Highiliners

by William B. McCloskey Jr.

  “Oh, shit!” cried Frenchy. “Four hundred females and jacks, and this string’s all picker pots.” Joe above them scowled and declared that they’d best clean out the pots on the double, stack them on deck, and move to better grounds.

  Sam steadied one edge of the pot and directed Hank on the other as Frenchy raised it to the side. “Brace her tight against the side,” said Sam. “Wait for a roll to port, then she’ll swing without us pulling the whole weight ourselves. Now.” Frenchy raised the pot just over the rail, and in it swung on the roll of the boat. It was lugubriously heavy. The force took Hank off guard, and the pot dragged him with it across deck as the others yelled.

  The boat rolled back to starboard. With Sam’s end braced and Hank’s swinging free, the pot pivoted and slammed into objects like an elephant on the loose.

  “Frenchy, drop her anywhere,” yelled Joe as he leaped down the ladder to help. The pot thudded to deck with such force the boat shook. All four grunted and strained to position it where the hook could raise one end back against the rail where it belonged.

  “Sorry,” Hank panted. “Forgot how heavy.”

  “Maybe three thousand pounds,” said Joe seriously. “She dasn’t run loose. Got to put more asshole to it.” But no one seemed upset further, now that it was over.

  With the big pot tilted against the rail, they opened the gate and leaned in to throw out the crabs. Not a one of the males was large enough to be kept. Like machines they grabbed two and three crabs simultaneously by the legs and sailed them over the top into the water. Joe helped, goading them to go faster. When he saw a section of ripped web he mended his needle through it with ferocious speed. They threw the coil and buoys inside the pot, pushed it to the far rail, and tied it down. Every job interlocked, and Hank soon gained the rhythm of it.

  Each fresh pot that rose to the rail was a nightmare of useless abundance, with hundreds of females and nothing to keep. The work of removing the crabs was the same as if they had all been keepers and money in the bank. And the pots, which if plugged with the right kind of crab would have been rebaited and returned over the rail to the same grounds, now had to be pushed astern and tied together. Joe drove them tirelessly by his own example. Eventually pots were stacked across the entire deck. They boomed others up to a second layer, swaying with a sinister force until they landed secure. Crouched on top to receive them, his toes dug into web for support, Hank could feel the pots shift with each boat roll.

  On the run—there seemed no other pace—Hank fell into the open hold. One leg went down all the way, and the other scraped painfully. The icy water rose beneath his rain pants and filled both boots. His legs were so heavy with water as he pulled them out that he wondered (no, he knew) how he would fare if he fell over the side. Everybody joked about it and he joined them. It furnished their only break.

  When the thirty pots of the string were stacked, covering even the open hold and towering above the deck like superstructure, Joe trotted through the galley to the pilothouse and gunned the engine. Hank was swaying with fatigue and his throat felt coated with salt sand. As he started inside, thinking only of fresh water and bed, Frenchy said, “Hurry back and I’ll help you fix the baits.”

  “Were not through?”

  “Oh, man, Joe keeps his pots at work, not deadass on deck.”

  Inside, when everything was ready, Sam and Frenchy threw their rain jackets under the table and peeled rain pants over boots without removing either, then lay back on the benches. Hank quickly emptied the water from his boots and found old newspapers to stuff inside, then stretched on the metal deck under the table and fell asleep at once.

  A half hour later the engine slowed. It was four-thirty and growing light outside as they dragged back on deck. Hank ached everywhere. They pushed the closest pots to the rail, pulled out the line and buoys, clamped in the bait hang, and launched them at Joe’s shout. Then they boomed down the top layer. When some deck space was opened by both rails, Sam and Frenchy suddenly began to compete. They each hefted pots by themselves—about seven hundred pounds empty—and scrambled to be the first to have one ready by the call to launch. The spirit caught Hank and he scrambled with them. Within minutes the final pots had hit the water, and they all panted as they grinned. They continued in motion, stowing scattered tielines, drawing seawater from the live tank to slosh seaweed and broken crab from the deck.

  The sun rose orange over the foamy swells and burned into their eyes for a few minutes until it reached the height of the cloud ceiling and disappeared for the day. The low mountains of Kodiak Island and the Trinities glowed purple in the distance. Hank watched, wonderfully content.

  They slept and drifted for a few hours. By eleven they had eaten a large breakfast cooked by Frenchy and were back on deck running gear.

  The next days blended into each other. Joe had more than a hundred pots, and he kept trying to work them every day. If the keepers had been abundant enough to return the pots directly to the same grounds he would have succeeded, but he had not found the crabs. They rarely collected more than fifty keepers (a modest single potful in the old days four years earlier) in an entire string, and often they pulled merely throwaways and bait fish. Joe drove them without respite until they were all bleary with fatigue, and then as the others slept he studied charts or talked on the radio to other skippers on the grounds, trying to figure the crab. Suddenly he would announce a new strategy. Once they moved all their pots from near the Trinities to the gulley off Two Headed Island without sleeping for twenty-seven hours, in winds gusting sixty. Then they moved again out on Albatross Bank, within sight of Japanese trawlers and the halibut longliners. When the westerlies blew too hard they spent a few hours with the other boats in Jap Bay or Kaguyak Bay. Joe tied alongside boats he knew, and while the crews slept the skippers would quiz each other in an elaborate, jocular ritual as they tried to determine who was on the crabs.

  “I’ll find the fuckers,” Joe muttered often. It was virtually the only thing he said any more. If they tried to kid him back to some perspective he regarded them blankly.

  Finally they had to return up the coast to Kodiak for supplies and to deliver their meager catch. Joe cruised at night after fishing all day, to save time. They were moored by eight in the morning at the cannery pier. Frenchy’s wife met him and they went together to buy groceries for the boat. Hank borrowed a fork lift and loaded a new batch of frozen bait, then filled the fresh-water tank. Joe changed the engine oil and with Sam performed some hasty deck repairs, including new hydraulic hoses for the block. After unloading, they moved to the fuel pier to fill tanks, then persuaded Joe to tie in the boat harbor for a few quick beers and lunch.

  “I’ll do it to keep my crew happy,” he growled, “but we ought to be getting back there in case the crab strike. Lines off at one-thirty.”

  “Come on, Skipper,” said Sam, who had been with him longest. “Three.”

  “Bullshit!” Joe considered. “Two-fifteen.”

  Hank and Sandra ate in the apartment, saying nothing of the broken Hawaii trip, then went to bed despite the daylight.

  “I miss you,” she said softly over and over. “Nights are so lonesome without you.”

  “I miss you too.” He tried to forget the boat and to enjoy the moment, lying on clean sheets as she rubbed his back.

  “Swede would take you back. He hasn’t hired anyone else, and he’s not mad at you.”

  He gave no answer.

  At two-fifteen sharp the Nordic Rose headed south again. Ten hours later they reached the grounds and resumed working gear.

  One day, suddenly, whether Joe had found them or they him, fat keepers began to swarm into the pots. In place of spidery, three-pound adolescents the color of dead marsh grass, up came eight-pound mature males, their dark purple shells glistening. The difference to the men’s spirits was like that between prison and sunshine. They cheered the first potload. After the second and third had proved a pattern, they danced around. Joe pounded each on the back
in turn and roared promises of a great debauch when they sailed into town with a highline load. Work became delight and recreation; the abundance dizzied them; they could not work the pots fast enough.

  Now, instead of pulling pots aboard and stacking them, they baited and returned them instantly, leapfrogging one into the place of the next they drew. Each man had always kept count of the keepers he himself threw into the open hold, and then Frenchy had tallied them in his head and shouted the total up to Joe to record. Now the numbers each declared were “sixteen” and “twenty” instead of the former “one” or “zilch.” The crabs were so big that few even had to be measured.

  They worked on and on, grabbing sandwiches on the run and washing them down with gallons of powdered soft drinks. It never occurred to any of them to stop. At first they shouted jokes back and forth to the wheel deck, with Joe leading the banter. When the first burst of exuberance had been dispelled, they channeled all their energies into the work. After a few hours it was no longer pleasure in the way it had started, but rather ferocious satisfaction. A hailstorm pelted them, but Hank only noticed when he slipped on ice.

  Hank had gradually assumed his share of the coiling and the controls. For variety they rotated these jobs with the baiting every ten potloads. They were clicking as a team: their work dovetailed, they anticipated automatically, they watched for each others safety. Only in competing to tally the greatest number of keepers did they act as individuals.

  Dawn after the first twenty-four hours came with orange streaks over the distant mountains rather than the usual gray. The wind shifted, the sun shone, and it turned biting cold. Only the latter fact meant anything. The water that had invariably crept under Hank’s heavy rubber gloves seemed to freeze. His equilibrium of wool underwear and wool shirt beneath rain gear, which absorbed and dispelled his continuous sweat and kept him warm, changed with the temperature and he had to add a bulky coat. The cold also crept through his boots from the sloshing water. He was slowing in spite of himself. When they had a few minutes’ respite while Joe cruised to a new string, Sam sauntered to the rack of tielines, selected a large one, and started skipping rope. Hank laughed to see a man in boots and floppy yellow rain pants thumping the deck. The roll of the boat made it clumsier. But Frenchy took over, doing it on one foot. Hank’s legs felt so heavy it seemed a foolish waste of energy. Frenchy handed him the rope. He took his turn with a shrug, and the heat started pumping through him again. They attacked the next pots with fresh vitality, as if they were starting the day after a night’s sleep.

  By second nightfall they had worked their entire string of pots twice, and the hold held close to fifteen thousand crabs. Frenchy had a roast going, and as they swung in the crab block they joked about whether they could stay awake long enough to eat it.

  “Dont need to stow the block,” said Joe as he leapt down the ladder from the wheel deck. “Be about ninety minutes.”

  “Hey, Skipper,” said Sam. “We need to sack out a few hours.” “When were on the crab?” Joe faced them. He was tallest by half a head, disheveled, red-eyed. Pieces of ice clung to his mustache and frizzled hair. The Santa dimples had become tight as a fist.

  No more to be said. They ate, then lay back where they sat on the galley benches while Joe piloted them back to the beginning of a string they had set the night before.

  It became a simple fight with pain. Joe Eberhardt, the easy-drinking buddy of the past and the glum driving skipper of the empty pots, became irrational in the presence of abundance. He begrudged two hours’ sleep a night. If Hank made a mistake or worked too slowly, Joe roared invective and leaped from his wheel deck to do the job himself. He did it to the others also. When Hank fumbled with the coiling, Joe told him to do nothing but bait. Sometimes he screamed abuse for no reason at all. Sam and Frenchy simply took it, turned their backs, and continued working.

  They all became haggard, stumbling. “Stick with it, man,” said Frenchy once when he saw Hank biting back tears at the pain in his arms as he tossed the heavy crabs. “Think of each of those fuckers as a quarter in your bank account, may be more.”

  Hank forced a smile, ashamed to be caught.

  “Don’t worry, we all do things out here we’d never do on land. This is no fuckin’ civilized life. Someday I’ll quit it and never look back.”

  A few pots later, suddenly as such things happen, a coil of line snagged as they dumped over the pot, Hank reached to free it, his arm caught in the bight, and like a fish flipped on a line he was pulled overboard. Water closed over him instantly. The snagged line had the full weight of the steel pot dragging it to the bottom. The icy cold was like a blow as it rushed under his oilskins. I’m dead, he thought. Desperately with his free hand he yanked his deck knife from its sheath and sawed the line between the pot and his arm. The weight pulling him snapped free. He tried to climb hand over hand back up the slack line, his legs immobile in the heavy clothing. He clutched the line—he could feel them drawing it back above him—as the pain in his lungs exploded into his head. He gasped in seawater and blacked out.

  The terrible cold in his bones was his awakening sensation, and then, with Joe’s mouth breathing air into his chest, sickness as he choked and vomited.

  They took him inside to the galley floor and stripped off the heavy, wet, clinging clothes, then wrapped him in blankets brought from the bunks below, and carried him onto Joe’s bed on the same deck level. He could not stop shivering. It was like red-hot irons of ice being passed through his body. They massaged his legs and arms. Joe had some brandy, and Frenchy brought hot tea and bouillon. He felt so weak he did not want to raise his head to take it, and Joe ended cradling him. Feeling foolish, he sat up, took two sips of the brandy, and fainted.

  When he came to again, an outer layer of warmth was creeping in toward the cold. He heard Joe’s tight voice in the adjacent pilothouse calling on the radio for help. Frenchy’s round face was wide-eyed, and Sam watched him with a grave expression. “Hey, come on,” he declared weakly, “I’m okay. Worry about your lost fuckin’ crab pot if you want to worry about something.” The two laughed uncertainly with relief, and Sam brought Joe in. Joe frowned as he towered in the doorway, listening to Hank’s firm declaration of good health.

  At last, they headed straight for Kaguyak Bay, anchored, and slept.

  Hank, down in his own bunk again in the dark hold with the noise of the live-tank circulators drumming close by from the engine room, began to shiver again whenever he woke. The water had closed over him like lead. Dead black water. Our Father Which art in Heaven...

  Next day they were back on the grounds, all working together on deck. Their jokes were louder than before, and their silences longer when they came. Joe did not drive as hard as before, and they began to average five and more hours’ sleep a night.

  After another few days their hold was plugged, and they returned to Kodiak to unload. Hank watched the town approach around Woody Island. He wanted a break, yet he feared it. Surviving a devil’s world was a simple decision if you were trapped, but coming up was a chance for escape.

  He soaked and soaked in tubs of hot water as Sandra washed his clothes and exclaimed at the stench. “Don’t you people smell yourselves?”

  He had learned to take the comment without reacting. “It’s different out there. It doesn’t matter.”

  “How long does this awful king-crabbing go on?”

  “Into January.”

  “January? That’s four months, and it’s getting colder.”

  Hank forced a grin. “Unless we continue to Dutch Harbor through February or March. That’s where Joe usually heads if the season drops here.”

  She faced him, her expression troubled. “What kind of life is that? Aren’t any of these men married?”

  “Navy wives, doctors’ wives, fishermen’s wives, they all make that decision before they say yes.”

  “Do you like it out there?”

  “Beside the point. It’s how I’ve decided to make my living.�
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  “You know, Swede had some kind of showdown in Seattle, and they ended making him a vice-president. Now he’s looking for an assistant. I think he’d consider you. In summers you’d have complete charge of one of the salmon canneries, and I’d go too. Hank, that’s a career.” He closed his eyes and lay back in the tub to avoid answering. When he looked at it coldly, he was sick of crabbing, sick of the ugly creatures themselves and of the misery. With college and Navy as background there were other options. Wasn’t life too short to spend pushing like a desperate animal? He knew well enough what the coming winter at sea would be like, and all the others in the future. Ever since his near drowning, admit it, the black water scared him.

  “Swede’s got to find somebody. You won’t have another chance.”

  Hank ran more hot water and settled into it. The warmth felt good beyond belief. “I don’t know. Okay, I might stop by tomorrow and shoot the breeze with Swede.”

  She rushed over and kissed him. They were soon in bed together and she had never been so tender. During the worst times on the boat he had dreamed of returning to this. A man needed a wife, a home, to settle.

  But, in the dark, the image persisted—it had been unleashed by stating that he would call on Swede—of the Nordic Rose kicking spray as it left harbor without him. He lay awake, watching distant masthead lights through the window. Been feeding Sandra words. The fishing boats had hooked him the first day he saw them in Kodiak harbor. Black water or not, he’d better see it through, or he’d spend the rest of his life making excuses to himself.