“Object on the beach, sir,” called the lookout.
Everyone crowded outside to look with binoculars. In a break of rocks, on a narrow gray shore, the water broke against a round white object half submerged, while a red board bobbed close by. Hank had seen endless driftwood while fishing, but a bad feeling gripped him.
A voice over the speaker said sharply: “Now, deck crew muster at number two boat on the double, boat crew prepare to launch the ready boat.” The officer tapped Hank’s shoulder. “You go along.” Blocks clattered and men moved everywhere as he hurried down the metal stair from the bridge to the boats. A seaman strapped him into an orange life jacket. No one spoke except to give directions. In the boat Mack stood by the tiller, and another man had started the engine. Hank stepped in. Mack told him to grab a monkey rope for support, nodding toward several ropes from an overhead sling with knots tied at intervals. The boat lowered, slapped the water with a bounce, rose, slapped again as spray kicked over them and water surged between the boat and the ship. Finally they rode firm, and Mack shouted commands for releasing the falls and sea painter. As they bucked toward shore they all hunched against breaking seas except Mack, who remained straight and grave by the tiller.
Hank jumped to the beach through breakers as Mack nosed the bow as close as he dared. He ran over the hard gravel and waded among the rocks. The board had the red of the Billy II. He tossed it on the beach and pulled at the white object. It stuck in the gravel beneath the water, then with slow sucking yielded the face of a large scale, with shards of red board attached.
“Recognize it, Hank?”
Hank nodded, unable to speak. Other tenders had scales, other boats were painted red, but these. . . . He waded above his boot tops among the rocks as the others cautioned him not to go too far. The water pushed and surged around his legs like a live thing.
Under the water, in the rocks, he grasped the fingers of a hand.
They all unwedged the body from the rocks and dragged it ashore. The face was scraped and bloated and turning black, but it had Pete’s red beard, his red hair slapped against his head, the vestige yet of the sassy carefree expression. As the water drained from the beard it fluffed out.
Hank vomited and vomited, then walked by himself into the spongy woods.
They found no other bodies. But the seagoing tug, with Steve aboard, had found a piece of lifeboat with the y ii part of Billy II stenciled on it. The currents and the sea had claimed the rest.
At the end of the third day the search was abandoned. Hank returned to Kodiak aboard the cutter. Along the way they passed the Rondelay, manned apparently by only Jones Henry and Ivan, the two who had ridden planes. They all waved gravely. Hank felt desolate not to be aboard his own boat among his own people, to talk out the experience.
The Rondelay entered Kodiak through the narrows, but the Coast Guard ship took a longer seaward route. As Mack explained: “Russian trawler cocksuckers are dragging nets practically across the harbor, and the best we can do is route all the time to keep watch.” Hank saw them: black, rusty ships the size of freighters. A few hours later he had also seen part of the Navy Base where the Coast Guard docked—a dreary place of long gray buildings—and had ridden a bus along ten miles of pockmarked highway, past the airport that seemed part of his prehistoric past. Where the road skirted the coast he could watch the Russian trawlers again. As they rounded a promontory he had a vista of Kodiak: the cannery buildings puffing steam, the frame buildings of the town topped by the dome of the little Russian (Russian!) church, the crisscross of floats with boats tied in. He reached the harbor, sighted the Rondelay, and broke into a run.
The rest were there, to his grateful relief. Ivan passed him an open bottle without a word, and he settled on the engine cover among them.
One by one they recounted their experiences during the search. As Hank told how he had discovered Pete s body, he found that the passage of days had lessened the impact enough that he could speak of it in a steady voice.
“Aye-yup,” sighed Sven, “ve all got to go some time, and if you stay around de vater, maybe you die vet.” He told of his own brother, lost only a few years ago with the rest on his halibut schooner as they fished Albatross Bank in late season. The last message anyone heard from them anounced that winds and freezing spray had begun to ice their rigging, and they were underway full speed toward shelter in lower Kodiak Island forty miles away. The Coast Guard and Navy hurried out to help, taking ice themselves, but they found nothing. “It’s no joke, ice,” Sven concluded. “It comes so sudden in vinter if she blows from north.” The others agreed.
Jones added that once ice accumulates so thick that your boat can’t right itself in a normal roll, “you can frostbite yourself out there hammering it off but your chances ain’t better than fifty-fifty unless she stops.” But then, remember the PequodP They all nodded. “Covered with ice and likely to turn over any second, and two days later they found her still floating with a list, ice in the shrouds so thick the plane first thought it was a growler from one of the glaciers. Full mugs of coffee still on the galley table.” Jones turned to Hank. “The boys could have ridden her out, you see, but they guessed wrong and abandoned her. Found the bodies not far away in a life raft, caked in ice, just like the boat. That was a bitch of a winter.”
“Yeah,” said Steve quietly. “It’s a hard decision to make when the time comes. Ten years ago near Cape Igvak we grounded the old Olga Bay. Fellow named Dave Snyder and me took our chances with the rocks and made it ashore, near froze and starved for two nights before a plane spotted us. The others went down when the Olga fell apart. You don’t sometimes have but a second to decide, and if I hadn’t seen a rockhold when the water surged away for a minute, and committed myself by jumping, I’d have probably taken my chances with the others. And Dave, he just followed. I don’t think he’d have jumped by himself.”
It had happened just the opposite, Jones recalled, with the fellows out shrimping off Mitrofania on the Dolly R when she grounded. Charlie Harris, who now fished aboard the Morning Glory, chose to stay aboard while the others decided to rush it the hundred feet to shore before the boat might break apart and hit them with debris. Charlie watched in broad daylight, helpless to do anything, as his crewmates weakened, froze, and died halfway to shore in the grip of a current. The Dolly R stayed fixed to the rock.
The way fellows piled their crab pots too high brought a whole new set of problems, Jones continued. “I myself saw Sam Dietrick sail from this harbor in easy weather with his pots strapped six high on deck —didn’t want to make that extra trip, you see. Couldn’t blame him. Cruised up to Marmot Bay and one of them northeasters we just saw hit him sudden. He reported that much by radio, and said he was heading for shelter. Wave must have tilted him too far, and the pots topheavied him the rest of the way over. Not a trace, ever, not even as much as we found of the Billy Two
Before he came to the Rondelay, Ivan said as he leaned heavily on the engine cover and handled the bottle, he was king-crabbing on the Miss Jane within sight of Kodiak and a young fellow—named Pete like the one just drowned—had crawled into the pot to change bait when a heavy sea washed the pot overboard. “Oh, shit, we brought that pot back fast, but the kid was gone and nobody ever found him. Last year his old lady married Led Freeman in town, fellow runs the store. She told me once on the street she wouldn’t never marry a fisherman again, not with the worry it give her every night he was on the water.”
Steve cursed mildly at the hour as he rose and started undressing. While they continued to talk, he poured stove water into the galley sink and sponge-bathed.
“I guess my old lady has a bad time,” said Jones. “The more you fish, the less you see them, and after a while you don’t think about the same things any more.”
“I was married once,” Steve volunteered. “Never again.”
Ivan puffed at his pipe. “Goddam, some girl come along, I’d take her. She give me lip I’d hit her, but with a girl waiting, may
be my money wouldn’t all piss down the barstool.”
Sven smiled. “I got a real fisherman’s vife from old country, knows the man goes fishing and the voman keeps ready the home.”
Steve pulled from his drawer beneath the bunks a pair of dress pants and a western shirt decorated in mother-of-pearl sequins, and then began to slap scented powder over his chest. Suddenly everyone became restless. The bottle was empty, and Ivan was turning it over and over. Jones said he guessed he’d go home and face all Adele’s questions about the Billy II. Ivan declared gloomily that he might as well start his drunk, and if Jones didn’t see him in a couple of days, try the goddam jail. Hank listened with increasing dejection to their plans that had nothing to do with him. He rose quickly when Sven said, “Come along, Hank, ve go up and have yust a little beer.”
“We’ll start mending and stacking crab pots first thing Monday morning,” said Jones. “Every ass better be down here.” Hank glanced anxiously, and grinned with relief when Jones added, “Your ass in eluded. You’re part of my crew until you go home, and you know where your bunk is.”
Much later, after leaving Sven, Hank found the address of Pete’s parents and phoned them. Their desolation choked him. They had learned all the details from both Swede and the Coast Guard, but they thanked him again and again for calling. He thought about it, then phoned his own parents, and felt guilty at their pleasure in hearing from him.
Afterward he walked through swirls of windy rain to the hills above town. Lights below glistened on the few blocks of weathered storefronts and formed halos around the bare bulbs of the harbor floats. No sound penetrated through the wind. Occasional figures staggered or walked, mostly from bar to bar or back to the boats. In the narrows a buoy blinked, and far out the dim massed lights of the Russian trawlers moved in slow banks.
He walked and walked, hoping for some revelation: not to explain—that oceans ran their mystic cycles and that men died in them was perfectly clear, and he did not need to know why as long as he was busy in the middle of it. But, given his life, how was he to use it?
CHAPTER 10
Russians
EARLY Monday morning, Hank and the rest started work on the crab pots. Jones stored his pots in an open clearing off the road to the Navy Base, where he and others left them unmolested when not in use. Most of the pots, including Jones’, were circular like big doughnuts six feet across and weighed about two hundred pounds. They were built with steel framework and webbing for the walls. A couple of boats had stacks nearby of square pots that weighed three times as much—seven feet square by three feet, which Jones said were the latest thing. No current could drift them from the bottom, and they held three times the crab, did a better job all around. But he lacked the capital to junk his existing pots for the expensive new ones, especially in a marginal salmon year.
Hank’s partner was Ivan, who after a weekend of boozing to near-stupefaction spoke virtually never. However, he used his bull strength on the pots in a way Hank could not. First they inspected each, and repaired rips in the webbing with the big needle. Then they hefted the pots into Jones’ pickup and took them to the pier, where they attached numbered buoys and a long coil of line to each. Meanwhile, Jones and Steve had remained on the Rondelay to remove the seining tackle and to rig a special hydraulic block for crab pots. When they loaded, the pots had to be stacked one on top of the other and lashed together. Soon there was practically no deck space to walk.
After loading, they bought frozen herring and fishheads from a cannery, then proceeded beyond the breakwater into an area practically within sight of town. Jones cruised among hundreds of floating markers lettered like those inside each of the Rondelay pots. Not far away, the fleet of Russian fishing ships moved slowly in the water. Hank chopped the herring in a tub and stuffed the pieces into an assortment of cans and plastic jugs punctured with holes. It was near sunset when Jones finally chose his grounds. One by one they bumped each heavy pot to the rail, emptied the buoys and line stored inside, snapped in a can of bait, then heaved it into the water. The pot sank bubbling while the attached line uncoiled and the buoys held it to the surface.
The lights of town twinkled pleasantly as they returned in the dark. “Goddam,” said Ivan glumly, “I’d like it we anchored outside for the night.”
Jones brightened and slowed the throttle. “Wouldn’t bother me.”
“Cut the shit,” said Steve, “somebody’s expecting me.”
So they moored as before. Jones returned to his wife and Ivan to his bar with the slowness of men shouldering heavy sacks, while Steve quickly sponged himself and sauntered off in a trail of manly perfumes.
Hank wandered the town. It was his next-to-last evening: perhaps with the goodbye dinner tomorrow at Jones Henry’s, his last look on his own. He said hi to many people, but saw more who were still strangers. He knew the insides of the bars and eateries and many of the boats, but Kodiak itself was far bigger than he had first imagined, far more a complex of businesses and interests beyond fishing. He only knew the segment that had involved him. Suddenly he wanted to possess it all. There were lights along the hills. For every threshold he could cross or face he recognized, there remained a hundred strange ones.
“Hank!”
He turned at the woman’s voice and there was Jody, wearing a dress rather than dungarees, her hair groomed and soft.
“Well, fisherman, you never came to claim that mug-up. Afraid Swede would see you?”
He found himself admiring her wide mouth and direct eyes—the kind of woman who really attracted him, not one of the mouselike Elsies who waited for a scrap of attention. “Guess you’ll sling hash again now that fishing’s over?”
“Not likely!” Her laugh was feminine but pleasantly husky.
He felt he should have talked about Pete, but he began to have different hopes and notions about the evening. “Say, I’m a pretty rich salmon fisherman. Why don’t we—”
A big bearded man Hank had seen on the grounds popped his head from a nearby tavern and shouted her name. With a broad smile and a wave, Jody left him.
In the morning they stacked a new deckload of pots and headed out. The ones they had set the night before would not have soaked long enough to be full, said Jones, but they’d haul a few so that Hank could work the gear and grab himself a handful of king crabs. Mrs. Henry planned to cook the crabs that night for Hank’s farewell party at the house.
Their first sign of trouble was a buoy marked with the Rondelay R wedged in the rocks of the breakwater. Farther out they saw another of their buoys afloat. They continued toward Cape Chiniak and there, in the midst of their pots, steamed the Russian trawler fleet. One ship moved slowly over their grounds as it let out its trawl, the taut moving cables visible astern. Even as they watched, the high rusty bow cut a path through Rondelay-marked buoys, and several bobbed loose with the current as the propellers severed them from their pots.
Jones Henry turned crazy.
He throttled the Rondelay to the ship and emptied his shotgun point-blank into the black hull towering above them, while the others shouted curses and invective. It was as futile as kicking a mountain. A few curious faces appeared at the rail high above them, and a dead fish slapped down on the Rondelay s deck to the accompaniment above of laughter and foreign words. Although Steve tried to restrain him, Jones loaded his gun and fired close to the faces. The men disappeared. The whistle of the ship blew. Jones Henry maneuvered the Rondelay astern of the ship and started firing at the cables with Ivan urging him on. A ship that had no trawl in the water left the fleet and headed toward them. Steve and Hank pointed it out, but Jones, now grimly calm, paid no attention. His hand left the gun only long enough to reload or to edge his boat closer to the thick, taut cable.
“Jones,” cried Steve, “pull out of it. Nobody could snap that fucker with a shotgun, and suppose you did, what about backlash?”
“Fuck it, Boss, fuck it!” countered Ivan. “Shoot ’em again, maybe just by luck—”
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br /> Jones returned his shotgun to the storage box. “Don’t often lose all judgment.” He shook his fist as he backed the Rondelay and started off. “No better than Japs, you cocksuckers,” he muttered with a tight mouth. “I’d give the rest of my pots to get you.”
The Russian, which had just been setting its trawl as they arrived, began to draw it back, all the time blowing its whistle. “At least,” said Hank, “they must think you can shoot their cable whether you can or not.”
The other Russian ship still approached. They were a mile from land. “I don’t know whether to stay and protect the rest of our pots or whether that bugger coming toward us really means...” Suddenly Jones chuckled and winked at Steve as he altered course and headed for a different part of shore. The ship changed direction to follow, coming with twice the speed of the Rondelay. “We’re too heavy. Dump some pots. Quick. Open lids if you can, mebbe the buoys’ll float, but dump! And hold tight. I might turn sharp.”
The bow of the Russian ship had a sinister height as it bore down. Hank saw it only through the sweat dripping into his eyes as they struggled with tieropes on the top layer of pots, then upended them directly over the side.
However Jones turned, the ship followed. No question of its intent. Hank glanced frightened at the distance yet to shore. He could hear the hiss of the high bow through the water. Jones stood on his open bridge, straight and proud. Going down like this? Hank wondered. Not even a life jacket? Neither of the others seemed concerned, except that Steve kept telling him, “When Jones gives the signal, hold tight,” as if he knew something.
“Dig in,” yelled Jones, and veered to port, then to starboard, each time forcing the Russian to a sharp alteration. Hank bellied down on the circular top of a crab pot and clutched his fingers into the webbing as the pots jiggled and shifted. “We can’t do this all the way to shore,” he panted to Steve. They jettisoned two more pots, and then Jones called for them to stop and get off the pile.
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