There was Pete by the tubs. His red hair stuck wetly to his forehead. “Man, this is no way to make money.”
“Want to give the job back?”
“I only need the dough and free chow. If you only need the work and give me the rest we’ve got a deal.”
Hank wandered to the harbor and found the Rondelay among the other salmon boats waiting out the strike. On deck, in the rain, Ivan sat splicing. Sven and Jack were off buying groceries. Inside, Steve and Jones Henry the skipper squatted cursing over the disassembled engine. Since jail, Hank had spent parts of the last two evenings aboard, listening to boat talk and learning cribbage before trailing them to the bars. But in the working daylight they barely grunted in his direction. With the engine torn down, the cabin was completely cluttered. Boards blocked the bunks, and parts lay over the stove and sink. He sorted through a box of greasy tools to find a punch they needed, then braced a wrench while they put their collective weights against another to break a bind, but realized that they absorbed him if he stood around and managed just as easily alone.
Ivan called him on deck and pointed to a compact white boat gliding in through the rain-pocked water. “Old Lincoln, riding low, full of halibut. Go to that cannery where she’s going to dock. Tell Buck I said you was a good boy to put to work.”
Hank arrived on the run, just ahead of the Lincoln, which eased with a gentle thump against the pilings. A leather-faced man in a stocking cap threw him a coil of line. Hank slipped the loop over a cleat and watched with relief as the man accepted his action and pulled the line taut. The new experience made his blood pump. He looked down at the scrubbed wooden tables and bins built into the decking. Everything had the appearance to it of sea-work. Two of the men lifted a heavy hatch and lowered themselves out of sight. He could see their arms prying loose large white fish and moving them.
The skipper climbed a rusty ladder from his boat to the pier. Hank stepped back instinctively, but the man paid him no attention. About fifty, thick-waisted, he walked with heavy authority through one of the doors, the rolled-down tops of his hip boots slapping against each other.
Buck the foreman said: “I’ve got my crew for the day,” barely stopping to hear Hank’s introduction. That would have ended the conversation, except that Hank mentioned Ivan’s name. “Oh, you know that wild bastard? Well, stick around. Lincolns going on the board. If we get his halibut I’ll use you. Worked in a cannery before?” Hank explained he was on his way to the western cannery if the weather ever lifted. “Haven’t you talked to Swede Scorden? Hell, with the salmon strike he’s half shut down. We’re part of the same company, you know. Follow me.”
In a radio room, Buck grabbed a microphone. He snapped some call words and then was talking to the famous Swede. Hank could gather nothing from the voice except that it was low, curt, and confident. “No, I don’t need him until the strike’s settled. Put him to work if you can.”
An hour later Hank was hired, issued rain gear, and set to work on the halibut sliming line. He stood by a metal table with a brush and a hose, along with two girls and a guy he knew from the barracks. As the halibut slid down from the loading dock in a mess of ice and gurry, Tim positioned it by a guillotine that severed its head, Linda scooped a chunk of bloody impacted ice from a hole cut near the head, Hank brushed and hosed away the gore, and Jen eased the carcass onto a conveyor that passed it through jets of water.
He had never seen such fish. Most weighed at least sixty pounds, while some were declared to be over two hundred. If they stuck to the metal, it was a hard tug to budge them. Some were so wide that he had to lean across the table to swab their far sides. His elbows would rest on their firm meat as he brushed slimy blood and ice from the thick porous skin, and it felt as if he were embracing big leather cushions. What kind of arms did it take to pull such fish into a boat?
The cannery crew traded positions as they worked through the afternoon and into the night. The only limitation came for the girls, who stayed with the lighter tasks. At the end of the sliming line, the fish emerged from their washing to be weighed and placed in various carts by size. The weigher jabbed a color-coded tag into each tail. Each cart was then pushed—hundreds of pounds on grainy metal wheels over a concrete floor—onto a scale and then to the freeze lockers. The freezer gang wore extra hoods and sweaters. Hank, with no extra clothing, found himself nearly desperate with the cold. It froze the hair in his nostrils at the first breath and dried his throat to a cold scratch. The steam of their breaths dimmed the air. His rain gear froze stiff and crackled as he moved. They hefted the fish from the carts to tiers of frosty shelves, forty-to sixty-pounders overhead, two-hundred-plus-pounders at ground level. It was a strange, fettered place, akin to working undersea. Hank volunteered in short shifts as often as he could stand it.
Each job had its tricks. When he first lifted the biggest halibut carcasses they slipped from his grasp, sometimes sliding to the floor. Tim showed him. “Place your fist in the hole where they cut out his guts, then twist your other arm so the hand faces out and grab the tail. Okay, now stand straight and brace it against your belly. Easy, huh?” And he, slight of build, demonstrated with a hundred-pounder he lifted from a bin and slapped on the table.
They worked into the night, sliming the final loads of halibut from the Lincoln, then piling them in a corner under layers of shoveled ice because the freezers were jammed. There would be a freighter docking in a few hours, Buck said. When they punched out near midnight, he chose several of the men, including Hank, to report back by 5:30 A.M. to move the shipment. They all returned to the barracks tired, but full of energy. Somebody had firecrackers, and they threw a string of them into the girls’ dorm upstairs.
Hank shook Pete awake. “Hey man, have a brew?”
“Go to hell. I’m back at that dump washing dishes at six.”
Hank yawned, pleased with himself. “I’ll wake you as I go.” His arms and shoulders ached, and it felt good.
The salmon strike went on and on. Hank at first paid it little attention except as it affected the opening of Swede Scorden’s cannery, but the issues began to draw his interest as his friends on the Rondelay argued the strike among themselves. It seemed that the salmon runs the year before had been spectacular, with the canneries paying forty-five and a half cents per humpie. This year the biologists predicted fewer salmon, but the canneries were offering a lower price. “Hell,” declared Jones Henry on one occasion when he took Hank along to a meeting of the United Fishermen’s Marketing Association, “what kind of game do those fellows think they’re playing? Don’t everybody know the fewer the fish, the higher the price should be?” Jones’ voice, as wiry as his body, remained even and firm. “I got the same boat payments, and a new engine on order. The cannery wants to see me crawl to them for a loan so they can take me over, mebbe. Well, I’ll fish from a rowboat before that happens.” Other fishermen nodded grimly. They sat around on folding chairs, men with weathered faces, wearing deck shoes and heavy work clothes. One of the movements afoot would have had the canneries pay by the pound rather than by the fish—nine cents had been offered in Kodiak compared to ten and a half in Cordova, and the pro-and-con discussion became loud. Hank was impressed with the number of men who spoke articulately. He had not thought of fishing as an occupation that bred public speakers, but these men, whom he admired more and more, appeared as able to pull their weight with words as with work when it concerned them.
One man argued that, whatever the price, the boats should start fishing. “The canneries is making suckers of us. They’ve got so much king crab coming to their lines this year they don’t need the salmon. First thing we know, the salmon runs’ll be over, because the humpies ain’t going to wait.”
“We got to stick with what we started,” said Jones Henry, “or the canneries won’t ever take us seriously again. You don’t think those fellows ain’t sticking together? What about all the canneries out in the bays that process nothing but salmon? You think fellows like Swed
e Scorden figure on closing down?”
“Swede’s got his beach sites,” said the man advocating capitulation. “The fish we don’t catch go straight into his set nets. Bastard’s probably running double shift and laughing at us like hell.” The comment brought a silence.
“Well,” said another, “I’m not for the canneries shitting over us, but I give it about another week and then I convert my boat back to king crab for the season.”
“Hope you’ve got a processor that’ll buy from you. The plant up the way’s so plugged they ain’t buying but from their own ten boats.” The meeting adjourned with no clear decision except to remain tied up. Jones Henry, walking back to the Rondelay, said seriously, but without apparent fear, “Last year the season was so good I paid most of my debts, and then got carried away with house frills like the old lady’s always wanted and replacing my old Jimmy. The way things are going, I may have to longshore or something just to keep the boat.”
Suddenly the ground trembled underfoot for a moment, then stabilized again. To Hank’s startled exclamation Jones said, “Oh, when you live in Kodiak you get those. Not enough to call an earthquake.”
For Hank, his work at the cannery turned to king crab as soon as the halibut boat left. Buck started him on the shake line, pounding tubes of crabmeat from the cooked and cracked legs. After the freedom and variety of jobs handling the big halibut, it was dull and confining to stand in one place doing one job. At least he had friends around him. They joked and horsed around when Buck wasn’t looking. Finally Hank landed a job on the butcher line. It was messy and strenuous in a satisfying way. To butcher, he wore a hard chest protector. He held the huge live crabs, two legs in each hand, pressed their shells against his chest and their undersides against a metal wedge, then with a snap of his arms tore them in two. Crab entrails dripped everywhere, even occasionally hitting him in the face. It took a special twist of his arm and wrist to do the job in a single motion. There was pressure to maintain speed, because the entire processing line depended on the crab halves produced by the butchers. Hank knew if he slacked he would be returned to shaking or some job even duller, one that could also be done by women. His arms hurt and throbbed at night, but he competed with the more experienced butchers and kept pace. The others stopped to wash their skin when parts of crab hit them in places not protected by gloves and rain gear. It seemed unnecessary to Hank—until one day he broke into a painful rash. “That’s how it is,” said Tim. “I’ve seen crab rash put guys in the hospital.” Hank weathered the rash, learned to wash even if it meant skipping a beat, and remained a crab butcher.
They settled the strike in the second week of July, for forty-four cents a fish, a cent and a half less than the year before. It was hardly a victory for the fishermen, but without ado they began to gear for a Monday opening. The weather remained bad for flying. Buck, at Swede Scorden’s direction, put Hank aboard the Billy II, a power scow being used as a salmon tender, and suddenly he was cut loose from a world that he had hoped would last all summer, without even time to say goodbye to his friends.
In the boat harbor he could see the Rondelay, with Steve’s hulk high atop the boom as he rigged something, while Jones, Ivan, and Sven the cook stood on the deck below. He called and waved, but they were too absorbed to notice. As the tender passed around the spit that edged town and the sight of buildings opened and closed to him, he watched the beanery and the bars, the jail, then the barracks, for people he knew. Would they still remember him in two or three months when he returned? The tender entered a narrow channel, with waterfront buildings on the Kodiak side and scrub banks on the other. Gradually they left the town behind until even the twin domes of the Russian church, dimming in the rain, disappeared behind the low hills.
The Billy II was not a satisfying vessel. Power scow, garbage scow, it had a high square housing painted bam red and nothing but a large fish bin occupying the entire forward deck. With a flat bow and stem, it chugged and bumped through the water. Roomy enough quarters—the entire engine space, wheelhouse, bunks, and galley of the Rondelay could have fitted into half the galley of the Billy—but the total of it hardly equaled the feel of the fishing boats he had visited.
The pace of the tender underway was slow. In the galley the cook, whose name was Joe Spitz, sat on a bench at a long table reading, while several fat chops smoked on a stove behind him. The man who was engineer, to judge by the grease on his arms and clothes, lay stretched asleep on another bench. The deckhand, Nick, a guy his own age, cut two quarters of fresh-baked berry pie and shoved one toward Hank. They had already started an acquaintance on deck when Hank had helped him coil lines and lash down some oil drums. In the wheel-house, which was separated from the galley by a few steps and a door, Hank could see the captains legs propped on a railing, while at the wheel stood his wife or girlfriend. She wore dungarees and a Mexican vest, with long hair tied in a velvet bow, and this fancy casualness seemed to set the tone.
Scattered radio voices from the wheelhouse occasionally broke the silence. The captain answered a call from Swede Scorden at the cannery to say: “Raining here. Well come through Whale Pass say six-thirty, wind southeasterly maybe ten or twelve knots. Tie up your place say three or four in the morning. Okay.”
“Hear you, Billy Two” said the dry voice. “That puts you in Whale Passage near maximum flood according to my tables. Not going to wait for slack?”
Joe Spitz looked up from his book and darted glances at the others in the galley. Nick shrugged.
“I’ll judge when I get there,” continued the captain. “Good mile of visibility. I’m not one for killing time.”
“Jesus!” exclaimed Spitz in disgust. “He’s got no judgment, and he’ll get away with it.”
Swede’s voice continued: “Are you carrying the whole load of stores I ordered? Over.”
“Affirmative that, affirmative.”
“I’ll send my unloading crew at the start of the six-o'clock shift. Your men can stand by. See you in my office at eight.”
“You slave-driving prick!” shouted the captain, after the radio transmission had ended.
“Somebody needs guts to tell that bastard off,” declared Spitz loudly enough for the pilothouse to hear. “Now we get no sleep.” Spitz had white hair although he was not old, and his mouth seemed permanently tightened at the edges. He placed his black-rimmed glasses on the open book, flipped the chops onto a platter, and slammed dishes of vegetables on the table. “Chow’s down if you want it. When we go through Whale Passage like circus monkeys, it may be your last meal.” As an afterthought he shook dried parsley over the potatoes. “Swede Scorden blows his nose and we scramble after his snot like it was nuggets.”
The engineer rose, yawned, and speared a chop. Nick prepared and delivered two platefuls to the pilothouse, returning to fetch a bottle of catsup. The captain and the woman started laughing, but the men at the table ate in silence. When two dishes touched, the boat’s vibration made the edges rattle against each other.
After eating, Hank put on his new oilskins and went outside to watch the scenery. He had hoped for mountains, but if they existed the misty rain obscured them. Only a low strip of land was visible. They passed a rock shoal where waves broke into white spray. Other waves, unobstructed, rose and fell in a variety of undulating patterns, their smooth surfaces striated by the blowing rain. When the boat changed course, he saw an opening between the island and the mainland. “This the famous Whale Pass coming up?” he asked through the galley door.
Nick glanced out. “Only Spruce Island Pass. Nothing special.”
“Whale Pass is worse?”
“Just add a bitch of a current to rocks and rough water. Sometimes a boat has bad luck in Whale, that’s all.”
“Bad luck!” Spitz stopped exploring his mouth with a toothpick. “There’s no such thing as bad luck; you’re talking bad seamanship, When you reach a place that’s dangerous at full current you lay to for slack, even if it costs you two or three hours. We’
re talking judgment, my friends. That’s the second rule of seamanship, the first being knowledge.” He looked from one to the other belligerently, as if expecting a contradiction. “You don’t knowingly buck into a force of nature you can’t control. You bow to it. Then you have good luck.”
“And the other boats catch all the fish because they get there first.”
“Until they crack up some day.”
Nick and the engineer exchanged glances and shrugged elaborately.
“You ought to be running your own boat,” said Hank with admiration.
Spitz peered over his heavy glasses. “You, my friend, either close that door or come inside.”
Hank recognized Whale Passage when they reached it, if only because Spitz appeared at the top of the stairs to the galley entrance wearing a life jacket. (Hank thought briefly about possible danger, decided that the captain’s skin was as dependent on safety as anybody else’s so that he knew what he was doing, and remained at the rail to watch.) They had crossed a body of open water with little ahead but a low hump of a mountain. As they drew closer an opening took shape, guarded by rock bluffs and a marker to the right and by a light on a rock to the left. The water appeared calm. As the boat passed between the navigation aids it stopped rolling. They glided swiftly, passing close enough to a face of blackened granite for him to see tufts of lichen and barnacles growing in the crevices. The water by the rocks was dark and swirling. No sounds, except for the squawk of a gull and the bounce-back of engine chugs from the rock face. Eddies of water bubbled in places like small creatures tussling just beneath the surface. Suddenly the boat began to be kicked from side to side arbitrarily. They traveled faster and faster, veering from a straight course like drunks. A red buoy passed that was being pulled almost horizontal by sucking and gurgling water. The wake from the buoy swirled downward like the propeller churn of a fast-moving ship. As for the boat, it felt as if hands were pushing from below. The water around them swished in streaks.
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