by Paul Watkins
‘We deflated our Zodiac and stuffed it back in the lazarette with the putt-putt motor. Then we knocked out those loose panels in the outriggers and down in the ice room. We stuffed the spaces with as many packages as we could and put the rest up in work lights, way up in the rigging. We welded the plates in once more and smoked them and dirtied them so no one would notice. Then we went back to fishing as if nothing had ever happened.
‘I guess we fished for another couple of days, heading gradually south until we were off Cape May.
‘We put in at Cape May and unloaded what scallops we had at a place called Southport Fisheries. I stayed down in the ice room. I didn’t want to show my face. When that was done and we’d settled up with the scallop buyers, Gil tied up the boat at a warehouse dock next to the fisheries place. He gave us each a couple of hundred dollars and told us to be back on the dock by seven in the morning.
‘I spent the whole night in a motel watching MTV. The whole time, I was thinking if it was going to go wrong, it would be now, and I had dreams of people busting into the room and putting handcuffs on me. I must have dreamed it six or seven times, and each time more and more people would be there and my parents were there and my old school-teacher. They were all piling into my room to watch the police put the handcuffs on me.
‘When we showed up at the boat next day all the stuff had been taken away by whoever made the deal with Gil. And as soon as we could, we left the dock and steamed back to Sabatini’s. While we were still out to sea, he handed out our pay. All cash. All old bills in fifties and twenties and tens. He told us not to spend any of it for a couple of months and then only a little at a time. He said we couldn’t keep it in a bank account, but that didn’t matter, since I don’t have one anyway. Then he told me to give you a call and for us all to be on the boat in two days. So I called you. And here we are.’
‘What did you do with the money?’
‘I stashed it in the same place I stashed all my other money.’
‘How much did you get?’
‘Never you mind. I got what I expected to get, and that doesn’t make me rich but it keeps my head above water for a while.’
‘Are you going to keep working for Gil?’
‘Sure. It’s a good boat to work on. He doesn’t cheat us and he makes a good catch when his dredges aren’t flipping. It’s a decent wage. I’d be a fool to quit before I had enough to cover any kind of mess up that might happen when we start lobstering. I’ll be fishing with Gil up until Christmas. Then I’ll quit and start setting out lobster-pots in the spring.’
‘I guess I’ll do the same.’
‘I’ve never had the feeling of being able to rest easy the way I do now. Now I have enough money not to think about money for a while.’
All week I had been thinking about the Grey Ghost and the run they were making. I no longer knew whether I’d have gone if Gil asked me. I thought of the months of work it would take to bring me even near to what Kelley had made in a week. The tiredness and the dirt. It felt as if all the rest I’d had in my time at home would be drawn out of me in the first day back on the Ghost. Nowadays I slept better out to sea. ‘Aren’t you still worried about getting caught?’
‘Not now. Those packages reach the market faster than you’d ever believe. By the time they hit the streets and the little dealers like Stevens, nobody knows where it’s come from.’ Kelley took off his shoes and picked at his toes, the way he did when he was nervous. He didn’t really know the way the business worked and was only trying to convince himself.
I walked to the edge of the cliff and looked down, gripping the rock with my feet to keep steady. It was a fifty-foot drop. Joseph and I used to come here and jump, feeling the air shoved out of our lungs, the slap against our feet as we hit the water and a rush of bubbles that took us back to the surface.
I breathed in deep and stepped off the edge, hearing Kelley shout as I slipped out of view. Pressure, like a pair of hands held against my face. My guts jolted up into my ribs. The wind spread my fingers apart. I tried to yell something but had no air in my lungs. Then came the sudden clap as I struck the water, and a rushing sound as I curved down into the cold. I rose slowly, feet first, to the top.
My hands stung and there was pain in the arches of my feet. I let myself be carried toward the rocks by a wave and gripped at the barnacles. The wave sucked back and pulled me away, ducking me under for a second.
Kelley looked down, hands on his head. ‘You did that on purpose!’
I waved at him and swam again at the rocks, this time finding a grip and climbing above the level of the waves. I rested on a ledge, sharp light breaking off the water and jabbing at my eyes.
‘Where are you?’ Kelley called down from the top. ‘Are you all right?’
‘Jump, Kelley!’
‘Never!’
Then I heard him mumble to himself. A few seconds later I saw his flapping arms, open mouth and the blur of his big pink belly strike the water. He disappeared, leaving an arc of spray in the air. For a moment, the only trace of him was a ring of white froth folding away in the sweep of a wave. Then a rush of bubbles hissed to the surface. In the middle of them I saw the soles of his shoes.
He dog-paddled across to where I sat, the salt already drying on my skin. He took in mouthfuls of water and spat them out again. His hands raked along the barnacles, searching for a grip, and twice the waves dragged him back before he left the water. ‘You knew I’d have to jump. You made it so I didn’t have a choice.’ He shook the sting from his red hands.
We missed the last bus back to Newport, so Kelley called a taxi.
When the man arrived, I recognised him as one of the cabbies that sat on the hoods of their cars outside the Y.
He leaned out the window. ‘How come your clothes are wet?’
‘We went swimming.’ I felt the salt crusty in my eyebrows.
‘I can’t take you in my cab with wet clothes.’ He pulled at his nose and then sniffed.
‘We’re almost dry.’ Kelley slapped the soaked thighs of his jeans. ‘It won’t matter.’
The driver shook his head. ‘I just finished cleaning up the car from last week. I gave a ride to some fisherman who got soaked in melon-flavoured alcohol.’
I remembered him now from the night Kelley was thrown in jail.
We asked him to wait, then ran across the road to a surf shop. We bought swimming trunks called Baggies, which came down to our knees. Kelley’s had palm trees done in pink and red and orange. Mine had pelicans in blue and green and purple.
As we crossed the bridge, Kelley asked the driver if it was true all the cabbies who worked near the Y had gone in for vasectomies.
The cabby blinked at us in his rear-view mirror. ‘I’d kill the man who started that rumour if I could find him.’ He was fat enough that his belly button would honk the horn if he stopped suddenly.
‘Is it true?’ Kelley hugged the headrest of the passenger seat.
‘I’d kill him stone dead, and you can tell him if you know him.’
Their voices blew past my ears. I wasn’t really listening. Instead, I thought about heading out to sea again. I had been on land too long. I closed my eyes and listened to the even rattle of our tyres crossing the spacers of the bridge.
Thirteen
A shark up in the dredge, almost dead by the time it reached our deck.
We were three days out to sea.
The shark was a mako, about seven feet long with flat eyes the size of golf balls. The grey of its back gave way to pale white on the belly.
Gil grabbed the mako by its sickle-shaped tail and dragged it to the centre of the deck. He kicked it in the gills to see if it was still alive.
The mako quivered under the leather of its skin, then opened its mouth and showed us some teeth.
I brought out my camera, which I kept carefully packed away in its styrofoam box. Then everyone wanted their picture taken with the fish.
Pittsley and Nelson knelt on either side o
f the mako and smiled. Pittsley wanted to point at it.
‘If anybody looks at the photo, they’re going to know where the fish is without you pointing at it.’ I crouched down and loaded a roll of film.
Pittsley pointed at the mako anyway, and Nelson stood with his foot on the thing’s head as if it were a shot lion.
Gil picked up the shark and hugged it, his fingers pressed hard into the rough skin to stop it from thrashing around. Franklin stood in the background, his head appearing first over one of Gil’s shoulders and then over the other as Gil staggered across the deck, trying to keep the mako steady while I took the picture.
Kelley crouched next to the fish and lifted its snout to show the teeth; small white pointing triangles on top and inward spikes below. Kelley opened his mouth to show his own teeth.
Then the shark bit him.
Kelley lost his grip on the snout, the shark closed its mouth and Kelley’s fingers got in the way.
Slowly and carefully, Kelley pried open the mako’s jaws and removed his hand. At first there was no blood. Then slits made by the teeth opened up and dark drops spilled from his hand on to the fish’s head.
Kelley walked to the ice hatch and picked up a crowbar used to dislodge stones jammed in the dredges. He began beating the shark on the head. He swung the heavy iron bar the same way a person swings an axe. The first few strikes left dents in the grey skin. After several more, we could see the pink meat underneath.
The rest of us stood watching, afraid to get close as Kelley took out his anger on the mako.
Eventually Gil told him to set the crowbar down before he hurt himself. When Kelley didn’t stop, Gil shook his finger and yelled, ‘I mean it now!’
Franklin bandaged the hand with cloth from a scallop bag, the same as he had done before with Kelley’s head.
‘Is it deep? Is it a mess?’ Kelley shouted in Franklin’s ear.
Gil brought a machete down from the wheelhouse. He carried it on the boat for removing tangles of fishing net that sometimes snagged on the dredges. He cut off the shark’s head and staggered back, swearing from the smell. He tied a rope to its tail and dragged the body to the stern. The fish’s bored-looking eyes gaped from its severed head.
Gil threw its body overboard and attached the rope to a holding bar above the lazarette.
‘What about my picture?’ Howard hadn’t wanted to get near the shark when it first came on board, but now that it was in bits and pieces and half of it over the side, he decided to make a fuss.
I took a photo of him sitting on the ice hatch, hands held over his groin the way he always sat. The shark’s head lay next to him, smelly and bleeding on the wooden hatch.
When we pulled up the carcass a half hour later, there was almost nothing left. Bites the size of footballs had been ripped from the belly and back.
Howard cut the teeth from its head and cleaned the jaws in a bucket of salt water and bleach. Then he tied them on the bow rail to harden in the sun.
I had seen trawlers docked at Galilee with shark jaws racked up along the bow. I used to watch fishermen unload the huge bodies, heads and fins cut off. They sometimes sold the meat as swordfish, since it tasted nearly the same and fetched a better price.
Kelley said a shop in New Bedford had a pair of jaws on display that a person could crawl through.
I told him I already knew. Father took me to see the jaws years before. We went there on a family trip, stood by the window of a rundown bar where the jaws were on display and then drove home. My father talked about them for a week. ‘Jesus. Did you see them? Did you ever see a thing like that in your life?’
It rained in the night.
The clean path of daydreams through my head shut down. A twisting greyness took its place.
Kelley wore a work glove over his bandage. The fit was too tight and he worked poorly. The scallops piled up on his side of the pen, and when I reached my hand across to scoop some into my section, he shoved me away and said he’d do his share.
I could tell he’d found some way to blame me for the accident, since it was me who brought out the camera. Somehow he had shifted the fault away from himself.
Howard had stomach cramps. Every couple of minutes, he threw down his gloves and stamped off to the toilet. He reappeared a while later looking drained and pale, and worked until the cramps sent him back inside.
Kelley’s moping tired me out. I pressed my knife against the metal basin of the scallop pen until it snapped.
‘Oh, I knew it would break sooner or later.’ I held up the stub of the blade and looked at Kelley from the corner of my eye.
He was too busy with his bandaged hand to bother with me.
I climbed the ladder up to the bridge. Gil had a box of new scallop knives under his bed. I saw them the night I tried on his survival suit. All I wanted was a couple of minutes rest. I’d sit on the dry floor of the wheelhouse, winding tape on to the new knife handle and maybe Gil would be eating potato chips and maybe he would give me some.
Gil slapped a knife on the control panel next to where I stood. Water dripped from the sleeves of my oilers onto the floor.
I had on a hopeful smile, scanning the room for signs of his special reserves of food.
I picked up the knife and still had on my hopeful smile.
Gil watched me, eyes screwed almost shut. ‘Fuck off.’ The depth gauge blinked and the radar blinked and Gil’s fingernails shone like eyes. Gil hit a lever that started the cable drums turning, to bring in the dredges. The whole boat moaned with the sound.
I walked out under the work lights. The warm smell of the wheelhouse was pulled from my lungs in one breath and replaced with salt air.
I held the greasy rungs tightly as I climbed down the ladder to the deck. Dead crabs not swept overboard lay on their backs, legs slowly scraping at nothing. Skates flapped their wings on the metal plates.
Howard still sat in the toilet. Through a small window in the door, I could see his head bowed over and resting in his hands.
It was Kelley’s turn to cut up the monkfish and he still hadn’t finished the job. They lay in a pile at the stern, mouths locked open and filled with sand. ‘I’ll help you just this once, Kelley!’ I shouted over the rumble of cable drums, pulling Kelley’s fish knife from his whalebone seat, where he stuck the blade. ‘But I want you to be grateful! I want to see some gratitude!’ Then I turned and shook my finger at him, imitating Gil. ‘I mean it now!’
Kelley stood by the cable drums, looking at me, teeth bared in a smile.
I picked up a monk and sliced off its tail, wishing I hadn’t picked Kelley’s knife to work with because it wasn’t sharp and made a mess of the fish. I raised my head from the jumble of meat and skin and wiry bones. A pinkness showed on the horizon. Perhaps it was the glow of a city, perhaps New York City, scorching the sky with its millions of lights. Silver dots of rain cut down through the work lights into my face. I imagined walking down Fifth Avenue in my oilers, my hair sticking up from not being brushed, moving with the shuffling steps I always took on the boat.
After stabbing at a couple of fish, I gave up working with Kelley’s knife and decided to find my own. I held up the blade, shook it at Kelley and mouthed the word ‘Useless’.
Then I saw that he had not been smiling.
He stood beside the cable drum, teeth still bared, face frozen and open-eyed. His right arm was torn off above the elbow. The rest of it lay stuck between the cables winding in.
I dragged him over to the ice hatch and laid him down. Blood poured from him like folds of silk.
I climbed very carefully up to the wheelhouse. ‘Kelley is hurt.’ I said each word loud and very clear in the stuffy space of the cabin.
Gil slopped out of his chair and ran down to see.
Then everything went from being what I remembered as very slow and calm to shouting and panic and pointless orders barked across the deck.
The rest of the crew piled out half asleep from the bunk room.
&nbs
p; From the bridge I watched the cluster of naked legs and arms and Gil’s back over the place where Kelley lay.
In the middle of their shouting I heard Kelley cry out in a high-pitched voice.
He had been cleaning grease from his gloves by gripping the cable as it wound in. I knew it. All of us did that when we couldn’t find a cloth to clean away the blood and oil that collected on the rubber. The bandage must have caught on a snag in the cable wire and dragged his arm in before he could pull free.
I climbed down from the bridge and helped carry him into the galley. We held him so high that we banged the stump of his arm against the door frame, and the spit from his screaming came down on us. I held him by the shoulder and blood dripped in my eyes and pooled in the dip of my collarbone.
We set him on the table and stared at his pale face. His lips formed words with no sound.
Then we tore the sleeve off a shirt and wrapped it in a tourniquet around the stump.
Gil called for the Coast Guard on his radio but couldn’t raise anyone.
Franklin pushed us out on deck and said not to come back in.
I sat with Howard on the ice hatch. He held his hands to his stomach and groaned with pain from the cramps. His dirty beard looked like brambles growing out of his skin.
Nelson and Pittsley were still in their underwear. They crouched against the stern, hidden from the waves that slapped the hull and crashed across our deck.
Gil appeared on the bridge and told us to finish hauling back the dredges. No one had answered on the radio. We’d have to steam to the nearest port, which was Block Island.