Breakers

by William B. McCIoskey Jr.

  “We! That’s your line now? Fifty won’t pay for gas.”

  “It will with volume. And Jody Dawn still gets its standard tendering fee.”

  “You mean I’m supposed to cheat the fishermen who deliver to me? I didn’t bring my boat up here for that.”

  “Read your contract. You bring your boat when they tell you. I’d suggest you give breaks on supplies where you can. For the rest, suck it up like the rest of us.”

  From one of the speakers: “This is Alaska Department of Fish and Game. Anticipate an opening within the next twelve hours. Boats: Do not stay dry.”

  The lines around Swede’s mouth drew down wisely. “Switchblade gets the facts.”

  “You do enjoy this. You know how tough it’ll be for the guys, now the fish are coming. When I just left my Jody Dawn the tide was still headed down. Four, five hours before we float again, that’s the time they have to decide.”

  “When she floats, you be out there. By the way, I assume you know your friend Jones Henry has the gillnetter Robin J. Has a big kid for his net picker. Told me he’d deliver to any tender but Jody Dawn. What’s between you?”

  “He thinks I’ve sold out. He hates Japanese. It’s out of hand and I’m worried.”

  “Cry on somebody else. I told Jones to suit himself unless Crawford’s the only buyer of ours around, then get his ass over to you.”

  “He took that?”

  “Jones and I go back to before you ever came to Alaska, Sonny.”

  Hank shook his head, suddenly depressed. “You wouldn’t have one of those old Swede Scorden bottles in that drawer?”

  “Shut the door.” Swede produced a flask from under a folded coverall. “Just drink it from the mouth, and keep the smell away from me.”

  “You’re on the wagon?”

  “Trying.”

  Hank returned the flask unopened. “Hide it deeper. Hey—” He tried to sound casual. “D’you have a phone line open, so I could call Jody? Maybe an office nobody’s using?”

  Swede pressed a button on the phone console. “Honey, give this man a priority line to Kodiak. I’ll be down on the wharf.” He rose and indicated his chair. “I’ve been glued here six hours. Time to count missing cartons.” The door closed behind him.

  Hank took the chair, gave the number, and waited, tension growing. He’d tried to think of other things all day, often succeeded during the business of preparing the Jody Dawn to collect fish and sell supplies. On the desk, Swede’s scribbled numbers showed he’d subtracted 27 from 33 and 34 to reach fish poundage. And added 3 to “yesterday” for the time fish would storm the Kvichak. Cracked their code.

  Connections beeped and clicked. He wiped his sweat from the receiver. On one of the speakers above the desk the Italians, his old friends among them, were wondering as usual what they’d do, and on another one Fish and Game instructed boats again not to stay dry.

  “Hello?” Her precious voice, with the edge that sometimes bit but had its own music, voice that he loved.

  Keep it light. “Hi.”

  “Well. Fish jumping?”

  The cool tone hadn’t changed, but at least she’d offered a question to keep talking. On other tries during the nine days since he’d left the house she merely put the children on the line, and told the last one to say goodbye. “The run’s started, but things are pretty tense. Low price offered. Guys say they won’t fish until it’s raised, and I don’t blame ‘em. I’m caught in the middle. Since Fish and Game predicts a thirty-four million run it’ll probably turn out all right for boats to stay tied up a few days, but I hate to see all that fish go home.” He didn’t want to ask about the children for fear she’d put them on and not return. “Things . . . running all right?”

  “Running as usual.”

  Risk it. “I really miss you.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  “You’re really . . . the most important thing to me.”

  “You’ll hurt your boat’s feelings.”

  “Jody. Darling. Please. Believe me, I’m so sorry. It sets me crazy I’m so sorry.”

  “We’ll talk about that someday. Have you seen Jones up there?”

  “Not yet. They say he’s in with the strikers.” At least they were speaking. She volunteered that Adele now worried both for the state of Jones’s health because of his tension, and for their new debts.

  John Gains opened the door without knocking, frowned at Hank, and pointed to his watch.

  Hank waved him off so strongly that the door closed. He drew a breath and interrupted her talk of Adele. “I. . . listen, Jody, you’re the most important thing to me, not the boat. And the kids. Don’t leave me. I want so much to hold you.” The silence lasted so long that he wondered if she’d walked away.

  “Look, Hank. We’re busy here. Let me fill you in. This morning I took Mother to the airport and sent her back to Colorado. She knows now there’s worse than living alone with bridge games around the comer and having a smoke whenever you like.”

  “That’s good!”

  “Now I’m packing.”

  “Jody!”

  “I need time to decide things. There just has to be time. You might actually see me and the kids before long. We’re going fishing.”

  It turned out some people he barely knew, friends of hers from earlier days, had a setnet camp on the Kvichak, and she was flying up to join them.

  “Without me?

  “How otherwise?”

  “Look, look, it’s great you’re coming up. I’ll rearrange bunks on the Jody Dawn. We’ll make plenty of room for you and the kids. Just like four years ago up here on that Orion boxcar. Remember what a great—”

  “Toot your whistle when you pass our beach, Hank.”

  “But you’ll be with—my kids’ll be with strangers.”

  “With old friends you don’t happen to know. Drop ashore for coffee and I’ll introduce you.”

  “Pete’s too young. He might walk into the water.”

  “I know how to watch Pete.”

  “I’ve got to take out the boat in three hours. I can’t even meet you at the airport.”

  “You’re not expected. I’m back on my own, Hank.”

  He was in no mood for John Gains and hurried past the door. Hands in pockets, he watched only concrete paving downhill to the piers. Doing this without him! A backing forklift beeped and he jumped aside ready to shout at the driver. Machine shop oils, ammonia smells, people themselves bumping him in their hurry, it grated on him, all of it. The hulk of a container barge rose above the boards of the pier, along with the top of the Jody Dawn’s mast. Swede stood on the gangway of the barge facing two subdued, respectful men, his face as wiry and mean as the first time Hank had ever seen him in the role of tough cannery boss. Everybody else had a place while his own eroded.

  It had begun to drizzle. Below the pier, boats lay half-tilted in muddy sand, their hulls exposed. Rivulets drained seaward from puddles around the pilings. Out in the river, shrieking gulls attacked salmon stranded to their fate on humps of land exposed by low tide. He remembered how the hateful birds pecked eyes. At the far end of the long pier a colony of the thirty-two-foot gillnet boats were braced together. Men aboard them buzzed hivelike, rail to rail, spots of orange and yellow raingear, their shouts like pepper above the grinds of machinery. Some of the men were climbing the twenty-plus feet of ladder to the pier. Everybody in place but himself.

  A familiar face passed. Lean, about his own age, always tense, gray now around the eyes. The man’s raw wrists protruded from tom sleeves of red long johns covered by a plaid shirt cut at the elbows. Oh yes. When tendering the old Orion. The fisherman who argued with John Gains over payment when Gains kept the brailer suspended long enough to drip out gurry and lower the weight.

  “Oh. Sure. You were crewing on the Esther N, right?”

  “No more. Now I own her. Bought last September. Jack Simmons.”

  “Congratulations, Jack.”

  “Bought on the strength of at
least the same buck a pound we got last year.” Eyes red and restless searched Hank’s face. “You’re with the office up there, right? Have they settled?”

  “Not yet, I hear. But I’m not office.”

  “Fish and Game’s going to open soon. Don’t stay dry they’ve said.”

  “I heard that too.”

  “You think they’re going to settle in time?”

  “I. . . guess it’s up to the Association.”

  “That Association, Christ! I paid dues since all the skippers in our bunch belong and look out for each other, and now I’m one of them. Why don’t you give us a fucking price and let us fish? I hocked my house for this boat and license. Even the building in Tacoma where I have my diner.”

  “Jack, I’m not management.”

  “Now we’re going up for another vote. I can’t afford to stay dry.”

  “I understand.”

  Jack glanced toward the Jody Dawn. “Understand? With a boat like that? Guys like you can’t be both one of us and one of them.” He hurried off to join others headed through the buildings toward the road.

  Hank descended a long, slippery ladder to the Jody Dawn’s deck. Seth waited, hands on the hips of thick, greasy coveralls. Water beaded his beard and eyebrows beneath a wool cap pulled low. “Supposed to be five cartons you ordered of toilet paper come aboard I haven’t seen. You going to let every deck ape who delivers fish use our crapper?”

  “Part of the tendering, remember? You’d be glad for it if your boat had just a bucket on board. But we’ll open only the deck head, not our head inside.”

  “I ought to go ashore. Terry needs a belt for his water pump. He didn’t stock an extra. And Mo wants hooks to catch dinner out there, and we forgot Terry’s strawberry ice cream he eats all the time. Does this shithole have stores?”

  “I don’t remember. But we’ll be delivering to a big floater-factory, they’ll be stocked.” He thought of Japanese tastes. “Maybe not the ice cream.”

  “It’s American, that factory, ain’t it?” Hank kept his expression neutral. Seth sighed. “Oh man, the way you’re fuckin’ around with the Japs and all.”

  From the pier twenty feet above someone shouted, and a ropeful of cartons bumped down against the pilings. “Well, that’s your toilet paper.” Seth looked around restlessly. “So we’re going to be stuck out there? Tide’s still on the way down. We got hours. I’m going ashore.”

  As it ended, Hank used his influence to commandeer a truck. They all crowded into the cab, with Terry on Mo’s lap both joking about it and Seth gravely riding middle. The wiper blades cleared the window with a slow shlock-shlock that Terry began to imitate. Suddenly they all fell into good spirits, even sang snatches of “Home on the Range.” The bumpy road led from the cannery complex through scrub, to the single paved strip connecting Naknek to the airport. Sparse weathered structures started dotting the barrens after a mile, and their numbers increased the closer they came to Naknek. Pickup trucks sped in both directions, crowding the lot in front of a big store built of new boards.

  Inside the store, between aisles of hardware, gloves, and boots, Hank and a younger man with curly hair stopped face to face, remembered each other, and shook hands. “My dad still talks about that fishing ride you took with us four years ago,” said Chris Speccio. “He knows now you’re a big-shot crabber, read some interview in National Fisherman, but he says, ‘Maybe the man knows how to crab, but I’m the one taught him all he knows about picking Bristol reds.’”

  “Sure. Tell him that’s how it happened. Nick’s your dad’s name, right?”

  Chris laughed. “That’s a good Wop name too, but no, it’s Vito.” Hank asked about the others in the Monterey fleet, and whether their code was still based on opera. “All the same, every bit, uncles and cousins just like always. Maybe Tony’s new on my uncle’s boat ‘cause he’s just turned fifteen; time to be a man. You think we’d change? Don’t even switch code operas no more, might get us confused ourselves. Anybody who wanted, they’ve figured us out long ago.”

  Hank, cautiously: “You guys ready to fish?”

  Chris rubbed his fingers along a packet of innersoles in his hand and studied Hank, suddenly quiet. “You know our Monterey guys. Should we do this, maybe do that instead. Here the fish are cornin’ in. Should we strike with the union where we’ve paid dues for twenty years? Should we go fish like we want for the cannery that’s bought our fish for twenty years? It hurts, man. You see those reds swimming in on the flood, and what was it you came to this wet dump to do except catch reds? I want to lay out nets and see ‘em smoke. Get my hands around those big sockeyes. Not buy chewing gum in some fuckin’ store.”

  Hank understood so well it hurt to consider it.

  Chris was headed to a strike meeting at a nearby hall he pointed out through the brush. “You oughta hear it. But you’re sort of management, I don’ know. But you oughta hear it.”

  Hank and his men made their purchases, then followed where Chris had pointed toward a wide frame building half hidden by brush. They picked through a rough path hemmed by growth. Men moved in and out of the building, guys like themselves in shaggy wool with greasy cuffs. Many younger men had beards, older ones tight, grizzled jaws. Their boots had trampled the ground into a gumbo of mud and cigarette butts. The place had the same undercurrent of hive-buzz as the beached boats—edgy, voices suddenly staccato. Occasional shouts came from inside.

  “I’ve listened around,” said Seth. “How the Japs are jerking everybody.”

  “The Japanese have their problems too.”

  “That’s your company line now, ain’t it!”

  “Come on, man,” said Mo. “Boss sees things we don’t.”

  “And you see nothing at all.”

  “It’s like a movie here run backwards,” said Terry, in stride with short arms swinging. “I see guys here delivered to us four years ago. But they all look different, and nobody says hi back anymore. Know what I mean, Boss?”

  “I know.”

  They followed others inside. Men sat on folding chairs and clustered standing. Damp wool made it steamy, and smoke formed a haze. A middle-aged man peered over glasses from a raised lectern, his voice raised but difficult to hear.

  From the chairs: “You think those independents are staying dry? They’re out in the water: So if we stay dry we’re stuck through another tide even if you get us a price, and the scabs get it all.”

  “If you go wet,” said the man on the platform, “you signal you’ll fish whatever their price. Just an hour ago they raised it ten cents. We’ve got to keep up the pressure.”

  “Pressure, yeah. Look at the two years ago we struck, and what it got us was days lost on the first run, same price for boats that struck who delivered to floaters, and a hike for only cannery boats that didn’t strike. The Japs played us and won, Sam.”

  “That’s the point! The fish started running, and when our blockade didn’t work we panicked. Fish and Game has predicted plenty of fish this year. We’ll make up a few days lost. But if we give in again, they know they can tough it a little more each year and we’ll cave in. This is the year to draw the line, or we’ll be doing it again and again.”

  Lean Jack Simmons popped from his chair. “Some of us can’t afford to wait.” Grumbles and assents from others.

  “It’s for the long run—long run, Jack. This is your future. Hang tough and you’ll make up any loss. You think I don’t need to pay bills?”

  “Yeah tell us, tell us, Sammy,” somebody shouted. “You’ve fished the Bay twenty, thirty years, boat’s paid for and your license came free. What about the rest of us?”

  A man with long sideburns and a smudged cap raised his hand from among the standees. “Get it straight for me, Sam. We started out asking ninety?”

  “Ninety-one.”

  “Whatever. Now we’re down to eighty-five, right? And they’ve just gone from forty to fifty. We ought at least expect halfway from them before we settle.”

  V
oice from the chairs: “My Dillingham buddy’s just told me on radio they’re close to settling up there for seventy.”

  “Still too low!”

  A red-graveled face in camouflage hunter’s cap: “We’ll lose the fish while we fuck around here.”

  Sideburns: “You didn’t hear Fish and Game? They’ve promised thirty-four million fish this year, and man just told us they’re running late. The run hasn’t barely started. Clean your ears.”

  “You trust fuckin’ biologists?”

  “Sit down, sit down, that’s asshole talk.”

  “You want to make me?” The two lunged for each other across chairs and knees. Others intervened.

  “Wow, Boss,” whispered Mo. “These guys are pissed. I didn’t know about any of this.”

  Seth pushed his shoulder. “Wake up. You never pay attention to the important shit. Japs kicking everybody around.” He glanced significantly at Hank. “You got to stand up to the Japs or they’ll eat you.”

  Hank listened, troubled. Back in Swede’s office they were indeed playing games with these people, and it was the dictatorship of Jap money. Japanese money.

  A large, heavy man rose. It was Chris Speccio’s dad. “All these years, Sam, you’ve just called on the cannery bosses and we made deals. I don’ know how, shook hands, right? But they listened. Before we had our union nobody listened. So we need the Association. So just do what you done before.”

  “Everything’s changed, Vito. Since the Japanese started buying to freeze in ‘79. That’s what I’m trying to drive home. Canning used to be the only show and I talked to four or five bosses. Now freezing’s a different monkey with a different market. Dozens of bosses, some far away. It’s changed the rules.”

  Jack Simmons had remained standing. He started out against close-packed knees.

  “Where you going, Jack?”

  “They say cash buyers already pay up to sixty-five. Stay dry if you want.”

  The big man blocked his way. “We don’t break up like this. We stay and vote.”