Highiliners

by William B. McCloskey Jr.

  Before they finished storing supplies the weather closed in. Wind smoked across the bay, and no plane could land. There was general glee among the crew because they expected to lie in at company expense. Hank firmly set them to work on repairs, driving them for ten and twelve hours a day as he did himself. However, he had discovered the liquor cache with his office keys. Each night he produced a bottle. They partied together and had a fine time. Two of the guys asked if they could return under him for the summer. It gave him a new sense of power to tell Swede he wanted them and to have them arrive with their gear a few days later as part of the regular maintenance crew.

  He kept track of the days only because he was working on deadlines. There was the day when the machinists would arrive, then the day for the foremen to assemble and hold briefings, finally the day when all the workers descended. Each event presupposed a body of other work completed—roofs repaired, galley in partial and then full operation, the flow of water restored to machines and lavatories, the rooms clean and the mattresses aired. He worked eighteen-hour days, then lay awake fretting over things not done.

  However, Swede commuted from Kodiak, and Hank came to realize how little of the show he ran himself. It had been Swede’s planning months before that determined what supplies were shipped, and he had merely checked them off. When the mechanics came, they suffered his presence while proceeding their own way with the job. Likewise the cooks and the foremen, unless he carried Swede’s direct orders. When skippers came to talk agreements with Swede, he witnessed a process of barter so encoded that he remained a stranger to it. When he asked for an explanation, Swede found a way to change the subject.

  Sandra arrived with her luggage, smiling. She settled for form’s sake in a dormitory single set aside for the bookkeeper, put up curtains at the window, left some token clothing, then moved into Hank’s cabin. Suddenly the bachelor trailings were stowed and the place assumed a cheerful order. But they had little time together except at meals in the chowhall, and these were shared in the executive room with the foremen. At night Hank worked late. He often climbed exhausted beside her into bed, murmured “Have a good day?,” and fell asleep.

  Within a space of two days the bulk of the cannery workers arrived, transported from town both by plane and by the cannery’s tenders. Most had flown from Seattle to Anchorage to Kodiak, and many of the younger ones had spent at least one night rolled in a sleeping bag on some floor. About half were Filipinos, men and women, older by decades on the average than the Americans. Their faces were stern, and they spoke sharply even to each other. Many of the Americans were green kids, recruited in Seattle with some vague notion of Alaskan adventure. Except for their guitars and motley knapsacks, they reminded Hank of fresh arrivals at boot camp, and he found himself playing the role of boatswain as he oversaw their issuance of blankets and beds. Sometimes he shouted at them to keep order. Two galley crews—one American and one Filipino—had arrived early. They worked at separate ranges in different parts of the same big kitchen and laid out their food alongside each other at adjacent steam tables.

  Hank’s first major gaffe came when he assigned bunks to the two nationalities together. No one had bothered to tell him that the Americans lived in the buildings to the east of the office and the Filipinos to the west. He thought his only task was to keep the sexes separated and to accommodate people by age. Some of the older Filipinos returned to complain angrily, just as shouts announced trouble. Hank ran to intervene. A young Filipino held his switchblade level while one of the American kids, confident from smoking marijuana to judge by odor, held a chair ready to throw it. At issue was the cot by the window in the room they had been assigned together.

  “Stop that!” yelled Hank. The boy with the knife only snarled as he crouched and weaved, while the other continued a string of obscenities as he tried the chair in different positions like a matador with a cape. It was one of the older Filipino men who broke it up. He snapped a command to the boy of his own nationality and gestured him outside. The boy lowered his blade, argued with the man in a normal voice, then left.

  “Put that chair down,” commanded Hank at the tail of the action. The American shrugged and obeyed.

  “I’m going to reassign you,” Hank continued, trying to sound stern as he wondered how far his authority extended. Swede appeared and fired both fighters on the spot. “Got a tender going back to Kodiak in an hour. Get your bags down there or charter your own plane.”

  The Filipino boy cried out and threw his knife to the floor to show his contrition. Swede shook his head, and the older Filipino declared, “He no good for this place, Mr. Scorden, you get him home.”

  “I didn’t pull the fuckin’ blade,” said the American. “He attacked me.”

  “Get packed,” said Swede. “If you can’t hold grass, don’t smoke it.”

  Outside, Swede set Hank straight about the bunking arrangements and gave him hell for not having figured it for himself. “And why didn’t you fire them? You’ve read the rules.”

  “How was I to know you’d back me up? That’s three hundred bucks airfare lost. We’d never talked about it.”

  “Okay, maybe. Put this in your head. You find a handgun on a man, or a knife in his hand he’s not using to cut fish, and you push his ass on the next plane or tender. Dock his wages against the fare if he has any. Fitsfights, now, look the other way, good steam valve. Offer Merthiolate when it’s over. Mostly the Filipinos and the others only fight among themselves. That’s why we bunk them separate. I don’t care about screwing, so long as they keep it off the boardwalks and the women stay with their own. The Filipinos police themselves if they can live in their own community, and they’re the hard, steady workers who stay the whole season without giving you bullshit. Now, hard drugs, fire anybody on the spot. As for booze and pot, I forbid those on paper, and that’s to keep it down. Cannery work’s wet and dull, it sometimes needs help. Unless they can’t hold it and might fall into the machinery. Or if you get some white kid like that one who takes on the spies after a few puffs.”

  “I don’t think he started that. If I hadn’t bunked them—”

  “I make it a rule to can both sides when it’s interracial. Saves other problems, and puts everybody on notice. Remember, there’s no doctor here, just a first-aid kit. Go on, now, unfuck those room assignments before something else happens.”

  The season opened. It was like waiting for a battle to begin. The cannery crews were restless, their jobs assigned but nothing to do until the tenders arrived to unload. Hank watched the clock; he knew when the second arrived on the grounds that set off the guns, when pelican hooks clanked open all along the waters to free the skiffs for the first set. That set, in crowded bays, would be the crazy one. Crews would be corking each other and tangling web with furious insults, with fights if boats scraped close enough for leaping aboard. Plungers would pop as the nets closed. Men would peer and peer for the turbulence that betrayed a big jag of fish. Oh, shit, he thought, to be out there straining up a moneybag of salmon, to have a hundred reds or humpies empty over your legs slapping and gleaming. He stared from the window of the radio room at the bare, low mountains that hid it all from view. The radios were silent except for empty crackles. Skippers were too busy with the fish.

  Next morning at three the first tender docked. Hank was on hand to grab a line and inspect the haul. By five the salmon had been transferred to the cannery bins, and the processing began.

  He began the first day as roving troubleshooter, with no duty and all duties. It took little time for something to blow. A hose that had probably been tested five times broke loose like a frenzied snake, spewing water over everyone. Most of the people wore rain gear. But Pete Erikson, who maintained the Iron Chink, wore only coveralls with wrenches weighting the pockets, and the hose soaked him down. One of the kids feeding fish started to laugh. Pete declared he was quitting rather than take filthy cracks from some punk. Hank quickly shunted the kid to another line. The foreman, busy with the l
oose hose, came back to give Hank hell for moving one of his men without consulting him. It was all shouted above the clanks and hisses of machinery. Then, while Pete stormed to his locker to find dry clothes, the Iron Chink clogged and had to be stopped while Hank ran to coax Pete back.

  On the sliming line, one of the inexperienced girls cut off her fingertip. After the hysteria had run its course and she was carried in shock to the little infirmary where one of the foremen with first-aid training treated her, there was the job of finding the fingertip to make sure it was not included in a can of salmon. One new boy, slightly effeminate, came to Hank with tears in his eyes to declare that he couldn’t stand the sight of fish guts, that no one told him it was going to be that organic. Hank worked a transfer with a girl stapling boxes. At the far end of the line they were shorthanded loading cans for the retorts, and he pitched in to catch them up. At another point he had just donned an apron to help the slimers (to show that he himself looked down on no job), and was joking with some of the pleased women, when a din of screeching metal erupted among the filler machines. Somebody loading cans from the loft had dropped a carton the wrong way, and a hundred collapsed cans had poured through the ceiling to jam into the moving parts. They shut the line for thirty minutes while the mechanics, cursing loudly and implying it was Hank’s fault for not watching the loft, yanked crumpled aluminum from the fish-coated fillers.

  At coffee break he joined the workers rather than the foremen. He glanced critically at the dingy little room and made a note to himself that it should be kept cleaner. Suddenly a native woman who worked at the patching table accused the woman who worked alongside of blowing her nose near the open cans. She turned to Hank: “You better stop her snotting right into the salmon, Mister Manager.” The accused knocked off the other’s plastic sterile cap, and they started pulling each other’s hair. When no one else intervened (the men watched laughing while the women goaded), Hank broke them apart. They both turned on him and told him to mind his own business. By lunchtime he was glad for the privacy of the executive room.

  The summer continued in a hectic pattern. Occasionally he cut loose to run along the beach or climb in the low mountains to let off steam, but usually the grind kept him nailed in place. While he managed to rise above the status of whipping boy, everyone considered his time their own. Skippers with engine emergencies banged on his door at two in the morning, and it was up to him to find a mechanic willing to help so they could rush back to the grounds. From his days as a shipboard officer, Hank was no stranger to the wheedling grip that subordinates could exert on anyone above them who betrayed a sympathetic tendency, yet he allowed himself to be conned. Late at night, and during his breaks, he found himself listening wearily, ostensibly to advise, to tales of woe concerning restless girlfriends back home, estranged husbands behind on alimony, aching backs and mysterious stomach cramps, and incompatible roommates. The women told on each other like children. If one left the monotony of the lines even to hose the floor or push a bin, he was sure to hear of it.

  “I’m the chaplain,” he complained to Sandra.

  She stopped kneading his shoulders long enough to bite his ear.

  Swede caught him one day ducked behind a wall. Hank explained he was avoiding a guy who was sure to pin him down with misery talk.

  “You’re crazy. Growl and they’ll leave you alone.”

  “Some have real problems.”

  “They’ll have them with or without you.”

  “You have a black heart, Swede.”

  “Don’t forget it.”

  While the cannery routine often extended late into night when the salmon were coming heavy, a whistle blast always started the lines again at eight. By then the tenders had arrived from the grounds with the catch of the day before, or Hank had talked to them by radio. He had also talked to Swede in Kodiak. At seven-fifteen breakfast he joined the foremen to plan for the day, telling them the distribution and nature of the day’s pack—the size can to be used, the amount of fish to be diverted for freezing—and relaying any other instructions from Swede. They discussed any breakdowns, potential shortages, or personnel problems. Most of the longterm foremen kept a distance, but as Hank settled in he managed to stay on top of the job, juggling the sometimes delicate line between his own authority and their little empires. He learned to refuse good-naturedly some of their own drudgery tasks if they tried to shunt them his way (tabulation of time cards, for example), while accepting others philosophically.

  Swede commuted between the three canneries of his authority. He maintained in each of the radio rooms a chart of the Island stuck with pins for his boats and lettered pennants for the fourteen tenders under his command. (Two of his tenders flew the Jolly-Roger pennant of cash buyer to lure fish at higher prices from other canneries, and Hank was never permitted to talk to these himself.) Swede coordinated the tenders as if he were conducting a naval engagement, and he also kept in touch with the hundred-odd seiners and forty setnet sites that delivered to him, working in a fine steam as he leapt from the swivel chair by the radio to juggle pins on the chart. The game was to help the fleets follow the fish and then to keep the tenders in the middle of the action. He flew regularly over the grounds himself to spot salmon concentrations, then issued directions in an elaborate code.

  Swede based his general code on numbers and colors in combinations he devised himself. They changed each day in a prearranged pattern that each skipper had. Favored skippers—the highliners—might have their private code for the season, based on the number sequence of a secret word or phrase. Spiro Agnew was a perfect one: two sets of five letters, none of them repeated. The letters of the first name would represent major locations and those of the second one graduated brackets of quality. “Yeah, Swede, doing a low G here, got a low G, figure tonight were heading south R.”

  There would be mix-ups. “Chip, you’ve got a thirty-one in East Yellow, that’s a thirty-one?” Swede would say with forced nonchalance as he leapt excitedly to search his chart for the nearest tender, muttering away from the mike, “Jesus, twenty thousand humpies and he couldn’t have made more than three sets since dawn. We’ll divert the whole south fleet down to Moser Bay, and they weren’t fishing shit there yesterday!” And the other voice would continue: “Right, Swede, thirty-one. Oh. This Wednesday or Thursday? Change that. Fishing forty-two in East Green, that’s a forty-two in East Green, okay.” Swede would settle back into his swivel chair as he shrugged at Hank and bit a new cigar. “Right, Chip, okay, keep at it.”

  The season was a good one. When it climaxed, Swede’s game of the boats, which might have guaranteed his survival in lean years, became unnecessary. By midseason they were wading in a nightmare of salmon. The lines worked fifteen and sixteen hours, and the bins were so backloaded that they often processed through the traditional Sockeye Sunday. Sometimes a load aged from waiting too long and was frozen for bait. Swede quietly discontinued his two pirate tenders. At one point he even placed a limit of 750 fish per crewman per day that his tenders would buy. The workers accumulated formidable overtime, but the grind was telling. Hank listened to more and more complaints. Except for the Filipinos, people quit arbitrarily over such matters as too few cookies at coffee break or a sour word from one of the foremen. Kodiak and Seattle scraped the dregs for people, and strange misfits arrived as replacements.

  One boy, with a spooky cast to his eyes and mouth, lasted a half hour at the sorting belt and went berserk. He leaped into the bin full of fish and threw them around screaming. Hank and the foreman followed, grappling with him until they were all rolling in slime and gurry. Finally, with no other way, they tied his arms in back and dragged him kicking to the infirmary. For two days the weather was too bad for a plane to fly in from Kodiak. The kid thrashed and yelled the whole time. Hank, to whom most of the watching fell, tried to clean and change him, but gave it up. By the time the plane made it, with a nurse from the Kodiak Hospital who grogged him at once with a shot, both the kid and the infirmary
stank with rank gurry. At least, Hank and the foreman were good friends thereafter. Next night they shared a bottle together after the line was secured. Two other foremen joined them.

  As the machinery became overworked, it broke down with greater frequency. Likewise the boats, which began to send in so many emergency calls that Swede hired back one of his pirate tenders to ferry parts to the grounds.

  Hank had little time to spend among the boats when they came in on Saturday night. He wanted to keep away from the docks, with the certain discontent they held for him, but he was unable to resist visiting when the Shalimar or the Adele H docked. Jones and Steve, relaxed in their fishing clothes, had all kinds of new anecdotes from the grounds.

  “Look,” said Sandra to ease his restlessness, “this isn’t the only season. I just don’t understand why you want to be on a boat so badly.”

  Hank would close his eyes against her version of logic and return to the job of running the cannery.

  CHAPTER 20

  Horse’s Head

  THE season tapered with the end of the humpie runs in early August, and Swede returned to his coded maneuvers. The chum salmon, though abundant and larger, failed to fill the gap. Swede had Hank close one line and ship the workers home, then finally in late August disbanded the other. He diverted the remaining fish by tender to the Kodiak cannery and left Hank to close down. Sandra, having finished the payrolls, returned to Kodiak also. All at once within a few days Hank was supervising the shutdown of a ghost village. His companions were old Pete Erikson and two other machinists, and a handful of maintenance people. They ate together in the executive dining room, final stronghold of the diminishing kingdom, and played cards to pass the lengthening evenings. There were days when the water had a cold sparkle, but the westerlies blew more and more, so that the harbor swelled gray, and all land beyond the radius of a few hundred feet disappeared.