constantly moving as they cut out the scallops.
Howard stood, hands on hips, chewing his upper lip with a worried look on his face. He passed his eyes from me to Kelley and back to me.
Kelley said that once when he worked a boat named the Mirabelle, out of New Bedford, they dredged up the jaw of a killer whale on Georges Bank.
‘It was like the bow end of a rowboat, racked up with teeth the size of your hand.’ He set his fingers together at the tips and held out his hand in the shape of a killer whale tooth. ‘And I had a friend once who was long-lining for swordfish way up on the Grand Banks near Canada. They set out lines with hooks and bait on them, then reel the line in and pull the fish up on deck with a little crane. One day at the end of their line they see something big thrashing around. White and black and huge, and they knew it was a killer whale. They couldn’t cut the line or they’d have lost all the swordfish past that point. So –’ Kelley set down his scallop knife, his cramped palm returning out of reflex, to the grip it had before – ‘they shoot the bastard half a dozen times with a shotgun and it’s still kicking around same as before. They tried to winch it up on deck and it bent their little crane over into the water. They gave up after that. Cut their lines and went home.’ Kelley nodded and licked his teeth.
‘But what do you figure its skull looks like?’ Howard’s legs swayed in rhythm with the waves, his feet remaining planted to the deck.
We sat on the ice hatch, damp with spray that cut bright silver clouds across the work lights and fell hissing across the work area.
Each of us in turn formed with our hands the shape we thought the whale’s head might be, stripped of meat and skin, explaining each curve we drew in the air and trying to be the one who was right.
I moved quickly and without effort on to the treadmill of the boat.
The concentrated repetition no longer bothered me. A part of my head just shut down, keeping me in the trance of daydreams.
Gil smiled down on us from the bridge. He was pleased that we had joined the chorus of his machines and clockwork running of the Grey Ghost.
The air conditioning broke.
Our bunk rooms became trenches of sweat. Nobody could take it, so we lay up on the bow or in the galley. It stayed breezy on the bow but the sun burned our skin after an hour, sending us down into the gloom and heat of the galley.
Kelley said it was about time he had a tan and stayed in the sun, while Howard and I slept at the dinner table, faces resting in the crooks of our elbows.
Franklin didn’t like us taking up his space and he sang while he prepared the meals. He told us he always sang when he readied the food and wasn’t about to stop now. He warbled his voice into gravel to make the point.
That night, at a slow time on the watch when few scallops had come up in the dredges and Howard, Kelley and I sat on our whalebone seats staring blank-faced into space, Kelley tugged at my arm and pulled me into the galley. The place was empty, since Franklin had gone to bed. The other watch was asleep on the bow, wrapped in blankets. Gil stayed in the wheelhouse with his portable fan.
Kelley took off his shirt, smelling like a tropical paradise from the lotion he’d smeared on himself before going to lie on the bow.
He had blisters on his back the size of plums.
‘I feel like I’m dying, Pfeif. My head is going to explode. My back’s all burned up. I don’t think I’ve ever felt this bad.’
I gave him some aspirin from the cupboard, then burned a needle with a cigarette lighter. I popped the blisters and slowly squeezed out the fluid, which ran down his back in clear trails. Then I poured rubbing alcohol on the raw places.
He made a noise in his throat when the alcohol touched his skin, but made no more sound than that. We had no bandages.
When it was done he said thank you and left without looking at me. He felt embarrassed having to ask for help and he didn’t want to owe me.
I didn’t want any favours from him either, and never mentioned it again.
Sometimes, leaning over the side to fit the winch hook in the dredge, I saw the grey sides of sharks slipping down into the green.
They followed both dredges to the
surface and turned away when they reached our boat.
I saw them tear apart fish that had escaped from the dredge, and watched their dorsal fins trail the boat as we cut the monk. The fins disappeared as each bleeding, ugly monk head fell beneath the waves.
At a distance I could make out the fins of larger sharks, which usually kept their distance, leaving the pickings to smaller, six- and seven-foot makos or blues.
The larger fins belonged to great whites, Gil said. The area we fished was their northernmost feeding ground. They always appeared in midsummer.
I stared without blinking at each dark half-moon fin, which seemed to me to be all the coldness and sharpness and effectiveness of the sea forced into one fifteen-foot barrel of muscle that would, if I ever fell overboard, rise up from below and bring me down dead.
I thought about my father and his nightmares, and later, in my bunk, the picture of the fins replayed in my head. The sea became for me then a black place, shuddering angry with dull eyes and scales and fins, warring across dark spaces. Silent, sharp-toothed war in total silence. Eyes always open. Constant vision war, and me with no way to fight. No tools for war in this place. Nothing to reason with.
It became a dead end thinking about the sharks, hearing again my father call ‘Please’ as the nightmares raked through his brain.
Each time the pictures came to me they seemed as ugly as before. There wasn’t even the hope of staleness that nightmares can take on when they have crashed through a hundred times.
I no longer cringed and went to my bunk feeling sick when Gil exploded at me. Most times, he ought to have been yelling at the engine or the winches, but it satisfied him more to be shouting at a person.
I wasn’t afraid anymore, and hoped he thought I’d never been afraid.
Kelley and Howard, I noticed, took on the same look of indigestion when they were being yelled at.
Pittsley still mumbled to himself when he stood on the lazarette, gripping his styrofoam cup of coffee.
Sometimes he would seem sane and normal. Then he would be a different person from this man who gaped off the back of the boat, making speeches to the fish.
It was as if he had built himself into everything he ever heard said about him, while the rest of his mind stayed blank. As if each day he stood in front of the dirty mirror in the Grey Ghost’s bathroom and asked himself, Am I tough like they say? Do I live brave and die strong, like it says on my T-shirt? Am I the Mekong Delta man?
He probably couldn’t remember. He had already lived brave and died strong and his heart was only beating out of spite.
A Coast Guard cutter broke out of the mist and circled us.
It looked bigger than the trawler, with a machine gun mounted on its deck. The hull was painted white. Blue and orange stripes cut diagonally across its bow.
Kelley went inside and flushed his bag of marijuana down the toilet.
Gil walked out of the wheelhouse, shook his fist at the cutter and yelled, ‘Oh, yeah? Well, fuck you!’
‘He must be talking to them on the radio.’ Howard set down his scallop knife and we both stood watching. ‘If you have any pot with you, I suggest you flush it down the head ricky-tick.’
‘I don’t have anything.’ I had promised myself not to smoke it anymore after I tried Kelley’s sinsemilla.
Pittsley staggered out of the galley in his underpants, still bald but with patches of fluff growing back over his ears. He stood on the lazarette and beat his chest in the direction of the cutter. He cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted across the milk of fog, ‘You’ll never take me alive!’
I edged over to Howard. ‘Are they after Pittsley?’
‘Eh?’
‘Do they want Pittsley?’ I wanted to be the first one with my hands in the air if they started shooting on account of Pittsley.
Howard fed himself a raw scallop, sliding it off the shell into his mouth. He shook his head and swallowed. ‘Nobody wants Pittsley. I’m sure he wishes they were after him, but they’re not.’
*
I felt the engines slow to an idle under my feet.
Gil shouted down from the bridge that we were being boarded for an inspection.
The cutter swung around and backed up against us, stern to stern. Men in blue uniforms and flak jackets crowded the back of their boat.
As soon as they were close enough, men began jumping on to the Ghost. A megaphone calling from somewhere on the cutter ordered us up on our bow.
The Coast Guard men held their shotguns in front of them at some regulation distance. They kept telling us to ‘Move it’.
Up on the bow of the Ghost, two men guarded us and made way for a third, who looked to be an officer and carried a gun in a holster under his armpit. All of them wore baseball caps with bright yellow numbers on the crown. The flak jackets had USCG printed on both sides.
‘All right, boys.’ The officer crouched down to be on eye level with us where we sat on the coil of bow line. He balanced himself with the spread fingers of one hand. ‘Anybody got anything to declare?’
‘Like what?’ I had raised my hand a little without meaning to as I spoke, realising from the way the words caught in my throat that I was afraid.
Gil turned on me. ‘Now shut the fuck up.’
‘No, you shut the fuck up, Chubber.’ The officer barked at Gil, not taking his eyes off me. ‘I mean, do you have a little smoking grass on board? A little’ – he sniffed and smiled – ‘coke?’
I shook my head. I was sweating even on my knees.
The officer stood up, without looking at me again, and pushed past the two guards. He climbed down the ladder onto our deck.
The two men held the butts of the shotguns against their hips, keeping their index fingers pointed straight along the trigger guards. The men had high cheekbones, straight noses and suntans. They looked like brothers.
I saw nothing more of the search, hearing now and then an order shouted across the deck.
The cutter wallowed at our stern.
The sea was a calm blue field that moved around us and past us.
Kelley and Howard were called down on deck to open the ice hatch.
One guard handed a stick of chewing gum to the other. He balled the tin foil wrapper and bounced it off Pittsley’s bowed head.
Pittsley didn’t look up. He stayed looking at his shoes, picking at the laces.
I peered across at Nelson, who gaped at the guards, his mouth making chewing motions as if he also had a piece of gum.
When Kelley and Howard returned a while later, their trousers were wet from the knees down. Their faces looked pale.
Gil propped himself up on one elbow and stared.
Nobody spoke.
A few minutes afterward, the officer poked his head out of the wheelhouse and squinted at us. ‘Captain?’
Gil followed him inside.
I scooted over to Kelley. ‘What happened?’
‘Nothing.’
I scooted back to my place on the rope.
‘Cut the talk.’ One of the guards lifted his gun from one hip to the other.
‘We’re not even allowed to talk?’ I shielded my eyes in the glare and looked at his face.
‘Not if I say you’re not.’ He jerked his eyebrows up into the bill of his cap and brought them down again.
Quiet.
Sea rocking the bow and sending us a breeze.
Then the cutter blew its horn twice. The shotgun boys wheeled around and vanished. More orders. People shouting ‘Hustle! Hustle!’ The cutter fired its engines and sped away, trailing a fat wake that rolled itself into the other waves and became nothing.
Kelley said the officer had made him and Howard climb down into the ice hold. Then the guards began rummaging through the monk and scallops, looking for drugs.
‘You got it here, don’t you?’ the officer kept saying.
Kelley told him to cool his fucking jets.
The officer walked up to Kelley until their faces were only an inch
apart. ‘I believe this man is going to make a run for it. Fuller, does this man appear to be making a run for it?’
‘Believe so, sir,’ Fuller said.
The officer made Kelley and Howard kneel on the floor of the ice hold with their hands on their heads. This was how their trousers got wet, from melted ice washing back and forth across the concrete.
‘Fuller, these men appear to be obstructing justice.’
Kelley and Howard stayed kneeling on the floor, ice fog rising around them.
‘Yes, sir!’ Fuller slid back the cocking mechanism on his shotgun and popped out a new black cartridge, which bounced on to the chilled monk tails.
There were no brave words from Kelley, and Howard bit off the end of his tongue.
Then the officer and the shotgun boys laughed. They climbed up on deck and left Howard and Kelley behind.
Kelley stayed on our bow, screaming at the cutter as it moved away across the blue field.
Gil sent the dredges straight back down. He was angry beyond words. For him, it was as if someone had broken into his house and rifled his drawers and he’d had to sit there and take it.
‘I just now thought of all the things I should have told them.’ Kelley climbed into the ice hold again and brought up the shotgun cartridge.
We took it apart on the galley table. It had six copper balls in it. After that, we poured out the tiny grey grains of gunpowder.
The Coast Guard had set things back tidily. The rooms were neater than they’d been before. Each of us went to his bunk and rearranged his gear the way it used to be.
Gil sat beneath the beer clock drinking iced tea from his blue plastic mug.
He said if the Coast Guard nailed a man with even a gram of pot or cocaine, they could impound the boat and catch, and send the crew to trial. ‘And if they nail you with a whole drug shipment, the Guard would just as soon shoot you and say you started it. Times like that, when you know they’re going to find what they’re looking for if they come aboard, you either give up without a fight or kill every single one of them, blow their boat full of holes and sink it fast before they call reinforcements, or soon enough you’ll have some Air Force jet bearing down on you and you become eviscerated.’