It was October 1972. Hank had become leaner, darker, since his final days of adolescence aboard the Nordic Rose. He spoke more deliberately. Few any more would have recognized him without his full beard. There were scars on his face from maverick crabpots and hooks, and the hand that held his glass had a finger missing.
Jody, her face pushed close to his chest by the crowd, looked up and smiled her smile. They locked arms and swallowed from each others glasses.
“Nervous?”
“Wouldn’t admit it if I was.”
“You’re ready, don’t worry. Every skipper has tò start with his first trip.”
Rosa the barmaid elbowed her way through to them bearing a tray with six full glasses of Scotch. “Hank, one of your friends just six-packed you, honey. Where do I put it all?”
“Who?” he laughed. She nodded toward a table where Tolly and Seth sat with two cannery girls. They waved him over insistently. Instead, he and Jody toasted them, then shared a long, leisurely kiss.
Five hours later, to time with slack at Akutan Pass, Hank stood in the little wheelhouse of the Nestor and guided his boat out of Unalaska Bay. In the predawn light the surrounding mountains glowed blue where the snow lay thick, dark blue where wind had exposed rock. Lights shone in isolated clusters from the processor ships and reflected on the water. Below he could hear thumps of gear as the others readied for sea. No use dwelling on the strangeness of it, that this was the first time he had ever held the wheel rather than hustled on deck when leaving harbor aboard a fishing boat. The wheel itself of the Nestor he knew from thousands of hours behind it, a hundred at least while others worked the pots, but there had always been a skipper to call for questions. He grinned to himself. About time. They passed through the inlet, close enough to the Pan Alaska dock to hear winches creaking from a boat being unloaded of its king crab and to see bundled faces of cannery people. The village was quiet beneath its backdrop of lumpy mountains. The door opened to the shack that housed the Elbow Room, spilling light across the snow as someone staggered out. He altered course on a range with the church, pointed his bow toward the opening between the sweeps of mountains, and soon started to buck into the wind. Often he looked astern to make sure the tiers of sluggishly clanking pots rode secure, even though he had climbed among them personally: as he had checked the bait, and the engine oil, and other things that Joe Eberhardt usually trusted his crew to do by themselves. A particularly high wave rose ahead. He felt sudden hollow fear as he throttled the bow into it. The boat pitched upward in the foamy crest, and he eased off. No broach, no disaster. He had done it before, but never with only himself to answer. Good, sturdy boat. It was now light. Behind him, the jagged snow mountains of the bay were obliterated suddenly by a squall that pelted ice on the windows.
“Watch over us,” he muttered in spite of himself, “our boat is so small.”
The normal odor of bacon drifted through the transom that looked down on the bunkroom. He could hear their voices but not their words. Discussing him? Their right, with no reason for confidence in a man who had merely worked alongside them on deck. What if he found no crab, couldn’t even pay for the trip? Worse, suppose he mishandled the boat while they worked the pots, and caused an injury? He began to sweat, in a wheelhouse not that warm, as he reviewed his scanty first-aid knowledge. Six hundred miles from the Coast Guard in Kodiak. The swells towered over his head when the boat hit a trough, then spewed water over the bow that blew back to cover the windows. The fathometer dropped from the sixties to the forties. Forgotten shoals? He rushed to the radar and the chart, but it was only the fathom curve he had crossed endless times before. What if a sea swept one of them overboard? Could he come alongside coolly enough not to broach over the man or chop him in the screw? If it happened in the dark besides, my God. How much more solid and safe the boat had seemed with Joe in command!
Joe had been a good skipper, once you settled in with him and knew the rules. In two years together, they had progressed from the fifty-eight-foot Nordic Rose to the seventy-eight-foot Nestor, which had only shrimped before, and Hank had learned much about boats as they converted to crabbing. Between personal explosions, Joe was willing to teach. “I won’t place anybody above you, Hank, as long as you stay with me steady.” Frenchy had been the first to be replaced, with brutal suddenness when Joe learned he had mellowed out one night at the Elbow Room and told an old buddy the Nestor’s best crab grounds. When Hank tried to intervene, Joe merely glared, while Sam told him abruptly that a basic boat’s rule had been violated and a basic action taken. Sam, after working his turns as winter relief skipper and saving, now owned half-share of a boat on which he and his partner alternated commands of the pilothouse and deck. That left Hank senior man, relief skipper at twenty-seven, with sixteen thousand dollars saved from two years’ hard fishing, plus ten percent ownership of the Nestor. During other winters, Joe had only gone south for a month, but this year he and Linda had decided to try again, and they were going to spend several months together renovating an old house in Oregon, leaving Hank a command through the winter and into the spring.
“Take your breakfast, Skipper,” said Seth. He wore red suspenders over his bulky wool shirt cut at the elbows, with long-john sleeves hugging his thick wrists beneath. Both of them braced automatically against the violent pitch of the boat.
“Bring it up, would you? We’re coming to Akutan Pass.”
Seth called below gleefully, “I fuckin’ told you so. Now he’s skipper, he won’t give up the wheel. Shall we kiss his ass, or leave him hungry?”
The burly Seth’s bullshit always relaxed him. It had been his recommendation that brought Seth aboard after Frenchy left, so they had worked alongside each other for more than a year. By now they had often trusted their lives to each other. “Watch it, kid. If you bad-mouth your skipper, he’ll bust you back to boat-puller where you belong.”
“That’ll be a long demote, from working for a greenhorn who’s scared to give up his wheel.”
“Only two pancakes. I’d better learn to eat less, since most of my work’s going to be making you deadasses hop to instead of doing it myself.”
After eating, the crew drifted up to the wheelhouse to lounge and talk: Andy, a crabman of ten years who could be deck boss on any boat, but who refused the responsibility of command; Dan, signed on as Hank’s replacement just the trip before, a husky kid they had selected by vote to be their crewmate from among a dozen who were roaming hungry on the beach, some visiting each boat for months in search of a berth; and Seth. Hank sat in the padded captain’s chair by the controls, Andy in the wooden portside seat. Dan stood between the chart niche and the binnacle, his legs braced and arms folded. Seth leaned against the window rail.
“Figured where you’ll set our pots?” asked Andy. He was lean and wiry, as much at ease as a farmboy on a mule, but a man of only necessary words.
Hank had been hoping they would ask. “Well,” he said calmly, “since we’re starting a new season on new grounds, we’ll prospect some. Joe Eberhardt did a great job of sticking with the rest of the boats where we all have to pull at the same crabs. I’ve charted out some possible new places. We’ll lay pots in test patches across the fifty-fathom curves from deep to shallow the way Joe would do, but I’m going to do it farther out and also closer in than the others. Try to catch the crabs before they reach the other boats.
“That’s what I like,” said Seth admiringly, “fuckin’ strategy.”
Andy was less impressed. “Joe always did pretty good where he set.”
Water broke over the bow in streaming sheets and splattered noisily against the windows. Seth glanced around, winked at Hank, and declared that the tarp on the bait box had better be more secure than it looked. “I tried it good,” said Dan uneasily, and a minute later slipped below. The others laughed together as Dan’s figure appeared on deck, holding tight with one hand against the boat’s motion as he tugged at the tarp ropes.
“Oh, shit,” Seth crowed, “I
love greenhorns. He worked thirty minutes to get that tarp right; if it was more secure we’d need to cut it open. Go on, Hank, give him a bath.”
With Joe on board, Hank would, without a thought, have altered course to catch a drenching sea. He considered it, then held his course tight to make sure nothing happened.
It was afternoon when he reached the first area he planned to prospect. As the others on deck climbed over the stacked pots with hooks and straps, he studied the chart, excited. Almost be an omen, to set the first pot into crab. Joe had coached him often to find the slope by passing with the fathometer, to look for the soft readout of the depth graph that showed mud rather than the hard contours of rock. Head into the sea, take her a little on the quarter. Not too fast, watch the roll, remember men on deck. He propped open the door to the afterdeck. “Let her go!” They heaved, and the first pot splashed into the water.
“N-fifty-two,” called Seth, and Hank recorded the buoy number.
Pot by pot, out they went. Hank could picture the big square frames settling in fifty-fathom darkness; the currents flowing through to carry the scent of herring and live bait across the seafloor; the big purple crabs stirring sluggishly from the mud to give it a try. “Get in there, every one of you bastards,” he muttered happily.
In his preoccupation to find the right spots and record them exactly on the chart he turned the boat wrong and broached a full sea over the men on deck. They catcalled as they clutched the tied-down pots, the water sluicing from the hoods and shoulders of their oilskins. As soon as he headed the boat correctly, he rushed back to the rail above them to apologize. Before he could speak, Seth called, “Get your fuckin’ mind off Jody, up there.” None of them appeared angry.
He altered his abject words. “Hey, maybe that’ll move your asses!” But he was trembling as he returned to the wheel. Enough of a sea to have washed one of them overboard.
After setting the deckload of pots, they returned for their others. He relinquished the wheel until Akutan Pass, then took it through himself. The others slept, as fishermen do when they have the chance. He had a following sea, and the boat all to himself, with the throb of the engine and the crackle of radio voices for company. Jody would have been good beside him. Tolly’s voice called him over the radio to ask how he was doing, and he answered with confidence.
Good to be fishing alongside Tolly Smith, and as skippers at that. Tolly had changed little since the days when they had first bunked together in Swede’s old salmon cannery and then finished the season aboard rival seiners. He still wore his gold earring, and the former happy swagger remained intact. When they strolled through Unalaska to the bar, Tolly beamed at everyone and received a like response as he bantered with them all by name, fishermen and natives and cannery people alike. He had fished from his own boat, the Juggernaut, for three years, and he owned one side of a partitioned house in the village. But his wife, who, it was rumored, ran his life when they were together, lived most of the time in Anacortes.
Hank had a key to Tolly’s house. Actually, the door stayed unlocked when nobody was inside: the key rather assured privacy. Hank and Jody found it useful.
His relationship with Jody had lasted a year and a half. She was independent as quicksilver. “Look around you, dear,” she had said with unusual gentleness when he had first proposed. “Women who marry fishermen either divorce or get the shaft. First they compete with the boat, and then they get stuck minding the kids.”
“But I wouldn’t be like that.” He named some fishermen’s marriages that worked well. She countered with more that had soured or been broken. But now she adjusted her life to his. When the Nestor followed king crab from Kodiak to Dutch Harbor, she rode the trip. This season in Dutch she worked supervising the shaker and pick lines on one of the processor ships.
Once, when she became pregnant, he was certain it would settle the marriage question. Instead, with virtually no discussion, she had an abortion. It upset Hank deeply. He had thoughts of denunciation and leaving. At a time when she might have needed his concern for her health, it was she who expended the effort.
“It wasn’t your choice, Hank. My freedom would have ended, not yours.”
“Goddam it, I make enough to support us.”
“Who wants to be supported?”
“I love you, Jody.”
“I know, I know.” She said it softly, and, he thought, sadly. “That doesn’t mean you have to own me, dear.” Her hand ran down his arm. Whenever she touched him now it was with special tenderness. “I’d marry no man but a fisherman. And no fisherman but you . . .”
“Ah, Jody, why are we wasting our lives, then?”
“Maybe we’re preserving them.”
Aboard the Nestor, Hank steered as he puffed one of the special cigars she had ordered from San Francisco to celebrate his command. He would have thought, before experiencing it, that it would matter that she had slept with others before him. She wouldn’t drift again, this he trusted. For his part, even when absent from her for weeks, he no longer joined the others in looking around if they pulled into an isolated cannery or town.
Her face: every inch of it had distinction, and the few years since their first meeting had only increased its vivacity and character. When her mouth drew into that wide smile and her eyes came alive, there was no painting that had captured such a woman. Even when angry. And when tender, when her expression softened toward him alone. . . . How easy had been all those little girls along the way, little Elsies who’d roll at his glance, and those occasional women like Sandra with whom he might have made it but for the bright shadow cast by Jody.
When his parents had visited him in Kodiak, Jody’s simplicity and natural warmth had moved his father, who had come to regard Hank’s Kodiak life with an interest close to envy, to comment privately, “That’s a rare woman. You’re some guy if you can handle her. Be like owning a Rembrandt or a Picasso.”
They returned next day with a new deckload of pots. Hank was tense to try his prospect pots and see the fruits of his judgment, but the wind was blowing fifty and gusting higher. He had them put out the stabilizers and assigned two-hour wheel watches to kill time in a straight slow line back and forth. But his sleep in the separate skippers cabin adjacent to the pilothouse was not relaxed. It was almost lonely up here, without the grunts and smells of the fo’c’sle. He had long possessed the fisherman’s instinct to go under fast but jolt awake on the instant with some change in the engine rhythm. Now, with every hesitation of the boat his feet hit the deck. What if any of them dozed, with other boats jogging close by? Yet he had to trust his crew. Their jobs were interdependent and he couldn’t do it alone. Back in the bunks he would have laughed at a nervous skipper, then begun to lose confidence in him. But, close to midnight, he jumped awake when the boat shuddered, and bounded to the wheelhouse. The boat was on course in a snowstorm, pushed by a following sea, nothing worse.
Dan leaped from the skippers chair when he saw Hank.
Come on, thought Hank, let me earn it first.
“Shitty night, eh, Boss?” They traded some heavily colored anecdotes of terrible weather.
Hank forced himself back to bed, but he lay awake. For a while he addressed Jody in his mind. Sure he wanted children, wanted a family with all the stability and continuity it implied. Couldn’t you give up part of your life to that, like other women? He stood ready to work with all he had, to provide.
Next time he popped awake, at one-thirty, the heavy motion of the boat had subsided. Not drifted into the lee of some island, near shoals? He hurried to the wheelhouse. Seth nodded to him from the skippers chair but did not rise. Hank checked the radar and fathometer. Plenty of depth. It was the wind that had changed. “Why didn’t you tell me it had stopped blowing?”
“What’s there to tell until the waves go down? Say, while you’re here, one of the hydraulic hoses looks thin, and that order from Seattle’s a month late with new ones.”
“I’ll call around in the morning and see i
f we can borrow one,” said Hank absently. He peered out at the lights of another boat a mile away. They remained constantly visible, rather than dipping and disappearing as they would in high waves. “Go rouse the guys. We’ll start pulling.” He waited with some unease to see if they would challenge starting work at two in the morning, but soon he heard their groans and yawns through the transom.
It took him longer to find his first pots than he had expected. In the dark, through alternating bursts of snow and clear weather, he cruised the area he had marked on the chart. The searchlight reflected on the wings of random birds and on the white crests of diminishing waves, at last glowed on a pink buoy. He maneuvered to it scrupulously, and earned a derisive hoot from Seth on deck when it turned out to be somebody else’s. He, a naval officer, unable to handle simple navigation electronics!
“Lets pick her,” called Seth.
“Put it back. I’m not operating that way.”
At last he found his own. The water was rougher than he had hoped, but nobody complained. He watched, trying to appear calm, as the pot rose to the rail. A dozen females, nothing else. They had no room to stack it, with the full deckload of other pots.
He went to the next trial area and they raised a pot. As he concentrated on handling the boat, they shouted for him and he rushed back to the rail. Andy tossed up a big purple crab. It pivoted in the air as Hank caught it. Without gloves, the spines cut his fingers. It’s legs and claws bent slowly at the joints, as if the crab were still seeking a hold on the seafloor.
“Your first keeper,” said Seth. “Got to kiss it for us.”
“Right you are.” And he did so, with a sense of relief.
He surveyed all his prospect sites and set his pots on the best. But, day by day, the crab kept slipping away. The weather turned bad, with the deck sometimes sheeted in ice, yet Tolly in the week delivered a load to Dutch Harbor and was now fishing a second, while the Nestor had not come close to a full hold. The failure rested on his shoulders. He decided the crab had migrated southeast and followed to head them off, but he must have traveled too far. When he returned to the congestion of the fleet, he could see through binoculars that other boats were taking twenty to fifty keepers in a pot, while he himself drew five to ten if any. At night, after eighteen-hour days spent virtually alone in the pilothouse, his eyes still haunted the charts as he tried to figure some strategy. On the radio, voices with Norwegian accents griped their ritual about lousy catches, but then they returned to port with enough to unload.
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