Highiliners

by William B. McCloskey Jr.

  Heads appeared from all parts of the rail and housing above them—at least forty. Some men on the bridge wore gold-braided uniforms, while one wore a suit. The men on deck wore varieties of fur caps with earflaps and grimy quilted jackets. A few women stood on a deck below the bridge. One held a broom. “Looks like the janitors and kitchen help,” said Jody from the pilothouse.

  “Don’t forget the processing lines.”

  Some of the men above pointed cameras. Hank waved and grinned. The expressions he received in return were reserved but not hostile.

  “Hello,” he shouted, and added the only appropriate Russian word he knew, “Tovarich.” As Seth and Dan laid fenders over the side, he indicated with his hands a desire to come aboard.

  A young man his own age, with a trimmed beard and a black visored cap, leaned over the rail. “You... have... difficulties?”

  “No, no trouble. Wish to come visit, see fishing.”

  It was a tricky communication, with the sea lapping against both hulls and surging between them. Hank had to rephrase his message, calling it word by word, before the interpreter understood and relayed it to the authorities on the bridge. The man in the suit said a few words without changing expression. The interpreter leaned far out and moved his hand back and forth in a negative gesture. But, with a self-conscious smile: “You... have... girlie magazine?”

  “Hey, you speak American! Seth and Dan, give up some old skin stuff, okay?”

  “Right, Boss “

  While they waited, Hank tried other questions, to learn that there were ninety in the crew and that they had been aboard fishing in the Bering Sea for six months. He learned also that the ship was eighty-four meters long and that it was called a “Class Mayakovsky.” A cargo ship came every few weeks to receive their fish meal and frozen fish and take it to Vladivostok. Before answering each of Hank’s questions, the interpreter spoke to the men on the bridge, and the one in the suit returned monosyllabic answers. When Hank asked how much fish they caught each day the interpreters English, which had grown steadily better, suddenly deserted him, and no amount of rephrasing could induce him to comprehend.

  “Hey,” said Hank finally in an easy tone. “You’re damned if you’ll answer that one, right?”

  “No understand.” But a smile twitched on his face.

  When Seth appeared with a handful of magazines, a basket was lowered quickly on a line. Hank tossed in a carton of his own cigarettes besides and indicated they were for the captain. On the bridge, the man with the most braid on his sleeve bowed slightly when the interpreter relayed the message, and left. As for the basket, several hands groped out to help it aboard, and the crew of the Nestor was rewarded with some grins and waves.

  “Thank you. Wait. Please.” The interpreter disappeared.

  “Gone to get you some Russian pinups, Seth,” said Hank.

  “That’s what I need by my bunk, a big Katrinka.”

  Jody laughed. “Those sisters up there could probably judo you thirty feet across the deck.” She stepped into full view for the first time, to wave to the women. They looked at each other, started exclaiming, then returned the wave enthusiastically.

  When the basket came down again it contained two bottles of vodka—present of the captain, according to the interpreter—and several booklets and magazines with titles in English including, USSR Decades of People’s Progress, Space Exploits of the Soviet Union, and Inspirational Encounters with N. Lenin.

  “Thank you,” called Hank. “May we come aboard and visit you?”

  The interpreter made his negative gesture again, and said it was necessary to bring in the net so would they kindly move clear of the ship?

  On the Nestor they had started a laughing jag over the booklets, and they transferred their good humor to waving and calling goodbye. The Russians reciprocated with less reserve than before, some calling messages that sounded like their equivalent of “Good luck” while cameras clicked again. When Hank nodded toward the bridge, the captain and the man in the suit inclined their heads gravely.

  “They seem like pretty good Joes,” Hank declared.

  “Yeah,” said Andy, “but I didn’t see them lower no Jacob’s ladder.”

  It was nearly dark, and the Nordic Queen had left. They were alone with their grounds to themselves again.

  The next day, as if the bright pink marker buoys of the Nestor had not existed, the Soviet trawler dragged through Hank’s grounds. The ship severed the lines of twenty-eight pots even while Hank roared alongside, blowing his whistle and shouting. No faces appeared this time at the rail or on the bridge. Several dark figures on deck continued working as if he did not exist.

  Hank turned wild. He blasted away at the ship with his hunting rifle. It had the deterrent effect of a mouse spitting at a cat.

  Twenty-eight pots, each producing seven or eight hundred crabs a week! He radioed the Coast Guard. A few hours later a cutter on nearby patrol arrived on the scene. “Well stand by,” the captain told him by radio, “while you load your pots and move south with the rest of the American fleet.”

  “This is my fishing ground,” Hank declared. “It’s sixty miles from U.S. land, and I’ll call that fuckin’ U.S. waters!”

  “Nestor, I read your message, but that’s negative under current law. You’re crabbing outside the pot sanctuary areas where the Soviets agreed this year not to fish. We have no jurisdiction.” The Coast Guard voice had the formality and detachment that he himself had used as a naval officer.

  The incident darkened Hank. The only physical expression he could give to his fury was to smash the bottles of vodka.

  They entered the main grounds with the rest of the fleet, sharing the area with hundreds of Japanese pots. If they pulled thirty keepers to a pot of their own, they were lucky. Yet he drove himself and the others even harder than before. He justified again in the name of high-lining; when the crab ran scarce, you worked twice as hard to make a decent load. The crew turned quiet in his wake. He fantasized a breakdown of the Russian trawler that would force it to dock in Dutch Harbor, and in fact monitored the radio bands constantly in case it happened. To catch the bastard off his boat for ten minutes! His hatred spread to all foreign fishing ships. When Jones Henry tied alongside to visit and inquire about the Russian experience, they watched the Japanese crabbers pull their multitude of pots.

  “I’d like to sink every one of them,” said Hank.

  “You understand me now.”

  “Yes.”

  His restless maneuvers took him to the edge of the main American grounds, but he could not escape the ubiquitous Japanese ships. Unlike the single Russian trawler, which processed its own hauls, these were smaller ships working in bunches around the nucleus of a huge factory mothership to which they delivered. They cluttered the water in every direction.

  At last the crew of the Nestor had been driven enough. They gathered in the wheelhouse, Jody included, and told him they were going to rest for a ten-hour night.

  “But the goddam weathers calm. Why didn’t you pull this on me during a storm?”

  “Because,” said Seth quietly, “we need a complete, easy uninterrupted fucking sleep.”

  “We’ll take turns on watch,” Andy added. “Too crowded with Japs to drift. We want you to sleep too.”

  Hank started to explode, then checked himself. “Okay, take your rest.” He eyed a monstrous factory ship riding a few miles away and started toward it full throttle. “I’ll use the time to visit a Jap.”

  “Oh, Hank, for Christ’s sake!” cried Jody.

  Andy’s eyes narrowed as if he might at last be readying a challenge. Hank had forgotten that this was not his own boat, and that when Joe Eberhardt returned he would be back on deck. “I’ll sack out later,” he said reasonably. “But we need evidence of what these foreigners are doing to us.”

  Andy and Dan went to their bunks, but Seth and Jody were interested despite themselves. They passed one of the satellite trawlers. It was pulling in a full bag
of fish. “Watch this,” said Hank, calm again, as he circled. “I’ve seen it through binoculars.” Instead of the catch being brought aboard—the stuffed bag appeared to be as long as the vessel itself—the crew of a red motor skiff detached the bag from the main net and started towing it toward the mothership. The men on the trawler deck attached a new bag and set their net again at once. “See that?” said Hank. “They don’t lose a minute of fishing. And I’ve watched enough in the last week to know they have enough crew to fish day and night without stopping. That’s what we’ve got against us.”

  The dark factory mothership rose like a small city. It blocked more and more of the horizon the closer they came. The side was a black rusty wall forty feet high. Hank’s whistle echoed back at him with the sound of a toy toot. He tried the radio bands, and found one that brought him a careful, singsong Japanese voice.

  After several minutes of palaver, the voice excused himself. An interval, and then the announcement: “Nessor boat, yes, captain of Tono Maru invite captain of Nessor boat for visit. We send kawasaki boat. Nessor boat please remain five hundred meter away. Kawasaki boat pick up captain.” The phrasing and cadence of the Japanese’s English echoed all the Jap villains of World War II movies they had seen on television. They started joking about it, and forgot they were tired.

  One of the little red tugboat skiffs was unloading a full cod end of fish alongside the mothership. A crane from above raised the dripping bag secured in thick straps as gulls dove into it wildly. The bag, a bulging sausage of fish, was larger than the tug, nearly as big as the Nestor itself. When the tug was finished, it headed toward the Nestor.

  “Oaw,” said Seth with nasal mockery, “that must be kawasald boat, come to get captain of ‘Melican fish boat Nessor, give him Hokkaido snow job.”

  Over the radio sideband Jones Henry’s voice said: “Hank, we heard all that. You be careful. Remember what them Japs did to us not so many years ago.”

  “Hear you, Adele Three, hear you all the way.”

  The kawasaki boat maneuvered alongside. Hank turned the controls over to Seth and started aboard. Suddenly he turned back to Jody and took her arm. “Hey. Come along?”

  “It’s been such a one-man show,” she said dryly, “that I didn’t dare ask.”

  “Forgive me. Come on.” She became the conventional woman, worrying about her appearance. “Just a Jap fishing boat, honey. And you’ll have to climb a Jacob’s ladder.” But she disappeared into their cabin, emerging briefly with clean shirt and pants, brushing her hair.

  The two Japanese who ran the kawasaki boat were polite, curious, and uncomfortable. The boat itself was essentially a deep bin, powered from a small wheelhouse. The decks were covered with slime and mashed pieces of fish.

  When they arrived alongside the factory ship, a crane lowered a basket with floorboards. The men helped them inside, and up they were lifted high over the water. They barely had a chance to enjoy the novelty before the basket reached the top, and the crane swung them inboard above the decks of the factory ship.

  Hank grabbed the sides and stared. Below spread two vast areas of pollock, each the size of a full football field. Dozens of men worked in the mass up to their knees and waists, leveling it and pushing it to ward conveyor belts. Their paddles might have been working grain, there was such abundance.

  “I knew they were raping our seafloor,” Hank gasped, “but, Jesus! I never dreamed it was half of this!”

  “You’re right, but shut up while you’re here. They didn’t have to let us aboard.”

  They landed on a platform above one of the two fields. With it close to dusk, floodlights spread a dead glaze over thousands and thousands of the foot-long white fish. Hank gazed, mesmerized. A grave, polite Japanese in khaki coveralls and hardhat bowed slightly, shook their hands, and asked them to go with him, but Hank held back, burning the sight into his memory.

  “Please come on,” said Jody. “They’re already worried by the way you’re acting.”

  When they entered the housing and started descending ladders, the decks were so stable and the areas so large that they could well have been in a building ashore. Their guide gave them white cotton gloves and walked them quickly through a warehouse-sized complex of processing machinery. It had the familiar dins and smells of any seafood plant, although the equipment was different than any he knew. In one section, a continuous belt of fish serviced a bank of heading-gutting machines. At each machine—he counted twenty of them, but more blended together at the end of the line—stood a man feeding fish rapidly into the blades. Their gloved hands moved like pistons, pushing more than a hundred fish a minute. He tried to see differences from Americans. Their black rain pants were belted at the waist with rubber thongs, for example. But they wore colored shirts and baseball caps, and their faces had the blank concentrated stare of any assembly-line worker. It was the quantity that was different, the obscene quantity!

  Some pollock fillets went in one direction for cleaning and freezing, some in another for a series of renderings into a white mush that the guide called “Fish paste, surimi, high protein, eat much in Japan.” The heads, bones, and tails went into cookers on the engine deck, utilizing the heat of the engines, for rendering into fish meal. The banks of machines and the men operating them stretched on and on, as did the areas for bagging the meal, packing the frozen fish blocks and filling color-coded containers with paste. They peered into vast holds white with frost, where figures stacked boxes by the hundreds to await transfer to a cargo ship.

  At the end of the tour Hank declared, “Very efficient.”

  The guide was inordinately pleased. Hank smiled at his pleasure and forgot for a moment that he faced a threat to his own livelihood, not merely a fellow human.

  As they followed the guide up through more decks and passageways, Hank peeled off to walk through a boot-lined corridor and glance into living quarters. He saw bunk areas sleeping eight or ten, all characterized by a cramped and steamy atmosphere, walls with voluptuous pin-up girls (both Oriental and Western), and small cookstoves on which simmered pots of food. Off other parts of the corridor, rain gear hung in heated drying rooms. Toilets were holes in the deck with treads for the feet. One room contained adjacent deep tubs of hot and cold bathing water. The men he encountered watched him curiously but with no hostility. One group sitting crosslegged in front of curtained bunks looked up from a card game, cigarettes in their mouths, and offered him a drink from a bottle of clear liquid. Raw, gin-type stuff, probably said. He grinned and thanked them, and they all nodded and grinned in return.

  The guide was trying to take Hank’s inquisitiveness in stride, but obviously it made him uneasy. And Jody—she chided him like a conventional wife rather than a fellow adventurer.

  Outside the door to a carpeted room, the guide in his groping English asked them to remove their boots, and handed them each a new pair of sandals sealed in a plastic bag. As they put them on, a mild worried-looking man in an open shirt came from the room to greet them. The guide introduced him as the captain. He shook hands brusquely, bowed, and held out a business card printed in both Japanese and English. Hank nodded, and tucked it in his pocket.

  “Captain say, you have card, please?”

  “Sorry, I don’t carry one.”

  A stony-faced discussion ensued between the Japanese. It was as if he had arrived at the all-star game without a ticket. Finally; “You will come in, please.”

  The four sat stiffly at the end of a large table while a white-coated waiter served them each a plate of hors d’oeuvre and a bottle of Japanese beer. The food consisted principally of crackers garnished with sardinelike fish in a sweet yellow paste, set atop squares of spiced meat. At the captains bidding, the waiter turned on a television set. The first picture it showed was of grossly fat wrestlers. The waiter hurried away, and soon afterward the screen blanked, then resumed with a song program delivered by Japanese girls in traditional costume.

  As Hank watched his wife slough her fishbo
at toughness and become quietly gracious, even charming, he realized that he had not been playing the game. He made up by complimenting the captain on the efficiency (magic word!) of his ship. His interest was rewarded by being told that everyone on the ship worked very hard and that everyone was proud to be loyal employees of the company. It was a large, important company, one that owned not only this small fishing fleet but many others all over the world, a company that was a father to all who worked for it. Everyone stayed with the company from the time he was young until the time he retired, and the company cared for him when he was old just as it did when he was young. Within this fleet, there were 450 men aboard the factory ship, and another 300 on the twenty catcher-trawlers and the support boats. Because they were all efficient, they could process forty tons of fish an hour around the clock, every day. Sometimes more. The information was both delivered and translated with pleased satisfaction.

  “And captain say, no waste, fish used every bit. Crab, other big fish, no waste either, freeze especially. Everything efficient.”

  Jody kicked Hank under the table, anticipating his reply regarding crab. A game, why not? He accepted another beer and was persuaded to give the catch statistics of his own boat. The comparison was so absurd that they all shared a laugh. After this the conversation traveled a relaxed route of pleasantries, led by Jody. It culminated with their admiring photos of the captain’s wife and children in Japan.

  At parting, the captain made a formal little speech which translated: “American and Japanese are friend, fishing together. There is much fish, and all are happy.”

  Jody gave her smile and made an acceptable reply for both of them. As for Hank, one further look at the masses of fish, as the basket lowered them back to the kawasaki boat, and any tenuous feeling of fraternity was erased from his mind.