Flotilla

by Daniel Haight

  “What’s up with him?” I asked.

  “He’s a jerk,” Riley said. “Only reason I work here is ‘cause he’s my step-dad. I can’t quit and he can’t fire me.” He brightened. “I keep waiting for him to fall overboard ‘cause then I’d own the place.” He started slicing onions while I looked around a bit.

  Riley talked about how many girls he’d met working here and hinted that they didn’t just invite him out to their boats for fishing. It was a small place, but set up like a ship’s galley – not a spare square inch. The cooking area was the size of a truck bed and most of that space was for the grill. Up front was the cashier/dining area.

  The Grill was small but it still had a bar counter with five stools, a front area where we made sandwiches and refreshed a box of cold drinks that lived on a bed of shaved ice. The painted stools were of the home-brew variety; the paint job looked like someone filled their nostrils with different shades and then sneezed on it. From the cashier to the railing was about ten feet of deck and that gave the location plenty of foot traffic. Beyond that I could see the colony spread out almost like a map.

  As the day wore on I got started making burgers on the grill and serving them. If you’ve handled the gas grill at home, there’s really not much else to it. Riley had to show me how to work the deep fryer for fries and corn dogs but after that he kept his distance. The heat was murderous in that little shack.

  The sun knifed off the water and cooked the corrugated steel roof of the Grill, turning it into an oven. I realized what Riley was so thrilled about when he heard I was going to be the grill man. By two o’clock it was over 115 degrees in that shack and would peg the little lawn thermometer next to the grill out at 120.

  Riley gave me a battered Camelbak that he had filled with ice water. After I sucked down the first one, he added some Gatorade powder – it kept me from passing out. At the end of the day, my clothes were soaked and caked with salt. This was a hot, miserable job.

  I was so worn out at the end of the day that I collapsed in a sweaty, smelly heap on the couch in the salon. I was supposed to help Dad with Pen Patrol when I got done but I was in no shape to suit up and go swimming. Dad said nothing and did it all by himself. I guess it wasn’t that big a deal – he’s been caring for these fish long before I got here. I was back at the Grill again the following day.

  After about a week, I had the process down. It was still hot and miserable but even hot, miserable jobs can be fun. Good jobs have you focused on what you’re doing. A bad job makes you focus on what you can get away with. If there was a ‘Good Job’ out here, you better believe they weren’t wasting it on me. We would take turns hosing off the deck with a saltwater hose but Jeb stopped this after our fifth hose fight. We started had impromptu snowball wars with the leftovers from the shaved ice bin. When girls would cruise by, we’d try and talk with them – we kept score on numbers, email addresses and anything that suggested we might get past first base.

  The girl operation was pretty simple – between the two of us we had a sex appeal factor of zero and thus it was more of an obnoxious extreme sport. We thought up the weirdest pickup lines and then dared each other to use them. Some girls laughed, some tried to slap us. I tried one on this hot white chick who was a few years older than us and here visiting with her boyfriend. He got mad and then tried to pick a fight with me after the grill shut. Jeb saw what was going on but refused to give me up.

  “If you catch him, he’s yours,” he said and it was all I needed to hear. The guy had just arrived and it was nothing to lose him in the colony – after you leave the gangplank there’s eighteen ways to hide and it just goes from there. I guess you could say that I was learning the lay of the land out here. The guy was a retard, though. He showed up the next day to start some trouble but Jeb told him that the offer expired at midnight.

  We ran out of propane for the grills one Tuesday but Jeb refused to let us leave early. Riley had screwed up the cash register and he was pissed off about it. Neither one of us were allowed to go. I was bored out of my mind and re-reading a 20-year-old hunting magazine when I heard something scuffle behind me.

  “Heads up!”

  I looked up just in time to get a raw squid slapped across my face. The gooey, briny mass slithered off my face and landed on the deck. I immediately stuck my face out of the nearby window and started dry-heaving. Sometimes I kid like that but not this time – I really lost my lunch.

  Pranks grew crazier and weirder over time. The only rule we had was: don’t get caught. If you get caught, you’re on your own – we both agreed to not narc on each other. Riley built a launcher out of some surgical tubing and we’d find leftover fish or other disgusting junk to send out over the water. This led to a formal complaint from the Phoenix after two boats reported being pelted with rotting fish.

  The more stuff we screwed up on, the angrier Jeb got and the angrier he got, the harder we laughed. Behind his back, that is. Jeb would yell at me, yell at Riley and then yell to my Dad who either ignored Jeb or made me sleep in the cold on the top deck, whichever one he felt like. He yelled at me but he refused to fire me. I didn’t understand why until later.

  I was finishing up with scraping the grill one afternoon when Riley appeared. All that crap that builds up on the flat cooking surface of our grill filled a 5-gallon bucket by the end of the day. It was every bit as disgusting as you can imagine.

  “I have an idea,” he announced. Reaching into the bucket of greasy, sooty junk that I just scraped, he grabbed a handful and started painting his face with it. I stared at him – had he finally snapped?

  “Now, you,” he said. I thought to myself: Why not? I took some and started gingerly dabbing it onto my face, but Riley shook his head. “No, you gotta get serious.” He took a handful of sooty grease and smeared it across my forehead.

  I gagged on the smell. It was completely nauseating. “That’s disgusting!”

  “I know, keep going!” He finished his paint job (if you could call it that) and reached for a stack of cheese slices that I used to top the cheeseburgers. He put one or two on top of his head and then put a burger bun that he’d added mayo and mustard to on top of that. “Now you,” he said. The race was on to make myself into the grossest food nightmare ever seen on the Colony.

  I tried to outdo him but once he saw what I was up to, Riley went back and started adding to his own hamburger. I ended up dabbing long streaks of mayonnaise and mustard to my face, Indian-warpaint-style, topping my ‘burger’ with tomatoes and lettuce and using the ketchup bottle to paint a nice big smiley-face on my shirt. Soon we were ready for display.

  I let Riley do the talking when we went back out to the front where a couple of customers were waiting. An older white lady was waiting to buy a cold drink and started laughing as soon as she saw us. “What on earth is going on?” she asked.

  “It’s a new promotion from Jeb,” he said. “He wants us to dress like our food.”

  “Exactly,” I added. “He thinks it’ll bring us more business.” She laughed, bought her drink and left. Before long, a crowd started to gather to see what she was laughing about. We did end up getting a lot of business and not a few pictures taken by the Pacific Fisheries Admin Office for the next company newsletter. I still have a copy of it somewhere … ‘The Phoenix Burger Boys Really Get Into Their Work’.

  The attention eventually attracted Jeb, who was so used to having little or no business that a crowd in front of the grill could only mean that we were up to something. He stormed up to the front of the grill and started to shout when Riley stopped him cold. He punched a button and the cash drawer flew open, giving Jeb a good view of the take we were bringing in.

  “That was a good idea, Jeb,” he said softly. Jeb stared at the money for a long minute and then back up at Riley. He turned around and walked away through the crowd without another word. For Riley, any attention was good attention and any time he could make Jeb look stupid, well, that was just the cherry on top.

&nbs
p; I finally got fired after the streaking incident. I still don’t know why I fell for this – Riley dared me to streak, run naked, on the Phoenix. We needed a tie breaker after running neck and neck for the most girls talked to and pranks pulled in a week. “I don’t know anyone who has the guts,” he declared after he suggested streaking to me. “But if anyone did, it’d be you, bro.”

  It was almost seven in the evening. The walking traffic was dying down and we’d be closed in 15 minutes. It was getting almost dark enough to turn the lights on. I had to run around the entire afterdeck and back again – maybe 20 yards total – to win. He’d already spent a couple hours trying to convince me but when he said he’d proclaim me winner and throw in fifty bucks, well, what can I say? I did make him show me the money, though … I wasn’t that stupid. I started getting ready.

  “Go!” he shouted and I was off.

  To keep me from getting caught, I found an old paper bag in the back and poked some eye holes in it. I must have broken the record for the 20 yard dash as I tore off. I was moving too quickly to hear any screams; I don’t think anyone really noticed. I was coming around the other side and within 5 feet of the grill when I saw that the joke was on me. Riley had rolled down the steel doors we used to close the grill up tight at the end of the day.

  I could only yell ‘Oh–‘ before I slammed full speed into the metal roll-up doors. They crashed like cymbals and I fell to the deck. Riley was inside, laughing his head off. My paper bag came flying off and it was obvious who it was, if it wasn’t before. I jumped up like a shot and started slapping the metal doors for Riley to let me inside.

  Riley responded by flipping on the music we played to attract people … I was doing the Full Monty to some Tejano music. I heard a woman scream and start laughing – I pounded on that door like I was on the inside of a burning house. “Com’on, man!” Riley’s response was to turn up the music louder.

  This naturally attracted everyone on board and I'm sure a few out on the Colony, too. I’ve never been more humiliated in my life. Finally after a minute he opened the door and I could go inside. I screamed and swore at him while I dressed but he was laughing too hard to really notice. Riley was decent enough to pay me the fifty bucks which I had more than earned. The crowd outside was laughing, too; it was the best joke they’d had all month.

  When Riley rolled up the doors again – a great cheer rose up in the crowd. At that moment, there was nothing else for me to do but raise my arms up like a champion boxer and take a bow. They cheered some more … my butt was certainly getting a lot of attention out here.

  Jeb, on the other hand, wasn’t amused. He fired me for ‘gross insubordination’ or something. Dad was kind of mad at Jeb but more so at me. “When we’ve got a thing going, I don’t need you drawing attention to us,” he said.

  “Thing?” I asked. “What ‘thing’?”

  “Never mind,” he grumbled and that was the last I heard of it. Later, Riley told me that Jeb’s friend, Virgil, had heard about the incident and was threatening to pull his money out. Dad had to go over there and calm him down. It sounded like a big problem but I still didn’t know what it was all about. Business deal? Scam?

  At first I felt guilty, but then I decided not to worry about it. Dad’s scams were his business – when he wanted to cut me in on the action and tell me what was going on, I’d be more careful. I told him as much and his response was to make me sleep on the upper deck out in the cold air.

  The next day Riley came by and told me how the girls were asking about me. When I told him about being fired, he waved it off. “You don’t need Jeb,” he said. “I’ll get you some more hours at the Range.” Miguel was a second-second cousin to Riley … his farts were horrific but he was turning out to be a gold mine.

  With my increased notoriety, the day jobs started rolling in. I started doing some gardening work for Gramma Alice. Like Marie, grew hydroponic vegetables on board the Green Thumb but she also grew fish on the E-Ring like we did. Some people said she had something to do with the old Hippy days but I never knew what. She was always out there working her rows of veggies and fruit and wearing a big, floppy sun hat. Our deal was for whatever she was growing – I never saw a dime. Out here, vegetables are almost worth their weight in gold.

  Gramma Alice always had an air of mystery around her. The rumor was that she maintained a pot grow house. She would get visited all the time by Pac Fisheries, the Coast Guard and the DEA whenever they had an excuse. She always came back clean as a whistle … she was always polite and never had a problem.

  They pulled a surprise inspection on her one morning when I was due to go over there. I spent an hour cooling my heels on the dock outside until the Security guys in their yellow windbreakers finished looking for whatever they thought she had. She was always sunny and cordial … to their faces, anyway.

  As far as the Pac Fish employees – it was very much an ‘Us vs. Them’ kind of thing. The official employees of Pac Fisheries lived on the Phoenix and certain designated craft nearby. Some of them were pretty cool and others acted like the cranky managers of an RV campground. Part of that came from the memos out of corporate and it was up to them to decide how broadly they were to be interpreted. Some of the Pac Fish people were willing to put the hammer down rather than lose their job. It would have been the height of embarrassment to lose your job and then contract to come back out and work as one of the people you were in charge of only a few months before. So there was a sense of following the letter of the law and that made the relationship between the colony bums and the Pac Fish people a little tense.

  I approached her tentatively thinking that maybe, she wasn't up for company. The search was immediately forgotten and she was as nice as she could be. “Hi, Jim,” she said. “How’s your Dad?” She had a soft spot for Dad, I realized.

  “He’s good. What am I doing today?”

  “I got some new bags of fertilizer,” she said, “and some chum work.” ‘Chumming’ was a miserable job and didn’t hunting sharks. She would take dead fish from other boats, put them through a wood chipper and use what came out to feed her fish. It might sound interesting but she never cleaned the chipper out and as a result it smelled like the world’s worst outhouse.

  I groaned about the chipper – it was my least favorite job. I was pleasantly surprised not to get the lecture, though. “I got a cure for that,” she said. She went to the sink and pulled out a small jar. Opening it, she held it out to me and said: “Take a dab and smear it on your upper lip”.

  “What is it?” I asked. It smelled strongly, like eucalyptus or something.

  “Vicks Vap-o-Rub,” she announced. I’d seen it before in the store. I took a smear of it on my lip and the overpowering scent made my eyes water. I couldn’t smell anything else, though. “Get to it,” she said – waving me toward the back porch and the waiting fish.

  I left the boat and started navigating the docks toward her pens. Some places were more intricate than others – we were satisfied with large, football-field-sized pens but others thought smaller. Gramma Alice had dozens of smaller pens that she used to grow different varieties of fish. Her dock system was huge – maybe fifty yards from the boat and the rest of the colony. It had taken her years to get things where they were and it wasn’t likely she would ever leave. The pens were organized by the size of the fish that lived in them. The larger, carnivorous fish were in pens farther from the boat and it took a few minutes to reach them.

  It was far away from any boat and for good reason: The stink from the chipper would have caused complaints if it was any closer. It ran on biodiesel and always took a minute or so to start up. I used that time to slice open the shrink-wrapped bales of fish and get them ready to go in. She had whole bales of rotted fish that were shrink-wrapped for transport and came apart in your hands when opened. Absolutely disgusting … not much of a surprise that she didn’t want anything to do with it. My feet were sliding on rotted fish guts and bird poop – the seagulls always visited o
n days we were chumming. I was feeding her stock of tuna with this junk and they boiled to the surface as the food splashed in. In seconds, seagulls were landing on the surface of the water and squabbling for anything that floated to the surface.

  I finished the chumming in time to see that girl on the Jet Ski scream by on her way to another ‘practice run’. She was close enough to smell the chipper and made a face as she went past but she still waved to me. I still didn’t understand what the practice runs were all about but she was seriously hot. Anytime she wanted to run by here was fine with me.

  After the chumming, I had to haul those bags of fertilizer in from the dock. The 50-lb bags of fertilizer were really bags of coir – peat made from coconuts. It was still miserable lugging them up her tiny ladder-like stairs. She was filling over a hundred identical terra cotta pots with the fertilizer and then hanging them from some cool little wooden holders. She was using the side of the Green Thumb to make more room to grow. Between trips, I remembered a question I wanted to ask.

  “HMS Green Thumb”, I read aloud so she would overhear me. “What’s ‘HMS’ mean?”

  “Normally, His Majesty’s Ship,” she replied, “in the Royal Navy. “But I’m the duchess of this yacht – so it stands for Her Majesty’s Ship. Me.” She tossed me a cold bottle of water that she had brought out and disappeared again. I took the opportunity to sit down with my feet hanging over the side of the top deck … I hadn’t realized how tired I was. The green smell of the gardens wafted over to me through the salt air – it was really chill to just relax here and enjoy the day.

  Dad wandered by as I was finishing the Gramma Alice job. They talked for a bit while she filled two grocery bags with fresh veggies. Dinner that night was a couple of freshly-caught tilapia from the pens and some of the carrots, done up tempura style. We had a quiet evening at home, which probably sounds boring but after the last few weeks it was a welcome change.