by Paul Watkins
For a while as I sat on my doorstep under the midday August sun, I thought how easy it would be to go back in the fall. I could have quit the boats that day. No one would have come looking for me. They’d hire a new crewman. That sort of thing happened all the time. Pictures of school invaded my thoughts. The package of memories that I had stashed away came unravelled in front of my eyes.
It didn’t last long. The pictures fell into the dark at the back of my head. I had already made up my mind.
‘What’s that, dear?’ Mother stood up from the tangle of her rose bushes. She wore a blue scarf on her head.
‘A camera.’
‘How nice! Did you send away for it?’ She picked a Japanese beetle off one of the bushes and flicked it into the street.
‘I think it’s from Bartlett. I know it is.’
‘Bartlett.’ Mother wriggled her fingers in her heavy work gloves. ‘Is he that old friend of yours who sold forest land that didn’t belong to him to the Boy Scouts and told them they could cut down all the little pine trees for their Christmas fund raiser?’
I didn’t answer.
She went back to cutting her roses.
My father ran his boat up on the rocks at Galilee.
He was the only one on board when it happened. He jumped from the Glory B as it keeled over into the surf and didn’t have to swim more than a hundred feet to reach the shore.
The owner of the Fishermen’s Co-operative told the Narragansett newspaper he’d never forget the sight of Russell Pfeiffer walking barefoot down the middle of the road, soaked wet and wearing a life-jacket on a foul, stormy day in August.
My father told everyone the steering jammed. The boat had just left port to go on another trip. Half an hour out to sea, he told his crew he thought the engine might be overheating, and headed back to dock to check the problem. He unloaded the crew and told them to go buy some lunch. He even advanced them some money, which was something he’d never done before. Then, on the excuse of running his boat a short distance to see if the engines were going to overheat again, he left the dock and motored a half mile out. He told the Coast Guard and the papers that the wheel and rudder had locked just as he approached the breakwater leading back into Galilee.
The Glory B rammed against the granite slabs that made up the breakwater. People who saw the wreck said its bow ploughed up against the rocks until it was pointing almost straight up in the air. Then it toppled over and began to take on water.
The whole breakwater was lined with people who had come to see the Glory B break itself apart in the surf. They stood in bright-coloured rain slickers, forced gradually back toward land by waves that rushed in harder and harder from the grey boil of the storm. I stood with Joseph at the front of the crowd. He had come straight down from Providence and didn’t have time to change out of his suit. I held my oiler jacket over the both of us, rain patting the rubber and pouring off the empty sleeves.
My mother and father stood with a policeman and another man in a suit whose umbrella had been blown inside out by the wind. He was the insurance claims officer and had already fallen in the water trying to get a closer look at the Glory B’s hull. Now the suit hung across his shoulders and clung to his buttocks like a mass of dead leaves.
Mother looked from my father to the police officer to the insurance man, her eyes almost closed against needles of rain, which cut across the rocks and dappled the water. My father went through the accident again, pausing now and then while the other two men nodded to show they understood what he was saying. Then he shook his head and stuffed his hands in his pockets. Suddenly he pulled his hands out again and talked some more. The policeman turned away and coughed. A wave smashed on the hull and hissed across the breakwater.
An ambulance arrived at the dock and two men with a stretcher ran out along the uneven rocks, pushing past the crowd.
They reached the end of the line and looked around. One of them turned to Joseph. ‘Where’s the injured man?’
‘I don’t think there is one.’
‘We had a call that a man fell in the water and broke his arm.’
‘Well, the only person who fell in the water was the man over there.’
The two medics approached the group.
The insurance man shook his head and held up his arm. The sleeve was torn. His wrist had been cut against the barnacles.
After a minute of talk, the insurance man took another look at his arm and bent it back and forth. Then he followed the two medics along the breakwater to their ambulance.
With each wave, the ruin of the trawler rose up and smashed down on the rocks. The sound of metal grinding against stone reached us over the rumble of the sea. Junk from the boat washed past in the channel. A yellow bucket. Life-jackets. The ice hatch and wooden planks from the ice hold pens. A shirt, billowing with the current.
I shivered as the boat hammered itself to pieces on the breakwater. I knew that by the time the storm died down there would be almost nothing to salvage. The whine of scraping metal and the clink of broken glass sounded to me like something alive and in pain.
Joseph sniffed at the coat I held over his head, catching the stench of monkfish and grease from the Grey Ghost. ‘They asked him for one too many favours.’
‘You’re sure it wasn’t an accident?’ I saw the long straightness of Joseph’s nose in the corner of my eye. I didn’t turn to face him.
‘I know it wasn’t. They pushed him too far with their muscling. They were trying to get him to do a run sometime next week. You don’t just run your boat up on the rocks after twenty years of fishing.’
‘It could happen. The steering could lock.’ I felt the spray of another wave touch my face.
‘It could, all right. That’s why he’ll get the insurance money. I’m only saying what I’m sure half the fishermen on the dock already know.’
I unclipped the lens cap from my camera, which I’d been carrying with me most places since I got it. I took some pictures of the Glory B.
A blur passed in front of the viewfinder and when I looked up, I saw it was my father and mother and the policeman.
The policeman shook my father’s hand. He wore what looked like a shower cap on the top of his hat and an orange coat that came down to his shins. ‘See you, Russ.’ He edged through the crowd back to land.
‘Right!’ My father raised his hand slightly, smiled for a second and then stopped smiling. ‘See you.’ He turned to me and pointed at the camera. ‘I want a big print when you get those developed.’
I thought for a moment he might be angry that I’d brought the camera, but he grinned, his head turned from the crowd. ‘If it had to go down, it may as well be in my own backyard.’
‘I’m sorry for you, Dad.’ Joseph pulled the oiler jacket off his head and draped it over my mother, whose little rain hat only redirected the water down the front of her coat.
My mother buttoned the oiler. ‘At least no one was hurt.’
‘Except the insurance man.’ I hid the camera under my shirt to keep it dry.
‘Well, that little fool deserved what he got.’ Mother peered out from the black rubber hood. ‘We told him not to get close to the boat but he did anyway. He’s lucky he didn’t get crushed between the hull and the rocks. As it is, he ruined a two-hundred-dollar suit.’
The Glory B lurched and slipped down with the next wave. Its wheelhouse sank under the surface. The dirty hull showed now above the foam. I made out the fat blades of its propeller.
The crowd of people had begun to thin out. Through the mist I watched red and blue and yellow rain slickers file across the parking lot and stop at cars or disappear into dockside restaurants. The ambulance was gone.
Mother started walking back along the breakwater. Then she turned and motioned for us to follow. ‘I have to say, some days I’ve thought about coming out here and sinking the boat myself.’
Father stood still for a moment and pressed his thumbs against his temples. ‘I’ll be taking some time off wh
ile the insurance is settled.’
‘You haven’t mowed the lawn in about six years, so you can start with that.’ Mother smiled at him. I stepped off the breakwater and on to the gravel of the parking lot. ‘Dad, you lost your hat.’ He touched the rough pads of his fingertips against his forehead. ‘So I did.’
Four men were waiting by my father’s truck. I recognised them as the crew. One man, whose last name was Kitteridge, stepped forward. ‘We’re going home now, Russ. You want us to call you in the morning?’
‘I’ll be at the Co-op at seven. I’ll try and fix you all up on other boats within twenty-four hours.’
‘I guess you’ll be working alongside us as a crewman from now on.’
‘Maybe so. In time.’
‘If you get yourself another boat, you know where to find us. We’re sorry it happened, Russ.’
They must know why he wrecked the boat, I thought to myself. They’re only going through the motions of apology for Joseph and Mother and me.
‘This is the first time I ever seen you without a hat on, Russ.’ Kitteridge grinned. ‘We’ve been meaning to ask you, Mrs Pfeiffer. Does your husband sleep with his hat on at home too?’
‘Oh, he takes it off before he goes to bed. But then I think sometimes he waits until I’m asleep and puts it on again.’
The noise of the boat breaking apart made us turn our heads.
Kitteridge took down his hood showing his straggly blond hair. ‘I can’t take much more of that sound.’
We were quiet as my father looked at his shoes, hiding any expression on his face. Then everybody began talking again as we got into the truck and my father started the engine.
I sat in front, watching the breakwater appear and disappear in the sweep of our windshield wipers.
The phone rang.
My father set his fists on the kitchen table. ‘I am not here! Do you understand? I am not here!’
Mother picked up the receiver. ‘Yes. May I ask who’s calling please?’ She held her hand over the mouthpiece and nodded at me. ‘It’s someone named Kelley.’
My guts jolted.
Mother held out the receiver on the flat of her palm. ‘Isn’t he one of your friends from the boat?’
I stirred my spoon in the mush of my drowned breakfast cereal. All week I had been thinking about when he would call. If he would call. Or whether the police would arrive at my door to ask questions. ‘Did everything go all right?’ I paced back and forth in the kitchen, winding myself in the phone’s extension cord.
‘Everything’s fine.’
‘Well, are you going to tell me about it or not?’
‘I’ll tell you when I see you. Meet me on Jamestown.’
‘Where exactly?’ I heard a car ride past in the background. Then a boat horn blasted twice. ‘Just get on the bus. You’ll see me.’
‘When, Kelley?’
‘Now. I’m already here.’
He met me at the bus stop on Jamestown, an island between Newport and Narragansett. He waved to me from the wooden bus stop shelter. The old ladies waiting for their ride to Newport didn’t like the look of Kelley and stood in the sun rather than sit next to him.
We walked out of town to the cliffs at Fort Wetherill. The fort was built during the Second World War to guard the harbour against German ships and submarines. The ruins lay buried in poison ivy and brambles, huge gun pits empty now, the concrete parapets crisscrossed with graffiti.
Kelley and I sat at the edge of the cliff, warm in the sun, watching bright-spinnakered boats tilt in the wind and move fast out to sea.
Far below I heard the waves, slugging the cliff wall and sliding back down.
Kelley told me how the run had gone. He spoke in a murmur, raising his voice only when the hammer of waves covered his words.
‘On the fifth day out, we stopped fishing and moved north. Up until then, it was just like every other trip we’d made. But as soon as we changed course for the north, that’s when I started getting scared. We torched holes in the outriggers and removed part of the ice room wall. We took the bulbs out of the deck lights. These were all places Gil said we’d be hiding the cargo.
‘We took turns looking at the radar. Somebody had to be watching it the whole time while Gil steered the boat. We had to tell him whenever a blip showed on the screen. I’d be sitting there six hours at a time, watching the screen, turning the distance dial from five miles to ten to twenty and never seeing anything.
‘When the holes were burned in the walls and outriggers, we welded the plates back in place but only weakly so they could be knocked out again with a hammer. On the outriggers, we smoked the weld marks so they wouldn’t stand out from the rest of the metal. I was glad we had work to do.
Otherwise, I’d have gone out of my head.
‘On the afternoon of the sixth day, I saw trees and little stretches of beach. Gil said we were someplace off Port Clyde, Maine.
‘Gil brought a Zodiac out of the lazarette. We took turns blowing it up with a bicycle pump, and when that was done we fixed an outboard motor on a wooden panel at the back.’
‘How scared were you?’ I watched him very closely.
‘Later I was scared. At the time I’m telling you about, there was too much going on to be worried. It was only in the times when nothing happened that I started worrying.
‘We dropped anchor a third of a mile offshore, no running lights, no deck lights. Gil turned the engines off, and you know how it is after days of hearing the engine and then suddenly having quiet. Your ears start ringing.
‘Franklin came out on deck with two rifles, old Army ones. One of them had an extension on it like a bottle made out of metal. Do you know what it was? A grenade launcher. Pittsley brought it back from Vietnam. I asked Franklin what on earth we’d need those for and he told me you didn’t ever know what the other man was going to be carrying.
‘Then Gil handed me the rifle without the extension and took the other one for himself. There were plastic bread bags over the rifle barrels to keep out seawater. We set the Zodiac in the water and jumped into it. All I could think about when we were riding in low to the water was how this whole plan didn’t have a hope of working. I wished I was you then. I wished I was on land. I couldn’t think of any amount of money that was worth this.
‘It was twilight when we made the beach. I jumped out in waist-deep water and waded up to the dry sand. Then I lay down in the weeds at the high-tide mark, watching for anyone nearby. Gil dragged the boat up above the water line and we waited for them to show. I couldn’t see a thing in the fog.
‘We were in some kind of picnic area with thick woods on either side and a dirt road running inland. I saw a couple of old tables and some barbecue grills and a hut with one side fallen in.
‘Then a man showed up. He was walking down the middle of the road, wearing a camouflage jacket. Gil went across and shook his hand. I figured he knew the man from another time.
‘Suddenly another two men stood up from the bushes. Both of them had shotguns. I pointed the gun at one and then at the other and then back to the first one. I still had the damn bread bag on the end and so I couldn’t aim straight. I was ready to kill him. I was ready to kill both of them. Then Gil waved me up and told me to follow these two men into the woods.
‘They walked on either side of me. I was trying to stay a little bit behind so I could watch what they were doing. They walked over to the hut and set their shotguns on the floor, so I set mine down too. Then one of them asked me if it was rough out there on the water and he reached out his hand to shake. I was so scared at that point I started laughing, and then they were laughing too. We were all so nervous that somebody would start shooting. And there’s Gil walking around with a grenade launcher. As soon as we figured we might actually get away with the job, we couldn’t help ourselves from laughing. They said their names were Emmett and Will and I told them my name was Rudolph. We couldn’t stop laughing after that.’
‘Where was Gil while this
was going on?’
‘He was in the hut with the other man, sharing a smoke. It’s funny, you know. I remember every fucking detail. I don’t think I closed my eyes once. I can account for every hour of this last week. Every minute.’
‘So what were those two men doing? Emmett and Will?’
‘They jogged back to a truck they had parked in the woods. Then they drove it in reverse down to the edge of the sand. The back of the truck was loaded with packages wrapped in black plastic garbage bags and sealed with electrical tape. We loaded the Zodiac with as many as it could take, and we took off out to sea again.
‘I threw the packages on to the deck of the Grey Ghost, while Gil tried to hold our Zodiac steady. Howard was up on the bow in his underwear, eating a box of crackers. He didn’t look at all worried. Franklin stacked the packages in the galley, and Pittsley stamped around all mad at me and Gil because we’d set our guns down. He was shaking his fist at me and asking me whose side I was on. Dumb fuck thought he was back in the jungle.
‘By the time we made it to the beach again, Emmett and Will had stacked the other packages on the sand. They opened a thermos of hot soup and we passed the little plastic cup around and drank from it. I kept wanting just to talk to them and ask them where they were from, but then I figured they’d only lie the way we all did about our names.
‘Gil and I made another trip out to the boat, and before we left the third time with the last packages, we all shook hands again but didn’t say much. I remembered thinking if I ever saw them again, even years from now, I’d still recognise them.
‘We reached the boat and Pittsley shouted to us that he saw something on the radar. Gil and I jumped up on board and hauled in the Zodiac, and the next thing I know I’m lying flat on the deck with my rifle, ready to shoot out the scupper. For a long time, we just waited in the dark. Fog was rolling all around us. All I could hear was the water.
‘Gil said whatever had been on the screen wasn’t there now, and if it had been anybody but Pittsley who said they saw it Gil might have been more worried. Franklin and Howard pulled in the anchor, Howard still in his underwear and looking like a bird with its feathers pulled off. Then we motored fast out to sea. I sat with Pittsley at the stern, watching for a boat to come out of the fog. All the time I was back to thinking there’d be no way we could get away with this. I was dead sure of it. But nothing showed up on the screen again, and after a while Gil came out on deck with a cup of coffee for each of us, said we were clear and let us get dry clothes on.