Highiliners

by William B. McCloskey Jr.

  Suddenly the Russian ship began to blow its whistle stacatto and to back engines with a great chum of water. Jones slowed his own engine and circled, his face calm. They heard the screech of steel crunching as the Russian ship jolted and its whistle blasted louder.

  “I remembered them uncharted shoals just when you did,” yelled Steve as he hugged Jones and danced around.

  The Russian ship escaped serious damage, but it had to hire a tug from town to tow it free.

  The projected quiet farewell gathering that night at Jones Henrys house became a wild bash. Throughout the fishing-boat community, Jones was the hero, but there was glory to spare for the other members of the Rondelay—even Sven, who had returned from Seattle on the afternoon plane. A passed hat collected a huge sum: enough to buy Jones new crab pots. He declared he could now convert to square ones like the big fellows.

  Hank at one point was carried on other fishermen’s shoulders. Dream of dreams, Jody took him over. She began to match his drinks with her arm around his waist. He ventured a kiss, and she accepted with such a ready tongue that he soon led her, or followed her, to the skipper’s cabin on the cash-buyer boat. With all the alcohol he had consumed he wondered if he could manage. But with the first brush of her naked body he found himself responding as he never had before. Never had he held such a woman! They went at it happily. Later they rejoined the party, and her head found its way to his chest even as they stood together. Near daybreak they returned to the cash-buyers cabin, but the owner now occupied the bed. Jody, laughing, led him to the crew’s quarters. She seemed inhibited by nothing, a natural creature, beautiful in every way.

  When he left reluctantly on the morning plane to Anchorage, Jody and the Jones Henrys and at least twenty others waved him off noisily. The party was only taking a breather, and if college registration deadline had not been three days hence and all other flights filled, he would have remained. As the plane taxied, he strained through the clouded window for one more glimpse of Jody’s long auburn hair and the wide smile that brought her eyes and the rest of her face to life.

  Part 2: 1964 SPRING

  CHAPTER 11

  Winter Pots

  HANK spent a restless winter. Chemistry, the Europe of Metternich, literature in French—they were inconsequential compared to the world he had brushed in Kodiak. Nancy quickly retreated when he tried to sleep with her, and his friends found him too full of enviable adventures: it forced him to tone down to the general level, chafing all the time. Reluctantly, slowly, he settled back into the social patterns of hops and beer busts, and into the study patterns required for good grades. He took up fencing, and on winter afternoons played basketball ferociously.

  The breakaway from his parents’ influence had begun when he first left for college, but the summer in Kodiak strengthened it. All in all, he felt a cheerful and heady independence about his life. As for the future, his daydreams no longer seemed to carry him beyond the nets of the Rondelay. Certainly not to the summer in France his mother still advocated, or a job next summer his father could arrange which might lead to a career with one of the major stockbrokers.

  The assassination of President Kennedy in late November stirred his empathy with larger forces. As he watched the replays on television and the actual murder of Oswald, he smelled and saw again Pete’s corpse, and heard Spitz’s arguments on cosmic disorder. At night he dreamed of mountains. But the ceremonies of death ran their course, and shortly after the burial a chemistry test forced him back into his own present tense.

  The pace changed abruptly in midwinter. Jones Henry wrote that the State Department had officially reprimanded him for harassing Russian ships and risking an international incident. Coincidentally, the State of Alaska, without explanation, denied renewal of Jones’ fishing-vessel license. Jones’ letter, written with occasional sings in a wiry hand, concluded: ‘Well, Hank, I don’t know except that you had better ask around for another boat next summer the way the rest of us is. When the U.S. gvt starts to stick up for the Russian buggers over its own people, it’s time to ship for Australia.”

  Hank, nervous at his own temerity, took a train from Baltimore to Washington the morning after receiving Jones’ letter. He went to the offices of the two Senators and the Representative from Alaska. After long waits, an aide at each place hurried out to half-listen, then suggest he write a letter. In his room back at Hopkins, Hank spent half the night drafting the letters, then banging out clean copies on a friend’s typewriter. He described the continuing provocation of the Russian ships and the way they had torn the gear of Jones and other crabbers, and told what had happened to Jones. Each letter closed with: “I think this is one he’ll of a thing to have happen to an American fisherman!” He mailed copies to Jones, to let him know that at least he had tried, as well as to The New York Times and the papers in Juneau and Anchorage. Polite letters came back eventually from each of the congressmen through an aide, nothing from the papers. Hank felt angry, helpless, and cynical.

  Several weeks later: “Son of a bitch, Hank!” Jones Henry’s voice shouted through the crackling long-distance wires. “You’re a smart guy! Know what I’ve got in my hand? My license! Bastards pretended it was only hung up on a technicality.” Besides the news itself, it dazzled Hank that he was talking to someone actually in Kodiak. “What’s it like up there now? How are Steve and Ivan and Sven? Ever see Jody?” He needed to repeat everything, because one voice had to stop altogether before the other could transmit.

  “All fine, fine, old Ivan drunk as ever. Snow got through dumping a while ago and now she’s slush and the winds gusting sixty. I just come back from crewing on a shrimper, figured I’d better grab pay when I could without a license, freezing a bitch out there. Now we got the license, I’m taking the Rondelay out king-crabbing first of March, work her till the end of May before I gear for salmon. Too bad you Can’t see my new square pots, mebbe feel what real winters like.”

  “You only need three on deck for crab or I’d be tempted to come up over spring vacation.”

  “You come up. Sven s not that hot to crab all spring with his family in Seattle. In a week you could make your fare.”

  Hank found a schedule, trying not to sound excited. “Hopkins lets out for Easter on—I’d cut Thursday and Friday classes the week before, maybe more—I could get up there about March ninteenth and stay until the twenty-ninth or thirtieth.” In his mind he was already canceling a trip he had promised to take with his parents and a date for the big dance after Good Friday.

  “Buy some thermals,” was Jones’ parting advice. “Not just long underwear. Because you ain’t a Norwegian yet.”

  Hank arrived back in Kodiak on Friday the twentieth, having placed himself in hot water with his date, his lacrosse coach, two professors, and his family.

  Jones and Steve were there to meet him and pourd him on the back. They collected his bags and soon were bouncing toward town in Jones’ pickup. The green mountains of summer had turned brown and snow-covered. The smells of fishy steamed crab blew into the window as they passed the canneries. “Oh man,” he declared, “I’m home again!” Adele Henry threw her arms around him at the door and fixed a fine meal to celebrate his arrival. She was a vigorous and outspoken woman, and although Hank had met her only twice before, they were now suddenly old friends. On the wall, in a frame that apparently once had held a photograph, hung his letter to the Anchorage Times, which had been printed without his knowing. Hank described until even he tired of it his visit to the halls of Congress and his opinions of congressional aides. Mrs. Henry pressed him for details of the Kennedy assassination and funeral. Jones then delivered his opinion of the State Department and the way it could even corrupt the State of Alaska. For Hank it was the finest evening he had spent since leaving Kodiak seven months before. Later, he could barely sleep. They had printed his letter, and one of the congressmen had responded with action. What power waited to be used when you grabbed an initiative!

  Next morning it was snowing
and still dark when Jones shook him awake in the guest bed and they left the house quietly. No sight of mountains, barely of the town, as they tracked through the slush around the silent stores and down onto the floats. A wind blew. It chilled him even through his thermals. As for the Rondelay, which had occupied so much of this thought during the winter—she looked smaller and shabbier than he remembered, and, slicked with ice and shrouded in snow that glowed dully in the blue half-light, more vulnerable.

  Steve and Ivan were snoring as they entered the warm cabin, but Jones had only to start the engine and they swung automatically into their boots. The stove had been puffing a small jet of flame all night, so the coffee pot contained steaming water. Steve showed him briefly how to adjust the stove—a trick Sven had guarded throughout the summer— and Hank began at once to take Sven’s place, starting coffee in the pot and slabs of bacon in the pan as he peeled potatoes and broke eggs.

  They shoveled their food with early-morning glumness. It soon became obvious that, aboard the Rondelay, Hank’s ability to write letters to newspapers gave him no more privilege than before. Jones declared the coffee too weak. Ivan grumped that he hadn’t fried enough potatoes to feed a fish, and Steve wondered why the he’ll he’d spooned the bacon grease into a can rather than leaving it with the eggs and spuds where it belonged? Jones told him to hurry with the dishes as the others went out to get underway.

  The boat started pitching as soon as it left the breakwater. Hank quickly understood the reason to hurry. A dish he had left on the engine cover smashed to the deck, a bottle of catsup fell from the cupboard, and the disputed can of grease overturned. As he cursed and mopped, he felt stealing over him the sinister headache and taste of half-digested food that heralded seasickness. Steve yelled for him to get his ass outside and start chopping bait. Had he been crazy to come back like this? The whistling wind had blown the rigging and deck clean of snow, but an ice slick remained. With each roll the sea washed over the rail and gurgled around their legs. He hunched against the cabin housing and, with teeth chattering and hands already numb even in heavy rubber gloves, started to chop at the herring in the tub.

  Above them on the open bridge Jones tooted the whistle. Ivan, his feet spread firmly and his face taking slaps of seawater, stood by the rail holding a hook on a line. The boat approached one of the buoys with Rondelay markings, visible only on the crest of a wave. Ivan threw the hook hard into the water close to the buoy, then yanked it back with the buoy and pot line it had snagged. He worked quickly, passing the buoy line through a hydraulic block rigged over the water. Hank gave him a hand: the line felt weighted to rocks, and as the boat rolled the water pulled the line out of their hands like an adversary in a tug of war. As soon as they had managed a turn over the sheave, the block brought in the line easily. Hank had seen Ivan so much in drunken helplessness that he had forgotten his ability as a fisherman. Ivan stood as easily on the pitching, icy deck as if it had been a grass plot, coiling fifty or sixty fathoms of line in only a few minutes.

  Steve motioned Hank to stand by the rail. A cold sea drenched them, and Hank grabbed the rail for support.

  “Move your hand,” Steve shouted. “Want it smashed?”

  Out of the water in a foam of bubbles came one of the new square crab pots. As it swayed with the boat’s motion it thudded against the rail just where his fingers had rested.

  Hank hooked up the pot at Steve’s direction. Then Steve operated controls that lifted it dripping onto deck as Ivan and Hank steadied the steel frame. It had an inexorable weight. As Hank tried to brace it he lost his footing on the ice and fell as the pot swung past and nicked his head. In a dizziness of pain he saw it returning aimed full at his face and flattened on the deck as Ivan with a grunt diverted it to crash against the rail above him. Hank scrambled automatically to his feet and helped bring the pot to rest. As he followed Ivan’s example, untying the cords that secured the lid, a sea that stung his forehead broke over them. He found blood on his fingers when he rubbed to ease the pain. Ivan called Steve and they examined the cut as Hank insisted on its inconsequence. His eye had wandered to the pot, where dozens of big spiny purple crabs were crawling slowly over each other. Bigger than any he had ever seen. He forgot his miseries and started to laugh and shout. Steve and Ivan grinned at his reaction, and they all forgot the cut.

  Ivan, with effortless efficiency, bent into the pot and slung out the crabs like a dog scratching earth, some into the hold and the rest onto the deck or over the side, barely seeming to choose between them. Hank lifted one out by a leg and admired its slow-moving, grotesque splendor, then started to throw it into the hold. Steve stopped him with a shout. “Don t you know a female?” He showed him the wide, egg-laden apron on the female’s underside, then handed him a bar to measure the minimum size of males. “It don’t help anybody to keep crabs that ain’t keepers, gets us a bad reputation at the cannery, so don’t sort until you know what you’re doing.”

  They replaced the baited can inside the pot with a fresh one, secured the lid, straightened the attached coils of line and buoys to pay out smoothly, and dumped the pot back into the water. Within seconds, Ivan had grappled a new buoy and they were pulling again.

  Jones Henry stood alone on the bridge, above the spray but exposed to the cutting wind, his face a vertical slit in his fur-lined parka. He maneuvered the boat from buoy to buoy, replacing one pot with the next as they worked down the line. On deck, Hank learned to creep at high speed on the deck ice, knees bent to give a surer balance. But the pots seemed endless. Even slinging the fruity ten-pound crabs lost its novelty as his arms found them heavier and heavier. After several hours he gladly accepted Steve’s order to fix chow as a chance to rest, but the struggle in the galley was even worse. The canned stew rolled from the pot. As he cleaned the mess and started again he began to laugh through his curses, it was so miserable.

  “Hank, get your ass moving!”

  After a few days, Hank had settled in. They started him running the line. He found that it was simple enough to aim the grappling hook and catch the strap between the two buoys. To coil the line once it began racing through the crab block was a different matter. Steve patiently coached him, but even with the block turning at a third its regular speed his coils were haphazard and often fouled. Yet he worked at it with such intensity that at the end of a haul his gloves had flown off and he was panting. He watched Ivan do the next one: the line zipped in and laid in a perfect stack of symmetrical coils, while Ivan himself appeared relaxed enough to have fallen asleep. Hank tried again, with no better results. After the third time, as his pile of coils flopped across the deck in an agonized jumble, he muttered, “I’ve stopped us dead. Better go back to the bait tub where I belong.”

  “Okay,” said Ivan, moving to take over.

  Steve looked up from baiting, surprised. “Everybody’s got to learn. You ain’t stupid. Get back there.”

  A week after his arrival Hank was marginally adept—and very tired. They had worked through the preceding weekend, and Jones suggested that, what the hell, they sleep in on Good Friday and Easter. It turned out that both he and Steve wanted to drop in on church services. “Not for me,” said Ivan. “Russian Easter comes in May. That’s when you see me in the pretty little church.” It surprised Hank, not being a churchgoer, until he thought of the shadow of death over the heads of fishermen. As for resting, he welcomed it. On Monday he would fly home. He had made enough to pay his planefare, and if he never saw another decomposed herring from a pot that had soaked for several days, that would be all right. On Thursday after unloading he followed Jones home, took a long hot bath, and settled with a drink in the Henrys’ small, overstuffed, cozy living room. He chatted with Mrs. Henry about President Johnson, the time it would take to fly to the moon, and, when she discovered he read French (that he did it badly she refused to believe), about Rimbaud and Baudelaire, whose poems she had in a bilingual volume. He read her the first few lines of “Bateau Ivre,” paused to close his eye
s, and fell asleep.

  “There,” he heard Jones say quietly as he drifted back for a moment, “you’ve talked him to death, and there he goes.”

  “Poo. You’ve worked him to death. First fellow I’ve met in years who can talk anything but fish. He did all right out there with the pots, did he?”

  “Oh, I could make a fisherman out of him. But not the way he runs back and forth to school and reads French all the time.”

  CHAPTER 12

  Waves

  NEXT morning, when Hank woke around noon, the sun shone against the curtains. The bed rocked with the easy roll of a boat JL i at sea, and for a second he could not figure where he was. Then he rose, opened the curtains on part of the harbor and town, and returned to bed with his pillow adjusted to enjoy the view. The sky was bilie for a change, and patches of snow gleamed on the mountain slopes. Boats lay moored along the T-shaped floats. Other boats arrived and left through the opening in the rock breakwater that otherwise boxed the crescent-shaped waterfront into a harbor. There were two arms of the breakwater—one extending from the narrow channel between the side of town and Near Island, which boats used when traveling via Whale Pass, the other reaching out from close to the canneries on the Navy Base road—and kids free from school were playing on the rocky tops of each.

  People moved along the docks and floats. It was difficult to make out the Rondelay for sure, since many boats like it were tied close together. By the little harbormasters building a dozen cars and pickups caught a gleam of sun. One man in hip boots strode down the ramp connecting the pier to the floats with a box of what appeared to be engine parts on his shoulder. A crew at the far end of the pier were loading crab pots aboard their boat. The waterfront, with its plain houses and stores facing out, had nothing but the business and pleasures of fishing about it. Outside Breakers Tavern two men holding beer cans studied the boats as they squinted into the noon sun, then returned inside again. A block up from the waterfront he could watch over the low roofs the activities of people on the main street. There was the roof of the beanery and the bar beside it. He stretched again, and wriggled against the sheets to remind himself of the luxury. But he was already restless to be walking in town and among the boats. He’d had no chance all week with fishing. And what about Jody? He dressed quickly.