Highiliners

by William B. McCloskey Jr.

  A quiet settled over his crew as the days dragged by in work with small reward. They ate in an atmosphere of gravity and visited less casually to the pilothouse. All fishermen learn to accept periods when they catch nothing no matter how hard they work, but not when other boats around them are pulling it in. Hank sometimes stared in desperation at the sea itself, as if the crabs might give some sign like the jumper salmon. How could any man tell what moved beneath such vast water?

  Finally he dragged their pots close to those of other boats and tried to make up for lost time hit-and-miss. By dogging Tolly’s tracks he managed to set on the edge of a crab mass. Two days saved him. They worked around the clock without sleep, until they were all dragged beyond simple fatigue to a robot state. Once a rotten sea object came up in one of the pots. As Hank watched enviously from the solitude of the pilothouse, sick with exhaustion and confinement, the others halted work to toss it at each other with crazy abandon. When it fell apart, Seth bounded to the upper deck, cut loose a spare buoy, and started an even more frenzied toss that ended only when the thick plastic was shredded.

  Their total harvest was about seven thousand crabs. Not necessarily a disaster. But then, other boats were taking less time to deliver twenty and thirty thousand.

  Hank slept five hours, then took the wheel for the rest of the trip back to Dutch Harbor. He could hear the others snoring below him. No one had bothered to fix a meal, and he chewed tastelessly on a piece of salt meat and a candy bar, while his stomach ached from drinking too much coffee. Once in port, would Andy wire Joe Eberhardt to hurry back? If Joe didn’t want to come, he’d probably let Andy and Seth hire replacements for themselves through the winter. What would Jody say? A cold wind had cleared the sky, and moonlight shone on a ghostly landfall of mountains and snow. The first sight of Unalaska Bay as he rounded a corner was the blaze of lights from the closest processor ship. Steam rose from its cookers like glowing cotton, and the stink of boiling crab gusted over the water. The shapes of raw mountains towered above. Except for Jody being there, Dutch Harbor was a sinister place to approach in the dark.

  He tied at his cannery’s ship outboard the Northern Queen, one of the large Seattle crab boats half again the size of his own. The snow-covered deck was deserted except for two cannery men in the hold throwing crabs into a wide canvas bucket. Even a glance showed the crabs tight-packed as honeycomb, compared to the swimming space left in his own tank. Seth, who had jumped over to tie their lines, stopped and looked at it too. Hank debated staying in the pilothouse until his crew had gone ashore, then decided to face them if they had anything to say, and went down to the galley.

  They seemed more concerned with taking showers in the bunk-house beside the processor ship and then with finding a boatride across the channel to Unalaska Village and the Elbow Room.

  “If Jody brings a boat, you’re welcome to ride,” said Hank. “But I’ll have to call around. She may be working.”

  “We’ll launch you and paddle you over,” said Seth lightly.

  He would rather they had told him off.

  In the wheelhouse he tried to rouse Jody on the sideband, but nobody responded from either the receiver at Tolly’s house or at Pan Alaska where she worked. Before deciding what to do, he climbed aboard the Northern Queen to learn their plans. As soon as he opened the door to the big galley he was enveloped in smoke and noise. Around the table sat Arnie Larson, the skipper, and his four crewmen, as well as their wives and girlfriends and, hunched together nursing coffee, three of the jobless men who haunted the boats. Arnie was strumming a guitar and singing in Norwegian as he and the other crewmen played poker. Their women snuggled against them or held their arms. The table was a scramble of Scotch and rum bottles, butt-filled ashtrays, stacks of change no smaller than quarters and bills up to twenty dollars, and a hock of red salted lamb with a carving knife stuck in it.

  “Hey, Hank!” exclaimed Arnie heartily. “Move over, you guys, make room.” Arnie was as big as a Viking. He had a full beard and eyes that were simultaneously warm and calculating. “How you do out dere on your first trip, hah?”

  Hank shrugged. “Ain’t stolen your quota yet.”

  “Ha ha ha ha. Hey.” Arnie pointed to Tom, the jobless kid closest to the galley. “Somebody get Hank a glass. Vant to deal in here, skipper?” He pushed the bottles and meat toward Hank.

  “Thanks, but I’m looking for somebody.”

  “Jody was down here a few minutes ago. She went to tie the skiff, so you better wait here.”

  Hank accepted the place offered him. He drank a slug of Scotch and cut himself some lamb in thin slices as the Norwegians did. It was an acquired taste—the meat was salted raw and had a strong flavor. “This Squarehead food is terrible,” he called over the music as Arnie raised the volume of his song.

  “Ja, have some more.”

  “Thanks.”

  Jody arrived with a flourish. She kissed him and declared: “Out ten days, you must have plugged the boat!”

  “Sure, sure.”

  “How many?”

  Didn’t have to quiz him in public. “Talk about it later.”

  She searched his face. “I saw Andy and Seth outside, and they wouldn’t tell me either. That bad, eh?”

  He would not have expected his crew to brag, but it bothered him afresh that they were ashamed. No use making a secret; it would be known as soon as the cannery weighed them out. “Seventy-one hundred.”

  Arnie stopped his guitar for a moment, there was silence, and then the noises resumed.

  “You look tired,” she said quietly. “Let’s go across.”

  “We’ll wait and take the guys over.” He poured some Scotch in his glass and handed it to her.

  At the end of the hand, Arnie threw down his cards. “Ah, bullshit, play me out a couple times, I got to stretch.” He climbed from behind the table, tapped Hank in passing, and motioned discreetly for him to follow. They went up in the wheelhouse. It was twice as large as the Nestor’s, with electronic gear several degrees more sophisticated. Arnie spread out a chart of the area that was full of pencil notations. “Ja, Hank, you show me where you set your pots. Maybe I give you some ideas.” An hour later, Hank and Jody were headed for Tolly’s house among the cannery trailers and equipment, then past weathered little homes lighted by a single bulb or by kerosene lamps. Snow blew around their legs. She sought his hand inside the flap of his parka. “Bad out there, huh?”

  “Couldn’t have been worse.”

  “Sure it could. You paid expenses, and then some.”

  “They all saw how the Nordic Queens hold was packed. Dan might stick it since he’s been on the beach so long, but why should Andy and Seth scratch with me after a good summer in the Bering and Kodiak? The way I’m doing, they certainly won’t follow me to Adak next month when the weather turns really bad.”

  She produced a joint and they shared it, but the sweet smoke failed to calm him. “I’ll tell you another thing,” he said in a burst. “Skip-pering’s miserable. I’ll never make it. Jesus! You just stand by the wheel all day. I’ve turned flabby already from standing around instead of working. Then when you fall into bed, there’s no good tired feeling like you’ve earned it. Your bones don’t ache, your head does. You lay awake and worry it won’t go right. Then it doesn’t, and the whole blame’s yours.”

  They passed the long frame building that housed the Elbow Room. The thudding rhythm of rock emanated from inside like shock waves. “I don’t feel like sharing you,” she said, “but I guess you need a stiff one.”

  “No, they’ll all ask how I did. If you can stand me, let’s go home.”

  In Tolly’s two-room house, heavy with the smell of the oil stove, she heated water and he sponged down as they exchanged alternate drinks from a can of beer and puffs from another joint. To start a more agreeable mood, he asked: “How’s life at the cannery?”

  “I love it there or I wouldn’t go for twelve hours every day. All the crab you can eat. It’s fun to set
tle the Filipino girls’ bitches about who gives who the evil eye. And the couple of men are pissed that they have to answer to a woman, so about once a day I have to stand them down. The plant manager kept pawing my ass until I said he’d get a knee in his balls. Canneries are nice. They keep you off the lousy boats where you might have to answer to yourself.”

  “Oh, boy. That puts me back in place.” He took her hands. How small she was beside him, despite her strength. Paying attention for once, he found her expression vulnerable, divided between humor and the deep seriousness she seemed bent on avoiding. He wanted to hold her like a child. “Hey, I love you, Jody.”

  “Well, Hank,” she said softly, “I love you too.”

  Without bothering to dry his chest he bent down and lifted her in his arms.

  They had just settled in the bedroom with the light turned out, when someone started pounding the door. It was Seth, with Andy and Dan behind him in the snow. Seth held a bottle by the neck. Boozed and come to tell me off, thought Hank.

  “We saw your light just go out.” Seth’s burly face was expressionless. “But we ain’t through with you tonight. Going to invite us in?”

  “Come on.”

  They settled solemnly around the table. Seth broke the seal on the bottle. He took a long swig, then handed it to Dan, who did the same and passed it to Andy.

  Andy cleared his throat and pursed his eyebrows, as if he was preparing to speak. Instead, with almost a sigh, he handed Hank the bottle. When Hank had drunk, Seth took it from his hands and started it on another round. They were all frowning, and silent.

  A half hour later, when they had drained the bottle, Seth muttered thickly: “Andy! You’re deck boss.”

  Andy rose unsteadily and raised his arm. Hank watched him with swaying vision, thinking in a person outside himself: they going to beat me up?

  “Okay . . . Skipper. Next time out we’ll find the fuckers. So don’t worry.”

  Dan banged his ham of a fist on the table. “That’s what we say, Boss.”

  Seth reached over, tousled his hair—more like tore it off—and declared: “Yeah, you asshole, don’t worry. We’ll find crab, even if we have to dangle you for bait.”

  CHAPTER 24

  Maneuvers

  HANK and his crew on the Nestor fished the king crab season around Dutch Harbor during October, then followed the openings west-ward along the Aleutians. The weather was predictably rough and cold. He could not shake his initial tension, but he learned from other skippers to keep stomach medicines in the wheelhouse to help him through. (The shelves of the single store in Unalaska were full of them.) As for fishing, he became adept or lucky enough to set their pots in a few good schools of crab and to scratch adequately in the intervals. Thus he survived the season without further disgrace. As they pitched back up the coast toward Kodiak, with Jody aboard, Dan produced a mandolin from his bunk, they all sang and joked, and he relaxed at last.

  His experience as a skipper had already affected him more than service as a naval officer without a command had ever done. Granted, he found the new disciplines onerous—to push himself under the tension of being responsible for others’ safety and livelihood; to skip meals that made his mouth water while still growing heavier; to watch the relieving horseplay on deck without participating; to make decisions he could not retract. But he liked being able to speak and know they would listen. He had come to expect their mild deference as his due. When the pots came up full, he felt it was more his doing than he ever had as a deckhand. Above all, he enjoyed chasing the crab and figuring their movements. There was one particular night he decided he would not forget. As hail hit the windows and he maneuvered the boat successfully to keep seas from breaking over the men below, a new string of pots came up plugged from the start with fat keepers. They were fishing untried grounds. He had calculated the location three days before during one of their sleep breaks while the others snored below. At sight of the full pots, he felt a crazy jubilation. This is my time and this is my place, he thought. It can never be better!

  They reached Kodiak a few days before Christmas, in time for Andy to take his wife and two children down to Bellingham, where their families lived. “Keep in touch,” said Hank. “There’s the Kodiak shrimp opening in January.”

  “Joe never fishes shrimp this time of year.”

  Earlier, Hank would have felt the need to justify and defend. Now he stated: “Fish and Game predicts a super haul, and Kodiak’s my territory.” He had no intention of being idle after deciding to save in earnest for a boat. Andy must have sensed his firmness.

  “I’ll give you numbers where you can find me. Old lady’s going to be pissed.”

  “Say I promised her a bunch of checks she hadn’t counted on. Won’t hurt to get our share.”

  When he phoned Joe Eberhardt in Oregon, the voice had a mellow growl in contrast to the uptight one of Joe the driving skipper. “Go ahead, if you want to shrimp. The more the boat fishes the more she pays. You know where our trawl gear’s stored. Just get to the Bering Sea with a deckload of pots by the March opening. Yeah, the house is coming along, and Linda says howdy. You’ll see us when you bring the boat to Seattle for May overhaul. Be good to take over again.”

  Right, thought Hank. And I’m going to grab every possible bit of experience before I hand her back.

  “You’ve changed, Mister Crawford,” declared Adele Henry at Christmas dinner. He had just returned from phoning his parents, to yawn over helping to draft a protest to Washington demanding immediate removal of the Japanese and Soviet fishing fleets from Alaskan waters. “Jones, remember that bright young Hank Crawford who saved you from the State Department, with ideas crackling from his fingertips?” She wriggled her fingers to demonstrate, then leaned over her plate and made a bulldog face at him. “You don’t speak French any more or read Baudelaire, do you? Jody, does he ever talk to you about anything but fish?”

  “If he did I’d yell rape. I’d think it was somebody else.”

  “Come on, Mother,” said Jones. “Who ever heard of a Kodiak fisherman talking French?”

  Hank felt himself blushing as he played with his wine glass. “I’m too busy now learning my trade, Adele. Who’d listen to me anyhow, until I amount to something?”

  “He does pay his dues to the Marketing Association,” said Jones.

  “Wrong kind of dues for a fellow like Hank,” said Adele. “Back in Washington—HI let Jones give you the details—do you realize who’s blocking a law that would give American fishermen control of the fish the foreigners are stealing? The State Department, that’s who, the State Department! And do you know why they won’t let us have a law? They’re afraid we’ll offend the Russians, who’d like to fish us bare and bury us besides. And because we’ll upset the poor Japs who just a few years back were torturing and killing our boys. That’s what we’re fighting!”

  “The bad thing,” said Ivan sententiously, “it’s that everybody boozes too much and they don’t go to church like they ought.” Only the newcomers to the table, Seth and Dan, paid any attention.

  “Well,” said Jones, “she’s right. We’ve got to be strong back here to bargain with the processors for a decent price, and then we’ve got to be strong to face up to the government that’s supposed to be looking out for us. Now, Ted and Maggie ... that’s Senator Ted Stevens and Senator Magnuson, I’ve met them both.” He paused for effect. “They told me down in Seattle not long ago when I was part of a delegation—and Adele was there, she’ll back me up—they said their Senate Commerce Committee’s going to push hard next spring for a two-hundred-mile law. That would extend the fishing we control from twelve miles to two hundred, you see. But they told me they need our support in any way we can make it loud and clear.”

  “Then you’re damned right, I’ll do some letters,” said Hank.

  “I’ll thank you when I see them,” said Adele. “Jody, you make sure they’re good ones. Daddy, carve more turkey; the plate’s empty. Seth and Dan, you’re ne
w here, but I want you to know that anybody on Hank’s boat is always welcome. I’ll just say we don’t stand on formality so long as we mind our manners. Isn’t that right, Steve?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said Steve uneasily. His face had turned wider and redder, and gray had begun to spot his hair and beard, but he appeared no more comfortable at Adele’s table than he had ten years before. His big hands crawled over each other in his lap when he was not exposing them for as short a time as possible to cut or fork his food.

  While Adele and Jody cleared the table and stacked the dishes (Jody had promised Hank beforehand not to make it an issue), the table talk returned to the new steel-hulled boat Jones Henry was having built in Seattle, and a monologue from Jones directed at Hank on the features and merits of work from different boatyards. “This is a fishery on the move up here,” Jones declared. “In my short time I’ve seen boats of all kinds turn obsolete. They’re experimenting now with fiberglass hulls that you’ll never have to paint or maintain, but they’re still too expensive. Next boat after this one, mebbe.”

  “Would you rather have a bank or a cannery hold the mortgage on your boat?” asked Hank.

  “Bank, bank, when it’s one that understands the fish business. If you owe it to the cannery you can’t bargain special price deals.” He winked. “Then again, cannery’s more likely not to foreclose in a bad year.”