Highiliners

by William B. McCloskey Jr.

  “Look, I’m just a fisherman on the beach. If you want to juggle weights, do it with somebody else.”

  “Don’t you think a highliner I can count on for volume and quality is worth more than a fellow who delivers when he pleases?” He gave a smile that creased his face without changing the sharpness of his eyes. “You don’t pretend that all fishermen are equal?”

  “I sure as fuck know that Jones Henry’s as good as that ass-driving Hanson prick.”

  Swede reached in a drawer, pulled out a bottle of whiskey, and shoved it over with a shot glass. Hank shook his head. “Jones Henry gets his share of that when he calls. Nothing special about it,” said Swede without haste. “I’ve got a better brand for the Nels Hansons. Nels brings in bigger shrimp. He also delivers to me exclusively. Now, Jones is a good fisherman. But he delivers his loads between here and other canneries, so he’s not my man. And, whether you like it or not, and Jones would admit it, he ain’t the fisherman Nels is. He’s not an ass-driving prick, and that’s what makes the real highliner.” Swede poured two shots, and drank one himself. “When I fished, I once had a skipper like Nels, and it’s probably what drove me inside.”

  “I’d have sworn you were born on a cannery line, with a dead fish up your ass.” When Swede accepted the comment without throwing him out, Hank took the shot.

  “Most old-timers up here have fished. And most young ones think they’re the first to go out on a boat. Now, Crawford, what’s your gripe? That the favors of the world are distributed unequally? For myself, I’d say that only the brave deserve the fair, only the ass-drivers deserve the bonus.” He poured another round, and drank his part of it. “I can take somebody like you or leave you. With your education, I’d as soon give you a try.”

  “Don’t waste the effort. I’m marking time until I can find a boat.”

  “The boats can be satisfying for a while. But they can be deep slavery when you’ve lost the ability to do anything else.”

  Hank remained silent.

  “Going to blab about this?”

  “No. I figure you were trusting me.”

  Swede moved him inside to supervise the picking lines, which employed four times as many people as the loading dock, and gave him a raise.

  In his new capacity, Hank spent whole days without seeing the water except from the prodigious flow from hoses and pipes. His crew consisted of women, except for two teenaged boys who hauled and cleaned the heavy bins. His responsibilities were threefold: keep the women productive, keep everything sanitary, and make sure all foreign matter from candlefish and seaweed to shell were picked from the endless belts of little shrimp. Within this closed circle, he found himself the custodian of authority and decisions. If a hose snapped, production halted until he improvised or sent someone running for maintenance. He held the keys to the cache of cookies the cannery supplied, and at coffee break he listened judiciously as his charges maneuvered to receive larger allotments than he had been told were allowed. If the bucketfuls of shrimp raised from the boats became clogged in the hopper, the women stood in place and called to him from their stations beside the empty belts, and he would leap to the platform to jiggle doors and start the flow again. At washdown time, it was his inspection that closed the shift, after determining that every particle of shrimp and antenna had been expelled from the machinery. At the end of the week he sat with the other foremen and Cutch to verify and tabulate the time cards. Since he supervised the largest crew, this job took him longer than anybody else’s. On some Saturdays he, Cutch, and Sandy the secretary would lock the doors close to midnight.

  He had rented a room with kitchen and bath in an old house overlooking the harbor and had acquired a bed, rug, and some chairs from someone on the Navy Base who was being transferred. Adele Henry insisted on supplying the kitchen utensils. As she declared more than once, it wasn’t often any more that she had the chance to furnish a young man’s apartment.

  At about the same time, casually in the way some things finally occur after too long, Sandra Dennis from Swede’s office drifted into his scene. She was quiet and deliberate—the anthesis of Jody in most ways. Hank could hardly picture her on a fishing boat or using hefty language. One night after a payroll session they went to Solly’s for drinks and a late meal. During the course of it, she said she came from Portland and that she liked photography, hiking, asparagus, king crab and salmon, but not shrimp, French poetry (translated), and Bob Dylan. Hank offered equal snippets of biography. Her face was plain—no highlights such as Jody’s wide gamin mouth, and no particular beauty—but he liked her expressions, and they joked easily together. She had a brother who was an accountant in town, and that was how she had found her way to Kodiak. However, she lived independently, sharing a place with three other girls, two of them teachers and one the assistant manager of a small store. When she first came to town eight months before, in July, she had hung around her brother’s neck and counted on him to do everything for her. One day she caught a look passing between him and his wife. “Well, I got the message all at once. People in a place like this don’t cling to each other. They live on their own.” To prove the point, she ordered another round—bourbon for Hank and gin collins for herself—and insisted on paying for it.

  Hank had begun to wonder if, after a date or two, he might corner here a girlfriend who would come home with him at times. But in losing the polite battle to pay for the round, he decided that was still a long way off. They discussed the frequent rain and agreed it was depressing, and he told her his goals lay in fishing, not in managing a cannery.

  “That’s interesting,” she said. “I’ve looked at those boats from up at the office window, but I’ve never paid much attention to the fishermen. Not a very clean life, is it?”

  “Well, I like a bath now and then, but that’s beside the point. It’s a satisfying life.”

  “Is it? For a man who’s been to college and been an officer in the Navy?” She was genuinely curious. “So many people up here do things you wouldn’t expect them to do. I notice my brother’s stopped wearing a suit and tie to work. I thought I was doing a strange enough thing just coming to Kodiak, but people all around me . . .” She laughed, and her face had an honest bewilderment he found attractive, possibly because there was no helplessness or coyness about it. “I’m probably ready to do something unusual myself.”

  He didn’t consider it, he just said, “Come home with me tonight, that’s different.” It was light enough to be passed off as a joke.

  “I wondered if you were going to ask me something like that.”

  “Men are all dogs. You might as well know it.”

  “At least they enjoy talking like dogs, don’t they?” She rose, and helped herself into her coat before he could hold it. Then she turned to him, her mouth smiling, but her eyes troubled. “All right. I’ll go home with you tonight. Like to lead the way?”

  It was all unexpected, not the least of it that she went into the bathroom and wept when it was over, and that she then returned to bed and curled against him contentedly for the rest of the night.

  In the morning she dressed, without a trace of shyness, made coffee and brought it to him in bed, and then as he lay with naked arms behind his head watching and marveling at the way events had turned, she proceeded to fix him breakfast. They ate at leisure, since the cannery was closed that Sunday. The single window, by the table, looked over the harbor.

  He had seldom sat with anyone and felt less self-conscious, less pressed to make talk. At one point he held out his hand, but she slipped hers away.

  “Isn’t holding hands for puppydogs?” She brushed her hair back from her face. “You know what might be pleasant though? Taking a bath in that tub of yours.”

  “Sure. Help yourself.”

  “I mean together.”

  He found it indeed pleasant. And they followed it by returning to bed at her suggestion. He had never had intercourse with daylight streaming through the window, and it was he who became self-conscious
before losing himself.

  Later, she dressed again, looked around the room, and said, “Well, I cooked breakfast, so you can clean up. I think I’ll go back to the apartment.”

  “Must be crowded with all those roommates. You’d have more room over here.”

  She nodded slowly. “Come on, get dressed and walk me over. I’ll introduce you to the other girls and see if you give them the same line you’ve given me.”

  “What do you take me for?”

  “A large dog at the very least.”

  He laughed, liking the image.

  The town was quiet as they strolled through. Some people were evidently in church and others were sleeping late. Even the boats seemed shut down. She stopped in the square and glanced around. “Not a particularly pretty town, is it?”

  “No, but I like it.”

  “I like it better, this morning,” she said simply.

  As they walked she accepted no interim physical contacts, no holding of hands, but he felt bound and identified with her nevertheless. Which of them had taken the initiative after all?

  Her roommates made no attempt to remove the clothesline of slips and brassières strung across the living room (a nicety he would have preferred), but on the other hand they offered him a drink at once and settled around giving him their full attention. The doorbell rang, and one of the three left with a man whom she did not bother to introduce. Sandra suddenly excused herself.

  “Some people have all the luck,” said Midge.

  Sally became animated. “Hank, let me fill your glass. Say, you don’t have any friends, any roistering fishermen who at least stay sober half the time?”

  Sandra appeared, carrying a suitcase and a knapsack. Midge and Sally gasped. “I’m moving in with Hank for a while, but 111 keep my bed here.”

  Hank felt trapped, annoyed, and pleased. At any rate, there was nothing to be done at the moment but follow the course he himself had suggested. Did he want to give up his freedom like this? As they passed near the harbor he looked hungrily at the masts. And what if she strung her stockings and underwear on a line across the room so he couldn’t walk without stooping? She had capitulated too easily. Why hadn’t he played it cooler? Then he thought of the bath they had taken together, and the way she snuggled against him. He looked at her for the first time since they had been walking. Her expression was serious, almost frightened, and she looked vulnerable. Hadn’t she cried the night before? “Hey.” He smiled. She studied his face, then smiled back.

  The first hurdle might have been Adele Henry, since he was invited to dinner that afternoon. But when he phoned and said he had a friend he’d like to bring, her reaction was “It’s about time. We’ll expect you both at two.”

  Within a few days, Sandra had become an easy part of his life. He spoke out against stringing laundry the first time it happened. “How do you do yours?” she asked.

  “Well, laundromat every couple of weeks.”

  “I guess a man by himself can go around up here smelling like fish. I’ll buy some extra changes, and we can do it all together every Sunday.”

  The cannery itself was still a world he merely tolerated—he knew he was passing through, waiting for the right boat to come along—but Sandra made it easier. Made it desirable, for the time. He still looked for the boats, but not with the same intensity.

  Then, just as he had mellowed, a boat he cared about would arrive to unload. There standing by the scales would be Jones Henry in his fishing clothes. Or Seth, strutting with the shaggy look of the deck about him as he talked ostentatiously of nets and gear. It took little to make Hank restless and miserable again. Worst of all, relationships were being modified by his association with cannery management. He could no longer saunter as easily into a bar and count himself a fisherman.

  Once, with Sandra alongside (she a representative of the actual cannery office), they joined the crew of the Shalimar at a table in Solly’s. Suddenly he found himself defending the cannery’s right to charge fishermen a penalty for excessive trash fish in the deliveries of shrimp. “Hell, it’s the boat’s job to cull. If we didn’t weigh out the trash and deduct it, you’d soon be delivering us a halfweight of candlefish. Nobody recognizes it, but canneries have a narrow profit margin.” Their quiet attention failed to warn him, and he continued with other things Swede Scorden had told him. “Fishermen don’t know the market down in Seattle, and that’s what controls the canneries up here. If the Seattle market falls and the cannery tries to drop its price to the boats in order to survive, you think you’re screwed by the dirty capitalists.”

  Jody turned to Mike and the rest of the Shalimar crew. “Meet Hank Scorden, Swede’s boy.”

  “Well, Hank is right, you know,” said Sandra, and started to explain some of the problems of cannery bookkeeping. Hank quietly silenced her. He felt humiliated and sick. For God’s sake help me get back to the boats, he wanted to beg of them. Instead, he made a clumsy joke of his allegiances. After another round which he insisted on buying, they made a glum departure. Sandra never did understand. As soon as they left the bar, she said, “They might as well be told the truth. Fishermen are so unrealistic.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it. Let’s walk by the harbor.”

  Into the breach, in midspring, came the halibut schooners from Seattle and Prince Rupert. While Swede’s cannery did not buy halibut, Hank could watch the boats moor at another pier close by. In cruised names he recognized from his earliest days in Kodiak seven years before—Grant, Republic, Northern, Chelsea, Thor—sturdy white-hulled wooden vessels, their bows straight with a simple grace. Nothing had changed on them, as it had in even his short experience on other fishing boats. He remembered the businesslike coils of line, the high marker poles topped with red pennants, and the covered work areas astern. Each of the schooners had a deep-grained air of serious fishing, a solidity with the sea characterized by thick planks and scarred cutting tables. He began to desert his cannery duties, to slip over and haunt the dockside where they were taking ice and bait.

  It was not easy to strike a conversation with the men aboard. They seemed a separate, taciturn tribe from other fishermen, uniformly older, and men of little banter even among themselves. Their faces were set and weathered. Most had Norwegian accents. In contrast to the local fishermen of his own generation, many were more wiry than muscular, and few wore beards. Instead of the spring-footed energy he had come to associate with men on the Kodiak boats, their feet hugged the deck as they moved from job to job. They were different; yet, like the appearance of their wooden boats, they seemed the archetypal fishermen.

  One day Hank stood watching a crewman on deck. The man’s blond hair stuck out from a soiled white cap and the frayed sleeves of his long johns protruded from a wool shirt sliced at the elbows. As he passed line from one scrupulously neat coil to another, he filed and straightened the large steel hooks attached every few feet. The coils were beautifully even, and the leaders to which the hooks connected were set in a regular subpattern within the coil.

  “Howdy,” Hank ventured. The man glanced up and nodded slightly without breaking his rhythm.

  As Hank watched, he realized that he called himself a fisherman without ever having fished by the oldest method of them all. Hook and line must have been invented centuries before nets and pots.

  “You sure coil that neatly.”

  “It’s how I vas taught to do it.” But the man smiled at the compliment. His large red hands kept working as he said mildly, “What are you, a tourist?”

  “Hell no. I fish salmon and crab and shrimp.” A silence continued until Hank asked how long a halibut trip lasted.

  “Oh . . . Three weeks you mostly stay out now. A few years ago ve fill the boat in ten-twelve days, but now with the Japs and the Russians, there ain’t that much halibut.” He pronounced the final word carefully—hahl-ee-boot—lingering over each syllable.

  “I once worked on the halibut lines, slimed them after they came from the holds, then stack
ed them in the freezers.” The story made no impression. “Some weighed over two hundred pounds, really tough to handle.”

  “Sure, you get some soakers. At least they wasn’t flapping.”

  “Do they fight much?”

  “Halibut? They’re mean son of bitches, flap so hard on deck they sometimes knock you over.”

  Hank glanced toward the metal building where his duties lay, where haggling women and heaps of shrimp awaited his return. “Guess you have a full crew aboard? Don’t need another man?”

  “Full crew, ja.” The man said it as if he were answering a strange question, but he glanced at Hank for the first time as his hands continued to work. “Ve always make the crew up in Seattle.”

  “You know any other halibut boat that might be short a man?”

  “No . . . The captains don’t like to take any fellow yust from the docks. You start as inbreaker in halibut, you know that? First year you make only maybe quarter share. Takes a fellow about three years to be a good halibut fisherman, if he works hard.”

  Hank laughed uncertainly, impressed still further. “Come on. Three years?” He watched the easy skill of the line being coiled and longed to try it, privately.

  When he returned to the cannery, his picking line had clogged and everyone was searching for him. Joe Cutch stood on the platform setting things right with his own hands, and Swede himself was wiping shrimp mess from his clothes as Hank walked up.

  “What the hell, Crawford?”

  “Sorry, Swede.”

  “Where were you?”

  Hank considered saying he had been sick, but: “I went to look over the halibut boats. You can dock me.”

  “Dock, shit. I either count on you or I don’t.”

  “Look, Swede, I’m not a cannery man. I was looking for a boat.”

  “You’re a cannery man when you’re on my clock.”