by Paul Watkins
We had just pulled the dredges on deck when Nelson appeared from the bunk room and walked toward the stern to take a piss. He stood with his hands on the small of his back, looking at the water. Suddenly he shouted, ‘It’s a man! A man!’
I moved to get a better look and saw the head of the man in the water. He rose up on the crest of one wave and disappeared into the trough of another.
He wore a survival suit.
Gil had already begun to wheel the boat around.
We waved and called to the man, but as we pulled close I saw his eyes were closed, his mouth shut tight. He looked old and his eyebrows were grey.
We passed him once and couldn’t reach him, so we turned and tried again.
His arms spread out from his body and the fingers waved like seaweed at the end. Glow strips on the suit reflected the sun’s weak light.
Pittsley and Nelson pulled him to the boat with a rubber-hook, then heaved him over the side with a rope. His heels slapped hard on the deck.
‘Dead man,’ Pittsley shouted in my ear. ‘We got us a corpse.’
I picked up my fish basket again, not wanting to touch the man if I didn’t have to.
The dead man’s survival suit looked weathered. A few barnacles grew on the rubber.
We crowded around and looked down at his face. It had been hardened by the sea. His eyebrows were crusted with salt and the skin was pulled tight on the bones. Behind the closed eyelids his eyes had sunk into his head. The lips were thin strips stretched over the teeth and his nostrils two fat, shrivelled holes.
Gil turned the man over with the toe of his boot.
I held my breath as I stepped close. On the back, in faded letters, I read:
Blow the Whistle To Attract Attention.
Relax. Remember – You Cannot Sink.
‘You want me to call the Coast Guard?’ Howard wiped his hands on his trousers, even though he had not touched the body.
Gil rocked on his heels with the strike of a wave against the boat. ‘What for? He’s already dead. Throw him back over.’
Without a word. Pittsley and Nelson picked the man up by his arms and started dragging him toward the gap in the stern.
I took another look at the man’s face and smooth shape of his forehead tucked into the survival suit’s hood. Then I took another pace forward, my eyes fixed on the face. A sharp jolt punched through my ribs. ‘It’s my dad.’
‘What?’ Pittsley and Nelson dropped the man. His head fell with a crack on the deck.
I began to breathe very fast, feeling the same shudders that had run through me when Kelley died. ‘It’s my dad.’ I knelt next to the body and put my hands on either side of his head, my thumbs against the freezing cold skin. ‘My dad.’ I looked up at the faces of the people around me. My dad, I tried to say again, but only crackled in my throat.
I wrapped my arms around his chest and began to carry him towards the galley. The body was heavier than I thought, and my knees were shaking. I fell over with the body on top of me. ‘Help me carry my dad.’ I stood up, took hold of the arm and pulled.
Gil set his hand on my shoulder and squeezed. ‘What are you talking about, Pfeif? What makes you think this is your dad?’
‘I know him from his face.’ I bent over and took the man’s head in my hands. My mouth locked again and I felt myself choking.
‘You don’t know anybody from that face.’
‘It’s my dad.’ Something acid rose up from my throat and spilled down the side of my mouth.
‘You told me your dad wasn’t fishing any more, Pfeif.’
I breathed in and breathed in again but the air was thin and empty. ‘He went out a couple of days ago with a friend. He was going as mate. Just for a couple of trips.’ I groped behind me for the ice hatch and sat down, a painful heaviness in my guts.
‘Pfeiffer.’ Gil’s face appeared in front of me, jaw muscles in two bars down the side of his cheek. ‘This man has been out here for a lot longer than a couple of days. This man has been dead a long time. Now you’ – his finger jabbed, out of focus, close to my sight – ‘you saw your dad only a day or two ago. Right?’
‘Yes. Three days ago.’
‘Well, then.’
‘I know him from his eyes.’ I bent down and pulled back the man’s eyelids with my thumb. The pupils were gone, rolled back into his head. Only the white remained. I stood up and screamed in Gil’s face. ‘It’s my dad!’
Gil took hold of my collar and lifted me onto the tips of my toes.
My nose fizzed and tears ran down my face.
Gil shook me. ‘Did you see him a couple of days ago or not?’
‘Yes.’ I dabbed at my eyes with the tips of my fingers.
He turned to Pittsley. ‘Then get this floater out of here!’ Gil faced me again. ‘There’s barnacles on the suit! He’s been out here for ages. Now it’s not your father and you know it.’
Pittsley took the man’s arms and dragged him toward the gap in our stern.
‘You can’t just leave him out here!’ I tried to push Gil aside but he held on to me, his hands gripping my skin through the material of my coat.
‘If we put him down in the ice room and hand him over to the police when we get back, they declare the catch contaminated and we lose it. We lose the whole thing. Now this man is dead and you don’t know him and you can’t help him. He doesn’t care where he is. He’s a piece of driftwood now. Do you understand?’
‘You can’t leave him out here by himself.’ I hung in the grip of Gil’s hands on my collar.
‘What are you talking about?’
I shrugged my shoulders, the heaviness in my stomach pulling me down. ‘Can’t.’ I looked up. The rest of the crew was watching me. I stared down at the deck, ashamed.
They threw the man over. I saw the ball of his head bob up on the wave crests. Then he was gone in the dullness of the broken sea.
‘Send these dredges down.’ Gil snapped his fingers at us and returned to the wheelhouse.
I heard the clank of chains, the hum of cable running loose.
At the end of my watch, I set the bloated scallop bags on fresh beds of ice and got a dozen eggs for Franklin from the food storage area at the back of the ice room. I listened to the boat idle in neutral for a second before the Cats slammed into gear and gathered speed.
I handed the eggs up to Howard. They came in a pink Styrofoam box with a barnyard scene in blue ink on the front.
‘You all right now?’ He held the eggs to his chest. Water dripped from the sides of the ice hatch.
‘I was sure, Howard. I know now, but right then I swear I was sure.’
‘You be glad you were wrong is all.’ He grinned and his head slipped away, leaving a neat square of grey sky in its place.
After he’d gone, I was very tired. I lay down next to the scallops and breathed in the peppery air, feeling my muscles go numb.
I stayed very still, having nightmares on the ice. I didn’t blink in case I suddenly found myself on the top of a wave, my dead and naked body in the red survival suit, legs dangling down, owning trails of seaweed and the studs of barnacles.
I lay in the bunk room with my right arm hooked over my eyes, hearing the clatter of knives and forks as Gil and Howard ate their meal.
The door opened and someone stood in the doorway without turning on the light.
I raised my head and saw Gil.
‘Not hungry, Pfeif?’
‘No, thank you.’
‘Better now? You don’t still think that man was your father?’
‘No, Gil. But out there I was sure.’
‘I know.’ His bulk filled the space of the doorway. ‘You were spooked. Everybody gets spooked. It’s usually a sign that a person needs a break. I was thinking maybe you’d want to take some time off when we get back to port. Take a couple of weeks.’
‘Is that a nice way of firing me?’
‘No. You can have your job back any time. You still looking forward to starting your
business?’
‘Still, yes. I’m learning the ropes from the old man who’s selling his boat.’
‘Listen, Pfeif.’ He walked into the room and shut the door. It was completely dark. ‘You’re working to pay off that boat, aren’t you?’
‘Pay it off and have some money to get started with. The dentist bill has been wiping me out.’
‘You want to pay that boat off now? By next week?’
‘Of course, if I could.’ Even with my eyes wide open, I could see nothing in the room.
‘You remember that time I made you stay on land while the rest of us went out to sea? Do you know why that was?’
‘Kelley told me.’ I heard his feet shuffle close by.
‘I didn’t think he’d keep his mouth shut to you about it.’
His knees cracked as he bent down, I smelled his breath in my face but still couldn’t see him. ‘Next week we make another one of those trips. Do you want to take Kelley’s place on this one? It’s all right if you say no. But if you come with us, you’d pay off the boat and probably have all you need to get started.’
‘What would we be doing exactly?’
‘Same as last time. Same place. Same people. Same chances and same pay. Fact is, I am under a little bit of an obligation to make this trip.’
‘When would we leave?’
‘In a week, like I said. You can’t use the money all at once, so use the time off to take a break afterwards. A couple of weeks, maybe.’
Gil was right, if I didn’t take a rest soon, I would go out of my head. Kelley’s death still kept me awake in my bunk, and I needed the sleep to be able to work well on deck. It was wearing me down each time I spoke to my father, waiting for him to tell me about what he had done in the years he put Joseph through school. I sat there wondering when he would trust me enough, the way he had trusted Joseph, to let me in on the secret I already knew. But he never spoke of it. He stayed silent and his silence was corroding my nerves. Rest. Time to sleep. Time to think. Time to lose, at least for a while, the perpetual rolling motion of the sea inside my skull.
I turned my face to where I thought Gil stood in the dark.
‘Good enough. I’ll be ready when you say.’
His knees cracked again as he stood. ‘Excellent. Still not hungry?’
I didn’t answer. A tightness had come up in my throat.
Gil opened the bunk room door and slipped out.
Rain thrashed the streets. It had been storming since the sun went down.
I sat on my bed at the Y, dressed in my oilers.
It was the middle of the night.
I’d spent hours trying to remember what Kelley had said about the run, imagining time spent watching the radar, the faces of Emmett and Will as they walked from the woods, nervous laughter when the men figured out they weren’t going to kill each other, and the weight of packages from the back of their truck. I tried to map each detail in my head, so as not to be afraid when the time came.
At three o’clock, I left the room and went outside.
Water bubbled in the gutters. It washed across the road in veils.
Rain poured down my arms and dripped from the tips of my fingers.
We were due to leave the dock at four.
The bars had closed and all the streets were empty. Cold gusts barged down the alleys. I took my time walking by the shop windows on Severn Street. Serious-faced mannequins stared through the glass.
I moved quietly past Lester’s boat and around the back of Sabatini’s fish house. Instead of going straight to the Grey Ghost, I crouched in one of the empty ice carts, watching for movement on the dock, listening for any break in the quiet. The bay was choppy and black. I tucked my hands into the sleeves of my oilers. Then I wiggled my toes in my boots, to keep them from going numb.
Footsteps. Howard walked across the dock. The wooden planks gleamed in the wet. Rain crowded around the wharf lights. Howard stood next to the Grey Ghost and looked around, puffing white air through his teeth. Then he jumped down on deck and disappeared into the galley.
I stayed in the ice cart, sheltered from the wind, waiting to see who else would show.
The wheelhouse door opened. Franklin’s face appeared.
I heard Gil’s voice inside. ‘Come on, Franklin. Shut the damn door. It’s too cold.’
A crumpled ball of paper bounced off Franklin’s head. The door closed again.
Then Pittsley and Nelson stepped onto the dock. They were both trying to shelter under one small umbrella. Pittsley tugged it away from Nelson and Nelson tugged it back. The two of them were drenched.
Acid washed through my stomach. My muscles tensed, ready to lift me from my crouch and shove me across to the boat. But I stayed slumped in the cart.
Wind nudged past the corrugated iron of the fish house roof. It gathered the strands of falling rain, spun them into shapes like people dancing, then swept them away across the water.
Shudders of tension rushed through me.
It was several minutes before I realised that I could not cross the shining planks that lay between me and the Ghost. Could not ride out to sea and do what my father had done.
I wanted to be gone. Wanted never to have come this far. Fatigue twisted my bones.
The twitching of my nerves died down and I crawled with cramped legs on to the dock.
I walked into the dark fish house.
Suddenly the blackness moved and became human.
My father stood in front of me, glaring from the deep hood of his coat. Slowly he pulled down the hood, showing the paleness of his bald head. ‘They’re waiting for you, James.’
‘I’m not going, Dad.’
The sound of breathing. Drum of raindrops on the roof.
He reached his hand out slowly and closed his fingers around my temples.
I didn’t move, waiting for him to crush my skull like an egg.
He ran his fingers through my hair and took his hand away.
When I looked up a few seconds later, he was gone, as if he had never been there. Then I saw his crooked shadow walk out into the storm, I ran to catch up, as the engines of the Grey Ghost thundered into life.
Afterword
When I wrote Calm at Sunset, Calm at Dawn, I had only just finished working on the deep-sea boats. A lot of the wounds I had suffered in the previous years were still healing, and I was still awakened several nights a week by dreams of sharks and shipwrecks – mostly things which almost happened but didn’t – that now played out like a film projected against the inside of my skull.
I was twenty-four years old, and had no real sense of whether those experiences had made me into someone different than I’d been before I went to sea.
They did change me. I know that now. But the nature of those changes was something I could never have predicted at the time.
One of the hardest parts about working on the boats was returning to university at the end of the fishing season. Following months of discomfort and danger, I found it hard to take seriously the wagging fingers of my professors and the men on my hall who wept when they received A- grades instead of A’s.
Out on the ocean, the stakes were huge. Lose your footing and be washed overboard or vanish in a storm when a rogue wave swamps your vessel. Back on land, my friends wrangled over things so trivial that, for a long time after getting back to school, I would feel a wall between us, isolating me from the obsessions which governed their minds. Eventually, I would slide back into the rhythm of student life and the fretting of my classmates would become my anxieties as well. Until that transformation was complete, however, the sense of separation seemed a heavy price to pay for the time I’d spent away from land.
It wasn’t until my final voyage that I began to realise this might be, in fact, a gift, rather than some kind of penalty, and one more valuable than any of the wages I had earned.
On the day after Christmas, I shipped out of Parascandolo’s Dock in Newport, Rhode Island. The boat was an old scallop dragger
with a bad reputation for accidents and fights breaking out among the crew. It was the kind of ship that fishermen refer to as a ‘slab’, but it was the only boat with an empty berth and so I had to take it. The weather had been rough that winter. As I stood on the ice-covered dock with my duffle bag slung over my shoulder, waiting to climb on board, I had a bad feeling about it, but I was hoping that this one trip would earn enough to see me through to graduation, which was only a few months away. So I went against my instincts, a thing I have never done since.
About sixty miles off the coast, we were hit by the worst storm I’d ever been in. It is the sounds I remember more clearly than anything else. The terrible shriek of the props as they cleared the waves. The incessant and demented moaning of the wind through the steel cables of the rigging. The clang of the metal baseball bat we used night and day to knock away the ice that built up on the surface of the boat. In the pitching sea, the winch men would often misjudge the precise moment when the dredges, each one as big as a car, would be hoisted on board. Instead of coming down smoothly, they would skid across the plates, smashing into the metal apron on the other side. For a deck hand like me, there was no place to hide. All you could do was try not to be in the way.
Down in the crew’s quarters, we strapped ourselves into our bunks, listening to the sucking gasp of the bow as it rose from the water and feeling the shudder, all along the keel, as we charged into the next roller.
I wondered how much more of this the boat could take. I knew that if we foundered, I would never get out of the boat before we sank. And even if I did get out, I had no survival suit and would only last a few minutes in the waters of the Labrador current.
After two days of this, the mate and two senior crewmen did something I had never seen happen before. They asked the captain to go in. I remember how quiet it became in the galley, even with the storm outside.
The captain refused, in language so exotically obscene that I, who thought he had heard everything, was left stunned when he got up from the galley table and locked himself in the wheelhouse. In the days that followed, while the storm grew worse and worse, he remained by the wheel, sleeping on the floor beside it even when the mate stood his watch, as if he was afraid that we might mutiny.