The figure’s head rolled loosely. Slimy water oozed from his open mouth. His lips were blue.
“You had another guy?” Hank cried.
“Lost hold,” mumbled Odds. “Don’t know.”
Hank demanded if either knew CPR, and when they shook their heads, ordered Odds to the tiller. “Keep us away from your hull, steer toward the closest boat without getting in a trough.” He crawled alongside Emmitt, showed him how to press the man’s chest on command, cleared a finger through the man’s mouth, and without thinking of it further bent his own mouth to the cold blue lips.
When he paused at intervals to spit sour fluid or to instruct, Hank could glance and hear activity around him from another life raft and a boat, as well as a throbbing overhead. “Coast Guard chopper’s coming down,” somebody called.
“No, she’s lowering a basket,” said another.
“Fourth man somewhere,” called Hank.
“Our boat picked up one.”
“He’s okay?”
“Body.”
Time moved in a haze, but within minutes or hours the three survivors were drawn up one by one into the chopper: first the one unconscious, the last one Odds with Hank’s assistance.
Hank retched and spat. Voices called to him. People wanted to pull him aboard their boats. He waved them aside, and headed back over the swells toward his Jody Dawn. He began to shiver, then sob, while the cold spray drenched him clean.
24
ICE
SHELIKOF STRAIT, FEBRUARY 1984
A frigid southwest wind continued steadily. Only half the Skagees crew had survived. Despite Hank’s effort at resuscitation Michael Tulganuk never breathed again, nor did the man picked up by another skiff. The boat itself sank before it could be towed, to create a new obstruction to trawls dragging the Shelikof grounds.
The experience left Hank quiet. The sour, acrid, awful taste around the dead man’s lips lingered in his imagination long after he’d washed and gargled enough to clean out a dozen mouths. Death had passed through that man’s body and he’d felt it, felt it! after sensing the return of breath only moments before. Radio messages from the fleet, and even from Odds’s wife and then Odds himself when released from the Kodiak hospital, made him out a hero, but it gave him no comfort. As with Jones Henry in the life raft, he’d failed to save.
The most sobering call came from Jody. They said little, just talked around it. “Take care. I love you,” she said in conclusion, then added, “Your kids love you too.”
Several first-timers to the roe fishery had ignored the barroom tales of trawl bags so plugged they could not be lifted. Joe Eberhardt barely escaped a disaster like that of the Skagee because his Nestor was a bigger boat with a stronger engine. It had taken him hours of maneuvering, however, to coax his overplugged trawl bag free of the bottom, while probably his best piece of luck had been a rip in the mesh that allowed some of the fish to escape and lighten the load. Two other boats of lesser capacity— also crewed by novices to the grounds—survived by cutting their cables to sacrifice nets, lines, cables, and trawl doors. All this gear now lodged on the bottom, snags that waited to rip or entangle other nets and lines.
Quickly Hank straightened the kinks in his fishing pattern. His routine wheelhouse challenge in trawling—to hold in mind a picture of unseen fish and opened net in motion, while above surface to tune both speed and the cables whose length determined the net’s position—was complicated here by the storming abundance of fish. It was necessary to avoid setting on the solid strips of red when they filled the color screen, to act with trigger response or risk losing gear. He soon became adept at finding gaps or weak spots in the schools where he could slip in his net without engaging the full mass of fish. Arne and Joe learned to do the same. It was a whole different kind of fishing. Never before had they worked to avoid the thick of a potential harvest.
On the crew’s part the routine was less pressured but steady. Although the fish they caught never came aboard but were transported by the bulging bagful directly to the joint-venture processor, the tows lasted only a short time. It required a steady shift of trawl bags, and consequent adjustment of supporting tackle. Each emptied bag towed back from the processor needed inspection. Rips and tears in the web were inevitable since vessels dragged nets close together.
Jace obviously knew his way around a deck and into the specialized Shelikof fishery. He even mended web faster and into cleaner meshes than Terry or Ham. Between sets he volunteered—although with an elaborate concern close to condescension—to coach Tom, whose fishing experience had seldom included nets. At least he now sensed Hank’s intolerance of bullshit and had stopped pressing to become deck boss.
The deck routine involved a minimum of mess since fish did not come aboard, while steady netfuls clocked off the dollars. “But no fun a -tall when you never touch what you catch,” grumped Terry, who seldom complained. Ham echoed with “Yeah.” Tom Harris remained too fascinated by the sea’s abundance and with learning new skills to be concerned. What most bothered all of them except Jace was the mass of gutted carcasses that soon floated everywhere. Wind dispersed only partially the stench of decay. “You don’t waste food like that,” Hank muttered. “What’s wrong with those people?”
One day the net brought in a high tangle of line around a battered wire pot, evidently from king crabbing days at least five years before. They needed to bring it on deck to clear the net. Everyone gathered. The thing dripped slime and sea growth. Small creatures slithered from within. Big whitened shells inside attested to crabs caught that never escaped since the pot, after being lost, had evidently continued to fish.
A lump of black mud in the pot stirred, and out crawled a king crab. Its carapace, luminously purple, was as wide as a dessert plate. The thick claws on its meaty legs snapped sluggishly. Ham ran for his camera. Tom Harris sucked in his breath and began to mutter that all the tales were true and he’d never believed it. Terry knelt to watch its movements with a kind of reverence, and murmured, “Oh, wasn’t that the days!” Hank stared with the rest. The creature had the beauty of things lost. The thousands of these we caught, he mused. All the years before they disappeared, whether overfished or moved off by Nature.
“The cookpot for you, baby.” Jace started to grab the tubelike legs.
Terry gripped his arm with a strength that nearly threw Jace off balance. “Hurt him and you go in the pot too.”
Jace turned indignantly to Hank, but Hank had leaned down to the crab to croon, “Thanks for calling. Go back home when it suits you. Meanwhile, we’ll just enjoy your pretty face.”
On a relatively calm afternoon Hank lowered the life raft again and, with Terry, motored over to the Japanese processor ship. The captain received them politely, but asked with concern, “Have not stopped fishing?”
“No, no,” assured Hank. “Crew still fishing fishing.”
The vessel, more than twice the length of their own, had the usual metallic and carbolic smells of a fish factory. Nothing aboard was unusual for a floating processor. A conveyor belt on the enclosed center deck carried fish from a delivery bin to a table lined by workers. Another belt transported the finished product to containers where others packed it for freezing. But the waste was startling. A man in rubber coveralls stood in the delivery bin up to his thighs. His hands flew, throwing female pollack onto the belt but tossing males to deck. With impersonal efficiency the men at the table slit open the females bulging with egg sacks, cut out the pink flopping planks of roe, then threw down the remaining bodies. Another worker with a pressure hose flushed the mass of females—their guts tumbled from their bellies—through the scuppers along with the discarded whole males.
“That’s good fish,” Hank told the captain. He made a gesture of eating. “Food. Food. No good to throw away.”
The captain shrugged. “Eggs precious. Porrack-fish cheap.”
Hank felt a flare of resentment. He was being hired to waste the fish of his country after fighting to s
ave them, in order to pump up a Japanese luxury market.
Back aboard his own boat, Hank groused over the radio with fellow Americans. “We don’t need another damn fish law,” he said, “but I’d endorse one to stop that waste.”
The comment of one voice spoke for the majority. “Too bad. Those fish are stormin’ in like raindrops and their meat’s not worth shit compared to the eggs. Plenty more where they came from.”
“All the foreigners waste our fish,” grumbled the voice of Gus Rosvic. “Why not? It ain’t their own.”
“Heyyy, Gus,” said another voice. “Who you plan to shoot today?”
“Why, I suppose any fellow runs over my gear, Luke. You feeling brave?” Luke laughed.
Somebody else noted that there was talk back in Kodiak of setting up a shore plant to process the pollack carcasses into fish paste for surimi. “But that’s Jap food and the Japs are making enough paste of their own in other places, so people say no way they’ll buy ours.”
From Luke, “One problem for the foreigners, in case you don’t know it, is something I read in National Fisherman. Our dollar’s strong the way it should be. So Japs and Europeans can’t afford to buy our stuff anyhow.”
“Don’t let ’em suck you in, Hank,” added Gus. “They’ll always have their excuse.”
“So just grab your share, man,” concluded the first voice, “and stop bitching.”
Spawning pollack continued to thicken the water. Sometimes the surface boiled and swirled from the intensity of the fish driving below. They migrated and the boats followed, up the wide Shelikof Strait hemmed by mainland mountains to the west and the high wooded foothills of Kodiak Island to the east.
The snow peaks on the mainland varied from volcanic cones still puffing seventy years after their last eruption, to canyons and sheer faces where centuries of weather had scooped out the rock. Each man responded to them differently. They held Terry’s gaze when he wasn’t working. “Gotten to be almost friends, those hills, always there,” he mused. Tom Harris regarded them with simple wonder. “On Chesapeake it’s nice enough flat which lets you see good if the weather’s clear,” he assured himself, “But this! Oh my.” Ham’s judgment was indifferent: “They’re real pretty, I guess.” And from Jace, “Too cold for this puppy, thanks.” Hank’s eye traveled the ridges often. They had a terrible beauty that had joined itself to his own history more than once, and he never tired of watching them.
Whatever demons that had been stirred in Hank by the Skagee rescue and deaths receded under the routines of fishing. The fleet now worked its nets abeam the very bay, Puale, where he’d married Jody when his boat and Jones Henry’s had rushed for shelter from an ice storm. He gazed at the half-hidden opening in the mountains that led into Puale Bay: an uneasy anchorage that offered rocky bottom and only limited protection from gales along a hostile coast.
What would it be like, he daydreamed, to own several fishing boats all churning out a percentage into his pocket? The Japanese could do this for him and no others. Now that he’d straightened it out with the Tsurifune team, he knew what to expect. They just needed to be faced down now and then. He’d make money for all kinds of independence. Buy Jody anything she wanted, send the kids to any school, impress Dad and make him proud. The Japanese were good people after all. He’d absorbed their culture, enjoyed their hospitality, and felt comfortable with them. Liked them!
Hank talked daily to Seth who was aboard the Puale Bay, fishing black cod in the gulf. Since the start of the new black cod season the ship had delivered ashore in Kodiak rather than to a Japanese freezer ship. It apparently made for a happier crew all around since they no longer put in months at sea without a break. “Pulling fish, pulling fish,” was Seth’s usual report. The prospect of marriage had made him more relaxed, even talkative, than he’d been for years past. “Shitty kind of weather you’d expect for winters here. Guys at the rail stay wet all the time.”
Eventually Hank broached the subject of Kodama, cautiously, since they were on the air for anybody to hear. “Could be worse,” Seth said. “Since our understanding. Kodo tried his ordering-about shit with me first day out, and I yelled him off my bridge. Shook him up. Funny how Japs fold when you yell at them. Kodo gets it now. He runs the fish pack is all. Totals up the catch log and delivers it. The rest is mine. And Mo’s my man for deck boss. That’s what we settled.”
Seth and Kodama had also reached another understanding. “I mean,” Seth continued, “what’s the use being a fisherman if you never get, like . . . wet? Some people, it’s just the money, but for me, I want the buzz. And Kodo, he’s a person anyhow wants to be in charge. Turns out he can handle a boat. He can ease up to a marker buoy with us pitching all-hell, then hold the side against the line coming in, all that. So each day, maybe twice, he goes to wheelhouse and me to deck. We switch places.”
“Makes sense. Good!”
“I guess I’ve got to admit it,” Seth continued. “OF Kodo ain’t so bad. Get this. He says, once we get ashore, he’ll teach me judo. I said let’s start now, man, but he says too dangerous on a boat jumpin’ the way we are out here.”
Hank smiled to himself at the drubbing in store for Seth when they reached a mat. “You’ll enjoy it.”
“I just hope I don’t hurt him if we get tangled. I’m a lot bigger.”
“He’ll manage.”
February wore on, mostly in bitter cold. Southwest winds continued to prevail, building steady swells from the open Pacific Ocean. The wave pattern from crest to crest made for rough pitching aboard former Bering Sea crabbers with lengths more than a hundred feet like Jody Dawn. The former shrimpers from Kodiak fared better since their length, in the seventy-eighty-foot range, fitted the period of the swells. In compensation, the larger boats could stay longer on the grounds before refueling from their mother ships.
One bright afternoon, the wind had calmed to little more than puffs, and swells had leveled out. The temperature held frigid, but sun sparkled on choppy water with an intensity that required sunglasses. The tow was under control. Tom came to the warm wheelhouse, as he often did between jobs, to admire the scenery. He handed Hank a mug of fresh coffee, and pointed to the holder with spare binoculars. “You mind, Boss?”
“Help yourself.” Tom had adopted Terry’s and Ham’s term rather than calling him by name. Hank did not object. While he had never told his crewmen to call him “Boss”—it had just happened—he’d spent enough time as a navy officer to be comfortable with an automatic recognition of authority. It kept things clear when commands became necessary.
Tom pointed to the charts, asked permission again, and unfolded the one for Shelikof Strait. He had set himself the task of recognizing all the bays and mountains within sight. He seldom spoke more than a few words at a time, but his eyes were always alert. Hank knew that Tom had seen parts of the world even though he’d clamped shut at mention of his Vietnam service, but the man’s wonder seemed that of one who’d never left his own backyard. Tom now focused on the mountains ridging the mainland a few miles away. They rose like white buttresses, their shadows blue, rock edges jutting through the snow as precise as etched lines. “Looks just like vanilla ice cream,” Tom volunteered. “It’s honey syrup in Alaska, everything, bad weather and all.”
Two large birds glided through the air like children’s kites, holding a steady course, then changing with a flip. “Oh my soul,” Tom breathed. “So those are eagles. Look how easy they fly!” Hank watched him peer at the birds with all his body, his large, capable hands clutching the glasses like a precious object, his mouth opened in an excitement that sent creases along his cheeks. Tom’s voice turned husky. “Wish every day for the rest of my life I could be here, like this.”
“Then stay here, Tom.”
“You think it’s possible?” Suddenly Tom became excited. “When I was a kid going to be drafted and joined the Marines,” he started, “I didn’t look to right nor left. Never left camp down to Quantico. Thought home was the only place
worth knowing. Got shipped to that terrible jungle and knowed soon enough I had no use for nothing but back home. Thought, when . . .” He looked away. “When certain things happened over there, thought I’d never see home again. Then there was hospital, and discharge. Done my duty and gone straight home, neither night spent nowhere’s else.” He faced Hank again. “Only then, when I got back and closed the door, went back to oyster and crab with Daddy, did I realize that I’d been around the world but never looked out the window.”
Hank nodded, but had nothing to say. Tom just stood, and the words continued to pour.
“Then that day you come out tonging with us on the bay, I saw there could be some right kind of people from places I’d wondered about all along, like Alaska. Saw how I’d let it all pass me by. When you called, Hank, and said come up for a time to work on your boat, there was never a thing could have stopped me. I went straight to pack. Daddy saw it and knew. He didn’t try no more to stop me than to kick at the moon, even though he knew he couldn’t fish his boat no more alone. Said good-bye even sadder than when he saw me off to war, I think.” Tom turned away quickly, with tears in his eyes. “I think he knowed I wouldn’t come back more except to visit.”
Hank was moved himself. The invitation had been for merely the two or three months of roe pollack, a return gesture for hospitality. But, he decided, I’ll find a place for Tom on one of my boats even if I put somebody else ashore.
One day when Seth called, his tone had changed. “Yeah, pulling fish pulling fish like always,” he uttered, then asked sharply, “You ever take the time to count what comes aboard here fish by fish?” When Hank asked if there was a problem, Seth declared, “Better not be!”
On the following day Seth’s voice had darkened further. “Your buddy. Not naming names. You looked him over before you brought him aboard, didn’t you?”
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