One by one the crews returned the cannery boats to the ways, stored their seines in the loft, and flew to Kodiak. Some of the larger independent seiners began to gear for king crab. Hank watched them impatiently. As soon as a cargo ship came to collect the last vanloads of the salmon pack, his job was over, and he could search again honorably for a boat. No discussion of this with Swede, but he assumed it was understood.
His relationship with Sandra had reached a curiously comfortable level. He took for granted that they lived together since she had long ago moved from her old apartment as her roommates watched wistfully. Now the bungalow at the cannery was dreary without her.
There was one sadness to it all. Sandra came as close as any woman he had ever met to his specifications for a wife, based on the stable values of his parents, which he could modify but not ignore. But it was in the presence of Jody that his impulses turned alert. This had been so practically since the day he had met her.
The Shalimar, its crew weary of steady fishing for shrimp and then tendering for salmon, came into the cannery dock. Mike and the crew radioed for a plane to fly them back to Kodiak to tie one on for a long weekend. Jody decided to stay and mind the boat. Her mouth spread in that wide smile that characterized her for Hank. “Booze it with you guys? I need a rest, not a brawl.”
Hank was delighted, for no other reason at first than for her company in the increasingly dull surroundings. He offered to restore the heat in one of the dormitory rooms for her use. “What, move my gear? But I will use your shower, and I won’t mind if you put some hot water in it.” As for eating with them: “Sure, but don’t expect me to do your dishes.”
At lunch, within minutes, she had breathed life across the entire table. Pete Erikson, whom no one contradicted, began to lecture the group on the combined impropriety and bad luck of letting a woman live on a fishing boat. In a few sentences he had progressed to the inferior quality of fish caught on such a boat—fish so old since nobody could keep his mind on the work that they fell apart in the cannery machines. Jody laughed derisively. Pete turned a glare on her that would have puddled any of his subordinates. “Young lady, you don’t know much about the fish business, I can see.”
“Your machines are a fuckin’ heap of tin without the fish I know how to catch.”
Hank, long forced to endure Pete by Swede’s dictum, gave her a grin and wink. She regarded him with blank curiosity.
Later, he was showing her a loft where the Shalimar could stow gear for the winter. “Sure glad you told Pete off,” he said.
“Nobody’s ever paid me enough to kiss ass.”
He felt stung. “A woman doesn’t have to play games to get along, she can always marry if it gets too rough.”
Instead of the retort he expected, she said seriously, “You believe that.” She stood before him, a head shorter, her hands in leather work gloves, her hair bunched in a loose ponytail and her face smudged, wearing an open wool fishing shirt under a torn slicker jacket, completely feminine and a complete individual. “If you spout that kind of shit, I’m surprised that Sandra hasn’t blasted off from you by now. Or has she?” “No. Were fine together. She says her piece sometimes, if that makes you feel any better.” He considered, then added, “We go our ways, though. We keep it independent.”
“That sounds like a big relationship.”
Hank felt himself blush. It had earlier crossed his mind that the loft might be a place to start again what he had never forgotten from seven years before. Sandra and he, after all, had exchanged no promises. But he didn’t like to talk about her to Jody. He busied himself opening storage space for the Shalimar among the draped seines and piles of equipment, then glumly followed Jody back into the blowing rain, along the slick boardwalks to the boat. She lit a cigarette expertly against the weather and started down the ladder.
He stood, waiting. She glanced at him with detachment. “Come have a beer if you want.”
In the galley of the Shalimar, she banged a beer can on the table in the way she had slung his coffee in the beanery the first time they met, and he told her so.
“Well, I haven’t changed,” she said curtly.
“Here’s to that!” He thought he was being gallant. “If Jody changed, the world would be poorer.”
“For a decent guy, Hank, you surely sometimes talk like an asshole.” She wedged herself into the cramped seat opposite him at the table and opened her own beer. “The fellows say you tough it all right on the boats, and most people at the cannery here think you did fair. We’ve wondered a couple of times where you’re headed.”
“Me? You’ve talked about me? Well, I want to get back to a boat as soon as I can find one. That’s where I’m headed.”
He wanted to change the subject, since it seemed pointless. “You’ve probably forgotten, but I still think now and then of that week after the tidal wave. We shared a bunk out on the Rondelay, you know, just before the gale that broke up Joe Eberhardt’s boat.” Her hand rested on his arm unexpectedly, and she laughed in the deep way which over the years he had grown to use unconsciously as a measure of other women’s laughter. He wanted to clap his free hand on hers, but remained still, enjoying her touch. “We saw the earthquake together up on the hill, remember? Held that woman’s kids in the doorway as we watched cars bounce down the road.”
“I’d forgotten that. Then I sent you down to help with the boats, and during the night with the tidal waves I worried that I’d sent you to be drowned.”
“You worried? That sets me up.”
Her hand left his arm as lightly as it had come. “A shivering green-head from back east? Anybody would have worried for you.”
“Come on, I’d fished the Rondelay all summer before.”
“So you knew how to handle a boat in a tidal wave.”
“Be fair.”
“Well, you did do all right on the Rondelay during the storm, when Jones was ashore and Steve was afraid to take charge. You’d probably make an okay skipper if you stuck to it.”
“Tell you what,” he said quietly, hoping for the best. “I’ll work at it and make my way. When I’m a highliner, I’ll come back and propose.” “Do that. I’ll put you on the list.”
“Big list, is there?”
“Sometimes I feel like a picture that everybody wants to hang on his wall.”
“Mike? Is he one?”
“My skipper? No, or I wouldn’t be aboard. It’s hard for people to believe, but men and women can work alongside each other and then go to their own beds at night.”
“Ah, Jody,” he teased.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You’re inscrutable.”
“I thought I was honest.” She gestured toward the remains of a six-pack as she rose. “Help yourself to beer, Hank. I’m sacking in. That’s why I stayed behind. To sleep.”
“May I follow?” he asked quietly.
“No.”
He knew she meant it. Alone, he sipped at the beer without taste, then left in a few minutes. What Sandra back in Kodiak might have said did not bother him. No commitments, and this was the wilderness, despite a few walls protecting them against the weather.
At supper, Pete Erikson for once was silent. Apparently it took less to shut him up than anyone had imagined. Jody presided automatically. She had a quiet good humor that brought the conversation to life, and the men outdid themselves to tell anecdotes that might earn her smile. Later, at poker, she proved as tough and straightfaced as any of them.
Hank walked her to the boat in the perpetual blowing rain after unsuccessfully inviting her back for a drink in his cabin. As he plodded along the boardwalk among the black shapes of buildings which a week before had been peopled and lighted, he chuckled and wondered what he had hoped to pull. She was nobody’s doxy, and he should have known.
When the crew of the Shalimar returned in subdued good humor, one of them sporting a bruise on his jaw, Hank cast off their lines. Jody waved and smiled from the deck, as once more
she slipped away.
The cannery closedown ended with the arrival of a cargo ship to remove the last of the canned salmon from the warehouse. Hank saw to the invoices, and then he was free. Over a drink in Hank’s cabin, the captain offered him a free ride to Seattle via Kodiak, and even agreed to take Sandra. The season had been good, with Swede promising him the full bonus, so he could afford her a trip. Fly to Hawaii together, return through San Francisco, and still be back in Kodiak to look for a boat in a couple of weeks. He broached the idea to Sandra on the radio. She was so thrilled that he was glad he had thought of it.
“I’ll be skinned. I remember you, and I think the name was Hank.”
The growling, self-confident voice came from a sunburned face that was almost rosy, dimpled, like Santa without his beard. Huge handlebar mustache, eyes in a perpetual squint, hair a sandy tangle. But it was the height of him—half a head taller—that brought the name. “Joe Eberhardt!”
They pounded each other’s shoulders and ended in a bear-hug embrace. “When did I last see you, Hank?”
“When you lost the Linda J on the rocks after the tidal wave. I was on the Rondelay, and we tried to throw you a line.”
“That, that, yes.”
“Linda?”
“Long story, Hank. I couldn’t see myself tied down to a house and brats, and I expect she got tired of living on a boat. I sometimes miss her.” They both fell silent. “Lovely girl,” Joe added gravely, then looked around. “I was hoping this ship had brought me some new crab pots from Seattle.”
“Those yours? Nordic Rose? Yesterday before my guys flew back to Kodiak I had them stack your pots out behind the parts shed. Twenty seven-bys, right?”
“You talk like you run the cannery.”
“I do, up to this point, but I’m looking for a boat.”
“Got some frozen fishheads to sell me cheap ?”
“Hell,” said Hank expansively, “since I still run the place I’ll do what no cannery’s ever done before, I’ll give you some. Tell me, you know of any boat that’s short a man?”
Joe studied him and thumped his arm and chest with a ruse of playfulness as he joked about the free bait, then declared: “One of my men just quit. You want to go crabbing out by Horse’s Head?”
“You’re fuckin’ A I do!” Hank shouted. “Where’s Horse’s Head?”
And that was the end of any trips to Hawaii with Sandra. When he told her by radio, he blocked out her disappointment with a vow to make it up to her sometime. Nor did Swede’s cool reaction bother him. He stepped instantly and exuberantly from the role of manager telling his men to cart off a batch of heavy crab pots to a crewman straining the same pots back on dollies and returning them to the pier.
The rain blew as they geared the new pots with bridles, hooks, lines, and buoys, then winched them clanging to deck. Joe handled the controls and shouted instructions. He worked them in a straight line. By the time they had hefted one of the steel-framed pots astern and lashed it, he had another swinging down above their heads. Hank was in a fine sweat by the time they finished. Quickly he packed his fishing clothes and stored the rest with the watchman to be returned by plane. Within four hours of meeting Joe Eberhardt again, he was pulling up fenders to the deck of the Nordic Rose as they headed into a dark and kicking sea.
He had only met his new crewmates, Sam and Frenchy, on the run. After checking him out on basic deck equipment, they settled together at the galley table while Joe in the forward wheelhouse steered them to the grounds. The two were both approximately his age. Sam had an easy drawl and quiet eyes behind heavy brown hair and beard. John French, who went by his last name, was notably cheerful. His face was round and smooth-shaven, the rest of him hefty and square. In answer to their query, Hank said he had only been crabbing for a week several years before but that he had fished everything else. “Bear with me a couple of sets, and I’ll be on top of it.” The boat swooped into a trough. Hank closed his eyes and held the table.
“Our new friend needs a salty piece of fish,” Frenchy declared.
“That’s what I need.” Hank leaned his head against the padded seat. “Put it on a string, then I can use it over.”
“Go on, crawl in the sack,” said Sam.
“Are we through for the night?” They both laughed. “Guess I’ll stay up.” He rose as casually as he could and slipped into oilskins. On deck he paid his ritual entrance fee again with the vomiting, then watched through teary eyes the buffets of spray breaking over the stern and the foaming whitecaps that glowed in the twilight.
Frenchy came out and suggested they ready the bait cans, since Hank appeared to be enjoying the outdoors. They climbed to a storage bin on the dark wheel deck and groped out cartons of half-thawed herring as well as some of the hard-frozen fishheads Hank had contributed. The herring was so mushy that Hank had to hold the carton against his chest. He aimed it for the thick wooden bait tub below, missed, and ended scooping hundreds of slippery little fish from the deck as seawater washed over his boots and hands.
“Keep at it, Hank. You’ll make master-baiter yet.”
“Does a medal go with that?”
“Gold cock.” Frenchy chopped some of the herring in the tub with a sharp-edged iron pole and stuffed the pieces into perforated plastic cans. “Crabs like that oily herring. Then, sometimes they like the big meaty stuff. Best give ’em their choice.” He banged some of the fishheads apart, impaled them on spiked hooks, then fastened a can and a hook together and held it up. “Hang bait, man. Now you know every trick of it. Make up twenty and clip them on that clothesline, then get inside and see if you can hold some chow. We’ll probably make a night of it.”
Two hours later, as they dozed at the table braced against the boat’s motion, the engine slowed. Hank popped awake with the others and automatically pulled on his rain gear. Joe pushed past onto deck, muttering that he’d found a good fathom curve, and thumped up the ladder to the outside bridge. The others followed quickly. They pushed each of the new heavy pots to the rail (“Wait for the roll of the boat, Hank, then she shoves easier”), slammed open its gate, lifted out the buoys and heavy coils of line, clamped in the bait (“Watch that gate don’t come loose and bang your head, Hank”), recorded the buoy numbers, hooked shut the gate, and with a collective grunt (“Watch fingers, Hank”), fulcrumed the pot over the rail and at Joe’s shout shoved it into the water. Hank endured their instructions, glad they cared while disliking the implication that he was a greenhorn. Joe worked them at such a driving pace that the twenty new pots were soon launched and they sat again around the galley table.
Hank found a whetstone and honed his deck knife, too long unused, as Frenchy and Sam started a game of cribbage. The engine roared full gun, the cards slapped, and jars of peanut butter and pickles rattled in the rack. The clock showed 10 P.M. When Hank finished he went to the pilothouse and asked Joe if he wanted to be relieved.
“No, thanks, I usually hold the wheel and let the guys rest when we’re working. Now you’re here, I’ll check you out on the electronics for later.”
Afterward, Hank settled into a fold-down seat beside Joe and watched ahead in the dark. A single light from another boat rose and dipped, but otherwise they had the water to themselves. He and Joe updated each other on their careers. As Joe talked, Hank realized that for all his hearty poise he had changed, grown restless. He now chose to fish in the remote places when the seasons would let him, with crab around Dutch Harbor and shrimp around the Shumagin Islands. “Just spent August out in the Bering Sea for the first time. Even in summer the weather’s too rough for a fifty-eight-foot boat, but I wanted to give her a try.” He stood straight by his wheel, so tall his head brushed the ceiling, a strong man all around, but his deep voice was soft. “I keep this limit seiner so I can still fish salmon if I want, but these Kodiak bays are too full of the past, Hank, 111 probably never go back. Get a bigger boat soon. Shit, now, before I put over these new pots I should have pulled one or two I’d left soak, to
see what we had out here. Even coming back to the far end of Kodiak throws me. Don’t worry, Linda’s better off without me, and I never talk about her. Seeing you brought it up. When we start to haul, fishing’s all that matters.”
Hank asked about the name Horse’s Head, and Joe lighted the chart to show him the area they had entered southeast of Kodiak Island. The line of the fifty-fathom curve traced the shape of a horse’s head. The area was all continental shelf, with nothing deeper than a hundred fathoms until it went beyond thirty-fathom Albatross Bank into the Pacific Ocean to plunge quickly to three thousand fathoms. “Those fathom curves and trenches are good places to find the crabs,” said Joe. “I set those pots we’re heading for, and then we ran to the cannery for my new ones, so this’ll be our first look at the crab this season.” He checked his radar and loran often. Around midnight, after a search among pots laid by other boats, they found their own.
Frenchy had set up more bait hangs while Hank visited in the pilothouse. He turned the rest of the job over to Hank and suggested he keep at least four baits ahead of the pots. As Hank chopped herring in the bait tub on the port side, the other two hurried around deck setting up. They turned the crab block out on its davit by the starboard rail so that it hung over the water ready to receive the pot lines. Frenchy lifted a two-foot plyboard hatch near deck center. Water welled from it over the deck as the boat rolled. “There’s where we throw the crabs into the live tanks, Hank. Watch you don’t go in yourself.” Hank eyed the open hole dubiously. Right in the middle of where they worked? But every boat had its working conditions.
Hank remembered the grappling and coiling procedure from the Rondelay. When Sam had coiled most of the line, Hank took his place by the rail and received the boom hook from Frenchy. He pressed his knees into the side to brace against the roll, and hoped he remembered what to do. The thick iron hook had a good feel. He watched the surging water, whitecapped and dark green in the pool of decklight, black and endless beyond. Beautiful, beautiful, no other place he’d rather be. A two-branched strap announced the pot. He leaned over to fit in the hook, and the picking boom took over from the crab block under Frenchy’s control of the levers. Up came the pot, water surging through its web and frame. Light shapes moved inside. They were all looking, including Joe, who had left the wheel to stand on the bridge rail above them. Hank gave a cheer as the pot rose stuffed full of crabs.
Highiliners Page 29