Gone Alaska

by Dave Barrett

The hull was packed. Besides Tom and Hank Rapp, four fishermen I’d never met had come aboard. We sat crunched up around a flat board that had been wrestled down from upstairs, on turned over crates and buckets so our knees stuck out over the low-lying table. All of us had had our share of the 100-proof refined powder of the coca plant—and all of us, including yours truly, had been reduced to a Neanderthal state by it.

  I’d played the first dozen hands, but when I lost on a full house of three kings and two queens to Philip Swanson’s Royal Flush... I rejected his repeat offer of another $20 loan to get me back in the game. By his accounting, it would take another week to settle the account on my original $20 ante as it was.

  I sat just outside the circle now: a handkerchief to my runny nose, thinking maybe, just maybe, I’d sneak in a few winks between now and first light.

  “All right! Settle down, you turkeys!” the dealer called out. “Settle down! Bets are on the table. Now show your cards, or forever hold your cod-piece, amen!”

  The players laid down their cards. When Tom Rapp won—a third consecutive time—they went wild:

  “What’s this? Tom Rapp? Again? How the hell you figure that? You tell me—I ain’t his brother. Why, Christ—look at this card? The ear on it’s bent crooked-er than my dog’s! And this one—this one’s been folded clean in half. If that don’t beat all!”

  In spite of their accusatory language, the men were really only poking fun at Tom Rapp. If anything, they were thrilled that Rapp had won again because it gave them an opportunity to be loud again. As for his tampering with the cards, I had come to see it as a kind of joke among them: one player bending a card this way, the other that way: until, by now, no one knew which card was supposed to be which anymore.

  “Hey, Adam!” Tom Rapp called out. The younger Rapp brother had just knocked half his winnings off the edge of the table again. And again older brother Hank was bending down to salvage what he could from the floor. “Howzabout another cup a Joe?”

  Tom Rapp was looped. Obviously, he and Hank had been cutting their powder with Jim Beam on the way up. The Joe he was referring to was coffee. After I’d folded, I’d made the mistake of taking a seat beside the stove. Now, whenever one of our guests wanted another cup of Maxwell House, I had to play the part of waitress as well.

  Turning to the men seated to his left, Tom Rapp added:

  “Any of you girls needing a cup?”

  “Oh, sure! Oh, sure!”

  I refilled the cups as they came in, and then set to brewing another pot.

  Swanson sat across from the Rapps, beneath the clothing net because he was the only player small enough to fit under it. His money was stacked in perfect columns of quarters, dimes and dollar bills—in sharp contrast, for instance, to the slopped heap beside Tom Rapp’s right knee. Since snorting his share of the cocaine, Swanson’s already natural inclination to fidget had accelerated to a remarkable degree. His fingers seemed constantly to be rearranging cards; pinching subtle creases into them; tapping the tops of them for a new draw. The cocaine had plastered a perma-grin on his face. His eyes, shifty as they were, moved from one player’s hand to the next with such comic intensity that I had to control myself from laughing right out loud. Although he wasn’t winning, he was holding his own.

  The dealer was calling out the next hand. But to no avail. Tom Rapp was stealing the spotlight again: going on and on about the magical qualities of the perfumey hair tonic he’d greased his head with for the occasion. Apparently not one to be upstaged, the dealer, one of the men I hadn’t met, smiled to himself. His pale blue eyes narrowed, glinting like metal. Then, still smiling, he reached beneath the table and, for the third time tonight, brought out his steel cowbell. I shook my head. Each time the players became too unruly, this fisherman used the device to call their attention back to the game. And each time he’d rung it, the contraption had only escalated their unruliness. All the same, the dealer, smiling ear to ear now, rang it loud and clear:

  CLONG!

  CLONG!

  CLONG!

  CLONG!

  CLONG!

  Not again! I thought. Call me a spoil sport... a stick in the mud... a sissy... what you will... but comical and lively as this bunch may have been... it was simply too much for my raw jangled sleep-deprived nerves. Enough! For everything there is a season! I was so exhausted that a perma-grin was fixed on my own face. If only I could get out from between the two Texas-sized players I was sandwiched between! I needed air. A place to think...

  “Hey! Adam!” a voice rang out from somewhere in the hull. “Adam!”

  I glanced towards the Rapp brothers, thinking it was one of them ordering another round of coffees. But the Rapps were still going on and on about Tom’s hair tonic: now claiming how it drove the women wild.

  “Adam!”

  It was Swanson. He’d been blocked from view because the man seated next to him had stood up to run his hands through Tom Rapp’s hair for good luck. I could see Swanson gesticulating behind the fisherman’s backside. He was motioning me to lean closer that he might be heard.

  “How you doing?”

  “All right,” I said. “Still tired though.”

  Swanson shook his head, cupping an ear.

  “Tired!” I shouted—so loud that Texas on my right frowned angrily.

  “I was thinking... ” Swanson continued, leaning closer now. “Since you’re just sitting there... how about heading out back and taking care of that small bucket of hooks you didn’t get to last night. There’s a good chance we’ll be needing them tomorrow.”

  “All right,” I answered, already standing up from the metal toolbox I’d been sitting on. “I’ll do it.”

  “Hey, Phil?” I overheard a fisherman seated next to him call out. “How about loaning the big fella to me when you’re done with him?”

  But hadn’t heard the rest of the man’s lame joke or Swanson’s reply as I scurried up the 5-step ladder out of the hull.

  Half an hour later I sat filing hooks on the cooler out back, a Coleman lantern propped at my feet for the close work. Fog had drifted in between the time we’d dropped anchor and when I’d come out on deck, visibility at about a hundred yards. The other trawlers assembled nearby were whited-out from view.

  Jacked as I was on Maxwell House and cocaine, it didn’t take much to conjure up the dream of the Beast I’d had two nights running. The Beast was half-dragon and half-machine and had risen from beneath a reef to destroy the world. With gargantuan shovels at the ends of its arms and legs and a huge hydraulic winch connected to its tail (like the winches I’d seen on a giant factory trawler—only bigger), the Beast had piled through these bays and inlets and quiet coves devouring everything from the ocean floor up. While the Beast grew, the world around it diminished: until all that remained of these watery fiords and forested islands were dry steppe and tumbleweed and little muddy creeks trickling through empty canyons.

  I think the Beast was a metaphor for feelings I’d been having since my talk with Sue Ann Bonnet. I was just then beginning to realize how my species had become a kind of parasite upon this earth: an invasive species destroying everything and anything that came in way of our appetites.

  “Enough!” I thought aloud.

  What was wrong with my species! How was it we couldn’t see past our greed? Why couldn’t we understand that we were fowling our own goddamn nest by not respecting this magnificent world that was our one and only home? Were our baser instincts—the weak side of my species--destined to bring doom upon us?

  Hooks finished, I turned off the propane lamp. To the east, the horizon was already reddening; the stars above the distant white-capped peaks beginning to fade. In less than an hour, we’d be fishing again. Looking down at my hands, I thought how gray and plastic they looked in my lap. They no longer looked like my own: just tools now like the other men’s hands. Balling them into fists, I found that it hurt to do so.

  There were sounds along shore. I saw two large ravens combing the
shell-strewn beach for food. The birds seemed like huge bats in the blue-gray gloom. They were in disagreement over something or other, cawing loudly. I remembered being told that seeing a raven fly in the first light of dawn was a sign of good fishing ahead.

  “Just my luck!” I thought aloud.

  The card party was quieting. No doubt our guests would leave soon. Then, maybe, I could con Swanson into allowing me a half-hour nap. Swanson himself was probably pretty worn out by this point.

  And I was about to continue on to the wheelhouse, when I became aware of something in my periphery, something coming towards us from the water and the fog. Turning slowly in that direction, I stopped mid-turn: my mouth, no doubt, gaping wide.

  “Oh, shit! Oh, shit!”

  Rising out of the sea like Poseidon himself, a navy blue supply barge—at least a hundred feet high—emerged through the fog. Frozen, my eyes fixed on two large deck lights at opposite end of the barge’s slanted prow, glaring down at us like the fiery eyes of the Beast I’d seen in my dreams.

  Stumbling, tripping over the bucket of hooks—I finally came out of my shock. The barge was about seventy yards away, heading straight for us. There was still time to warn the others. Racing to the door of the wheelhouse, I yelled out the only thing I could think to say in brief enough terms to rouse the men:

  “Fire! Fire! Everyone on deck!”

  It did the trick. Punching and kicking and clawing the men below clambered for deck. I head the card-table overturn in their wake; the sound of coins flying across the room to the floor. One man cried out that he’d been bit; another that his head had been stepped on.

  Rushing back outside, I climbed the ladder leading to the roof of the wheelhouse to untie our skiff. There was still time! The barge was a good sixty yards away. We might have to swim for it: but at least no one would be trapped below when the Western World went down.

  The men were on deck, some even in their skiffs, hurriedly untying them from their stays. All were shouting:

  “Fire? What fire?”

  “No!” I shouted back, motioning towards the oncoming disaster with my head while my hands worked furiously on a knot. “No fire! The barge! It’s heading straight for us!”

  Swanson appeared on deck now, running right beneath me. He had an oil-smudged rag in one hand and a monkey wrench in the other. Even in the ashen light, his face was brick red, and manic. Like those before him, he was yelling “Fire? What fire?” He mumbled something about there being no fire in the engine room.

  The skiff untied, I was free to glance over my shoulder and see why the men were still standing about. The barge, which had been coming towards us at such a good clip, was stationary now, about forty yards away.

  Word had been passed among the men so, in some quarters, laughter could be heard.

  “Oh, shit!” Tom Rapp laughed. “Ain’t no fire, Phil! It’s just young Adam! He thought the barge was going to hit us!”

  “Barge? Hit us? What?” said Swanson, looking from one fisherman to the next. “Don’t fuck with me, you bastards! What in the hell is going on—“

  “No. That’s right, Phil,” said another man. He pointed at the barge from his skiff, no longer paddling. “It was the kid.” Grinning, he added: “Must have been smoking some pretty strong shit!”

  By now I’d become aware of the long wire cable extended out of the water connected to the side of the barge. Before I could explain for myself, Hank Rapp said:

  “That crazy kid of yours thought the barge was gonna wop us when it was only straying on its anchor!”

  Feeling about two inches high, I descended the ladder. I wouldn’t even try to defend myself. It was too stupid! A barge barreling down on an anchored boat?

  Shrugging my shoulders at Swanson, I was met by a hard fist that knocked me off the last rung of the ladder to the deck.

  “Get up! Get up?” Swanson said, standing over me with monkey wrench still in hand. “Get up before I smash your teeth in.”

  I was already crawling to my feet, grabbing hold of a rung of the wall ladder. Swanson’s sharp left had come out of nowhere, like a hardball striking a sleeping infielder. Checking my mouth for blood, I found none.

  “I was trying to warn you,” I said.

  Those fishermen still on deck had closed ranks around Swanson and me. Most were still laughing, their bead-set eyes registering FIGHT. I was careful not to appear too confrontational. First off, Swanson’s punch had really done a number on my head. Second, I figured if we got in an out and out brawl, and I was somehow able to put Swanson down, the other men—with the possible exception of Tom Rapp—would side with Swanson and finish the job for him if he fell.

  “Don’t you ever yell fire on this boat unless you goddamn fucking mean it!” Swanson said. He’d lowered his wrench, but was still fuming.

  “You tell him, Phil!” someone piped from one of the skiffs.

  I cringed, forcing myself not to look in the man’s direction.

  “Now get your ass downstairs and clean up that hull. We’re pulling anchor in half an hour.”

  Turning to the other men, Swanson said,

  “All right. That’s it, boys. Party’s over. We’ll split the pot between us.”

  Overwhelmed, but glad to have a hole to climb into, I made for the wheelhouse. By the time I reached the ladder leading down to the hull, the topic of concern among the men had become who had and who had not been winning prior to their card game’s disruption.

  Chapter Fifteen

  A Close Call

  By ten that morning I’d stopped counting. Bam! The second I’d cleared a line of one salmon and set the brake to bring in the next it was jackpot all over again. My clothes, hands, arms and face were splotched and splattered with the blood and scales of these salmon. I was literally running back and forth between the cockpit, the cooler and the holds below deck; slipping and sliding and side-stepping past disemboweled carcasses of salmon; so busy and so drunk with fatigue that the danger of what I was doing didn’t occur to me. Everything was simply jerk and reflex now.

  It was noon: the sun straight up, the sky a pale blue, cloudless. The seas were relatively placid: swells running across the broad green waters like a zephyr across fields of wheat. All around Esther Island came the frequent far-off flash of salmon harvested on the decks of other trawlers in the drag. Gulls chased the trawlers in tow: wheeling, swooping, and diving in our wakes for another handful of fresh-tossed innards. A gang of them flapping three feet over my head had become so aggressive that I sprang up from my crouched position over a half-gutted salmon and slashed the air with my knife and even nicked one of the birds on its leg. Cursing at the unruly birds, I stumbled back into the cockpit 15 seconds later. The trolling pole on my left was already shivering: signaling another catch.

  “Damn it!” I cursed out loud.

  The holds were already three quarters full. Where was I supposed to store the catch if things continued at this pace? Slamming back the release lever on the brake, I whirled in the next line.

  I’d seen Swanson only twice since our 5 a.m. breakfast of peanut butter sandwiches and leftover corn chips from last night’s card party. On both occasions, we’d only exchanged grunts and nods towards each other. This had been just as well with me. In spite of my old grievance that I did the bulk of the work while Swanson ogled over back issues of Hustler magazine, it was a luxury to not have to deal with his incessant nagging. My single hope was to make it through this last day on Esther Island without incident. During the three-day closure coming up, I would decide whether to quit the Western World. Even if I couldn’t get anything out of Swanson for the first three weeks of work, I figured these last three days of record catches on the Island should bring me a least a few dollars. Something for my misery.

  The clothespin and rubber snubber for the next tag-line were clear of the water, with reach. With the same hurriedness of movement, I re-set the brake, and then unclipped the tag from the main trolling line. Feeling the power and size o
f the salmon on the end of this line, I wrapped the snubber part of the tag around a forefinger and climbed out of the cockpit. I’d land this one at center deck: take no chance of losing it.

  A minute later, I had the forty-pounder aboard. I was crouched over it at mid-deck, had just opened it rose-pink belly to remove the flowery innards. While scraping the excess stomach lining off one of the two flaps of meat with the side of my blade, a shadow crossed over my work. Swanson, of course. He was inspecting the catch. Leaning over the cooler, he lifted out individual salmon and began to finger the meat. Shortly after breakfast, I remembered Swanson scratching the bottom of his pipe for resins. If there was one thing I couldn’t tolerate right now, it was another of his little THC fits.

  “Hey! I said hey!” Swanson began—his voice with its characteristic shriek, his boots in my face. “What’s going on back here? How am I supposed to sell this kind of shit? Huh? Who in the hell would buy this kind of slop?”

  I ignored Swanson: flipping the forty-pounder over and scrapping stomach lining off the opposite flat of meat. Often, in the past, Swanson would simply walk away if I continued working right on through one of his little fits.

  “Are you fucking blind, man?” Swanson continued—his voice making me cringe. “Look how you’re butchering the meat... ”

  My hands were trembling so badly now I had to stop. All morning I had been preparing myself for just this sort of confrontation. I’d promised myself I wouldn’t let him get to me. If I could just get through this last day! And here it was... happening all over again.

  “What?” I shouted—my head still down. “Look at what?”

  “The meat, damn it!” Swanson cried, furious now. He was pointing down at the pink flesh: his finger jabbing inches from my nose. “Look how you’re dragging the knife all crooked along its belly. Sweet fucking Christ... ”

  I strained to see the supposed marks: but found the straining only made my eyes blur worse. From overuse or zero rest or plain dumb stubbornness, I couldn’t—or refused—to see a damn thing.