“Yahoo!” yelled the captain from a window of the wheelhouse. “Here come the tide rips.” Spitz, standing nearby, watched him with unconcealed anger.
Up ahead, a dark line ran across the water almost like a wall, with streaks on the near side and thousands of choppy waves on the others. As the boat hit the waves, it began to pitch wildly. Water splashed in little geysers all over the deck.
When the boat settled into a calm open passage again, Hank regretted the end of Whale Pass. He remained leaning on the deck rails, letting the rain pour over his oilskins as he watched the sea. The busy water stirred excitements he had sensed in himself earlier, staring at ocean waves on a beach, which had never before been ignited. Dusk filtered into dark. No light shone along all the shore. They passed an occasional fishing boat whose lights bobbed in and out of visibility like ghost lanterns. Land and water were indistinguishable. The loneliness and beauty of it clung to his mind like new music.
Finally he became chilled enough to go inside. They were all gathered in the pilothouse, lounging and smoking—even Spitz, who appeared to have weathered his snit. The room had a pleasant combined smell of warm electronics oil and beer. Hank hung close to the door, unsure of his welcome.
“Come in and dry off,” said the captain in a friendly voice when he noticed Hank. “Had your fill of poetry? I think we saved you a can from the last six-pack.”
Hank laughed as he opened the beer. “Thanks very much ”
The conversation resumed. It wandered from the strike and the fairness of the price offered for humpies to the money some fishermen now made in king crab, to a newspaper account of Negroes beaten for riding buses in Georgia, to the way President Kennedy the preceding October had stopped the Russians from putting missiles in Cuba, to speculation over whether the astronauts could ever stay in space for more than a few minutes without dying or going crazy, to the way Swede Scorden manipulated fishermen. Nick and the engineer said little, but the others were full of opinions. Hank told of restaurant sit-ins between Washington and New York to force service for Negroes (without volunteering that he had participated twice himself) and told how people in Baltimore had cleaned the cans off grocery shelves on the day the battleships headed for Cuba. It was pleasant company, although less heady than the activities of Kodiak he had just left behind.
Around midnight the captain and Cindy went to their cabin, leaving Spitz in charge of the pilothouse. Nick and the engineer had drifted to bed earlier.
Hank asked Spitz if he could help. “Brew some coffee if you want.” Spitz gave him instructions, and the resultant pot was satisfactory. Hank studied the green needle of the radarscope as it traced the shoreline and tried to coordinate the land shapes with those on the chart. It became increasingly hard, as the strait widened and the images became disrupted by distance.
“Guess you know your away around here?”
“Eyes closed,” said Spitz.
“Only dangerous part’s Whale Pass?”
“Well, the rest is open enough that you have to be more stupid to hit the rocks. It still happens. Before radar, of course, you pulled over at night. Unless you had a clear moon, or no judgment at all.”
“You’ve been here that long?”
A pause. “Off and on. Okay, friend, if you want quizzes and want to learn, let’s start at the bottom. You know port and starboard?”
“Left side and right side, red and green.”
“That’s something. Go out and check our running lights.”
Hank did as he was told, happily. Outside, he slipped on the slick walkway. His legs shot toward open water, although he grabbed a rail long before falling overboard. Nothing but wet darkness beyond the warmth of the boat. He shivered to think of being in the water, watching the only lights anywhere recede.
Back inside he asked if he could steer. Spitz showed him the rudiments in quick order, then continued what became a lecture, leaping from subject to subject as Hank strained to store the information. Rules of the Road. Know your wind and the direction of the current. Don’t guess. On and on, as Hank wondered again why Spitz was not captain of his own boat with all he knew. “Know your boat. Each one handles individually. This power scow, for a bad example. Maneuverable as a plow. When you’re going to turn, make plenty of allowance, don’t take a close shoal and expect God to help if a williwaw hits you broadside.”
The night wore on, with Hank at the wheel most of the time. At one point in open water Spitz dozed, but most of the time he talked: always information, never about himself. They entered the wide mouth of the cannery bay and traveled through diminishing arms of water as land closed in again. Hank watched the radar contours eagerly. They passed close to shore, but no forms took shape outside in the dark to show him the terrain.
Close to four, as predicted, a misty collection of lights emerged ahead of them. “Well, that’s your new home,” said Spitz. “Heaven help you.” As they approached, the general light separated into bare bulbs with rain halos that etched a series of docks and gabled roofs extending a quarter mile. Spitz directed Hank in the placement of lines, and they moored without waking the others.
CHAPTER 4
Sockeye Sunday
IT was a village of white clapboard sheds built upward into a hillside, with everything connected by steps and boardwalks. Mist hung so close in the dim morning that it fuzzed around the corrugated roofs and hazed out the structures farthest away. A long windowed building was lighted, and inside he could see people walking with trays and eating at tables.
With tide low, the cannery pier rose twenty feet higher than the floating boat docks. The barnacle-encrusted pilings towered above the Billy II. Hank lent a hand unloading the supplies, first with Nick to break them from the hold, then with two cannery guys named Jordan and Ozone to carry them to the store. The two were such a team that when one started laughing the other joined in a near-giggle. They walked with heavy cartons on their shoulders up a gangway pulled nearly vertical by the tide, then up along boardwalks and low ramps. Hank followed the others from the porch of the store to the warehouse, past long shelves of austere staple foods in giant cans. In back, a sallow nervous man marked each carton with a hard stroke that nearly pushed it off his shoulder, then snapped if he put it in a wrong place. When it was over, Hank stood on the porch asking questions of Jordan and Ozone as he watched the faces of people on the walks and wondered what they were like behind their checked shirts and kerchiefs.
“Down below,” said Ozone, who with his buddy worked winters in a Seattle filling station, “you spend on booze and pussy as fast as you make it. Don’t have nothin to spend it on up here; store ain’t got shit and the pussy’s free.” The comment started laughter between the two that nearly doubled them up. Suddenly a wiry man wearing a yellow tractor cap strode past. Jordan and Ozone quieted instantly, and started with purpose toward one of the buildings.
“Who’s that?” asked Hank, trailing.
“The boss, Swede Scorden. Don’t follow us if you’re new; go check in the office.” Jordan started laughing again as he added “Unless you plan to work for nothing.”
Hank followed the main boardwalk, moving against a general tide of people. A whistle blew twice, and a girl in passing used a word that shocked him, coming from a female, as she observed that only one whistle remained before starting time. People stomped from porches and down the hill, hands in pockets, talking little. Their ages varied, although most were young. Some of the girls appeared worth knowing, and he tried a direct smile as each passed. A few smiled back; others stared through him.
The office, a long white clapboard building like the rest, had a sign on the glass: “OFFICE wipe your feet.” The door was locked, although a man at a desk bent over papers without looking up. Alongside the door were tacked two mimeographed sheets, one entitled Crew Shift Hours and the other Rules for Bunkhouses. Each was signed by C. L. Scorden in heavy black script. Hank began to read the rules, which began “UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES shall: (1) Alcohol be pe
rmitted; (2) Smoking be permitted except in the presence of LARGE ASH TRAYS at least a foot in diameter; (3) Fighting be permitted. There is a cleared area behind the dump for this if you want to risk the bears; (4) Knives and guns be permitted; (5) Food be brought in to encourage rats. During night work, the chow hall will be open all the time; (6) Rowdy noise.. “My husband says the office don’t open until eight.”
An older man and woman were sitting on a bench alongside the door. Both their faces were hefty and weathered. The woman wore a long print dress and boots, and her iron-gray hair was secured neatly with big amber hairpins. The man’s white hair was shaggy. He wore a shirt with string tie and hip boots rolled down.
Hank gladly joined them. “You folks from around here?”
“Oh . . . ten mile up the beach. This is Mrs. Hatcher, and I’m Dan Hatcher.”
“More like eight.”
“Yes, Td say eight mile up the beach.”
A conversation started easily, with Mrs. Hatcher in particular happy to talk. They lived in their cabin, she said when Hank showed interest, and fished salmon with a set net. Dan had built the cabin himself forty years ago—of course they’d added since then—and they’d raised four children in it. The two boys now had their own seiner together, built by Dan and themselves. One daughter, who lived Outside, was coming to visit, to help with the fish-smoking, and they had boated over this morning to meet her plane. “I’ll tell you, with this strike of the seiners—the boys tell us all about it by radio—our nets have caught near everything and we’ve worked and worked. But for us and a few other set-net folks along the shore that deliver to the tender, I’ll bet this cannery wouldn’t be open now.”
Hank was curious about a set net. Dan explained that you staked it in a fixed place instead of running it like a seine. When the salmon swam into it, their noses went through the web. The meshes were too small for their bodies to pass, “and when the poor fellows try to back out their gills hook in the web, and there they stay caught until Mrs. Hatcher and me pick them and put them in our boat.” They owned their site, and nobody else could use it.
They handled the net all by themselves? It seemed natural enough to them. Best to have two people in the boat, one to steer and the other to pick. Although Dan could do it by himself easy, added Mrs. Hatcher. “If there’s fish he’ll catch them. He hunts good, too. We’ve never gone hungry. The children try to get us to spend the winters in town, but except when the boys fetch us for Christmas, we wouldn’t want to live anyplace else. It’s too busy in Kodiak. Not like before the M war.
“Dan and Maude!” said a dry voice cordially. “You had breakfast? Come up to the house.” It was Swede Scorden.
Hank rose, but Scorden paid no attention to him.
“Well, Swede ... we came over today ...” Dan squinted his eyes. “Want to buy five gallons of red paint. Got five ton of herring. Going to pump air into them, shoot them with red paint, and sell ’em to you for sockeyes.”
“Good,” said Scorden. “At least you’re planning to pawn off real fish on me this year. Last season, half of what you threw in my hoppers was stones.”
Dan slapped his knee. “I can’t help the dull blades on your Iron Chink.”
Mrs. Hatcher rose and smoothed her dress. “Charles, well eat in the messhall. Mary’s not expecting us.”
Scorden glanced at Hank. “Who are you?”
“Hank Crawford, sir, came from Baltimore last month, delayed all this time and I know you’ve been waiting—”
“Go over there to the chowhall and bring to my house—the place up there with the red curtains—four complete breakfasts. Tell the cook it’s for Swede, make sure they’re covered good so they stay hot.”
When the office opened, Hank was given the name of his foreman and assigned a bunkhouse bed and number. Rooms were arranged off long corridors. When he opened one wrong door, a Filipino sprang to attention and grabbed a knife from under his mattress. By the time he found his place, a bleak room of three double-tiered bunks and six lockers, he yearned for Kodiak. Signs on his door said BOOTS OUTSIDE and NO BROADS AFTER TEN EXCEPT THROUGH THE KEYHOLE.
The foreman’s name was Joe Cutch. Hank had trouble finding him. A girl in a kerchief, one with big eyes who he thought had smiled at him, pointed out Cutch’s burly swift figure in a bright-red shirt through several lines of conveyor belts. By the time Hank had stepped over troughs and around machinery to the moving conveyor of gutted fish bodies where Cutch had been, the red shirt was high on a trestle, pointing out something down on the other side to a man with a pole. Hank climbed the metal stairs to a walkway overlooking bins of fish, keeping his eye on the shirt. Just as he approached, Cutch jogged down another stair and began gesturing to a tall man in coveralls who knelt with a wrench to the underside of a many-bladed machine splattered with fish bits.
Hank paused a minute to appreciate the scene from his panorama. It was busy and interesting, far larger than the halibut line in Kodiak, with a variety of complicated machines. Even with a layman’s eye, he could trace the progress of the salmon from deep bins, where men sorted them onto running belts and others lined them head-to-head, into big machines with water spraying in all directions that transformed them from creatures into slabs of food, to lines where people with knives and brushes dressed them further. The fish then disappeared into other machines and emerged as chunks in cans. Farther on, the cans—with lids now on top—went into steaming cookers. Hundreds of feet beyond, fork-lift trucks moved stacks of cartons. Water gushed everywhere. Fish-gut washed along the floor and clung to people’s oilskins. The air was saturated with the odors of fish, and the noise of machinery required shouting. Like to try all the jobs, he decided.
He finally caught up with Cutch. Hank towered over him, but there was no question of the foreman’s superior energy. Cutch glanced at the slip, and called over the noise, “Henry, is it?”
“Hank, if you don’t mind.”
“Fine, fine. Have to get you a time card, Hank.” He gripped his arm as if holding a piece of goods and darted off, pulling him along between clacking machines. Hank followed to a cluttered small office enclosed in glass. Cutch scribbled Hank’s name on a time card, pulled him to a punch clock outside the office and showed him how to use it, then, the arm still in grip, trotted to a far end of the warehouse where an Indian girl stood by a machine. “Audrey, show Hank how to make boxes.” And Cutch was off.
Audrey was large and shy. She spoke only in monosyllables. The job they shared, far from the mess of fish and general activity, involved opening flat packets of cardboard and stapling the flaps on a simple machine so that they became cartons. Hank learned the job in five minutes and was completely bored with it thereafter. Audrey murmured that it had taken her much longer, and in fact she still stapled about one out of ten incorrectly. He worked there all afternoon. After dinner, they returned until eleven. Twice Cutch darted by and Hank turned expectantly, hoping to be rescued. But Cutch did not even glance his way.
At coffee and meal breaks he passed through the real work areas. He looked with yearning at the men on the fork-lift trucks, even at those standing in one place by the clacking cans, and envied wildly the men using their muscles to sling fish and push heavy carts. When the workday ended, his spirits lowered further to find among his roommates the giggle team, Jordan and Ozone. The other occupant of his dormitory was a rough-looking guy his own age named Tolly Smith, who had cut scars on his face and wore a gold earring. Tolly at least asked if he was squared away before he sprayed cologne on his chest, put on a flowered shirt, and sauntered out. Hank lay awake long after the self-generating laughter of Jordan and Ozone had faded into snores. He listened to the rain on the metal roof above and to rats scurrying, and wished close to tears that he could be back in Kodiak.
In the cannery, he continued to staple boxes with Audrey. She was a gentle person, and he treated her politely, but they had no real communication. She lived in a village with her parents, she said, except she lived here for t
he summer. Summer was nice, here at Mr. Scorden’s cannery. Yes, winter was nice in the village too, learned a lot in school. But cannery was nicer, didn’t have to work so hard and made lots of money.
At mealtimes and breaks Hank haunted the docks, watching the beautiful seiners that drifted in for repairs or unloading. The men aboard were carefree, marvelous. They lounged and worked joking from deck to deck, oblivious of the cannery workers. The two were different breeds, and Hank was ashamed to be among the latter. When there were no boats, he tried to meet some girls by sitting at various places in the chowhall. Most had already formed attachments. If he could only transfer closer to where they worked! In the dormitory, Jordan and Ozone often chattered about getting “pussy,” but it was only Tolly he ever saw with anyone female.
Monday in remote Alaskan canneries is Sockeye Sunday, the traditional day of rest. Seiner crews must by law stop fishing over most weekends. They have delivered their catches by Saturday. By Monday the cannery bins are empty, with a new haul not ready for the tenders until Monday night. By Saturday afternoon, scores of boats had come from the bays to tie up and buy supplies. Hank watched the procession begin as he walked the docks during coffee break. Masts dotted the water as far as he could see down the passage of green mountains that framed the inlet. New faces crowded the platform by the store. He wandered among them, feeling the stink of the cannery on him like a curse. The fishermen all knew each other. Their talk was of web and power blocks, sockeyes and diesel engines. He drank it for minutes, and then the whistle returned him to Audrey and the stapling machine.
At dinnertime he mingled again. For once the sun had been shining, and there was a pleasant warmth in the air. Several shouting fishermen boarded a pontoon plane, ready for a night in Kodiak. The sound of a harmonica drifted from one of the boats. He’d had enough! He jumped over to a deck, entered the cabin, and asked if they needed a crewman. No, and besides, did he have experience? But it started him in motion from deck to deck. By the time the cannery whistle blew, he had taken two friendly slugs of whiskey and had received a dozen negative answers of assorted cordiality. One skipper told him to check back if the weather closed in, since half his crew had flown to town. In an instant the words changed a daydream into a possibility. He returned to the stapling machine elated, paying little attention to the fact that he had missed chow and punched in fifteen minutes late.
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