Raiders

by William B. McCloskey

  By Jody’s arrangement, Swede Scorden waited with a car at the municipal pier. After hurried thanks to Gus, Hank found himself in a vehicle that was stable on the road while his inner system continued to swoop with the waves. In the long twilight, lamps and neon lights were already bright along Seward’s main street. By the time they reached the highway to Anchorage the mountain snows around them had turned darkest blue against black sky.

  “Nice of you to come yourself,” Hank began.

  “Jody caught me headed for Anchorage. Thank the usual politics before the next Fishery Council. Hot enough issues that young Tsurifune plans to be there, incidentally. If the Japanese can persuade the Council to hike up the black cod quotas it would leave enough for them, even if Americans gear up to take more than in other years. For the same reason, Americans want to keep down the quota so it’ll be easier for them to take it all. Part of the Game, as I’ve said before.”

  The car passed through hilly forest where dim fir trees bowed under the snow. Hank would have been glad for silence while he collected uncertain thoughts, but Swede’s dry voice continued. “Feel you’re pulling your share out there?”

  “Can’t complain. Sometimes our catch figures seem spotty even though the fish never stop coming.”

  “I’ve noticed. The numbers eventually filter to my office.” After a pause. “You’re the captain. Keep an eye.”

  “What do you mean? I do keep an eye.”

  Swede changed the subject abruptly. “You like eating black cod?”

  “Maybe as delicatessen sablefish back East. But Arty our cook tried to bread and fry some fresh. The smell sent us puking. Stuff went overboard fast but the galley stank for a week, even the pans. We got a lecture from Kodama on marinating first and so on, but the crew said they’d throw the kid overboard if he ever tried to serve it again.”

  “You’re all peasants. A chef friend’s place is on the way to the airport. I phoned him to fix some for us. About time you knew what you were catching.”

  “Well. . . good. If we have time.”

  “If? Everything in the fish business is ‘if.’ Likely we’ll have time.”

  As they progressed, a moon rose to turn the scene around them white. Eventually they left the forests for open stretches along the wide Turnagain Arm. Hank shifted restlessly under the seat belt. His balance still swayed from the sea. Under moonlight, hummocks of ice cast shadows along the arm’s frozen water, and snow peaks above the ice glowed brighter than in daylight. Terry, back in the wheelhouse, would be watching the same light rise and fall on rolling water. And Jody . . .

  He glanced over at Swede’s face in profile. Chin still defiant, and with his wrinkles erased against the brightness outside, no older than when he’d first met the man nearly two decades ago. Face it. “Swede . . . How do you feel about this, working for the Japanese? I’m taking flak out there from other fishermen. Is it just prejudice? Jones Henry went too far, but now it sounds like everybody’s gone anti-Jap. I know I’m under a Japanese wing. But I’m just sharing a resource while I help develop the fishery and pay my bills.”

  “That sounds like whining, Crawford. Deals are being made all over. You’ve watched American fish investment go to zero since the crabs collapsed. In this time and place, if you want to do anything bigger than fish the same little boat all your life, you’re stuck signing with foreigners who know the value of fish. You made a practical decision.”

  Hank decided to admit what bothered him most. “They act like they own me.”

  Swede’s laugh wasn’t pleasant. “Get used to it.”

  “There’ve got to be alternatives.”

  “You know yourself American banks are scared since king crab collapsed. You accept foreign help or go scratch. Now, being in a Norwegian pocket might be the easiest, since they’re closer to our own culture. Sign your soul and house again to, say, Christiana Bank. They’re funding new trawlers for Bering Sea groundfish, with American ownership on paper. That’s of course what you’re already doing in a different fishery with Tsurifune. The Scandinavians are cool, reasonable people. But when it comes down to the money, sharks like the rest. Like you’d better be whatever you do to make your way.”

  Swede braked, swore, circled a boulder in the road, then gunned back to an even eighty miles an hour. He resumed calmly. “You might as well stay with the Japanese. They won’t shake you around any more than the others, and for all their scheming they have a sense of honor.”

  “But with Tsurifune, sometimes I get almost paranoid and think they’re screwing me. Listen. You’re in their Kodiak office whether you run it or not. Tell me this straight. Is it true your plant in Seattle’s paying six cents more than Alaska for the same black cod?”

  “You want it straight? The answer’s yes. And you’ll find it so in Canada too. In case you didn’t know, the lower forty-eight and Canada have both banned their black cod grounds to foreigners, which means to Japanese mainly. So the Japs are desperate to keep their Alaska quota. Their strategy is to make black cod unattractive to fishermen up here by paying a low price, while keeping Tokyo supplied by paying what they need to in other places where they’ve lost the fight. Maybe, they hope, your fishing friends who give you a hard time and are so hot to take over all the black cod will get discouraged and fish for something else, and they’ll get to keep their quota.” “Son of a bitch!”

  “Don’t judge too fast. Tsurifune and others at his level need to work every angle to stay in business. That means continuing to get what fish of ours they can with minimum sacrifice, and only giving in when they might anger us enough to cut them off. Collectively they’ve had to idle hundreds of their fishing ships and thousands of fishermen since we took back our two hundred miles and other countries followed.”

  Hank shrugged. He remembered his encounters at sea with foreign fishing ships before the Magnuson Act of 1976. It had been a toss-up whether the prize went to the Soviets or the Japanese for greedy overfishing and their indifferent overrun of gear laid by smaller-boat American fishermen.

  Swede began a long account of a meeting in Anchorage he had just witnessed. A coalition of American fishermen, fish processors, and marketers had presented a united front to their Japanese counterparts to demand that they lower tariffs and open their closed markets to processed American fish. “You could hear the collective suck of Japanese breath at the proposals,” said Swede with a relish rare for him. “Top people from Japanese fishing. They didn’t want to come, but they were afraid of Reagan’s new State Department if they didn’t. Your Tsurifunes were there. The last thing those people want is to allow fish into Japan that’s already cut their workers from the loop and that’ll then compete with their own product.”

  Hank listened only sporadically. He had begun to wonder: If Tsurifune and his friends played sly with the price they paid for black cod, what other tricks were they playing?

  Swede continued to enjoy his story of the conference. The Americans held an ace, with a bill by Alaska Senator Ted Stevens that set a near-immediate date for the phaseout of foreign fishing within U.S. waters.

  “The Japanese tried to offer concessions that would have benefited one of the three American interests over the others. But the Americans didn’t break ranks. Both sides just stared. Sometimes nobody spoke for half an hour.” On the final day the Japanese gave in, partially, by agreeing to buy fifty thousand tons of U.S.-processed fish and to approach their government to lower tariffs. “That might not sound like much, but it was a hell of a breach in the Jap wall. They’d never had to deal with the whole American industry united, and with the threat of our government behind it. To my knowledge, Stevens has now shelved his bill. It served its purpose. But you can see how the pressures on Tsurifune are closing in.”

  Swede appeared to wait for his comment. “Well,” said Hank at last, “I can see their problems. And I like them, especially the old man. Their hospitality’s great. We probably shouldn’t begrudge foreigners the fish that we can’t take. In a hun
gry world we shouldn’t hoard food we’d waste. But—”

  “I’m glad to see you’re not as provincial as some of your buddies, Crawford.”

  “But that fucking six-cents-a-pound difference mounts to thousands of bucks I need. Other Kodiak guys need. So Japanese still hold the cards. They’ve got the money and the market.” He lowered the window for a blast of fresh air. The moon’s reflection sped along the iced water of Turnagain Arm. “I’m still stuck with them.”

  “And they’re stuck with you. You’ve got the things they want at the moment: your American quotas and your good reputation. That happens to give you more power than you might think.” After a while Swede added quietly, “Just stay on guard.”

  “You’ve told me that twice now. What do you mean?

  “Well. . . Here’s an example. Something little known yet, just a rumor. Last year the Coast Guard might have inspected a Japanese longliner and found what they think are double logbooks: one for the inspectors showing a modest catch, and the other recording what they really caught, which might be twice as much. An old trick. It was the ship of a Tsurifune colleague, incidentally, not the old man’s. I won’t ask if you’ve been approached on anything similar, but I’d caution you to—”

  “Never. And I wouldn’t!”

  “I believe you.”

  Suddenly Hank pictured Kodama’s reluctance to see him count trays in the freeze locker.

  Swede pulled to the side of the road. “Piss call, Hank. Age calling. You suit yourself.”

  They separated to do their business. The highway was wide and smooth, built for traffic, but they occupied it alone. With the engine off, the creak of ice sounded clearly from the bay a few hundred feet from the roadside. Moonlight glowed on it all. A chilly breeze blew ice odors that combined with those of spruce trees rising dark above him. They could have been at sea for the isolation.

  Out there on the longliner, Hank wondered, could trusted Kodama be pulling tricks?

  Twin car lights meandered in a distance, disappeared behind rocks around a bend, approached, and flooded them. The car stopped. “Need help?”

  “No problem, thanks,” said Swede, and the car continued.

  If, Hank said to himself, someone had stopped like that in Baltimore, I might have thought robbery. One reason Alaska holds me here. Am I letting it turn to shit on me?

  Back on the highway Hank continued. “I’ll ask again. Why tell me to stay on guard?”

  Swede drove a long time before he answered. “I didn’t want to put ideas in your head. But their game with your boat might now be this: to hold back the perceived American catch wherever they can. Your deliveries go toward the total that Americans accumulate toward proving they can land all the black cod with nothing left for foreigners. For Japanese. The less you catch, the more’s left for them.”

  “And Tsurifune tried to send me off to fish on grounds too shallow for a good catch! The bastard was screwing me! How should I do it, Swede? To save myself and get back at them?”

  “You could give up your fine crabber and your house, go back to a little seiner, and build your family a log cabin.”

  “Wish I could.”

  “No, you don’t. You’re ambitious. There’s too much out there. You just need support to help get it. So if I were you, Crawford . . . Keep to your contract, don’t blow your chances. Stay cool and fish your ass out of this hole. Just take nothing for granted. Check everything.”

  “You’re fuckin’-A I’ll check. They can watch out for me now!”

  “And save your firepower. Japanese hate confrontation; they’ll do better by you without it. You’re valuable to them. Produce well for ’em so that everybody’s happy, and by contract you will get back your securities and the controlling shares you now own just on paper. Then get out and do again as you please. Go cautious if you like. Or get savvy, learn the politics, name your terms, and jump into the game with your new chips. Play it calm with Tsurifune and you might end up owning most of a fishing fleet.”

  Hank lowered his window again and let the moon-drenched night blow around him. It calmed him and brought his thoughts back to earth. “All I think I ever needed was a limit seiner and three or four crew. That’s the fishing I love. Then, okay, expanded to my fine, big Jody Dawn but still with the same-sized crew and the wheelhouse still practically part of the deck. With crab I owned the damn world out there for a while. Now I watch everything changing under my feet.”

  “You owned nothin’ unless the system protected you. But you’re American in the right time and place so you’ve got more of the world than most. Don’t feel sorry for yourself. Remember that the fish is here with us, not with foreigners for all their interest and schemes. If we can take the fish, it’s ours, not theirs.”

  “Ours? I thought you were working for the Japanese.”

  “For salary.”

  Hank’s thoughts were too heady for anything but a joke. “When I get that empire, Swede, I’ll put you in charge, go back to seining salmon all summer, and take my family to Hawaii for the rest of the year.”

  Instead of a dry laugh, Swede’s voice deadened. “Find somebody else. I’m done fighting. The Japanese have given me safe harbor. It suits me now to play safe and watch it all become history. The best I could do was caution you. Now you’re on your own.”

  Swede’s steady foot on the pedal brought them to the restaurant on schedule. His chef friend had a charcoal grill fired and waiting. Fat dripped from the marinated black cod filets and sizzled from within the meat.

  Hank forced himself to be polite and accept a serving. He was unprepared for the fish’s depth of flavor, and a heavy richness equal to sirloin. Before long they were driving again toward the airport. The taste lingered in his mouth. “Pretty good, I’ve got to admit.”

  “You’d better.”

  They reached Anchorage with time to spare. Hank checked in for the flights through the night that would take him via Seattle to Baltimore by the next afternoon. Then he turned to Swede for a final question. But Swede had disappeared.

  18

  CITY LIGHTS

  BALTIMORE, EARLY DECEMBER 1983

  Shoji Tsurifune’s near trick occupied Hank’s thoughts between sporadic naps during the long connecting flights from Anchorage. Fantasies of payback alternated with concern for his father. At the Baltimore airport, however, when he saw his cousin Bobby and Bobby’s wife, Alice, waving, their familiar friendly faces helped dispel dark thoughts. Need to put all that from mind for a while, he told himself. “How’s Dad? How’s Mother holding up?”

  Alice hugged him. “They’ll be so glad you’re here. Aunt Jane says he’s doing better. We’ll take you straight to the hospital.”

  They drove into the city, past the new baseball stadium and new convention center, into the harbor area now bordered by walks and restaurants. Hank forced himself to relax. Sea spray and endless longlines of thrashing fish began to seem far away. Even at midday early holiday lights festooned lampposts as well as the rigging of the historic sailing ship moored at the quay. People bundled up against the early December chill strolled the open space with no apparent purpose other than leisure.

  “Look at all this, Hank-o,” said Bobby. “You left just before the city came alive. I can’t even remember the old stuff that was here. Factories, something like that. Torn down and now we’ve got condos right on the water, and see that marina over there? Great places to eat and watch the scene.”

  “And shops,” added Alice. “Just a zillion nice stores.”

  “I remember crabbers and oystermen who tied up here and sold their catches. What happened to them?”

  “Oh, those stinky old boats, I do recall. That was sooo long ago. Thank goodness we got rid of them.” Alice turned to him with wide sympathetic eyes. “It’s an emergency I know, but such a shame Jody couldn’t come too. Up there God-knows-where in Alaska with the polar bears.”

  “Come on,” Hank chided in good humor. “What have you been reading?

 
“Those long dark nights they talk about? Without first-division teams or even a bitty stadium or cultural stuff like musicals, or . . . or formal dances? I know you’ve got your big company or something, but don’t you and poor Jody go crazy? I’d just die up there and so would Poodles. Wouldn’t you sweet?” Bobby grunted. Hank noticed that both cousins had put on weight in the year or so since he’d last seen them.

  He tried to picture Jody at one of the stuffy formal fund-raisers. That would be the day. (But how long since they’d danced except to a bar jukebox? Did Jody even own an evening gown? Had she ever wanted one?) He concentrated on city sights that had been part of his growing up.

  They turned up Charles Street. “To the right,” said Bobby. “That big entrance? My office is on the twenty-seventh floor, view of everything. I just walk to work from Federal Hill across Harbor Place. Like I said, Hank, this town’s got it all.”

  “How’s business? Sporting goods, isn’t it?”

  “Athletic shoes. Hank, you wouldn’t believe how I’m doing. Old canvas sneakers are history. So many kinds now that the yuppies need to buy different shoes to run, walk, sit, shoot hoops, run bases, you name it. Then, ho ho, every year or so we change styles so they have to buy new. Bonanza.”

  Hank wondered aloud about the Merchants’ Club down one of the streets. It had been a mainstay of his father’s life, where businessmen of substance met at lunch in paneled rooms, served by discreet waiters all called by name. “I always felt like hot stuff meeting Dad there.”

  “Uncle Harry’s invited me now and then,” said Bobby. “Actually, well, my crowd belongs to places with more pizzazz.”

  Their course up Charles Street took them through lines of genteel shops and townhouses to Mount Vernon Place with its monuments, stairways, and trees, crowned by the pillar of the Washington Monument. “Nothing’s changed here, at least,” said Hank. “Do they still have that flower festival in the spring?”