Breakers

by William B. McCIoskey Jr.

  Hank grinned back in surprise at his father’s grin. They clicked glasses. If I asked for a loan now, he thought, I’d admit failure and lose what I’ve gained in his sight.

  He remembered his grandparents in Baltimore, Dad’s sober church-going people and Mother’s livelier widowed Gram Lacey. Both his grandmothers wore black, yielding early to their years. (Dad sixty!) As they aged they had relied on his father, who eventually took over all their affairs and saw them through old age to death. It had seemed the natural order. But now he in his turn would be too far away. His parents wouldn’t need money. What of the rest? “Sixty! What’s it like?” he ventured, and regretted it at once. He didn’t want to hear.

  “That’s a question.” His father leaned back and dabbed his mouth with a napkin. The lips below the gray mustache had a gray tint of their own.

  “Sorry—I mean, never mind. I shouldn’t have asked. Look out there, how the moon makes the mountains look like chalk.”

  “I hadn’t thought about it, but . . . well, I have. And it’s a damned shock. At sixty, you might find that you do pretend. I won’t say that I still think like a teenager, or like a young lieutenant with everything focused on survival and duty. But I don’t feel older than forty. Frankly I sometimes wonder how it all slipped by so fast.”

  “Still a lot of years ahead!”

  “Oh yes. But I know the day’s coming. I’ll retire, say good-bye to some things, stop making decisions that affect more people than my family. We’ll travel, your mom and I. Do interesting things together. Not so bad.”

  “Do you want to retire?”

  “Hell no.” He started to eat again, then put down his fork. “If you really wonder, it’s a little like facing the end. Not like that death lottery when you’re young and strong and off to war. Rather like . . . you plan for it, you watch it coming. But until you’re sixty you don’t believe it, really. Then all at once you do. Even when you know there’s probably years and years ahead.”

  “Let’s change the subject.”

  “Very well. To the point. If you’re strapped for immediate money, let me help. It can be part donation, part loan. I’m sure you understand that my cash has limits—I’ve invested to make sure your Mother’s taken care of no matter how long she lives. And of course maybe we’ll both have a long old age. But, a few thousand.”

  Hank’s stomach tightened at the suddenness. “No. I’m doing fine. But I appreciate it.”

  When he relieved Jody at Pete’s bedside, she kept her voice low since the child slept, but her eyes and mouth showed humor for the first time since the illness. “He almost started to talk, then twinkled for a second. Maybe he’s playing a game. I’d like that in a way. Nice dinner?” Hank nodded. She kissed him. “Okay. Settle in with your critter there.”

  The warm feeling from the dinner continued. His son slept peacefully, fever gone. He brushed a cheek against the peach-fuzz face. Never stopped to examine what constituted love. When it came he took it for granted, from parents to courtship to kids. What fortune to have six people whom he loved, who loved him in return! And friends besides whom he’d hug in a minute, like Adele and Jones, Seth, Tolly.

  His arms needed to be full. He eased into the bed, unstrapped the restraint and, careful to maintain the IV needle, drew in the small body, chest to chest and warmth to warmth as in nursery days barely more than a year ago. The sweet-smelling, downy hair parted for his kiss, and his lips lingered on the yielding baby skull beneath. So vulnerable. My dad might have looked at me like this, he thought. And what does he see now, in me? Give it a few more fishing seasons and this peck of soft bones in my arms will be tall, maybe taller than me, all muscle, sprouting a beard. And I’ll be older. And my dad . . . will be older.

  Suddenly Pete stiffened and yelped. His body began to jerk. His head beat back. The IV needle pulled out. His mouth chattered. Feces squished from the diaper. “Help!” Hank called, “Help! Petey don’t die, Petey I love you, honey, honey, don’t die. Help!”

  Nurses pulled the child from his arms and sent him from the bed. “Don’t let him die, oh please don’t let him die. Petey, Petey.”

  A doctor shook him by the shoulders. “Your child’s having a seizure. Not good, but he’s not going to die. It’s under control. Here’s a towel if you want to clean yourself.”

  Instead he called Jody from the nurse’s station, then hurried back to the room. The child was being wheeled away, still thrashing, braced by pillows. “Stop! What are you doing?” Hank cried, running beside the gumey.

  “CAT scan, new technology,” muttered the doctor. “Stay alongside, talk to him if you like but I don’t think he’ll hear until the seizure’s over.” As they walked, the little body stopped jerking and Pete whimpered. He looked up blankly at Hank’s voice, and pushed away with his free arm. “Keep talking,” said the doctor.

  Jody arrived, hair askew, sleepy eyes blue-bagged. He ducked into a lavatory to sponge the mess from his clothes, soon rejoined her. They were allowed to hover in the CAT-scan room, calling encouragement as the child, groggy but strapped tight, went into the sinister clanking machine like a corpse on a slab. Two other doctors had joined the examination. “Yep. Subdural empyema,” said one. “Need to drain it. Set up surgery.”

  The entourage bustled the gumey to the operating room as a doctor came to explain. “It’s what we call a pus pocket. Evidently some H-flu germ—that’s a bacteria—escaped our treatment, and it’s lodged in a pocket the antibiotics didn’t reach.” He paused. “In his head.”

  “Oh Christ,” Hank choked.

  “Doctor Smitt’s our neurosurgeon. He’s very good. We’re going to drain it.”

  Jody’s voice was level. “What long-term effect?”

  “I’m sure we’ll have it in time.”

  “The full story, please.”

  “Well. If there’s scar tissue there might—might be danger of more seizures. We won’t know. But seizures can be controlled with medication. They can also ride their course so the patient returns to normal.”

  Hank found his voice. “Won’t know for how long?”

  The doctor patted his arm. “We’ll spell out possibilities after we see.”

  It meant that Pete’s recovery from the meningitis would be protracted. It also meant a continued fiscal drain since their insurance covered only basics. Hank’s father quietly switched the motel billing to his own account. When Jody, who paid the bills, found out, she at first refused, then kissed him and accepted it. But she and Hank agreed that their independence was too important to accept a deeper donation.

  Harry Crawford delayed his return to Baltimore for two more days until the worst had passed, spending increased hours on the phone. He left an open account with his rooftop restaurant. Hank and Jody used it once, for lunch, but only to appear not ungrateful. Jane Crawford stayed on in Kodiak. Phone reports indicated no discontent among two foster mothers greedy for children and two children happily indulged.

  When Jody wrote her own parents they phoned. “We want you to keep us posted,” said her mother in a husky cigarette voice. “Good Lord, kids’ diseases, don’t ask how many I went through with you. Thank God it’s not my responsibility anymore.”

  “Why don’t you ever come see us?” growled Colonel Sedwick. “You know I’m not well.”

  Two mornings after the emergency Pete looked at his parents brightly and started to squirm, although he still did not speak. “Give it time,” said a pediatric neurologist brought for consultation. “Normal child’s development might be delayed a few months. But he’ll catch up. Now, the seizure . . . others might follow. “

  “You mean for a week, maybe a month, right?”

  “At least, sir.”

  Jody folded her arms. “What do you mean?”

  “Worst case, a lifetime.” Hank groaned. “Each body holds its own mysteries. Some things we can’t predict. It might never happen again. But, ah . . . best not to leave him unwatched for a time.” To a question from Jody: “Very like
epilepsy. Sudden, intense, then over. Put pillows, anything handy to cushion him, head especially, so he doesn’t harm himself. Do not put anything between his teeth. That popular misconception might choke him.”

  “I see,” said Jody. “And medication. That’ll help?”

  “Definitely.”

  Hank shook his head. “You’re wrong. You’ve got to be. My kid’s not going to be epileptic. We’ll get another opinion.”

  “I suggest you do, if it helps.”

  Jody continued steadily. “The drug has side effects?”

  “Not debilitating ones. Does need to be taken regularly, on time.”

  “For a few months, you mean,” Hank persisted. Jody put a hand on his arm. He knew the answer.

  Nurses on all the watches had made a pet of the vulnerable but outgoing Pete. It became their project to make him speak. The child’s elfish refusal with a wiggle under the covers, combined with the shadow of more seizures, increased his charm. The attention meant that he was seldom alone during the day, and Jody could bunk in the bedside cot each night. It made sense that Hank return to the boat. Her income had stopped, and he paced the route from hospital to motel like a caged tiger, scared for Pete and uneasily diminished by a situation beyond his control that included an empty wallet. Jody recognized the latter and issued a hundred-dollar bill above expenses: “To carry. Don’t expect more if you spend it.”

  Hank flew first to Kodiak. They justified the expense so that he could check on the house abandoned in haste. The front door was secure. Marge had driven out to pack the children’s clothes after she took them over, and closed up correctly. The first wrong he sensed came with the acid stench that swept against him when he opened the door. Chaos in the damp and chilly living room. Stuffing from the armchair and sofa littered the floor. Knobs of feces lay everywhere, some of it matted in a fuzz of white mold. Somehow raccoons or other creatures had found an opening, come in for shelter, and made it their playpen.

  Hank stormed and shouted, then cooled enough to manage a laugh when he found that neatly shut doors had kept the creatures from the bedrooms. He scooped, swept, and disinfected while scheming traps, poisons, even night ambush with a pistol. At last he merely patched an obvious opening (wiry hairs stuck to the edges of a popped knothole) and shored other possible break-in points. If he built close to nature, then the nature of animals had to be respected as part of the deal. Would Jody see it that way?

  Back finally in Dutch Harbor, all but Seth greeted the Boss boisterously.

  Seth, with a captain’s gravity, informed him: “We’ve done good as most everybody. Not everybody, maybe, but good enough. And . . .” The relief skipper’s eye had a gleam new to him. “I’ve found my own hole, call it Seth’s Sloo, that nobody else knows where, not even Mo.” The bushy face, usually as open as a map, remained tight. “Nobody.”

  Hank understood. “Then the Sloo’s your secret. Money bag when you get your own boat. When we head there it’ll be my stretch on deck and yours at the wheel.”

  The reserve lifted at once. “Come on, man, let’s go catch them fuckers!”

  For the remaining fraction of the king crab season they highlined again under Hank’s sleepless prod. But half his season had still been lost to courtroom and hospital.

  The Seattle bankers understood. (The son of the loan VP had summer-seined in Puget Sound and—to the VP’s voiced concern and probable disappointment—talked of following the boats north rather than start banking at the bottom.) The bank extended the boat loan period and in the process let Hank skip three payments.

  Less flexible were Kodiak loans for the new house. Hospital bills crept above Hank’s insurance coverage, then suddenly soared, requiring another loan and mounting payments. It meant that he needed to winter-fish for anything saleable in the water—no Hawaii break with Jody and the kids—hanging tough until the next Bering king crab season bailed them out.

  11

  TROUGHS

  SPRING-FALL 1981

  By midwinter the tanner crabs had all but disappeared. Hank hired the use of a crane in Dutch Harbor and installed the big net reel and davits that converted the Jody Dawn for trawling. He hated doing it—his zest had become the chase for big crabs, not tutti-frutti little fish that Asians mushed into paste—but he was glad he’d followed Swede’s advice. He signed into a Korean joint venture. At least the Jody Dawn had that added horsepower for dragging, unlike the now-glum Tolly’s new engine that he had scorned to upgrade. The conversion also opened his option to go shrimping if he chose. Shrimp stocks had plummeted from their previous numbers in the Kodiak bays, but no one considered this permanent any more than the king and tanner crab drops.

  Aboard Jody Dawn, Odds dubiously touched the chains, bobbins, and steel doors of the new trawling gear. His experience since childhood aboard uncles’ boats included only floating gillnets, baited hooks, and seines that encircled on the surface, so that the trawl’s complications to drag the bottom required fresh, difficult thinking. Terry summarized the general opinion after two test sets with a cheerful: “Man, this shit’s no fun. You drag and wait, and then what you get’s piddlefish like they’d slip through your toes.”

  “Yeah!” echoed Odds.

  Seth took to trawling enthusiastically and Mo, his burly shadow, thus accepted also. For Seth it harked back to his early days with Hank on a slave-driving shrimper. “Remember that hard-assed squarehead Nels? Old bastard like to killed us he pushed so hard. Then didn’t pay us proper. Dead, ain’t he? Pfoo. But funny thing, looking back makes me laugh now, how bad it was. Man we could take it!”

  Hank nodded, remembering also Nels’s dogged fishing even after cold sea had crippled him, until at last the sea claimed him altogether.

  Seth discovered he liked the thump of bobbins as they scraped down deck to the water, and relished grabbing thick chains to lash steel doors against the hull at just the right instant. Heavy stuff in motion; perils to overcome, all of it with tricks that he knew. He lectured the others on the danger to make sure they understood.

  They caught pollack enough: bulging bags of the soft halfpound fish. It was the easiest fishing any had experienced, since a tender simply detached the bag and floated it over to the Korean factory ship. “No fun at all,” repeated Terry as they watched indifferently the fruit of a two-hour tow bob through the water without ever touching their deck. Nothing of the passive creatures in the net earned their respect like a heavy king crab’s clawpower or a salmon’s angry thrash. The huge mass floated like a carcass, submerging, then sluggishly breaking the surface. Waves licked around glassy fish heads sticking through the meshes. Seabirds swooped screaming to peck dismembered chunks of fish. Bladders popped like muffled firecrackers, from the seafloor creatures raced up through too many atmospheres of pressure.

  “Well, if you gotta be bom a junk fish,” said Terry, “this gets it over quick. Then maybe you matter next time, be a sockeye or something.”

  “Everything has a soul,” said Odds. “Every one of them junk fish has a soul.”

  “Yeah, maybe. But then a sockeye has a bigger soul.”

  “Come on,” said Mo uneasily. “They’re fish”

  “Set the fucker again,” snapped Seth. “Nets out of water catch air.” They straightened the alternate net that had been delivered back to them from the tender, and attached it to the trawl’s warps. The few minutes’ hustle came closest to work in their day.

  Seven American boats were delivering to the Korean mothership. It went smoothly at first. Even at nine cents a pound—unspeakable price compared to that for their usual targets—the money slowly mounted since they fished a total volume tons beyond that for crab or salmon. The Korean in charge of the factory ship’s tender hailed them with raucous cheer each time he came to transport a bag of fish. Terry gaily tossed over a girlie magazine to acknowledge a gift of leathery dried fish that none on the Jody Dawn but Odds considered eating.

  Then, three weeks into the season, Hank radioed for his haul to be
collected, and heard back in barely intelligible English: “Tender-boat wait.” Each hour he called again with greater impatience as his boat and crew stood idle, to be told the same. The bag of fish dragged astern like a gross sea anchor, undulating with the swells. Birds, having eaten all the breakoff, drove beaks directly into the encased bodies. The occasional tail flick through the meshes soon stopped. The bag, originally a mass firm as a sofa, flattened and softened. Its brassy smell soon lost freshness.

  “Goin’ to rot on us,” said Seth, disgusted. “Better call those gooks and make ‘em come.”

  Hank radioed fellow-skippers. Same delay. Only one delivery had been taken in the last five hours. Hank glared at the factory ship, stolid in the water while his boat’s anchor of fish jerked them with each swell like a leash to a dog. He itched to confront them, but the ship lay a mile distant, too far to safely take the dinghy in rough water.

  When at last the tender came, no one joked. Hank in float coveralls signaled the skipper alongside rather than tossing a towline for the fish. Only after repeated waves did the man bring in his boat. Once-boisterous almond eyes regarded him warily. Hank jumped rail to rail. “You take me to factory ship.” He waved off objections. The engine stayed in neutral during prolonged radio talk in Korean. The tenderman’s face, no longer creased with smiles, had a child’s sheen but a weary age. Not only his deck was slimy, but also his cramped wheelhouse where dead fish odors had concentrated away from the wind. At last the Korean started his engine, and without facing Hank placed a ragged cushion over the exposed springs of the single captain’s chair. Hank acknowledged but remained standing.

  A Jacob’s ladder clacked against the ship’s high rusty hull. Thirty-foot climb, Hank estimated. The Korean gestured to show the difficulty, then pointed persuasively back to the Jody Dawn. Hank shook his head. He knew they had a basket they could have lowered. “You want it tough buddy? You got it.” He grabbed slippery rungs on an upswell and climbed firmly hand over hand. Even though in good shape he was panting by the time anxious hands helped him over the rail.