Highiliners

by William B. McCloskey Jr.

  Hank felt the heat rise in his face from Swede’s glare. He braced himself to be fired. But he only had a few bucks after furnishing the apartment, and there was rent next week, and Sandra. “Swede, I won’t duck out like that again, in the middle of a shift. But I’ll still look for boats at lunch break and at nights, and when I find one—”

  “I need foremen I can trust to stick. You belong back behind a fork, and you’d be out on your ass if I wasn’t shorthanded. Tell Cutch to reassign you to loading gang if you want to stay.”

  “Suits me fine.” Hank looked at his picker lines, where the women were all watching surreptitiously as they worked. He had not considered the embarrassment of such a plummet. Sandra might not... “You mean this minute? Who’s going to take my place here?”

  “Me, until I find somebody. I can rely on me.”

  Hank grinned. It didn’t matter after all. He sauntered to find Cutch. Indeed, it didn’t matter. In another hour he was sweating under oilskins in a hold full of shrimp and ice, shoveling heavier forkfuls than the others, and it felt good.

  That night his muscles hurt in the old way, so much so that he couldn’t sleep. “This is awful,” said Sandra as she rubbed him down. “And you’re not even upset. Swede hardly ever changes his mind, but in a couple of days, I’ll—”

  “Leave it as it is. Doesn’t have to change anything with us, unless you only bunk with foremen.”

  “Stop that kind of talk.” She bit his neck and started to rouse him. But she murmured “Soap doesn’t do much for that fish smell.”

  He managed to intercept many of the halibut skippers to ask for a berth, but the man on deck was right: none were interested in a green hand. One by one the wooden schooners left their moorings and disappeared beyond the breakwater.

  On the whole, Hank found it not a bad experience to tumble to a laboring job again. The entire air of Kodiak was one of fluid relationships both of people and position. Skippers of the smaller salmon boats crewed on larger ones during shrimp and crab seasons. He had seen a man’s woman of one season turn up the next with somebody else, and he had heard of men in the cannery game who went broke and started again from the bottom. Maybe the storekeepers and professional people of Kodiak maintained straight career lines like those back east—no way he had of knowing for sure—but how could men do this who worked on frail boats which the sea might sink with barely a warning? All in all, he told himself when the shoveling of shrimp someone else had caught became wearisome, or when he had to swallow directions from kids who once worked under him, it was good to be flexible and to stay loose.

  After Sandra’s initial shock at his demotion, their life together continued as before. He still made the most money (some weeks more than as a foreman) and contributed the larger share to expenses. However, as a member of the loading crew he had to report by five in the morning, while her day began regularly at eight. And, while she was through at five, his quitting time varied between three and midnight. Soon she had assumed all the chores of housekeeping. If he chose to wander restlessly among the boats, or to seek out fishing friends in the bars, she usually stayed behind. But she was always waiting for him back in bed. It was a good arrangement. He wondered if his father wouldn’t be envious, after all the standard disapprovals had been voiced.

  One by one he faced up in his lowered status to the crews he knew, as they came in to unload. Seth’s potential derision bothered him: if it turned abusive he’d probably poke him. The crew of the Dolores R was still asleep in the dark predawn when Hank and the rest of the unloading gang opened their hatch and crawled into the ice and shrimp. They had shoveled out half the hold when touseled figures holding coffee cups began to appear. Hank met it head-on. He tossed a shrimpy snowball that hit Seth on the back of the neck, then stood looking up with a grin.

  Seth’s burly, boyish face peered around on the docks, then settled below as he recognized Hank. “Oh shit, man,” he said reproachfully. “I was counting on you to find me another boat. The guy I replaced is coming back.”

  Nels Hanson of the Delta watched him with curious satisfaction and declared himself not surprised to see that a fellow who bad-mouthed skippers, and never hopped to it, couldn’t hold a foreman’s job.

  “Hell,” said Steve on the Adele H when they came in, “I’d rather be down there too than bossing a bunch of hens on that picker line.”

  And the Shalimar. Jody gave a hoot when she saw him in their hold, and summoned Mike and the others to have a look. “Hiding microphones down there?” she called. “One thing sure, that’s the slowest pitchfork I’ve ever seen.”

  “Doing the best I can, what with ice laid by amateurs and the shrimp no bigger than worms,” said Hank, suddenly happy.

  “Swede giving you a bad time, Hank? Catch you not defending the poor hungry canneries?”

  “It’s too hard to leave this place from the top, so I’m trying to crawl out the asshole. Help me find a boat.”

  “What’s Sandra say to this?”

  “She’s stuck with it. I’m serious, I need a boat.”

  “We hear you,” said Mike. “I’ll keep watch. Meanwhile, put your back into that shrimp of ours. Liable to turn sour just waiting for you to move.”

  “I’m smart as hell, but don’t ask me to reverse the clock. Ever consider delivering fresh?”

  “We’ll be at Solly’s or Tony’s or the Ship’s,” called Jody as they left. “Join us when you can.”

  The trouble was, even though his old friends might recognize him again, the shrimping was good and the weather not bad. Boat’s crews simply stayed intact. Salmon season would start in mid-June, but that was still long away. And king crab season, which had lasted year round during the mid-sixties, now closed in January and did not start again until August.

  One day as Hank emerged from a hold for lunch break, he saw one of the halibut schooners glide through the breakwater and head for the adjacent cannery. The fleet had just left a few days before for a three-week trip. Hank raced across piers to receive the schooner’s lines, his oilskins still dripping shrimp and ice. It was the boat where the man had talked to him while coiling. A hospital squad removed a crewman in a wire stretcher. Hank helped, then jumped aboard to quiz the man he knew. Seth arrived also and started nosing around.

  “Ja, poor Sverre, a big sea threw him into the checkers against something sharp, maybe broke his back.” Too tricky in the rough weather for the Coast Guard to raise him by helicopter, so they had left their gear in the water on Albatross Bank to rush him in. Going back right away.

  “I can take his place,” Hank declared.

  “Oh? Got to talk to captain.”

  Seth had already reached the captain, a heavy, middle-aged Norwegian who was shaking his head. “Ve probably fish with the men we got.” But he wavered enough to narrow his eyes and ask, “You pretty husky?”

  Hank had spoken to this captain before. He edged in and began to talk, using a few of the halibut words he had picked up around the schooners. He nearly pleaded.

  The captain looked over both Hank and Seth dispassionately until the man Hank knew spoke up slowly in Norwegian. They hired Hank as an inbreaker on a quarter crew share.

  Within an hour, Hank had squared it as best he could with a stunned Sandra in the office, grabbed his gear from the apartment, bought hip boots and wristers at his new shipmate’s direction, and leaped with full arms onto the deck of the schooner Lincoln.

  Seth, his bushy young face tight with resentment, threw off their lines. The cannery sheds of Kodiak receded.

  CHAPTER 18

  Inbreaker

  HANK knew enough to act less excited than he felt. His five crewmates seemed friendly enough, but they were very reserved. From the apparent age of their weathered faces, all but one might have been fishermen since before he was born. He missed some of their names. The captain was Igvar Rasmussen, and his friend from the dockside conversation was Trygve Jensen (who pronounced it Treeg’-va Yen’-sen). A rough-looking man his own
age with ice blue eyes was named Sven. Of the two who mumbled their names, one had a long hound-dog face that ended in a round open mouth, and the other had a face that was full and rosy. They spoke among themselves in Norwegian. Only the captain and Trygve seemed willing to attempt English with him.

  Igvar, from an enclosed pilothouse only a few feet above main deck, called an order, then translated for Hank as the others started moving. ‘Trygve will show you below. Den you help cut the bait. Pay careful attention to how Trygve shows you.” His voice had an agreeable rise and fall that Hank had heard in other Norwegians.

  Unlike most other fishing boats Hank had known, with the galley located just off the work deck, the living quarters of the Lincoln were reached by descending from deck through a hatch. The overheated room below was both cozy and cramped. Curtained bunks occupied the forepeak in close double tiers, and seats that doubled as storage lockers lined both sides. The stove was fitted tight against the bulkhead nearest the hatch, with its exhaust pipe paralleling the ladder close enough to scorch a shoulder. A table filled the center of the room. It was now raised to the ceiling to make an open space where Trygve explained they had laid the injured man.

  “Ja, poor Sverre, leave his bunk yust like it is, you take this.” Trygve patted a top one that practically clamped against the overhead. For locker space, rather than move the injured man’s belongings, Trygve consolidated his own gear to make room for Hank’s.

  The boat pitched, then snapped into a roll. Hank finished quickly below and hurried topside before the motion should begin to make him sick. On deck, water was already breaking over the sides. Amidships stood an arrangement of bins and tables. The pilothouse rose aft like a miniature conning tower, with an adjoining covered work area behind on the stem. Igvar’s calm face, pipe in mouth, peered from the window as he steered. Trygve first told Hank to put on the oilskin half-sleeve wristers he had bought. “Keeps the fish off your sleeves, then every day you Lysol them. Okay, Hank, you want to cut the octopus like this.” The frozen chunks of tentacles and head were sliced with a knife, and the resultant pieces had to be about three inches long and half as wide. It seemed easy enough, and Hank soon worked at fair speed even though Trygve was much faster. After the stagnation of shore, the cold slap of seawater against his legs and the salty wind around his face were exhilarating. After a while he tried matching Trygve’s speed. His knife glanced off a frozen chunk.

  “No use you lose a finger, Hank. Go slow till you got it,” said Trygve mildly. He examined Hank’s pieces, shook his head, brushed the remaining octopus to his side, and lifted a basket of semifrozen herring in its place. “Chop the herrings in two, like this. Takes time to learn octopus.”

  Whenever they filled a basket, Trygve sent Hank aft with it to replenish the supply of the others, who stood around narrow tables on the covered fantail putting the bait on hooks. They all worked intently, faces relaxed but hands moving as rapidly as pistons. With enough pieces cut, Trygve took him back to join the baiting.

  Each coiled unit of lines and attached hooks was called a skate. Trygve lifted one to a table and began to re-coil it from the top onto a square of canvas he called the skate bottom. As he explained, the hooks were attached to the line at twenty-one-foot intervals by leaders called gangions. He speared a bait on each hook, then laid it in the center on the skate bottom as he coiled the line around it. The operation was trickier than it appeared. Several times Trygve interrupted patiently to make Hank do his part again. “If she ain’t coiled right it makes a snarl, and if you don’t put on the baits right they fly off.”

  They prepared twenty-four skates, which Trygve said would be tied together into separate strings of twelve each when the time came. At a length of three hundred fathoms or eighteen hundred feet for each skate, Hank figured it roughly at more than eight miles of line. He had counted more than eighty hooks on one skate, making about two thousand hooks they had baited altogether. His part in it had been negligible, yet his wrists and hands ached.

  They all went below for mug-up. The others lowered the table from the ceiling and settled around it to play pinochle as they pulled out pipes and cigars. Hank, not invited into the game, sat watching as he tried to appear interested. He thought he had heard the sounds of a boat in seas before, but steel boats made no sound at all compared to the groans and creaks of the Lincolns caulked timbers. He joined Igvar in the pilothouse and offered to take the watch.

  “Nei, better get your rest, going to vork like hell soon.”

  Igvar did not appear talkative, but in the easy solitude, as they watched the bow pitch and dip among the gray swells, he told something of himself. He had started in the boats with his father out of “Norgay, Stavinger,” by the time he was eleven. “Cabin boy by thirteen, full fisherman in dory by fifteen.” During the war he escaped the Germans and operated boats from England for the Resistance. Afterward, “I vas still young feller, maybe twenty-five, no sweetheart. I had a cousin in Ballard, so I come to Seattle and vas soon on boat, fishing the halibut.” (He pronounced it as did Trygve, with the same lingering respect over each syllable: hahl-ee-boot.) “I vork hard and save money. Now I got a boat, a vife, two kids, and three apartment houses.”

  But as for turning over the wheel. . . Igvar suggested again he get some rest.

  Below in the galley the pinochle game had stopped. Trygve was preparing to relieve the watch and the other three snored in their bunks. Hank disliked being idle when he had just begun on board. “Can I start something to cook?”

  Trygve wagged his finger warningly: “That are Olaf’s stove.”

  The sleepers lay on their backs with hands over their chests like corpses. When Hank crawled into his own bunk he found little room for any other position. He could not sleep. The noise of the planking sounded like small explosions as the bow—no more than three feet from his head—veered up and down in the water.

  It was dark when they returned to deck under floodlights. Olaf, the one with the long horse face, had risen to prepare a meal beforehand, and they shoveled huge quantities of meat, noodles, bread, and creamed corn in silence. After the hot cabin, the air was cold and slicing. They all trooped astern and went about their preparations as if Hank had not existed. Trygve pointed to a place beside a bait bench for him to stand. “Yust vatch first time.” Olaf and Sven removed the canvas tops from some of the skates and tied them together in sequence, bottom end of one to top of next. They positioned them by a high metal chute that was attached to the stern. Trygve and the rosy-faced man, whom Hank now knew as Ralph, readied several marker poles. Each pole had a red pennant on top as well as a battery-operated flashing light. Attached to the pole was a plastic buoy, and leading from this was an anchor. Close to the anchor, Trygve tied the end of the first skate.

  When Igvar shouted they sprang into motion, anticipating each others movements so closely that their work interlocked. They threw over a marker pole and buoy, then an anchor, and the first skate began to zip over the chute with its hooks clacking against the metal. It was very fast and neat. After one string of twelve end-connected skates was laid, followed by another anchor and marker, they laid the second string.

  Within minutes Igvar called and they returned to the main deck, where in the dark a small flashing light approached. One of their red pennant poles drifted into the pool of deck lights. Sven hauled it aboard and bent the attached line over a power block they called the gurdy. Ralph began coiling the anchor line as it payed in. Trygve called Hank to set up the boards of several bins both on deck and adjacent to the table area in the center. “This is the checkers, they call it. Fellow who dresses the halibut keeps the checks on how many we got.” Trygve slipped his arms into wristers as he nodded toward Sven at the gurdy. “Whatever you do, stay clear of the roller man, ja? Unless he calls and we run with gaff hooks, but you yust watch that too, stay clear.”

  “What regular job can I be doing?”

  “Cut more octopus like I showed you. No, not octopus, you don’t know eno
ugh yet. Cut herrings. Yust stay clear of everybody.” When the anchor came to the side Hank forgot the directive and went to help. Trygve barked him back.

  Suddenly, to the sound of a collective “Hah,” Hank looked up to see a halibut fly over the rail on Sven’s gaff hook. The big flatfish landed in one of the checkers, and immediately started to thrash so hard that the boards shook. Trygve beat it on the head with a club until it lay still, then plunged his gaff into the head and lifted it onto the table. “Faster you kill him before he gets bruised, better he keeps,” he explained to Hank. “Maybe seventy pound, eh?” The halibut was still alive, a monstrous and beautiful creature glistening under the deck lights. It’s flat, thick body was olive-brown on one side and white on the other, about three feet long from tail to head. Hank stopped work to stare. He had handled dead halibut on the sliming line, but the impact of this huge breathing fish that spread over most of the table was vastly different. Both eyes were crowded grotesquely onto the brown side of the head. Their hooded stare was angry. The mouth gasped open to show teeth. Trygve without ceremony sliced a half-moon cut into its side where the throat might have been and scooped out a mess of entrails—a minuscule gutting for a creature of such size. The halibut flapped with its whole body even as the angry eyes glazed.

  “You call this hole the poke when the guts come out. Iceman in the hold stuffs it with ice; that makes the whole fish keep.”

  By now Sven had gaffed another. He swung it over the rail, then flicked it free of the gaff hook, meanwhile continuing to run the line and to knock the hooks clean of untouched bait. Hank remained staring in admiration as he tried to impress the job on his mind.

  “Goddam it, inbreaker, cut de baits faster,” roared Igvar from the wheelhouse. Hank started chopping vigorously.

  “Skate!” yelled Ralph, who had already coiled a skate, detached it from the string, and tied on the canvas bottom.

  “You, Hank,” said Trygve, “hurry back to fantail the skates as soon as Ralph makes.”