“Hey.” Hank frowned. “Now they can band together and control prices, can’t they? They could dry up our fisheries by refusing to buy. We’ll never get into pollock or any other bottomfish. We’ve been sold out.”
“Hank, I’ve got to read this report. They’ve had some experts from Japan studying the plant. I’d better make sure they haven’t eliminated me. Free for lunch tomorrow? Meet me noon. We’ll talk the realities of buying a boat. Don’t worry, I can still help, but forget a new Bering Sea crabber. Think two alternatives: partnership with somebody or buying an older and smaller boat.” He appeared tired as he nodded out the window at a shrimper moored below. “She might be for sale in your range. Remember Nels Hanson last winter?”
“The Delta, sure. I recognize her now. Looks like she survived the ice after all, assuming her engine runs after all that salt.”
“New engine.”
“What’s wrong with Nels? He chisel enough insurance to get a new boat, or did he run out of crew to exploit?”
“Never heard you talk like that before.”
“Nels Hanson never used you as a deck swab for two clockaround weeks, then paid you off with seventy-five bucks and a kick in the ass. Long as the old prick survived, he’s back on my shit list.”
“When his boat iced and capsized, he clung all night to the hull before the Coast Guard found him. One of his guys gave up and floated away. The other guy claims if Nels hadn’t ridden him every time he started off, he’d have gone the same way. Nels’ kind is tough on himself too, you know. Immersed in that water for hours. Lost one leg to freezing, and circulation never returned to the other or to his hands. Inside two months he was back aboard on crutches. But he hasn’t been able to keep any kind of crew, and he can’t do the work himself. I think he wants ninety-three thousand for her with gear, but he might have to settle for less. Sixty-five-foot Gulf shrimper, built eight years ago. All the fishing boat most young skippers ever dream about.”
Hank jumped aboard the Delta with a curious sense of the past suspended. He entered the cabin when the familiar hard voice said “Come.” Nels Hanson sat at the galley table, his squat, heavy face unchanged. No sign of disablement showed, except for a pair of crutches against the bulkhead.
“Nels, remember me?”
“Yeah, one of the crybabies. You ever learn how to fish?” The eyes stared him down. ‘Well, I’d consider hiring you back if I could trust you to hop to it. Mug-up and sit over there.”
The unreality made Hank smile. “Pour you some coffee too?”
“I can pour my own if I want it.” His hands remained motionless on the table, huge, white, and puffy, like two beached jellyfish. Hank remembered how they always showed workgrease under the nails, how he had used them to thump the arms and chest of a prospective crewman, how his handshake crushed sadistically.
“We were listening that night. Sorry you had such a rough time.” He considered, then added: “Glad you survived.”
“Well, if you’re on the beach, don’t beat around the bush. I happen to be between crews, so I might take care of you. Go on, find your buddy. Get the grub at Kodiak Market on my account. We’ll go over for fuel and ice, and be out shooting net by nightfall. You afraid to work through the night to make up for lost time?”
“I’m my own skipper now,” said Hank quietly. “Swede tells me your boat’s for sale.”
“He told you wrong! I’m looking for a goddam crew, not a sale. Listen.” Nels leaned forward, rocking his thick body, his face suddenly intense. “Never a month since I first fished the shrimp in Kodiak, not a single goddam month, have those shrimp been running like the last two months. In August they landed twelve and a half million pounds. Hear that? And the run’s still going. If you’re a skipper why ain’t you out there?”
“I’m on king crab, just back from the Bering.”
“Crab pots? That’s tricky gear—raise ’em, dump ’em. That all the skipper you are?” He hobbled purposefully to the stove, and by a series of maneuvers using teeth and the crook of his arm poured himself coffee, then returned with a full mug. He sugared and creamed it rapidly, with the same dexterity. “Then you’re available, because king crabs are scratch around here. What kind of fisherman sits idle when the water’s plugged? Huh? You know that boats what usually can’t fill half a hold in three days are coming back in two days with deckloads? Crab pots! Trawl gear, that’s fishing. You ever hauled a cod end that spilled twenty-five, thirty ton of shrimp on deck? I reckon not.”
Their eyes met and held. Hank started laughing. This ugly bastard whom he’d hated...
“Your boat’s geared for crab, you say.” The helpless hands started thumping the table. “Well, now you don’t have to waste time converting.” Nels’ voice rose to a roar and his face turned red with frantic energy. “Well, bring your whole goddam crew aboard, there’s room, I’ll sleep here on the bench. Only let’s get where they’re running and take our share!”
Seth had arrived back that day, dirty and tired. “You’re fuckin’ nuts,” he shouted. “You forgotten how that prick treated us?”
“You said yourself you learned on the Delta.”
“Learned from you, Hank, while we near died keeping up under his shit. Listen, stupid, I’ve been dreaming of sack time for two months. You think Joe Eberhardt ever let us sleep?”
“I’d thought some of sleep too, but... You ought to see how he’s worked a system of hooks and catches in his wheelhouse. He can still handle the controls himself. We’ll set our own pace, and fuck him if he rides us.”
“Thought you were a skipper now, not deck ape for a cripple.”
Hank touseled his hair. “Man, I’ve confirmed it from other boats, the water’s plugged with shrimp. You ever brought in trawls with thirty ton?”
“Oh shit...”
To Jody he explained: “Be more money toward a boat, honey. Just a few trips. Maybe then he’ll sell the Delta, and I might want to buy. We might want to buy, you and me. Hawaii’s there any old time.”
“Don’t let him do it to you, Jody,” called Adele Henry in dead earnest from the kitchen. “They never know when to stop unless you make it clear.”
Jody smiled her smile, but her voice was wistful. “He smells the fish. That’s probably why I married him.”
CHAPTER 28
The Kodiak Sea
WITH Swede’s help, Hank found the level a bank would risk and began the search for an older boat. The status of Bering Sea skipper-owner would have to be accomplished in increments. Nels Hanson did not sell the Delta. The few shrimp hauls that Hank and Seth landed him, before they returned to their boats in Dutch Harbor, provided him with enough money to wait, dead hands on the galley table, until other crews fell his way. This would remain the pattern of his life until the sea claimed him, as he intended she would.
Jones Henry knew after one season that he had overextended himself to take on the Bering Sea. The steady hardships of Kodiak fishing were lodged in his blood, but not the fanatic drive of the Westward fleet. “But now I’ve got the tigers tail. Only one way to meet payments every quarter, because no bank’s going to foreclose on me “ So he followed Hank back to fish the November opening in Dutch Harbor.
The solution, figured one storming night in the Elbow Room after a gloomy assessment of the traps of ownership, had beautiful logic. Hank and Jones decided to go partners. It gave them credit beyond their individual resources, enough to order construction on a new fifty-eight-foot salmon limit seiner that could be adapted to crab and shrimp in season. Hank would take over the ninety-foot crabber and gradually buy controlling interest, while Jones would fish the smaller boat where he belonged. The tax benefits of incorporation offered ways to keep more of their income for boat payments, but the paper work! Hank learned from Jones that skippering somebody else’s boat might be responsibility enough, but that as owner he needed to keep all kinds of records, for crew payments, Social Security, insurance, deliveries, amortization . . . Finally they hired an accountant (
in small-town Kodiak, it was the brother of Sandra, Hank’s former girlfriend) so that only days, rather than weeks, needed to be stolen from their fishing and rest to keep the government satisfied.
Hanks equity increased a few thousand in a manner he treasured. During Christmas, after a rugged November out of Dutch Harbor that marked his final commitment to Arnie Larson’s boat, he and Jody flew Below to visit his parents in Maryland and hers in Colorado. Hank’s father and mother were great. He could regard them now as equal adults rather than the arbiters of his conduct. It made him regret that fishing had placed so many miles between them, since the years that were developing him had aged them. His mother lavished warmth on Jody, and his father was openly proud of them both. When Hank enthused over his plans for a boat, his father suddenly said: “Are you too independent to take a wedding present of five thousand toward that boat, and another five for a share as my personal investment in the industry?” Hank gave a yell and pumped his hand.
As they were parting at the airport, with talk of a reunion in Kodiak, Hank’s mother took Jody’s arm and said lightly, “One visit you can put down for me, dear, if your own mother doesn’t. . . You know there’s always more to do than you think, when a baby comes.” Hank’s father was saying to him simultaneously, “Hope I’m not too old to enjoy my grandchildren if they ever come.”
The call on Jody’s parents had cordiality but tighter overtones. At Hank’s house they had guarded the expletives, with an occasional slip that brought from his mother a wince and a wry joke about the use of soap. Jody’s mother left the room when Jody dropped an “asshole,” and her father began a lecture on bad influences to his future grandchildren. Colonel Sedwick had retired from the Army, and was writing his memoirs. “You can count on it, Crawford,” he told Hank with the aloofness due a one-hitch Navy man. “Thirty years’ service to my country, in the Army where it counts, gave me worthwhile experiences. People can benefit by reading about them.”
“I’m sure of it, sir.”
“Jody, now, we won’t make a secret of it, she’d have married into the Army if I’d called the shots. Still, I’ve always liked angling for fish on a free afternoon, and if you can find somebody to pay you for doing it, I suppose that’s pretty clever.”
Mrs. Sedwick had a trim figure, with a leathery face that appeared permanently suntanned. She sipped vodka drinks after eleven in the morning and chain-smoked with hands that trembled slightly. “Jody as a kid?” she said in response to a question. “Oh, Hank, not very obedient.” She smiled, revealing a vestige of Jody’s wide mouth and lively eyes. “You know, she played with boys rather than girls. And with the way we changed posts every two or four years, you could say she ran wild. Of course her father thought that was fine, all the fights. But where was he when her clothes got ripped, or I had to stop in the middle of a bridge tournament to run her to a doctor for stitches?”
“Not to change the subject,” said Colonel Sedwick, “but when am I going to see a couple of grandsons by you two?”
Back in Kodiak, Jones had begun to fish his pots for tanner crabs while he waited for the delivery of his new limit seiner. He only received seventeen cents a pound for them, compared to the sixty-five he had just drawn for king crabs. Yet with the king-crab seasons over, Jones and a hundred-odd other Kodiak skippers had discovered that fishing tanners through the winter met the payments better than the old idleness of less pressured days. With no room for two skippers, Hank scratched a thin living, and a hard one, back aboard Nels Hanson’s shrimper. The tanner crabs at least ran close to the sheltered bays. The fabulous fall runs of shrimp had gone their way into open water. Only those trawl men who would not let go, or who needed the money, were willing to dare the storms of Shelikof Strait to follow the few remaining pockets.*
Seth went with Hank, still chafing. When it became clear that Hank would have his own boat, he offered Seth first berth with opportunities as relief skipper, and Seth was now his man. For Hank, the turns on deck under Nels seemed his farewell to youth, to the unburdened bull work of a crewman. It made him savor the hardship of handling ice-coated nets, even bending to the orders of a driver made doubly acerbic by his handicaps, in a way that would have made Seth crow with mockery had he realized.
* In mid-January of 1974, in fact, the new eighty-six-foot Kodiak shrimper John and Olaf was trapped in the Shelikof during a storm of freezing seventy-to-one-hundred-knot winds and forty-foot seas. They iced so desperately that the skipper and three-man crew beached the boat on offshore rocks in Portage Bay—the bay adjacent to the one where Hank and Jody had been married the year before while riding ice—and they apparently attempted to make land in their life raft. Their bodies were never found, only the raft. Ironically, the John and Olaf remained afloat, mugs of coffee still on the galley table, a horrifying specter of ice.
In early March, Jones finally turned the boat over to Hank and took Adele south for a while. The extra position on deck had changed hands several times since the boat was new—nobody could endure the closed compact of Steve and Ivan for long—so that it was easy enough for Hank to clear a berth for Seth. To be skipper to Steve and Ivan was another problem altogether. They had served under Jones for a dozen years, and they still regarded Hank as the kid they had taught to fish. Clashes erupted often. Hank wanted to highline, to push to the brink for all the tanners he could get. One night in bad weather when he decided to continue working pots, Steve shouted him down with such vehemence that Hank half expected to be slammed with a huge fist, or to be thrown overboard by the leg as in the old days. He held his ground, but lost the argument. Seth, who was tuned to Hank’s pace, was regarded by the others as an interloper. Fishing with Steve and Ivan was at best an armed compromise.
In late March the Senate Commerce Committee in Washington sent word through the Alaskan Republican Senator, Ted Stevens, that it would convene a day-long session in Kodiak to hear fishermen’s views on the foreign fleets. The committee at last was considering a bill to establish U.S. two-hundred-mile fishery jurisdiction.
Despite short notice, Jones cut his vacation and flew home to testify. He had barely arrived before Steve and Ivan fell over him like children to report how Hank ran the boat. Hank himself was weary and disgusted. He argued his case in the galley before them all, with Steve and Ivan watching in hostile silence. “I’ve never known men who fish harder than you guys, when you feel like it.” He turned to Jones. “But when they’ve had enough they quit. I might as well tell the waves to stop as get them back on deck. Jones, we could have delivered ten or twelve thousand more crabs, with that much more money toward the boat.”
“Steve and Ivan ain’t buying a boat,” Jones said reluctantly.
“But they’d each have a thousand bucks more apiece.”
“For who, the government? They both make all they need.”
“What about their damn pride? We could be highliners instead of just another bunch of apes in the fleet.”
“Well, Hank, you know—Steve, Ivan, and me...”
“Tell him, Boss.”
Hank exploded, to keep face in front of Seth. “You guys don’t have the balls any more to fish a deckload. You getting old?” The words brought Steve slowly to his feet, fists clenched. “Look,” Hank continued reasonably, “just go out with me once and work it my way. Jones come too and watch. Let Jones be the judge.”
They agreed, grudgingly.
First they attended the Senate hearing at the Elks’ Hall. Senator Stevens arrived in the morning from Anchorage with his staff. A busy, impatient man under effort to be cordial—there were hearings in Sitka and Juneau on the following days—he listened to witnesses for two hours, then flew back to Anchorage for an afternoon session. Hank, among those who testified, told of his bitter experience with the Russian trawler and of the masses of pollock on the Japanese factory ship, while Jones and the other fishermen who spoke reiterated the same anger. But it was over practically before it began, and they were seeing the Senator off at the airport
where they had greeted him only three hours before.
“Well, Ted, we’d had a banquet prepared for you tonight. But the main thing is, we’re counting on you to rid us of the foreigners.”
“We’ll do our best, Jones.”
After the plane had left: “Well, Daddy,” said Adele, taking Jones’ arm. “I am impressed. He recognized you and called you by name, just like that.”
“Ted’s a good man,” said Jones expansively. “Come on, I’ll take everybody to lunch.”
Next morning it was snowing, with a thirty-knot westerly. But it was Hank’s show as agreed.
“Don’t corner yourself, darling,” murmured Jody as they lay in bed after the alarm rang. “Remember they’re not your permanent crew.”
“Thank God.”
He and Jones walked glumly to the harbor in the dark. The snow swirled in white halos around the street and dock lamps and covered the boats from deck to crosstree. The others were awake. Seth had bacon frying. Hank took the controls firmly, and Jones settled without a word in the seat at the other end of the pilothouse. It was four when they passed through the breakwater. Behind them the snow had already blotted the few lights of town. The sea took them over with a jolting pitch.
Throughout the day, Hank took care to be cool. He saw to it that they had time to eat—a nicety he sometimes forgot in the heat of working the pots—but he kept the pressure steady. The tanner crabs were running well. With pots yielding forty to seventy each, the main tank was layered with them by nightfall. As the wind shifted to the north, the air became colder and the sea rougher. He kept them going, through the night. Jones watched it all, a nonparticipant except once when Hank asked him to take the wheel so that he could spell them on deck one by one.
“We don’t need relief,” said Steve for them all. “Just you worry about the wheel, where you belong.”
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