The Last Run

by Todd Lewan

  One day a letter arrived in his post office box. He read it over carefully and showed it to Ing. Idaho wanted him back. It had taken the authorities three years to extradite him but they had finally gotten around to doing it. Apparently, he’d been sentenced in absentia to eighteen years for jumping parole. The Alaska authorities were to return him at once for a hearing.

  A month later, Mike DeCapua was back in Boise. Before his hearing began at the Idaho superior courthouse the judge called him into his chambers.

  “They tell me you’re a fisherman,” the judge said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Like some coffee?”

  “Sure.”

  The judge poured and then sat back in his leather chair and considered him.

  “You know,” the judge began, “I’m an angler myself.”

  “Sir?”

  “I’ve always wanted to fish in Alaska. Tell me, now, from one fisherman to another —is it as good as everyone says?”

  If Mike DeCapua was good at anything, it was telling people what they wanted to hear. And he really heaped it on this time. At length, the judge sat forward, his bristly eyebrows bunching.

  “Tell me something, Mr. DeCapua,” the judge said. “What will you do if I let you out?”

  “I’ll go fishing in Alaska, Your Honor.”

  “I have your word on that?”

  The sentence was commuted to a year, and after ninety days Mike DeCapua was released for good behavior. The police escorted him to the airport. They wanted to make sure he was on the plane when the cabin door shut.

  His ticket to Sitka was one-way.

  SEVEN

  The couch at Georgia Kite’s remained Bob Doyle’s refuge through the rest of November. The days grew shorter and the nights colder still. The snowlines on the mountains were lower with each dawn. Before daybreak a frost would leave thin ice on the porch steps and whiten the branches of the big tree out back. There were no flowers to see anymore, but by late morning the frosts would go as if they had never come, leaving beads of liquid like tears welled up on the leaves of bushes and on the fallen spruce in the forests.

  Then the solstice came and went, and Christmas, too. It had been snowing in the mountains. Rangers closed the access road to Cascade Park a third of the way up the mountain because of the drifts, but hikers were still allowed to roam about the Old Mill Site out toward Herring Cove. After a heavy rain the trails would be softer to walk on. But if the air hardened with a cold front, the pleasure of feeling the forest give a little under his boots would not be there and it felt as though he was walking down a damp gravel driveway or a field of frozen crickets.

  By now Bob Doyle had met most of the flophouse mainstays, though there was always another newcomer who had fallen among them. Harvey Kitka and Spoon Davis still had enough of their summer fishing shares left over to keep the beer kegs filled. Dirty Dick was still fighting his weekly showers, though he’d given up trying to hide his beer, and Sue Nelson, who lived four doors down, was still fighting with her husband, Perry, about her drinking. She was in the habit of stopping by the Basement at night, wearing tight sweaters and laughing that smug little laugh of hers and making eyes at John Gino so he would let her swig his vodka. A homosexual had made a pass at Dirty Dick, which in turn threw Sue Nelson into an uproar. A couple of sisters from Jackson College had been trying out for size most of the fishermen in the Basement bedroom. Rob Kite was still bringing weed up from down south, but having a hard time undercutting his competitors.

  It was a slow time of the year for fishing, and Mike DeCapua was getting a little cranky about having to stay put in port and do boat repairs—busy-work, he called it—while his skipper waited for a window of clear weather between blows. The boat he’d been on, a longliner called the Min E, hadn’t been pulling much and he was in an increasingly evil mood. He was in a very evil mood the afternoon he banged down the stairs of the Basement and found Bob Doyle shooting a rack of pool with Norm Niessen, a friend who lived in the woods out off Sawmill Point Road. Niessen had moved up to Alaska from South Dakota years earlier. He was describing what it was like to live five years in a dilapidated school bus.

  “Is he still talking about his days in that fucking bus?” DeCapua said.

  “Kiss my ass, Mike,” Niessen said.

  “Sorry, Mom.” DeCapua turned to Bob Doyle. “It’s just that I’ve heard that one about a zillion times.”

  “I said kiss my ass,” Niessen said.

  DeCapua smiled. “You know what I call this guy, Bob? I call him Perfect Mom. Tell him, Norm. Tell Bob here why I call you that.”

  “Quiet, Mike,” Bob Doyle said. He was leaning far over the table, lining up his next shot.

  “Listen,” DeCapua said. “All you dumb fucks ever do is shoot pool. Fuck pool. Say, Bob, do you want to play pool all your life?”

  “You know something better?”

  “How about fishing?”

  DeCapua told him that one of the deckhands on the Min E had gotten into a scrap with the skipper over holiday time. The skipper was not letting crewmen go for the holidays. So the deckhand split.

  Bob Doyle looked at DeCapua good and hard.

  “You’re shitting me.”

  “I ain’t.”

  Bob Doyle lowered the cue stick.

  “When does the boat leave?”

  “New Year’s.”

  For two days they untangled snarls in longline gear, stocked up on fuel, groceries, and tweaked the engine. Before daybreak on the first day of January 1998, the day of a rockfish opening, the Min E sailed out of Sitka Sound.

  It sailed right back one night later. The rockfishing was horrible; after thirty-two hours of haulbacks, they’d barely pulled three hundred pounds.

  Bob Doyle was not nearly as upset as the others. He had made it through his first commercial fishing trip without a major screwup. And he felt he had hit it off with the skipper, Phil Wiley. After they had tied up, Wiley walked up to him and invited him to stay on another month, and to sleep on the boat, too, if he liked.

  “Phil’s got a crush on you,” DeCapua said. He and Bob Doyle were walking back from the ANB to the Basement. “What you do, anyway? Give him something special in his rack?”

  “He’s a good guy.”

  “He’s a cocksucker.”

  Wiley, he explained, had shortchanged him out of three hundred dollars after a trip the previous year. Once they had beached and the rest of the crew had split their shares and gone to the Pioneer Bar, DeCapua pulled Wiley aside.

  He told him, “Okay, I don’t care what you do to the rest of the crew. They’re not here. It’s just you and me.”

  “Go on.”

  “You owe me three hundred dollars. I want my three hundred dollars. You give me my three hundred dollars and I keep my mouth shut and go home. You don’t give me my three hundred dollars and I’m going to the crew. First I’ll tell them what a retro check is. Then I’ll tell them you owe them a retro check. Don’t think I won’t. I got all the catch figures. I want my money and I want it now.”

  Wiley looked blankly at him. “Is that it?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Fuck off.”

  So Mike DeCapua marched back to the Basement, pulled out a phone book and called every marine insurance company listed in the yellow pages until he found Wiley’s. He told the agent that his client was a high risk.

  The agent asked him why.

  “Well, your guy is not paying the crew. Which makes the crew mad. And they’re going to retaliate by hurting the vessel when Mr. Wiley is not around. And you are the ones who are insuring him.”

  “I see.”

  “You guys are going to wind up paying that boat off to the bank because it’s going to get lost at the dock sometime because of his behavior.”

  “I see,” the agent said.

  “And what’s more, that vessel ain’t safe. Her mast is unsteady, her deck is loose from the rails, and she needs extensive hull work. And he ain’t do
ing it.”

  Three days later, a marine architect showed up to inspect the Min E. He took some notes, made out a report and sent a letter to Phil Wiley not long after. It said that unless repairs were affected, the boat would no longer be insured.

  The repairs, DeCapua said, set Phil Wiley back a bundle.* Still, he did not fire DeCapua.

  “But he sure made me pay,” DeCapua muttered.

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, when Phil takes me out, we work just enough to get a small catch, to cover some expenses he’s got, and then we come right back in. There’s never enough left over for me to get a good paycheck.”

  “Oh.”

  “He can be a bastard, all right.”

  The Min Ety sailed again on January 15. Bob Doyle and Mike DeCapua were on it. They worked the lower half of the Chatham Strait and returned to Sitka with one thousand pounds of black cod.

  “That bastard,” DeCapua muttered. He and Bob Doyle were walking up the dock. “That fucking bastard did it to me again.”

  “Listen, Mike,” Bob Doyle said. “I don’t know if he’s doing it on purpose. I mean, I don’t see the sense in it.”

  “In what?”

  “In shooting himself in the foot,” Bob Doyle said. “I mean, why would he do that?”

  Mike DeCapua laughed.

  “People do it all the time,” he said.

  *In a phone interview in November 2003, Phil Wiley said he vaguely recalled a dispute with Mike DeCapua over retro pay and said his deckhand did contact the company that insured the Min E to lodge a complaint about the boat. However, Wiley said any allegations that his vessel was not seaworthy or that he slighted crewmen of pay were false. The skipper said the Min E was a fine boat with a sturdy hull that required only routine maintenance, and that at no time could he recall any insurance inspectors finding otherwise. Though he could not remember any other details about his disagreement with DeCapua, Wiley did say it was not uncommon for skippers in Alaska to hold back the retro pay of deckhands who jumped ship or left a vessel before it had been adequately cleaned and retooled after a fishing trip.

  EIGHT

  The morning after the Min E returned to Sitka from its second bad trip in as many weeks, Bob Doyle went to the Halibut Hole to look for Mike DeCapua. He was not there, so Bob Doyle sat down and had a coffee and a black bean soup with cheddar crackers. He read the previous day’s paper with the coffee and smoked a cigarette. It was raining out and there were large, oily puddles in the street. Two young women came out of a hairdresser’s shop next door, touching their necks and laughing, and picked their way around the puddles. More people went by the window on the sidewalk. Most wore slickers and boots. A man was carrying a little girl on his shoulders. The way the girl’s blond bangs stuck to her forehead and the terribly bright smile on her face sent a chill through Bob Doyle so he ordered another cup of soup with crackers and lit another cigarette.

  Mike DeCapua did not turn up, so around eleven-thirty Bob Doyle walked up the main street to the Moose Lodge and had a Crown Royal with the barman. DeCapua didn’t show up there either, so he left a five-dollar bill on the bar and thumbed a lift out along Halibut Point Road to a yard where shipwrights welded the hulls of steel boats. He knew that DeCapua used to camp out at the yard, sleeping inside the hulls of ships that had come in for repairs. He asked a couple of the metalworkers if they had seen him. They shook their heads. Nobody had seen DeCapua for months.

  In the rain Bob Doyle walked back along Katlian Street. The plywood of the sagging houses looked gray and wet. He turned in at the ANB and was about to take the ramp down to the docks when he spotted Mike DeCapua coming across the parking lot. There was no mistaking his heronlike strut. Bob Doyle called out to him. DeCapua came over and stood next to him under the awning.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” Bob Doyle said. “Where you been?”

  “At the bank.”

  Bob Doyle gave him a puzzled look.

  “Restitution,” DeCapua said. “I pay fifty bucks a month to this joint I hit a while back, the PO leaves me alone.”

  “Oh,” Bob Doyle said. “You won’t believe what I did today.”

  “What?”

  “I think I may have found us a job.”

  “No kidding.”

  “The job service called me this morning. They got a job for us.”

  “Baking cookies?”

  “No,” Bob Doyle said. “Somebody posted a job today for two deckhands on a fishing boat.”

  “Two hands?”

  “I got it right here.”

  He felt in his pocket, pulled out a piece of paper, unfolded it and handed it to DeCapua.

  OPEN TIL FILLED. SEASONAL DECKHAND POSITIONS FOR ROCKFISH SEASON. QUALIFICATIONS: PREFER PRIOR DECKHAND EXP OR SOMEONE WHO HAS SOME KNOWLEDGE OF BOATS. LONGLINE STUCK GEAR USED. WILL BE FISHING THE SITKA SOUND WATERS. WORK MAY EXTEND TO TENDERING FOR THE TANNER CRAB SEASON. WORK IS TO BEGIN IMMEDIATELY.

  “You got a number?” DeCapua asked him.

  “I already called.”

  “And?”

  “The skipper said he’d need two guys. He said he’d take one green hand if another experienced one came along.”

  “He did, huh?”

  “This could be what we’re looking for. And the best part is that we’d be set for February, too —just tendering fish from the other boats.”

  DeCapua was reading the ad again.

  “It doesn’t give the skipper’s name,” he said.

  “It’s Morley. Mark Morley.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Nothing,” DeCapua said. “Means I ain’t never heard of him, is all.”

  “He’s down at Old Thompsen Harbor. He said he’d be there pretty much all afternoon. If we went down there now we’d probably catch him.”

  DeCapua was reading the ad again.

  “And what’s our take?”

  “Ten percent of the catch.”

  “Ten each?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That ain’t bad,” DeCapua said. “But what the hell kind of skipper gets his deckhands from a newspaper ad?”

  “It wasn’t in the newspaper,” Bob Doyle said. “I got it from the job placement service.”

  “Same fucking difference.”

  “Well,” Bob Doyle said, “it could be just what we need to get us through the winter.”

  A smirk flickered across DeCapua’s lips. “It would be something to see Phil’s face after we tell him that we’re splitting.”

  “So we go?”

  Mike DeCapua looked out at the channel. There was a wind rising, a chop building.

  “Oh shit,” he said. “What do we got to lose?”

  It was getting on evening when they reached Old Thompsen Harbor. The wind was ripping along the breaker wall and the tide was up. They walked down a grated ramp and under the orange glow of the lamps along the main pier. There were not many boats in their slips, but the few left there for the winter were rocking and pitching in the chop. To the left, down the far end of the third dock, they saw the silhouette of a long, dark ship and the dark shapes of two men on the foredeck.

  “That must be it,” Bob Doyle said.

  “It’s a schooner.”

  “Is that bad?”

  “No,” Mike DeCapua said, “I like schooners.”

  They walked along the dock until they came to a ship with a rounded, black stern, with the words LA CONTE painted on it in white. A heavyset man in a slicker and a cap was standing on the slip, handing a bag up to a second man on the bow.

  Bob Doyle called out, “Howdy!”

  The big man on the dock turned.

  “You Mark Morley?”

  “Yeah?”

  “My name is Bob Doyle. I called you this morning. About those deckhand jobs?”

  “Oh, right!”

  The man came over, looking awfully big in a sweatshirt two sizes too large for him, and a
cap and slicker. He was not tall as much as he was stocky and bull-shouldered, the size and build of a tailback gone a little heavy. He wore his cap cocked way up with the brim curled, like a kid in Little League might, and he had big, floppy ears and thin, wide-set eyes that seemed small behind his thick, oval glasses. Bob Doyle thought he looked like a philosopher in a fisherman’s jacket.

  “This here is Mike DeCapua.”

  “Good to meet you,” Morley said.

  “Same.”

  “So, you guys looking for work?” Morley asked.

  “Depends on what the work is,” DeCapua said.

  “We do gray cod, mainly,” said Morley. “We’ll probably take some dog sharks, too, being that there’s so many damned sharks and that nobody ever misses a shark.” He laughed.

  “Who’s he?” Bob Doyle asked, motioning to the man on the foredeck.

  “That little guy? Oh, that’s just my manager. What I call him, anyways. His name’s Gig. Hell of a fisherman. You know him?”

  “No,” Bob Doyle said.

  “I know him,” DeCapua said.

  “Hey, Giggy,” Morley shouted. “Come on over and say hello.”

  The man walked to the stern of the boat and leaned over the bulwark. He was Native; that Bob Doyle could see straightaway. He was small in height, but rangy and strong looking, with thick, stubby fingers. His head was covered with the hood of a sweat jacket, but out of the sides of the hood stuck tufts of hair, shiny and black as a raven’s wing. But for his mustache, there was something boyish, puppylike, about his face. It might have been the smooth, fair skin, it might have been his eyes, black and long-lashed and wetly shining, like a harbor seal’s. He also had this crooked, shy grin, like a schoolkid who’s just been busted for smoking in the bathroom.

  He was wearing one of those grins.

  Morley continued, “This here’s Bill Mork, but everyone calls him Gig.” Morley pointed to Bob Doyle. “Giggy, this here’s Bob, and that there’s Mike Dee…”