Highiliners

by William B. McCloskey Jr.

  Slowly Hank bailed the water down. He was alone. He felt quiet, unafraid. “Jody, I love you,” he murmured occasionally. Goodbye. Warm and easy. Yet he kept bailing. There was a rustle beside him. Jones had found the other can, and was dipping water so slowly that most of it escaped through the holes before it passed over the side.

  “Hello, Jones,” Hank murmured.

  “Hello, Hank.”

  Seth stirred on the other side of him and started scooping water with his hands.

  When Hank slept for a while, he dreamed of juicy oranges.

  The wind had returned by morning. No way to tell which direction. Nothing on the horizon. Ivan responded slowly to Hank’s command. Together they battened the canopy and prepared to endure the waves again. Jones had returned to a degree of function and helped where he could, but Hank felt that he could slip away again at any time. He no longer tolerated Seth’s passivity. He commanded him to lend his boots around, first to Jones, and he commanded him to blow up the floor of the raft, then to keep lookout through one end of the canopy.

  The terrible waves built again. The troughs engulfed them in silence, the wind tore at the canopy as they rose, and the breaking crests foamed across their bodies.

  “Let me die,” begged Seth when Hank goaded him to shift his weight with the others and to bail.

  “We all die together. Move”

  Jones motioned Hank and whispered in his ear, “I ain’t doing no good. Help me over the side. Make sure Adele gets the boat insurance.”

  “Shut up. We stay together.”

  The waves beat them into stupefaction. Each time the sea crashed over top, Hank hoped it would tear off the canopy and end it. His feet no longer had feeling, even when he massaged them, and his fingers felt dead as cotton tubes. If he survived he’d be as helpless as Nels Hanson. So would they all. Why didn’t he let them die if they were to survive like Nels?

  Once he fainted, and woke to the small warmth of Ivan rubbing his arms and legs. None had killed themselves in his absence.

  Ivan remained physically the strongest. Hank had become too weak to move except in a crisis. When they had a few hours’ respite from the waves, Ivan covered the three of them with his body as best he could.

  The fifth night was approaching. The wind had built to what felt like fifty knots, blowing streaks of white across the crests, and the temperature had dropped so that ice crackled on the canopy. The horizon kicked with mountains of water. They had seen no vessels since the night before when Steve was lost. Jones’ eyes remained closed most of the time, and Seth barely responded. Hank felt his own spark freezing finally, whatever his will. Only Ivan had the strength to bail with effect, and to fasten shut the canopy again and again. “Tell Jody . . .” he whispered to Ivan, but lacked the strength to finish whatever he had to say.

  “Down there, is anybody alive?” came an amplified voice from the sky.

  It was a Coast Guard helicopter.

  They lifted half the canopy—Ivan helped by Hank and Seth. The helicopter lowered a basket. The downblow of its rotors leveled the sea slightly, but the wind kept pushing the helicopter like a chess piece. The basket first banged in the sea, then nearly capsized the raft. At a stable moment in the trough, Ivan lifted Jones into the basket and Hank waved wildly for them to lift. The sea crashed over the basket and swept it away from the raft as it swayed up in the air. The canopy, half open, finally tore loose. They held to each other and the sides of the raft.

  Up went the basket and disappeared into the hatch of the helicopter, then wobbled down again. The wind blew it into the water. The helicopter maneuvered it toward them.

  “Seth next, get ready,” said Hank.

  They helped shove him in, with water boiling around. Ice coated the basket. It rose, fell with a sudden dip of the helicopter, then rose with Seth clutching the sides in wide-eyed terror.

  Without the canopy the water crashed over them like an orgy of whips. There was barely light left in the sky, and in a trough black walls surrounded them.

  The basket came again. Hank looked desperately at the lifeline and at the leadlike water, but said, “You, Ivan.”

  Ivan hugged him, and threw him into the basket.

  The ride up was a wild bounce of water, wind, and ice. Hands pulled him free, then banged the basket free of ice and shoved it out again. The motion of the helicopter was nearly as turbulent as the raft, but at last, now, heat surrounded him.

  “Jesus, he jumped!” exclaimed one of the crewmen.

  Hank cried out and looked down through the opening. The orange raft below was empty. He thought he saw Ivan’s shaggy head, but the water was a cataclysm of black shapes and forms. He lay his face against the deck, sobbed, and fell asleep.

  EPILOGUE

  PEOPLE discussed the rescue for months. By the time the Coast Guard had found the raft, it had drifted from Kodiak 180 miles into the Pacific Ocean. The search before this had continued for three days, ever since a Japanese trawler spotted the burnt-out Adele III forty miles out, overturned, but still floating. The judgment of panic may be faulty, but no judgment concerning vessels at sea is absolute. If the Adele’s crew had stayed with their boat, the fire would have been a mere incident in their lives. Then again, in the middle of the night, the crippled boat might have sunk before they could cut the line, taking them with it.

  As for the problems of finding a seven-foot raft in several thousand miles of storming open sea: perhaps the sincerity of Ivan’s prayers conveyed his words to their destination after all. The Coast Guard ship and aircraft crews had put in the kind of hours usually credited to halibut and crab fishermen. The pilot who sighted the dull chip of orange that held four men—it disappeared into a trough just as his eye caught it and did not show again for a quarter of a minute—was living on coffee, having not slept for a day and a half of searching. When the helicopter found the raft, with darkness close, there was nothing to do but radio position, then risk everything on an immediate rescue without waiting for ship’s support. Flying low in such winds the helicopter might have joined the raft, so that the Coast Guard flight crew, all with families on the base, were staking their own lives as well as those of the Adele’s men on the outcome.

  As they recovered, Hank, Jones, and Seth shared a hospital room. They endured together the agony of thawing from frostbite; later they slept, gazed at each other, sometimes spoke, though seldom of the experience they had shared. The doctor said that without the foot massages it would have been worse, that Jones especially might have required amputation. Their situation differed from the one that had crippled Nels Hanson the year before. Nels’ hands and legs had been immersed directly in the cold seawater, without the fragile warmth of other bodies and of the canopied life raft as buffers.

  Although Seth, the youngest, recovered most quickly, the weakness he had shown haunted him. Hank and Jones never mentioned it. They barely remembered or cared, but Seth asked for a bed in another room. Hank roused himself enough to forbid it. Seth left the hospital first and disappeared from Kodiak. He left only a note to thank Hank for saving his life.

  Throughout the weeks of recovery, Hank and Jody stayed in the Henrys’ guest room rather than at the rented place of their own. Since Jody worked, Adele could look after both men. If Seth had stayed, Hank would have insisted on accommodating him under the same roof.

  As he healed, Hank felt no desire to dress or leave bed. He lay gazing through the window. Each dusk as black shadows engulfed the houses, mountains, boats, a malaise crept over him despite Jody’s presence. If he slept, he woke hallucinating that he was back aboard the raft, always at the point where the canopy ripped with “blah-blah-blah” and the frigid seawater clawed across his body. Jody, in the night, soothed his groans without questioning.

  During the day, Adele bustled in almost hourly with some new concoction, but he usually pretended to be asleep. All the food he really desired was oranges. He wanted a long train to his thoughts, needed time to worry about Seth, to ponder h
is own panic and irrationality, to weep for Steve and Ivan.

  Could he return to the boats? Never without fear. What then? Cannery? Business back east? He no longer felt pushed. He was tired. Except during the nightmares, the calm that had settled on him when he knew he was to die remained. To be alive was enough. He found himself chuckling without cause. Only once did he show any vigor, when a reporter from Anchorage tried to cross-examine him and asked: “Now, how did you feel when you saw your buddy Steve—” Hank shouted him off, and no amount of persuasion roused him from a steady stare through the window until the man had left. Yet he felt great love for the people of the world. Having been placed apart had drawn him back. He wanted to see all those he cared for, to smile at them and listen to their voices. His parents flew in from Baltimore. Swede Scorden came several times, with wry jokes about life under a Japanese boss. Joe Eberhardt and Tolly Smith stopped over in Kodiak on their way from Seattle to Dutch Harbor. They joked with the heavy knowledge that the experience might have been theirs. Many others in town visited. He received them all, pleased. But after a few minutes of searching their faces his eyes focused beyond, at the mountains, and their conversations slipped away. He spent hours with Jody, merely holding her hand. His mind, most of the time, rode a train that had yet to reach its destination.

  From his window he watched the signs of Kodiak springtime. The snow melted, leaving only brown on the slopes. In cruised the sturdy wooden halibut schooners with their first loads of the season. Boat by boat, the tanner-crab fleet laid up, many to convert to seine gear for the forthcoming salmon. He watched men he knew leap between the decks and piers as they boom-hoisted their pots to the backs of pickup trucks. Why did they use so much of their energy over a pile of steel cages? he wondered with detachment.

  As the days grew longer, he forgot gradually to fear the approach of night. One day he watched some friends scrambling over the crabpots and envied them slightly.

  The small seiners whose doors had been padlocked since the last of the September silvers now had busy men aboard again. Among the boats was the dear old Rondelay, directly within his view. That had been the best fishing time of them all, the time Steve threw him overboard for whistling, that Ivan had finally allowed him in the skiff, that they had corked the Olaf and fought it out, had toughed it together during the great dog-salmon bonanza. If ever he had the money ... Seiner crewmen in grease-caked coveralls walked purposefully from boats to shops with machine parts on their shoulders, and others mended cork and web along the wharves. When the sun shone, he watched them climb among the masts as they scraped and painted. In the bars, he knew, the cozy winter pace would have changed as men hurried in for a quick one. Their talk would now be stacatto exchanges on engines and gear rather than long anecdotes of seasons past. It would be alive down there.

  Jody was gazing from the window also. She had come in as always in her free time to sit with him, sometimes hours without speaking, since she sensed his pace and adjusted to it. He watched her profile, the strands of auburn hair that caught the light, the face in repose that was capable of such animation. Her recent weeks must have been dreary.

  “Hey,” he said quietly. She turned. “Want to drive down by the boats? Maybe it’s time I tried these feet.”

  Her eyes came alive. “Sounds good.” At her look he felt a stir of energy. The wool shirt she brought from the closet, one he had worn a hundred times, seemed like an artifact from a distant world as he touched it and studied the red checks. She did not push, except that once he sighed at the effort and lay back again. “Uh-uh,” she said firmly.

  At last he had to do it. When he put weight on his feet, the pain made him gasp. Her grip tightened around his waist. He stood still, not wanting to make it worse, then forced himself to take steps. The difference in their heights made it easy for him to lean on her shoulder. “Long as you keep me propped,” he muttered when the pain settled enough to let him speak, “I can get a job pulling nets.”

  “Yeah, but don’t spill fish down my neck, buster, or you’ll get a knock in the gut.”

  “I’d better use that cane and spare myself the backtalk.”

  Adele exclaimed and exclaimed as he hobbled into the living room, forcing himself to stand straight. Jones glanced up with disinterest. Though he dressed every day, in clothes that now sagged on every part of him, and moved a single round trip on crutches from the bedroom to the overstuffed chair by the television, he had lost all vitality.

  “I’m taking Jody to lunch by the harbor. Come on, bring Adele.”

  Jones shook his head. “Have to go up steps.”

  From the window of the pickup Hank watched the boats hungrily and breathed their odors, as Jody drove onto each of the cannery piers. Friends dropped their work and climbed from decks to cluster around. When Swede saw them through the high window of his office, he appeared with flask and cigars.

  “Not turned slanty-eyed yet,” Hank observed.

  Two of the cannery workers were gawking. Swede fixed his cold eye on them and quickly they returned to work. “Had it out with the head Jap. They might have control, but finally they were smart enough to go home to their rice and fishheads and leave me in charge. Jody, now that you’ve got his lazy butt in motion again, call Mary for a time you can come to dinner.”

  On the way back to the center of town, Jody parked so that he could enjoy the panorama of boats. Instead, he drew her over, and they necked, oblivious of people passing on either side.

  “Good to have the old man back on his feet again,” she murmured.

  “Be a long road yet, Jody.”

  “That’s what you think. I’d been debating for a week whether it was time to kick you out of bed. Don’t think you’re going back except to sleep.”

  “Jody, maybe I shouldn’t fish again.” Her hand picked at a button of his shirt. “It’s tough on you, and maybe I...”

  “Yes it’s tough, but the rest of what you’re saying is bullshit, dear.”

  Lunch in the big dark room beside the bar at Solly’s became a roaring affair, the table spilling with free drinks, and friends gathered like bees to honey. Hank, though stimulated, tired quickly, and Jody, her wits and tongue gaily sharp, carried much of the conversation. He sat back, listening to the talk of boats and gear, involved in it one moment and detached the next. He watched their ruddy, scarred, bearded faces and their big water-puffed hands, and he felt the rhythms of their self-confidence. What other society in the world would he ever have chosen to join, once he had seen this one? Jody was part of it. He sought her hand under the table and she squeezed his in return.

  Back at the house, next day, he rose whistling and kept to himself the initial pain of weight on his feet. In the living room, he stopped beside Jones’ chair. Jones shook his head.

  “Hey!” roared Hank suddenly. “The seiners are gearing, and the bars are hopping with guys from the boats. We’d better hear what they have to say. So get off your ass.”

  Adele leaned over the back of the chair and placed her hands protectively on Jones’ shoulders. “Oh, no, Hank dear, Daddy couldn’t.. She winked anxiously at Hank and Jody. “After all, Daddy’s nearly fifty-five, and you’re not yet thirty, he needs time to...”

  Jones reached for his crutches and struggled from his chair.

  Hank’s recovery, once he had decided on it, came fast. His feet soon consented to bear his weight again unaided, although it took a year for the numbness to leave, and his first morning steps were routinely painful thereafter. But as he knew, what physically active man ever escapes all reckoning? Jones required longer and always afterward walked tenderly. He became fond of declaring: “What a fisherman needs is his arms, so long as his legs hold him in some kind of way.”

  Insurance replaced the burnt-out Adele III. The partners ordered a new ninety-foot crabber-trawler that Hank would skipper. Meanwhile, the new fifty-eight-foot seiner Jones had ordered for himself arrived in time for the salmon season. “We’ll fish slow,” said Hank when Jones ex
pressed doubts. “Install a skipper’s chair on the bridge, and you just sit while you concentrate on the jumpers. I’ve always wanted to be skiff man.”

  “That was poor Ivan’s job. Won’t be the same without Steve and Ivan.”

  “Never will be. But the two of us didn’t survive to sit for the rest of our days.”

  “I only survived because you made me. I’d be crippled, or dead.” “Then you owe me something, don’t you? Let’s fish. Our big problem is to find a couple of young apes to pull web.”

  Often he worried about Seth. Then, during the heat of their preparations, Seth phoned from Kansas City to ask if he and Jones were okay.

  “What are you doing, don’t hang up, what’s your address, what’s a fisherman doing in Kansas?”

  “I’m no fisherman. There’s supermarket jobs everywhere.”

  “Get up here where you belong. We need a good man.”

  “You’d take me back?”

  “You’re fuckin’ A!” shouted Hank joyfully. “Need airfare?”

  Seth returned deeply quiet. He worked so hard that Hank had to slow him down. His presence doomed the other two crewmen to the status of outsiders. They were both kids fresh to the Kodiak docks. Seth, as senior deck man, broke them in with grave forbearance. Jones and Hank gleefully rode them at every opportunity, teaching them with the roughness of bears to cubs and growing back to health on the experience. When Seth finally relaxed and ventured to joke again, they all became a crack team.

  After that? Much of it is another story, or a continuing one.

  Jones remained with the salmon. After the final run of silvers, as October gales moved in, he turned the Adele IV over to a relief skipper and took Adele south, where the warmth helped his circulation. He went partners in a welding and machine shop for the tuna boats out of San Pedro. After one good season he actually took Adele to Europe for a month. Each spring found him back in Kodiak to bring out the corks and web.

  Neither Hank nor Jody wanted to separate. When the new crabber-trawler that bore her name was ready, she rode it with him from Seattle, then stayed aboard to cook and stand watches throughout the winter shrimp and crab seasons. Hank was soon too lost in the challenges of his boat to brood over the open waters to which he was returning. And Seth, who followed as his lieutenant, had so determined himself against weakness that he appeared to welcome the frigid waves that had nearly destroyed him a half year before. They all fished hard.