Breakers

by William B. McCIoskey Jr.

  Fish filled the wide deck bins. He could see no room for more, but a crane lifted the Jody Dawn’s bagful with its green and yellow chafing gear dripping slime, to be emptied on top of the rest. Hank had expected to see the deck bustling with Koreans but saw only two. One of them, buried to his thighs in fish, steadied the bag and hammered open the drawcord. The gush of dead creatures knocked him off balance. For a moment his head disappeared in the mass and his hardhat bounced off. The captain on the bridge above shouted harshly and the single other crewman on deck laughed as the man regained his feet, groped for the hardhat, and returned it to his head, and started distributing the slippery bodies with a paddle.

  The man behind the paddle scowled up, then away. His face had a purple mark that Hank had seen somewhere before.

  In the wheelhouse: “Down-go,” explained the Korean captain after working the crane controls. He walked barefoot on a worn carpet that covered the enclosed deck. (Hank had considered removing his boots, but scraped them outside instead.) The captain thumbed the thin pages of a dictionary, pointed to “blade,” added “Chop-chop down-go,” and drew a finger across his throat.

  A trip through the factory area belowdecks confirmed a breakdown in the cutting machinery. Two men in coveralls sweated over a battery of blades still dripping fish scraps. The rest of the crew, in thick rubber coats, lined shoulder to shoulder wherever they could fit, furiously scraping and cutting individual fish. Hank had seen enough surimi lines to know that skin and bones needed to be separated from meat in order to make fish paste, and that only machines could do the work in volume.

  “How long take fix-fix?”

  The captain shook his head. He led to the wardroom through smoky corridors where rust bubbled through yellowing paint. Away from the processing, everything smelled of sour food. A messboy served cups of rice wine and laid out bowls of the spiced fermented cabbage Hank had tasted reluctantly on the Korean longliner arrested two years before in the Gulf of Alaska. This brought it back, the purple mark on the man’s face. Captain of the longliner caught fishing illegally, who had begged on his knees not to be reported for fear of prison and beating. Hank nibbled at the kimchee out of politeness, sipped the abrasive alcohol, tried to picture the man. Not his fault, even though he’d been gleeful along with Tolly and the rest at having nabbed a foreigner cheating on American fish. It was the Coast Guard officer who’d refused to alter the report, following duty. One-two-three, inevitably.

  Back on deck, as Hank waited for the tender to return him to the Jody Dawn after it delivered a delayed bag of fish from another boat, he watched the man covered in gurry behind the paddle. The man kept his back turned. “Hey,” Hank called softly at last. The man turned for a moment. Same purple birthmark from temple to chin. His lip was now pinched by a scar that induced a permanent scowl and showed missing teeth on half-stumps. Yes. The pleading captain.

  The Korean factory ship never recovered full capacity. It accepted only a single haul a day from each of its contracted trawlers. After a few days, five of the seven boats in the joint venture quit and left. Only the Jody Dawn and another remained: skippers both who needed the money. At least each could then sell two additional daily hauls. One night in the brief dark Mo on watch called him. “That the lights of our gook ship, Boss? Ain’t she movin’ away?” Hank radioed to no answer. By morning the horizon was clear.

  Three months later the Jody Dawn had still received no payment for the pollack caught and delivered, nor were any of Hank’s inquiries answered. He reported the affair to the State Department. The same people who had tried to ruin him a year previous for Seth’s bullets at the Japanese trawler now filed his complaint in some remote drawer.

  “Write our senator,” said Jody. “You know how.”

  “I damn should.” But he didn’t get to it before going to sea again, despite her reminders. It seemed futile.

  Back in Kodiak, Jones Henry, in port briefly during a bountiful salmon season, declared: “You bought it.” Age was making him acerbic, and third Scotches didn’t help. His winter welding business for the San Diego tuna fleet had entered hard times along with the fleet itself, driven from American ports by activists’ pressure against setting nets on dolphins. “Serves anybody who does business with the foreigners and their boys in our so-called State Department. You can add the porpoise huggers, don’t get me started. And now you’ve got a boat too big to gear for salmon like the rest of us. You can drag, but none of the draggers around here can find shrimp anymore, so what have you got?”

  “Daddy!” snapped Adele from the kitchen. “Hold your tongue. Hank always knows what he’s doing.”

  Hank turned defensive with Jody in the room. “I’ll make it up this fall with king crab. As for shrimp, come on.” He raised his glass. “I’d find ‘em. This town’s gone crybaby. If Kiliuda Bay’s empty as they say, it means the shrimp’s gone to other bays, or a little offshore. Or down by the Shumigans or off the mainland by Mitrofania. Anybody can fill a boat when the water’s plugged. Now it’s time for the real fishermen. Prospector time. When you separate the cream.”

  “Cream—that’s you, I take it.”

  “Anything out there, I’ll find it.” He turned to Jody for affirmation. But she watched him, detached.

  “Not even the biologists can find shrimp anymore, Hank,” called Adele.

  “Those guys have no more idea than a schoolgirl how to set gear for their samples, Adele. So what do you expect? Do they ever ask fishermen to show ‘em? I hear not.”

  “That’s one time you got it straight,” growled Jones.

  Jody had turned strangely quiet, even in their home with the beautiful view. Whenever they talked of the house, conversation became stilted. Pete was their heartache and the subject they shared most freely. It had been nearly a year since the meningitis, but while he hopped in all directions like any three-year-old, he still did not speak. Bills now accumulated for therapy that produced no results. At least the precious child was healthy. Hank hugged him and played with him all the time, when he was home, until Jody needed to say: “You have two other kids, you know.” Then Hank would gather all three against him and read, giving Henny and Dawn the chance to spell out some of the sentences themselves. The two older children had settled into a pattern. While they played together easily, Dawn continued to chatter and boss. Henny ducked his head as if to let the words flow past, and soberly followed his own course. Both, in their way, guarded their mute little brother.

  At last, in mid-September, the Bering Sea king crab season opened. Hank and his men, like crews in the rest of the fleet, stationed themselves tensely for the set and haul. Up came the first pot, the second . . . the twentieth. Just last year they had frothed to the rail with a routine hundred big, sluggish male keepers in each. Now they contained no more than two dozen, plus more fish for hang-bait than could ever be used. Radio talk repeated over and over: “Just not feeding yet,” and “Probably all still dug in the mud,” and “You see all those foreign draggers? There’s your fault.” Hank shrugged off his unease. If old standbys were dry, it meant the crabs had found other holes to challenge his prospecting skill. Time to push.

  Ten days later the hold contained no more than 60,000 pounds, compared last year to a routine 160,000 fished in half the time. With Hank’s drive from ground to ground each crab had cost him double or triple the fuel of other years, while the men worked harder since they stacked pots after nearly each haul to run and test a new area. They returned to Dutch only when barely enough fuel remained for the 150-mile trip. No other boats waited at the plant pier to compete for space. Workers grabbed their lines, leapt aboard, and opened hatches even before the circulating water had time to drain. In little more than an hour their ten days’ haul had entered the cookers, and seawater gushed again into their tanks.

  At least the price rose. Last year Swede had paid eighty cents, finally ninety cents a pound. This year he’d posted $1.27 but Hank, making a noisy climb to the office, managed another seven ce
nts without argument. “Only a dozen boats in so far,” Swede admitted. “Some had only thirty, forty thousand pounds. Your scratch is the biggest delivery yet. My lines are hungry.”

  Hank refueled and returned to sea at once.

  The king crabs did not appear. By October the average number of keepers in a pot had dwindled from the two dozen at season’s start—poor enough compared with better days—to three or four. The big pots rattled instead with other creatures that ranged from flapping skates to spiny red-fish that could spike through gloves, and with cod that some who had fished only Alaska had never seen before. By now everyone could identify cod by the fleshy whisker on the lower jaw.

  To save money on the Jody Dawn they ate fewer steaks and more from their catch. Mo reluctantly learned to batter thick cod fillets. Hank wondered anew at the savor of the flaky white fish fresh from the water, bemused by the way he’d avoided cod in the past through memories of cod liver oil. The taciturn Odds almost smiled since fish had always been his village food along with game. (“Cow meat’s got no taste,” he’d often declare, while stuffing down his share.) Seth put it glumly for Mo and himself, great eaters of beef. “Fish is nice, but it don’t fill the comers.”

  Many boats of some 250 on the grounds gave up to cut losses. Increased fuel costs devoured most profit. Some of the homeward Seattle boats diverted to crabbing grounds around Kodiak. They competed with the local fleet for a supply that had dwindled there also, depleting it further.

  Ashore in Dutch, snow lay untracked between buildings, where in other years paths would be trodden to ice by men headed for supplies or a drink. Loading cranes screeched only occasionally. Swede decided it was cheaper to pay return fare for half his plant crew than to feed them, heat the dormitories, and deal with fights that inevitably arose from idleness. John Gains had long since gone to Japan to confer with company officials on other sources in the world for crab, since shortage in one region did not mean the end of it for those who could pay.

  At the airport, where planes once arrived full of people and left with only special boxes of iced crab for high-scale Tokyo and New York restaurants (most of the product went frozen by ship), outgoing flights were the crowded ones. Cannery hands flown in weeks before to work double shifts on overtime now sat glumly by their bags nursing pennies. Some had logged no more than fifty or sixty hours in a month. Puddles slicked the floor from their pacing in and out during long waits—sometimes days—for flight weather and space to take them home.

  Hank drove harder. Finally his crew begged a break ashore—implied mutiny to get it. After delivering a thin load he agreed curtly to a three-day lay-in ashore (glad at least to take a few hours’ rest himself). Vacation started with a listless dinner of fried bologna, no match for celebratory delivery-day roasts of other years.

  Odds appeared before them in shore clothes with his seabag packed. “I’m going.”

  “You can’t!” exclaimed Seth. “You’re part of my deck.”

  Odds picked his words gravely. “I prayed over it lots. People here from church is going to put me up till I figure how to get home. Some day out there, the way we push, one of us’11 get hurt bad, not just smashed fingers. And I got a family. Not worth it, the way we’ve been doin’ this year.” Hank rose to take the initiative. Privately he was relieved since small shares would now stretch further despite extra work. He shook Odds’s hand and wished him well. The others followed. Hank promised to send a check at the end of the season. A minute later, Odds had become part of history. It subdued even Terry.

  A day’s sleep later, Hank restlessly lingered over a single beer in the dim Elbow Room where once he had ordered $180 six-packs of Scotch for a joke. Cold wind straight from the sea weighted the vestibule door of the weathered frame building when anyone opened it. Hank glanced at old Nick, the bartender, half asleep on his stool. Start Nick talking with no customers to divert and he’d do the good old days nonstop. Although it was evening—in other years time for shouts to start spilling over the snow—the few tables were empty except for two men in hard hats. To increase his gloom the hard hats reminded him of the Korean with the purple birthmark and smashed teeth. Not his fault. Yes his fault.

  “You guys from those new oil exploration rigs?” he ventured, to escape his thoughts. That’s right, they said without interest in further conversation. Why didn’t they stay at their usual bar of choice over the bridge at the Unisea, a place new like the bridge with nothing of fishermen about it? Different men, who hustled greasy ton-weight drills on a platform protected from all but the worst of the ocean. They lacked the foam and lilt that came from pulling live creatures from a clean sea.

  Pat Saunders, one of the biologists from Fish and Game, pushed into the bar against the blown door. Ice beads flew from his parka. Hank waved him over more eagerly than in normal years. He’d always considered bureaucrats incompetent to set trial pots accurately enough to trust their data. Said so at meetings. Neither smiled as the newcomer pulled up a chair. “Where you guys hiding the crabs, Patrick?”

  “You tell me.” The biologist’s face, ridged as a leather scarecrow and now wind-reddened, always looked clenched, and the eyes seldom relaxed. “You know how to set pots.”

  “Nowhere, nowhere.”

  The admission brought a calming breath. “Well. We think warmer water might have pushed males north and west of traditional range.”

  “I’ve prospected further north and west.”

  “We predicted a shortfall.”

  “You talked about a short year-class, but come on, Pat, how could anybody . . .”

  “You fishermen never listen. Never do. For two or three years we’ve warned you birds and the politicians both. Spare some of the matures for next time.”

  “What did you do, poison the water to prove your point?” When the biologist’s mouth pursed he grinned to soften it.

  The bartender interrupted with Pat’s drink. In other years the tab would run, but now payment per round was understood. Hank slowly reached for his wallet, relaxed when Pat waved it aside and paid himself.

  The man’s glare continued. “You’d like to blame the biologists at the public trough, wouldn’t you? Well, we have our opinion of you birds too. With you it’s all for today. You and the politicians both. You pay us for our science but never listen. Then things collapse and it’s our fault.” He tasted his Scotch and, in a milder tone: “Nick, times are hard, but this stuff’s water.”

  “Sorry. My eyesight.” Nick came over heavily, holding the bottle by the neck. He topped Pat’s glass, and started talking. “Ever see times like this? Ask me and I’ll tell you. Plenty. Back in ‘47, that’s thirty-four years ago exact, I keep count, when I paid off from the Navy here, honorable discharge and the War over. They shipped the Natives back home to Unalaska here from evacuation, but there was broken stuff everywhere—you know the Japs bombed the Navy base at Dutch Harbor other side of the creek but it was vandalism too—and I met my Aleut lady Stella and decided I could do worse than settle down here since I like it quiet. . . where was I?”

  “Pouring the booze, Nick,” said Hank mildly.

  “Yeah, well, this bar, called it the Bluejay then, sometimes only open if a Coast Guard ship come in for bunker, didn’t even have a vestibule door against the wind, door then opened direct facing the beach, and the one store, long white building and a boardwalk around it, company store for Native welfare, that’s where I worked. Don’t think I don’t have stories to tell. You think there was all these crab factories and crab boats back then? No sir. People left us alone. Except for government Indian Affairs, in and out again fast as they could go. And Coast Guard now and then, come in for fuel. Did I say that before? Where was I now? Did I tell you yet about the famous Native lady with tits so long that for a quarter she’d—”

  The two oil drillers saved them with “Hey Pop, over here, another round.”

  The biologist resumed his own train as if it had not been interrupted. “Ever consider your own stupidity?”<
br />
  “Don’t be such a firecracker, Patrick. I just wanted to tap your wisdom. You’re the one who knows what’s going on.”

  “Oh shit, Hank, any wisdom I have now, it’s hindsight.” But the slight flattery eased him. He took a long drink, stretched, and cracked his knuckles. Then, quietly: “What do you birds do out there? I’ll tell you. You’re in such a push to grab more than your share that you slam those seven- and eight-hundred-pound pots to the seafloor in seconds. Ever think how many crabs you splat under each pot?”

  “But they were everywhere. They crawled in your dreams.”

  Pat sighed and drank again. “Not the whole answer to why they’ve gone, but look. Say what, you work three hundred pots roughly? And you smash ‘em down fresh every day or two? Four, five crabs busted each slam. Some two hundred and thirty boats last year all did the same.” He dipped a finger in his drink and traced wet figures on the table. “Round it to seventy thousand pots, fifteen times to the bottom for each in a month. No, make it ten, be real conservative. And stay conservative, say only three animals busted each time. That’s two hundred thousand and some, no, shit, over two million crabs wasted. Wasted!”

  “Food for the survivors,” Hank said lamely.

  “Then count the females and undersized that keep chasing your bait, brought to the surface, tossed back, over and over. That stress stunts some, kills some. With throwbacks, do your guys ever rip off a leg or claw when they’re too tired to care how they toss? You know they do. Some animals don’t survive, so that’s more that never hatch eggs or grow to keeper size for your hold.” Pat emptied his glass and went to the bar for another.

  “None for me.”

  “You’re not on the wagon. Forget the beer. Two Scotches, Nick, and adjust that ol’ eyesight.”