Highiliners

by William B. McCloskey Jr.

  “I came back to fish.” He hoped they would not laugh. “I’m going out with Jones Henry on the Adele H.”

  “Jones has a full crew.”

  “Work without pay until I shake down, then look for a boat that needs somebody.”

  “What’s wrong?” asked Jody, less harshly. “Get in trouble back home?”

  “I want to go fishing, that’s all.”

  “You mean for a week or two?”

  “I had in mind a career.”

  “You mean like one of those government jobs, and then you get retired on full pay?”

  His face felt hot and prickly. He looked at his watch, and rose casually. “Do it a step at a time, I guess. Hope to see you guys around again. And Jody, nice..

  She regarded him seriously. “You just order that shot for decoration? Keep us company. Maybe the boys can tell you which boats to look for.”

  With Jody’s guidance, the tone of the conversation changed to how he was going to get along. As far as they knew, no skipper had an opening, but at this time of year out there, guys had enough accidents that it didn’t hurt to go the rounds of canneries as each boat unloaded.

  “You ain’t the only one out looking,” said Mike, and pointed to a burly kid of about twenty who sat alone on a barstool, nursing a beer. “He’s been around since Christmas, looking for somebody to take him. Skippers give him trips now and then just for grub, the way you’re doing. What’s his name? Let’s call him over.”

  “Seth, get over here,” said Jody. The kid hurried over with a hopeful, almost puppydog expression. “Seth, shake hands with Hank here.”

  “Hello, sir,” he said in a husky voice. “Seth O’Malley. Are you a skipper?”

  “Oh, Jesus,” laughed Mike. “Its so cold out there.”

  “Afraid I’m just looking for a shrimp boat too,” said Hank gravely. The difference in their ages was painful: O’Malley resembled half a dozen enlisted kids to whom he had assigned daily shipboard jobs in Vietnam to the accompaniment of respectful salutes.

  O’Malley’s manner changed to caution at once. “No work around, I can tell you that.” He looked wamingly at Hank. “Two or three of the skippers—the Juggernaut, Lady Eve, Columbia, Dolores R, all of those —said they’d take me for sure if they ever get an opening.”

  “Okay,” said Hank. “I’ll steer clear of those.”

  The statement relaxed Seth somewhat. “Well, when I get a berth, I won’t mind telling you what else I might see around.” Hank learned that he slept in a deserted cannery and bummed meals off fishing boats when he could. He himself felt like an old sage as he pulled out his pipe and filled it. “I used to wash dishes in a beanery around here. It fed me all the food I could hold.”

  Jody threw back her head and laughed. “I remember! You squirmed in there as wet-dog as Seth here the first time he came to the boat, scared shitless I’d charge you for a coffee refill or something. And Td been in Kodiak a whole six months, I knew all the score.”

  “You were a stranger too? I thought you were born here.”

  “Order us all a round, Mike.” Jody lit a cigarette as Mike complied and said lightly, “Army brats are never born in a single place. I could tell you about Okinawa, or Texas, Germany, Georgia They all look the same after the Army clears a space and puts up barracks. So. You played soldier through the Navy, eh?”

  “Hey,” said Seth, relieved, “you’re with the Navy Base out there in Womens Bay, aren’t you? You’re just kidding about a shrimp boat?” Hank shook his head.

  By the time he returned for Adele Henry’s dinner at seven, he was pleasantly full of Scotch (plus a round of mm that came by mistake), and singing to himself. Things looked terrible, but things weren’t so bad.

  Steve and Ivan sat awkwardly in overstuffed chairs, their hands rigid on the arms. Adele seemed to tower over them. “You boys want to wash up?”

  “No, ma’am, we already washed on the boat,” said Steve, gazing up warily.

  When a bell rang in the kitchen and Adele bustled off, all three men relaxed visibly. “What’s your poison, Hank?” asked Jones. He and Steve held glasses of whiskey and ice. Ivan, clear-eyed and gloomy, drank an opaque yellow liquid.

  Hank flopped loosely on the couch, on the end close to Ivan, as his thickened tongue bumbled over the words. “Just anything you got, babe, make it double and don’t bother with the rocks.”

  Jones glanced toward the kitchen. “You take it on the rocks in this house, my friend. Mrs. Henry says it ain’t refined to drink it any other way. Now, sherry, you can have that straight from the bottle.”

  Hank cheerfully clutched his throat.

  Ivan turned a stolid, indignant face. “You stink like a barroom, you know? Either you move or I got to move. People could get drunk just smelling your breath.” Hank stared, amazed. His face must have shown he was about to make a joke of it because Steve frowned and shook his head. “And I want to tell you this,” Ivan continued earnestly. “Booze is no good.” He gestured toward Jones Henry approaching with a filled glass. “Hank, just say: No thanks, Boss, I know you mean okay but I’m through. Pour that devil’s shit—” He glanced with apprehension toward the kitchen. “I mean, say to him—Boss, pour that evil stuff down the crapper where it belongs.” He looked up at Jones and appealed, “Boss won t mind, will you, Boss?”

  “Drink your pineapple juice,” said Jones, and handed Hank the glass.

  Adele Henry returned, and both Steve and Ivan leapt to their feet. “Sit down, boys. Daddy, I’ll have my martini. Now, Hank. We’ve had President Nixon in office nearly a year. I want to know how you think he’s doing.”

  Hank eased to a seat away from Ivan as he fumbled to make his answer sound intelligent. He disliked Nixon’s face and manner, yet the new President’s decisions seemed like good ones. As for Agnew, he could say with authority as a Marylander, “I didn’t even like him as president of the PTA.” Adele clung to every word.

  “Then you tell me this,” said Jones Henry. ‘When we can’t get them Russians even to honor agreements to stop overfishing our stocks, what makes you think we’ll get anything but a jumbo-sized shaft from these Strategic Arms Limit talks they started last November? I think Nixon’s a fellow ought to come out here and try to pull a few shrimp or crab away from a Russian trawler before he sends people to Moscow to make bargains. They’ll never make any agreement they won’t cheat on, and what have they got that we need so bad?”

  “I. . . think we’ve got to trust. . .” Hank was not that sure of it himself.

  “Daddy, stop running your mouth when you don’t know a thing about it. Hank’s just been in Washington where it all happens.”

  The dinner, when she finally served it, was elegant. Hank had not eaten such fish since leaving Alaska. Adele insisted he open the wine and serve it properly, since Jones wouldn’t know the difference between chablis and barswill. The last thing he wanted was more alcohol of a different variety, but he drank his dosage, as did Jones. Ivan was allowed a glass of ginger ale without question. Steve’s lips curled beneath the beard at the taste of the wine: when Adele turned away for a moment, he got it over in a single gulp. She, however, mellowed with the wine enough to insist that Ivan and Steve take heaping seconds of the food, and then to comment that Jones was lucky to have a fine and reliable crew.

  Possibly Hank slept that night. But he leapt from bed the instant Jones tapped, and with nervous hands dressed in everything warm he could pack against his body. Outside, a cold wind cut across the harbor. They bent into it, saying nothing.

  After the cold, he began to sweat almost at once in the stifling heat of the boat’s cabin. The air was full of the heavy bacon and coffee odors he remembered. He removed some of his clothes and went to the stove where Steve was flipping potatoes in a big iron skillet. “Better let me get started on something easy, mate.”

  “Hey,” said Steve heartily, “he’s already smelled the job that gets him out of the cold.”

  As they ate breakfast around
the comfortable table, Ivan pointed his thick finger at Hank’s face and said through a mouthful of food: “You won’t be a highline kid much longer if you don’t lay off that booze shit, Hank.”

  Steve splatted catsup over Ivan’s eggs and roared, “Shut up, you reformed Aleut.”

  “Hey, I don’t like that much catsup!”

  “You’ve sure gone on the wagon,” said Hank.

  Ivan’s dark, high-boned face flushed with excitement. “Thank the Lord Jesus Christ and His Mother the Holy Virgin! I saw the dawn before it was too late. Steve and Boss helped me.” His eyes watered. “I’ll never forget it.”

  “Eat your fuckin’ eggs,” said Steve.

  Jones and Steve began to discuss the depth they would set the trawl. “I don’t trust that portside door,” said Jones. “She came loose last time. Check it before we go out. Hank, we’ll show you some of this gear while we’re in harbor water. Finish up.”

  Outside, they swept and shoveled the snow from the deck. Then Steve took Hank aft to the long drum around which the net was rolled. “You’ve never gone drag fishing, right? This trawl here’s nothing but a big fancy bag made of web, with all kinds of gear to make it lay proper. You unwind it from the drum into the water, weight it to the bottom with its mouth open, and drag it along to catch up the shrimp.”

  “Ever seen a butterfly net, Hank?” called Jones from the entrance to his wheelhouse on the deck above. “She’s wide at the mouth, and she gets narrower all the way to the cod end.”

  “Now here’s how you keep the mouth open,” said Steve, patting a series of floats wrapped under the webbing on the drum. “These string along with the head rope and hold up the top as she drags.” He slapped some gray metal balls in a different series. “These are your bobbins. They’re heavy, they go with the foot rope and weight down the bottom end of the mouth. They bump below the web on the seafloor and save web-snags on the rocks. Then the sides of your mouth, that’s what the doors keep open.” He pointed to a massive steel square secured against the rail on either side of the boat. They resembled slightly curved doors.

  “You want to be accurate, Hank, you call the doors otter boards,” said Jones. “When you lower them hooked to each wing of the net, they plane out as you move through the water. They keep the mouth apart, and they hold everything down to the bottom. They each weigh seven hundred pounds. You stay clear until you know what you’re doing, because if they start slamming in seas they smash where they please.”

  “Boss is right,” Steve added. “You let Ivan and me handle the doors, understand?”

  “The whole trawl,” continued Jones, “she’s tuned and balanced. To begin with, the webmaker sews together a dozen separate pieces, and the way he cuts and fits them tells the way she’ll ride. It ain’t like a seine with just a simple long wall of web. Then, as we shoot the trawl, I control where I place it by the length of cable I let out and by my speed. It’s a whole new set of tricks from seining. For instance, the salmon swim near the beach and close to the surface, but these little shrimp buggers live in the mud forty-sixty fathom deep except when they come up to feed. Sometimes my new sonar helps me see what’s down there, but don’t count on it.”

  “Then you have to push the bottom mouth of the trawl through the mud?” asked Hank.

  “No, she rides up a few inches above the bobbins, or she’d scoop crab and all kinds of trash. I adjust my dandy line on the head rope to keep her raised, and right forward of the mouth you drag your tickler chain, and this stirs the shrimp a foot or two up in the water so that they pass right into the trawl mouth. Trawl gear has all kinds of little tricks.”

  “Looks complicated,” said Hank seriously as they unmoored.

  “You’re fuckiri A it’s complicated,” Steve declared.

  After stowing lines, Hank put his hand on Steve’s shoulder and asked in a low voice, “When did old Ivan go on the wagon?”

  “About three years ago, after he near died from the DTs and the judge dried him out a month in jail.” Steve looked at Hank sharply. “It wasn’t funny.” Hank nodded. “Well, Jones and me, we got the priest at the Russian church, and we all worked him over together. It was a bitch. The day they let him out of jail we dragged him straight across town to the church, and there we was, Jones and me choked on the incense, those gold and silver statues with holes for eyes staring at us, the priest talking in both Aleut and Russian, and Ivan running around on his knees yelling and praying. That’s a day I won’t forget. Then Jones and me, we had to give up booze for a while to keep him straight. Then he got over feeling sorry for himself, and now he’s glad when he can smell booze on somebody and give a lecture.” Steve grinned. “They got an AA in town. Ivan goes whenever he can, and I hear he jumps up all the time to give witness.”

  As soon as they left the breakwater they entered high, rolling seas. The first streaks of day shone in the sky as the Adele H pitched into it. Hank rejoiced at being aboard a real boat in seas he could feel, and when he became as seasick—as he feared might happen—he took it in stride and they all joked about it together. After the second hour, as the glow left and the misery sank in, he huddled in a corner of the deck away from the wind. Snow sliced across the sky and seas gurgled over the deck to swish around his feet.

  By noon they had reached their grounds, a bay north of Kodiak Island. Steve told him to stand by and watch the first shooting of gear. “And stay clear of lines.” Indeed, the setting of a trawl made the other fishing he had done with purse seine and crab pots seem simple. While he followed easily the sequence of the net off the drum, there were a great variety of line and cable attachments at different points which he failed to grasp the first time around. In the few seconds between releasing the big steel doors and lowering them into the water they swung out, then thudded back with a force that made the boat shudder. Steve and Ivan stood by the windlass against the housing and payed out the thick cables attached to the doors, calling to Jones each twenty-five-fathom mark. Jones shouted for them to set at a hundred fathoms.

  Hank had psyched himself to work, had anticipated for a month the time when he would pitch in again on a fishing deck, and what he saw was a closed-loop operation for two men. “That’s it?” he asked when they secured and headed back to the cabin.

  “Rest while you can, dumbhead,” said Steve cheerfully. He and Ivan settled into a game of cribbage.

  Jones dragged the trawl for an hour and a half, then called them back on deck. Steve and Ivan spooled in the cables, and when the doors rose, hurried to secure them against the side. Next they rolled in the net over the drum astern, making all the adjustments of lines and cables in reverse. The rolling deck had acquired a film of ice. Steve and Ivan raced surefooted as cats along the surface, their knees bent and their bodies low. Hank imitated them, but as soon as he gained confidence and forgot what he was doing, he would slip.

  Despite the snow, wind, and seas, hundreds of squawking seagulls suddenly gathered astern to dive at the water. The red-meshed cod end of the net floated up with the fatness of a submarine. The seagulls perched on top and plunged their beaks through the webbing.

  Although they could return the bulk of the net to the big drum astern, the cod end with the catch had to be maneuvered to the side and lifted to deck by boom. Steve and Ivan grabbed lines and fastened blocks with quick precision. The net became a taut column that stretched high and dripping above them. It could be lifted from the water only in increments. Ivan leaned over the side to double-wrap a rope around the column, and then the boom raised the strapped portion. At last a bulbous, pear-shaped bag rose from the sea, oozing pink shrimp fragments and green mud through the mesh. The weight made all the lines rigid and started them groaning in the blocks. Jones leaped to deck and began to work with Steve and Ivan as part of the team. The bag—it was at least five feet across—cleared the rail and swung free over the deck with the force of a wrecking ball.

  “Near five-six thousand pounds, fair start,” said Jones in good humor. “Here, Hank,
you pull the clip.” He pointed to a short line attached underneath to the pin of a brass coupling that held shut the pursed opening of the bag. Hank hurried gladly from the sidelines, and jerked the line with all his might. The bag merely swung and carried him with it.

  “Better let me do it,” said Ivan.

  “Let him be,” said Steve, laughing. “Snap your guts, Hank.”

  Hank gave an angry yell as he pulled again. Out popped the pin. The bag opened, and twitching shrimp poured around his feet like concrete from a hopper. “Look at all that, my God!” he shouted.

  Jones returned to the wheelhouse. After they had set the trawl again, Ivan rigged a heavy pressure hose and began to cut trenches into the mound of shrimp with a water jet, while Steve and Hank walked through culling out what Steve called “the trash.” There were crabs, and large flapping fish, and hundreds of white candlefish no bigger than the shrimp that Steve told him to ignore. As each layer washed from the main pile, new fins and claws emerged like artifacts from a dig. Hank looked anxiously as he threw them back in the sea to see if they swam. Some did, and others floated dead. “You call this trash?” he asked, holding up a twenty-pound halibut.

  Steve took it from his hands and flung it overboard. “Everything but shrimp’s trash when you’re shrimping. Nobody pays for the rest. And you needn’t moon over the dead ones, they’ll feed something else down there.”

  Hank still examined some of the creatures, grotesque fish colored throbbing pinks and reds, others so spiny they stuck through his gloves, the shrimp themselves which were exquisitely detailed. Even the seaweed was marvelous in its variety—fronds of kelp as thick as industrial belts, slimy stalks the shape of insects’ eyes, lacy fan-shaped twigs, brown clusters of balls. He had surely known it before, but it gave him fresh pause, the vastness of unknown things in heaven and earth, the forces that gave them life.

  “Grab your shovel,” said Steve. “You ain’t a biologist has to study each fin and asshole, you’re a fisherman, remember?”