Firestorm

by David Klass

  Gisco’s eyes shut tight. Fortitude, Gisco. It’s your duty to watch this. He forces them back open.

  Chill, Purina breath. We’re just casting a net out.

  Gisco swivels his head to look at me. You may be the beacon of hope, but you’re as blind as they are.

  Blind about what? We’re just going fishing.

  There’s a deep sadness in his face that makes me recall Eko, on the roof of the beach house. I remember how she sat silently, her fingers cupped, her eyes wandering over the night sky, as she contemplated the imminent loss of all the beauty that she knew would soon be gone forever.

  Now I’m getting the same combination of fury and futility from Gisco. The only difference is that Eko also felt guilty, perhaps because she was a human.

  Gisco has no such burden. He’s angry and terribly sad. But he’s also, oddly, a bit curious.

  His eyes sweep the trawler from stem to stern, staring at the faces of crewmen. It was always my biggest question about the Turning Point. The one thing I could never quite understand. What were they thinking? Your species is, after all, intelligent and capable of deep compassion.

  Dog eyes can be unexpectedly expressive. Gisco’s are wide and wet with sadness. Now that I see it, I’m starting to understand.

  I stand next to him and watch the positioning of the nets. There’s the smell of the engine, and a fume of lube oil. I ask him: What do you understand now?

  He’s watching the men who are doing the work of lowering the nets. Crew members of every race and color, stripped to the waist and sweating in the hot sun. Their muscles, straining. Their serious faces. Eyes intent on their tasks. None of them look like bad or evil men. As they scraped the floor of the oceans bare reef by reef and acre by acre, they were just too busy to care. It was a hard job on a sunny day. They were just going fishing.

  48

  The big boat slows as its net is lowered.

  “You’ll feel the otter boards hit the seamount,” Ronan promises.

  “I didn’t know there were mountains in the sea,” I tell him.

  “There’s a whole range of them called the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Coral grows on them and fish just love them.”

  And trawlers love to destroy them, Gisco contributes darkly.

  “Your dog doesn’t look so good,” Ronan notes. “Is he seasick?”

  It’s heartache, carrot top, Gisco mutters telepathically, and walks off, shaking his head.

  The big trawler judders all along its length, as if it’s struck a small iceberg.

  “That’s the otter boards hitting bottom,” Ronan tells me, excited. “Now we’ll start to fish.”

  The crew finishes positioning the net and opening the great doors.

  The next three hours pass very quickly.

  Anticipation builds. The increasing drag of the trawl net pumps the crew’s excitement up and up.

  I share the adrenaline rush. Like a big-game hunter, seeing a bush move near a watering hole. Will it be a rhino? Lion? Wildebeest? You grip your gun and you wait.

  Or, in my case, I grip the handle of my shovel and join the crew at the starboard rail, peering down into the water.

  I can tell they’re imagining the catch. I also try to picture what’s going on more than a thousand feet below us.

  In my mind’s eye I imagine a vast school of orange roughy teeming above the cold and shadowy seamount.

  Our net sweeps forward, anchored to the bottom by the footrope, skipping merrily along on its weighted wheels.

  The rock hoppers jitterbug up boulders. Shimmy through coral. The great steel doors are spread wide, zeroing in on the school of bottom-feeding fish we’ve located from above.

  Orange roughy channel in through those huge otter board doors. Are caught in the net. Swim in circles trying to find a way out, but are funneled to the back, till they end up packed into the cod end.

  Then the mouth will close and the net will be hoisted up. I imagine a victorious cheer from the crew. The fish will be deposited on the deck in a flopping reddish heap.

  The orange roughy will go to the slime line to be filleted. I’ll shovel the small, unwanted bycatch back into the ocean, and everyone on the boat will celebrate.

  That’s what I imagine. What’s Gisco’s problem? Men have been fishing for thousands of years. People have to eat. Fish is a good source of protein. The ocean covers three quarters of the earth’s surface, and we’re just trawling one tiny swath of it.

  Perhaps coming from an awful future skews your judgment. Eko was full of gloom and doom, too. Vegan meals. Rooftop ruminations. Since the future is so messed up, maybe my canine companion is just a bit too sensitive.

  The trawler moves very slowly now, just two or three knots. Chugging along, pulling a laden trawl net. I can feel the load of orange roughy a thousand feet down.

  Maybe when our catch comes up, the captain will relax and I’ll be able to play a little more soccer and do a little less scrubbing. Maybe they’ll pass around rum and dance the hornpipe, or whatever the modern equivalent is.

  “That’s it, boys,” Rudolf, the fishing master, finally shouts. “Haul it up.”

  The winches grind as the cables are brought in, wound around huge spools by hydraulic motors. It’s painstaking progress—the reverse of when the nets were let out, except now tons of fish are being dragged up from the depths.

  I gather with other crew members on the starboard side of the work deck, waiting expectantly.

  Ronan stands near me. “Ready with your shovel, lad?”

  I shrug, unsure. “How will I know an orange roughy when I see one?”

  “Can’t miss ’em,” he assures me. “Reddish orange. Bony heads. Big eyes. Fillets are great, broiled with a little white wine. Real distinctive taste.”

  Maybe it’s ’cause they grow so slowly, Gisco suggests, padding up to join us. Orange roughy live to a hundred and fifty years. The fillet you’re thinking of cooking is probably older than your grandmother.

  “If we’re lucky we could hit the jackpot,” Ronan adds, peering down into the water. “When they spawn they gather in huge schools.”

  Since they live so long, they don’t start breeding till they’re twenty-five. So when you wipe out a school of breeders, it takes three decades to replace.

  “Oh, stop being so negative,” I admonish Gisco. By mistake I utter the words out loud.

  “What, lad? Who’s being negative?”

  “No, not negative. Nets. I said here come the nets.”

  They are brought on board in reverse order. First the giant steel doors are remounted on the sides of the trawler and locked back into position. Then the footrope is hoisted aboard and lifted to the back of the work deck by a derrick.

  The body of the net is tugged up and moved to one side, where it will not get in the way. The cod end is now visible, just off the stern ramp. It’s not a small bundle anymore. It’s become a giant orange bag, ten feet wide and long as a school bus, cinched up with white ropes.

  I hear a few of the crew members curse, but I don’t understand why yet.

  Hooks are placed in the cod end, and a crane is used to drag it up the ramp and onto the work deck. It instantly becomes the center of activity as a dozen men surround it. I stand back, trying to get a glimpse of exactly what is taking place.

  Angry curses are ringing out more frequently now, as different sections of the cod end are unstitched and the catch is dumped onto the deck.

  Curiosity gets the better of me. I creep forward for a closer look. Worm my way between two burly sailors. And then I, too, see it, and I catch my breath.

  49

  There must be some mistake. The net is orange, but the fish in it are not. Nor do they have bony heads or big eyes. Sure, a few of them do. Here and there I see flecks of bright orange in the vast, dark trawl net. But it looks like just a smattering of orange roughy.

  It’s a catch of bycatch. A school bus of bycatch. Tons of other fish, squid, octopus, crustaceans, corals, and anemones that
are breathtaking for their variety and diversity. In fact, the mountain of sea organisms dumped gleaming on the work deck have only one thing in common: they’re all dead or dying.

  Eko tried to teach me how to communicate telepathically with wild creatures, but I could never seem to make the connection.

  Now, for a split second, a previously unknown little trapdoor in my mind blows open. And I hear it. And feel it. Don’t ask me how you can feel a sound, or a thought, but I sure do, just the way you can feel thunder. What I hear makes me tremble and drop my shovel on the deck.

  A cold HOWLLLLLL of pure, primordial pain sweeps across the deck like an icy wind. I’ve never heard anything like it in my life, and yet somehow I know exactly what it is: the final agonies of a million life forms, hauled up from their reef, crushed during the trawl, and now slowly dying from the radical change in pressure.

  As quickly as it opened, the trapdoor in my mind whips shut and I pivot.

  This is Eko’s training, too. The anticipation of a blow that I do not see. The fist comes from behind me, and by turning my body at the last second, I dodge the worst of the punch. It’s First Mate Eye Patch, in a foul mood. “Stop gaping, pick up that shovel, and get to it.”

  So I get to work. And it’s not fun.

  The sun is directly overhead, beating down on the tons of bycatch that I’m trying to shovel back into the water as quickly as I can. The mountain of sea life seems to be moving and melting and moldering all at the same time.

  Heaviest and most dangerous are the branches of coral that the rock hoppers cracked apart and pulverized. All of the coral is sharp to step on, but some that crew members call fire coral burns my skin on contact.

  I weave and sidestep around the deck, digging into the heap of bycatch with my shovel. A dozen times, and then a hundred, and then a thousand, I carry twenty-pound loads to the edge of the deck and dump them back into the ocean.

  I try not to look down into my shovel, to see what’s stirring there, alive and in pain. But sometimes that’s impossible. I often have to pry apart things that have gotten tangled up with each other or enmeshed in the netting.

  And to do that, I have to look.

  I pull apart branches of broken coral trees that have been wedged together like stacks of firewood. Octopus and eels are stuck deep inside the stacks, as creatures that spent their lives in caves sought some familiar hiding place from the unknown force yanking them skyward.

  Anemones, starfish, mussels, and sponges have to be sliced from the mesh by the shovel’s blade so they can be tossed overboard in dying clusters.

  Then there are the deep-sea lobsters and crabs. Some still grip the orange nylon with their claws as if continuing to fight against a baffling enemy.

  The small catch of orange roughy is taken belowdecks to be processed by the slime line. The fillets are frozen, while their heads, tails, bones, and guts are fed into drainage systems that scramble them and shoot them out in red flumes behind the boat. The sailors call this vapor of fish paste gurry, and there’s a tail of seabirds a quarter mile long that follows our boat, cawing loudly as they snack on the bloody mist.

  Listening to the hungry calls of the feasting seabirds, as I bend to my grim task, I start to understand why the captain said this was a floating factory of death.

  Most of the fish we hauled up, however, are not orange roughy. There are thousands of them, their scales flashing all the colors of the rainbow as they lie on the deck. Their eyes are bugged out and their bellies have exploded from the change in pressure. Their protruding guts are the first things to stink in the sun.

  Last, and most horrible, are the larger fish and sea animals. There’s a dead dolphin. Dolphins breathe air, so I guess that this one must have been snagged while diving and drowned when the trawl net took him to the bottom. As I haul him by his rear fin over to the side, I touch his skin—soft as the most luxurious leather—and remember the dolphins that saved me when Eko and I were menaced by the bull shark.

  A giant sea turtle lies upside down on the deck, flailing with its legs, bleeding gobs of red blood from a cracked carapace. I grab its tail and with another crewman drag it the length of the work deck to the stern ramp.

  The cracked shell makes a pap, pap, pap sound as we haul the turtle along. Blood stains my shirt and pants. I make the mistake of glancing into its eyes.

  I know sea turtles grow slowly, to great ages. How old is this Methuselah of the deep? Two hundred years? Three hundred? How many times has it circled the earth, only to be entangled in the nylon net of the Lizabetta and cracked apart by the weight of the trawl? It looks back at me and seems to be asking, If you weren’t going to keep me, or eat me, why did you do this?

  I have no answer for the dying giant, so I shove it down the ramp and it sinks out of sight.

  An eternity later, I toss the last shovel of bycatch into the ocean and drop my shovel.

  Are you okay? Gisco walks up next to me. You don’t look so good.

  I’m not so good.

  What’s the matter?

  Instead of answering, I vomit over the rail.

  50

  Grumbling during dinner.

  Unhappy fishermen. Paid partly by how much they catch. Disappointed. Fearful that they may be blamed or even fired for the day’s orange roughy debacle.

  By whom? I don’t know. Not the captain.

  Someone above and behind the captain, pulling the strings. Someone they’re too scared of to name directly.

  They allude to him in whispers as the Boss.

  “A friend of mine was on a skunked boat,” one sailor says, between reluctant spoonfuls of Jacques’s odious fish stew. “The Boss radioed the captain and had him sack the whole crew. Left them stranded in Nouakchott.”

  “Where the hell’s that?”

  “Mauritania. A thousand miles from nowhere.”

  “Aye, the Boss’ll breathe fire when he hears about this,” another fisherman agrees in a nervous whisper.

  I wonder who this mysterious Boss is, who sacks whole crews and breathes fire. Could this be the monster my father warned me of?

  The men start drinking. Beer, whiskey, rum. They chug the beers and slug the hard stuff down straight. Their voices get louder, and tempers start to flare.

  I’ve never seen fishermen drink before. Bottles sprout like a glass forest on the table, and empties soon spill out of a trash can.

  “If we were going after orange roughy we should be off New Zealand,” an African sailor complains.

  “You know the limits there have been taken,” Ronan points out.

  “So what? Russian boats still go in.”

  “That’s true enough.” Ronan lowers his spoon and spits on the floor. “What is this crap anyway?”

  “The finest fish stew you’ll ever eat,” Jacques announces proudly. “I gave it the special family flavoring.”

  “Does that mean you pissed in it?” Ronan asks.

  Jacques grabs a cleaver. “One more word and I’ll cut your tongue out.”

  “Then at least I won’t have to taste your swill.” Ronan stands. “And don’t you ever pull a knife on me.”

  “It’s not a knife, it’s a cleaver. Would you like to see how it feels?”

  In answer, Ronan swings a rum bottle against a table leg. The bottom shatters into a crown of jagged glass.

  The other crewmen back up fast, scurrying out of the way as the fat cook and the tall Irishman square off and begin to feint and swipe.

  “I’ll cut your lying throat open,” Jacques promises.

  “Come on, then, Fat Man. I’ll gut you like a fish.”

  Jacques is surprisingly nimble on his feet, but Ronan is younger and quicker, and has a longer reach. He swipes suddenly and the jagged glass rakes the cook’s shoulder.

  Jacques trumpets like a wounded elephant as red blood stands out against his blue tattoos. He picks up one of the benches, which must weigh two hundred pounds, and charges forward with it. The bench becomes a bulky battering ra
m that knocks Ronan off his feet.

  The big cook is on him in a second, swinging his cleaver in lethal arcs. Ronan desperately rolls under a bunk.

  Jacques squats and circles, trying to get at him, slicing and dicing the air. When that doesn’t work, he shoulders the bed sideways, and the heavy iron frame tips. It falls to the floor with a resounding crash, depriving the Irishman of his cover. Ronan tries to roll away, but Jacques corners him against a wall. The cleaver begins to descend …

  A gunshot rings out and everything stops.

  Jacques’s arm literally freezes in midair.

  We all turn.

  First Mate Eye Patch stands there, gun in hand, ferocious look on face. “Drop the knife.”

  “The bastard cut me …” Jacques protests.

  The first mate’s pistol swings toward the cook. “If anyone’s killed on this boat, the captain or I will be the one doing the killing. Last chance. Drop it.”

  With a salty curse, Jacques lets the cleaver fall. “Later on, I’ll finish you for sure,” he promises Ronan.

  “No you won’t,” the first mate snaps. “Don’t you fools know it’s bad luck to spill blood on a fishing boat?”

  Superstitious crew members murmur their agreement.

  “Now all of you go to bed,” the first mate tells them. “Tomorrow we’re going to be trawling a virgin reef.”

  The crew likes the sound of this. Men shout out, “Finally,” and “That’s the stuff.”

  But First Mate Eye Patch isn’t done yet. “Mark my words,” he warns from the doorway. “If there’s any more fighting, I’ll sack the lot of you and hire a new crew that likes to fish. Do you all understand that? Ronan?”

  “I’m going to sleep, sir.”

  “Jacques?”

  “I’m a peaceful man,” the big Canadian growls. “Except when some fool insults my bouillabaisse.”

  “Is that what it was?” a sailor calls out. “I thought it was raw sewage.”

  Jacques climbs into a top bunk, insults all of our mothers in French-English, and pulls the curtain closed.

  51

  Semidark bunkroom, still thrumming with the bloody energy of the knife fight.