by Todd Lewan
“Oh, what the hell, Giggy,” DeCapua said. “Why don’t you just ask him why he’s really here?”
“What?”
“You want me to ask him?”
“What the fuck you talking about?”
“You don’t know, huh,” DeCapua said. “How about the skipper’s cell phone, for one thing? It rings all the time. Whenever we’re in range that thing’s ringing. That’s the owner calling, isn’t it?”
He turned to Bob Doyle.
“You just go up to the wheelhouse?”
“Yeah.”
“Hear the phone ringing?”
“Yeah.”
“Didn’t answer it, did he?”
Bob Doyle looked away.
“See?” DeCapua said. “He don’t answer his phone. Told me not to answer it, too. Why? Huh? Why don’t he want to talk with the owner?”
“That’s enough,” Mork said.
“What?”
“Shut up.”
“We’re fixing shitty gear and baiting shitty chums. Why are we fishing with chums? They’re cheap. Owner gave them to us for nothing. But we aren’t talking with the owner. Why not?”
Mork dropped his skate. He squared his shoulders and fixed his dark red eyes on DeCapua. His lips were working.
“Oh shit,” DeCapua said. “Mom’s mad.”
“What you say?”
“Nothing.”
“You say another word I’ll kick your ass.”
DeCapua looked down at his skate and whistled. Bob Doyle waited for it then. But nothing happened. Mork just sat there on his bucket with his face twisted in disgust. DeCapua put his hands on his knees and stood up.
“Hell,” he said. “It’s time for my watch.”
“Is he always like that?” Mork asked. DeCapua had already gone out.
“He’s a talker,” Bob Doyle said.
“He’s a pain in the ass.”
“Sometimes.”
“All the time.”
“Don’t let him get to you,” Bob Doyle said. “He likes to talk. Most times he talks for the sake of talking. He’s not so bad. And he’s good at what he does.”
“He gets on my nerves.”
“Well, don’t let him.”
With his lips, Mork drew another cigarette out of the pack, lit it and let a curl of smoke slip between his teeth. He said, “Let’s just get our twelve thousand pounds and get the fuck home.”
Bob Doyle nodded.
“That fucking asshole,” Mork said.
Then he reached down and picked up another line.
FOURTEEN
They had finished a supper of casserole and soup and Marlon Brando had just appeared in The Godfather when Mike DeCapua banged down the ladder to the galley and told everyone he was done with his watch. Bob Doyle picked up a pack of cigarettes, fixed himself a mug of coffee and climbed up into the wheelhouse. He looked into the partition behind the skipper’s chair. Mark Morley was lying on his side, snoring. Bob Doyle sat down in the chair and looked out to sea.
The boat was on autopilot, so he sat watching the wheel move itself. It was a strange thing to be sitting at the helm of a ship that did not need to be guided through the night. He sipped his coffee and smoked. There were a few stars out. He could not see the swells but he could feel the slow lift of the boat and the soft, heavy settling of the stern when one passed underneath. The La Conte was taking the swells on her quarter, settling nicely as the swells rolled by, and he sat in the high chair and looked for a light, something to break the blackness.
After a half hour he saw a flicker of light, like a firefly in the woods on a muggy night, to starboard. It was such a small point of light that he wondered if it was a ship at all. In a few minutes he saw it was a fishing boat, and as the ship grew closer he saw that its outriggers were up. They’re heading in, he thought. They’re running a slot to Cross Sound. I wonder if they filled their totes. I wonder how many totes they have. I wonder if they were out on the Fairweather Grounds. I wonder who is waiting for them at home.
Every now and then he would glance over at the computer. On the laptop you could monitor the La Conte’s track. It showed that the ship was following a true course, driving just east of the thousand-fathom line of the Alsek Valley along a four-hundred-fathom gradient. Where they had sailed appeared as a solid black line. Where they were going appeared as a hash line. The seafloor showed in reds and browns and blues. That’s a whole other universe down there, he thought. It was a world of canyons and plains and mountains and deserts. He tried to picture how it would be down where the rockfish were swimming. It would be quiet, of course, and dark. It would be very cold, too, he thought.
He noticed a gray silhouette on the screen, and beneath it the words Submerged Wreck. The gulf was peppered with explosive dumping areas, cables, sunken destroyers and cruise ships. This one had the shape of a fishing vessel. He wondered how long ago it had sunk. The vessel looked like it had turned on its side. There was the outline of her tail and her propellers, stuck in the mud. He imagined a boat covered in barnacles and coral and waving plants, a dark, watery tomb.
He settled back in the seat and sipped his coffee and lit another cigarette. He heard a cough and watched Mark Morley shuffle out the side door and climb down the outside ladder. Within a few minutes he heard boots on the stairs. He glanced at the video plotter and rubbed his eyes.
Behind him, he heard Morley say, “So, how’s it looking, Captain Bob?”
“A boat passed us a half hour ago. Looks like we’re going to be alone out here.”
“When was the last time you checked the bilges?”
“An hour ago. They were just a few inches up. I pumped them out.”
“Good.”
They stared out at the perfect blankness ahead.
Morley said, “I really hope this works.”
“Me, too.”
“I really mean it. I hope this trip works for all of us.”
“I do, too,” Bob Doyle said. “I really do. And I hope you keep me in mind for that tendering job in February. I’d like to work with you on that.”
“I know.”
“Hey,” Bob Doyle said, “that was a lot of fun yesterday out at Whale Park.”
“It was, wasn’t it?”
Morley removed his glasses. When he did Bob Doyle could see the dark pouches under his eyes that the thick lenses had hidden. He thought the skipper’s eyes wandered a little, too, almost like a blind man’s eyes.
“So,” Morley said. He put his glasses back on. “What really happened?”
“With what?”
“Your wife.”
“Oh,” Bob Doyle said. “She had an affair and we split up. It was an enlisted man. A flight mechanic on the base.”
“Feel like talking about it?”
“Not really.”
“All right.”
“There’s not much to tell,” Bob Doyle said. “She went for this big, twitchy fucker who collects guns and plays around on the hangar decks with laser-dot scopes.”
“Damn.”
“One time the prick shot himself by accident through the hand with his own forty-five automatic.”
“Wow.”
“He wanted me to take a poke at him so he could court-martial me. I was an officer and officers can’t pick fights. You lose everything if you do.”
“You didn’t hit him, did you?”
“No.”
“That’s good. Violence doesn’t get you anywhere. One minute you think you can do some good kicking somebody’s ass, next thing you know you’re worse than the thing you’re fighting. Take it from one who knows.”
There was a card wedged in the glass of the lookout window. It was one of those miniportraits of Jesus that Bible salesmen hand out at supermarkets. Bob Doyle nodded at the photograph of the young woman beside it.
“You always bring her along with you?”
Morley nodded. “Tamara’s a good girl. We’ve had our ups and downs. But she’s my world.”
>
Bob Doyle pondered the photo.
“I was a lot wilder in my younger days,” Morley said. “Drank a lot. Never saw a lady I didn’t like. Well, maybe a couple.” He laughed, then said, “I’ve been in trouble with the law, you know.”
“Really.”
“No shit. I did time for a hitting a cop. Not a lot of time, mind you.”
“No?”
Truth was, he had served fifteen months at a correctional facility in Anchorage for kicking in a cop’s face in Valdez. That episode was the grace note to an agony-to-ecstasy-to-agony tale that had actually begun two years prior to his arrest, on a rainy summer night in Sitka.
That night, Mark Morley had been chugging Jim Beam inside the Pioneer Bar and popping off challengers at the pool table when a little guy with a New York accent and a nifty parka chalked his stick and put a bet on the bar. At first glance, he didn’t look like a pool-hall hound. He looked like a chump. But he wiped the table. That impressed Morley. The man had a college degree. And he was an Alaska skipper. To Morley, a high school dropout from Detroit who was the son of a West Virginia coal mining clan, polish and sea savvy were qualities to hold in high regard.
They bought each other whiskies. Rob Carrs introduced himself and in no time Morley was pouring out his woes. He had just bailed from a Bering Sea trawler and come to Sitka to find work on a salmon troller. Literally, he had missed the boats; everybody was already crewed up for the season. He did wangle a job trolling on the Tiffany with a bunch of Mexicans. But the crew never made a dime. The owner always stiffed them.
Morley was too proud—and hungry—to go on like that. He’d packed his bags and was prepared to operate forklifts in Detroit for the rest of his days. Relax, Carrs told him. Alaska had its share of fool’s gold. But there was plenty of real gold to be had, too.
The next day Carrs introduced him to Dave Franklin, owner of the Heida Warrior, the troller he’d been skippering. Morley was in luck: the boat had just lost a deckhand. Carrs vouched for him and by that evening the boat left Sitka with Mark Morley in tow.
The Heida Warrior fished the last opening of the season, unloaded in Ketchikan and returned to its port of call, Sitka. The trip was a success. In Deep Inlet, they caught a heap of dog salmon and sold them for forty thousand dollars. Everyone, including Morley, pulled a nifty share. That was the end of any thoughts of returning to Michigan. The man was hooked.
The following season they did even better —until Morley got into trouble with a barmaid at the Marine, a strip joint in Ketchikan. She caught his eye with her overly tight Bush Company T-shirt. He caught hers with his tangerine-colored sport jacket and a line delivered with just enough excess of Southern drawl: “Hey, dawrlin’! What’s a sleazy girl like you doing in a nice place like this?” She rolled her eyes haughtily and sauntered off. He howled.
A few hours later she returned in a body suit. They and Carrs had a few more drinks before stumbling next door to the Frontier Bar. In a booth, Morley took off his glasses, and they started squeezing. She stuck her tongue in his ear and offered him a ride home. Carrs took his cue and waved to the couple on his way out the door. They hardly noticed.
The next time Carrs saw his deckhand was at three the following afternoon at the local jail. He found Morley slumped in his cell, still in his tangerine jacket, looking as glum as a lost beagle. His lovely lady had apparently filed rape charges. According to Morley, they had driven to a parking lot at the ferry terminal. She offered a blow job. He accepted. Because he’d had much to drink it was not easy going, and she sat up, annoyed, and said that on second thought her husband might not understand her tardiness. She shoved him out of her car, the job half done, as it were, and he was walking back to the wharf when a police car rolled up.
Unfortunately for him and the crew of the Heida Warrior, the judge did not buy Morley’s version of events and ordered him held for two days until his bail hearing. Dave Franklin had to post ten thousand dollars bail, Carrs had to take formal custody of his deckhand and a trial date was set nine months hence.
When the State of Alaska v. Mark R. Morley came to trial, everyone turned out for the show except the plaintiff. Because of her unexplained absence, the prosecutor had to rely on the statement she had given police the night of the alleged incident, in which she said she could not recall having any sexual contact with the defendant. Normally, the case would have been thrown out right away. But this one had been advertised in the newspapers for months, so they took the proceeding to its hazy conclusion.
The verdict came back not guilty, but it was obvious that Morley was shaken up. He had lost his beard, locks and ponytail—he had to snip them for trial —and much of his swagger. It took him months to get over the experience. He quit clubbing, topless dancers, pot parties. He worked all the time and, as a token of gratitude to Dave Franklin, built a bait shed on the aft deck of the Heida Warrior. What Morley lacked in sea smarts and tact he compensated for with enthusiasm and loyalty. He did not snivel, gave 100 percent effort and was always ready to sail on an hour’s notice. His hard work paid off. Franklin and Carrs rewarded him with a full-time job as deckhand.
By the fall of 1994 Morley had paid off his debts, settled up with the IRS and had twenty thousand dollars of his seining share stuffed in his duffel bag. He’d had no time to spend money; the Heida Warrior fished without letup. In mid-September, after a one-day stop in Sitka to pick up bait and longlining gear, they took off for Cape St. Elias and a forty-eight-hour halibut opening that Dave Franklin did not want to miss.
He wasn’t after the halibut. Alaska’s fishing authorities had forgotten to set a limit on what boats could take as black-cod bycatch. At the time, halibut was selling for fifty cents a pound; black cod for three dollars a pound. Plus, Franklin knew a hot black-cod hole near Cape St. Elias. It was a no-brainer. They sailed straight to it and dumped every skate they had, 150 all told. They were still fishing the hole when a storm snuck up from the southwest and caught them with 70 skates still in the water.
A gale was blowing and the seas were up to thirty-five feet when the cooling unit blew. The catch began to spoil. Most skippers probably would have pulled their gear, turned south and clawed back to Sitka against the blow. Not Carrs. He ordered the crew to leave the gear in the water. They made straight for the nearest port, Cordova Bay, the longlines trailing behind.
It was a wild ride but a quick one. Instead of eighteen hours, it took them twelve to reach Cordova Bay. They anchored and started hauling back. They were stunned: every single hook had a huge black cod dangling from it. The total haul was seventy-five thousand pounds. After deducting for groceries and supplies, each crewman walked away with twenty thousand dollars —not bad for two days work. And more was to come. No one in the fleet, it turned out, had gone for halibut. Another opening had been scheduled in a week’s time. Franklin parked the Heida Warrior in Valdez, told the crew to be ready to go when the weather cleared and hopped a plane with Carrs to Sitka, leaving Morley behind to mind the boat.
It was Mark Morley’s finest hour: he had weathered a humiliating trial, gained his sea legs and the respect of his mates and, with forty thousand dollars in his duffel bag, was the richest he had ever been. Not only did Morley have the dough, he was in an Alaska boomtown flush with swank restaurants and 24/7 cabarets. The tin man from Motor City had made it to his Emerald City.
He decided to celebrate his good fortune; really celebrate. He drank, smoked and snorted his way to dizzying heights, along the way wooing women, his Achilles’ heel. Valdez had no shortage of female flesh: divorcées, single moms, ladies of means with a misstep or two in their lives, waitresses, strippers, lap dancers, barflies—they were all hard-partying gals, a little rough around the edges, and all lookers. Every one could see Morley coming with his Detroit street strut, his California ponytail and nothing but greenbacks and time on his hands.
When Carrs returned a week later, he found his deckhand had blown nearly ten thousand dollars of his earnings. Morley h
ad girlfriends in every joint in town, though there was one tart, Lisa, who had hooked her float to his parade and refused to let go. She was a runaway from the Midwest, early twenties, a little goofy—she claimed she saw angels walking the streets—with a stringy, bleach appeal. She’d had a few run-ins with the local police, and was not exactly a hit in the clubs. (One bar manager had eighty-sixed her for soliciting on the premises.) It was Lisa he took to the Sugar Loaf dance club the night of October 2, 1994. The bouncer told her to scram. She refused. So the bouncer called the cops. While the couple danced on the floor, two officers entered, grabbed the young lady by the arm and led her out to the parking lot.
By the time Morley got outside, they had the girl up against the squad car, arm pulled up behind her and twisted in the socket, screaming. Morley shouted at them to let her go. One of the officers barked at him to back off. Morley called him a choice name. The cop told him he was under arrest for disorderly conduct, grabbed something—Morley was never able to say afterward what that something was—and raised his arm above his head.
Morley ducked, and in one lunging, sweeping motion, upended him. The cop went down hard. Morley kicked him in the chest. The officer rolled over on his back, tried to cover his head. Morley reared back and kicked twice more, as though he were kicking a field goal, and the cop’s nose and cheekbones caved like Chinese porcelain.
This time bail was set for twenty thousand dollars. Franklin and Carrs put up half each. Afterward, Carrs tried to talk Morley into fighting the charges. “I will go to court for you,” the skipper told him. “That bastard egged you on. He was begging for trouble. That was police brutality.” But Morley wouldn’t have any of it. He didn’t have the heart, not after the circus in Ketchikan. He pleaded guilty to third-degree assault and was sentenced to two and a half years, with the possibility of parole in fifteen months. He also had to pay the officer’s medical bills and court costs —fifty thousand dollars in all —which left him in a twenty-thousand-dollar hole.
After his release, Morley got a job at a gas station a block from the Pioneer Bar, where he met Tamara Westcott. He moved in with her, but soon fell behind a few thousand dollars in his restitution payments. In the fall of 1997, his parole officer gave him an ultimatum: pay what he owed or he was going back to prison.