To Gus’s laughing amazement, Jones held out his hand to shake with Hoss. “What about your wife back home, asshole?”
“Adele’s a fine girl. You tell her if she can’t do without me for a little while, she can come meet me here in Kodiak.”
26
CRAB DREAMS
AUGUST 1951
Harold Simmons was Hoss’s proper name. Jones made a note of it as he signed the boat’s log and became a crew member of the fifty-four-foot wood hulled dragger Kodiak Star at two-thirds provisional pay. A boat some twenty feet longer than his own troller out of Kodiak. Engine about double the size and three times the horsepower of his own, and diesel at that. Certainly more elbow room in the cabin, perhaps because anything that could be moved was tucked snugly away. Jones’s own boat, shipshape by ordinary standards, suddenly seemed a mess in comparison, even though he’d occasionally sneered at the pigpens kept by other fishermen. Yet the orderliness made him feel right somehow. It didn’t hurt to have standards, and maybe since he’d left the Marines, he’d let a few lapse.
Hoss patted an upper bunk with a clean, bare mattress. “Yours. Sheet and blanket down there in that cabinet. Got a sleeping bag with your gear?”
“Back on my own boat in Ketchikan. Up in Bristol Bay we just slept in blankets and a bearskin.”
“I heard they lived like pigs up there.”
Jones suddenly felt defensive. “Open boat. Only a half canvas for shelter!”
“Yeah.” After a pause, Hoss offered, “You can borrow my extra bag for a while. Get it cleaned ashore before you give it back.” Standing face to face, Jones noticed Hoss’s eyes were gray, and his expression had turned impersonal, no longer vulnerable nor defensive. “I don’t need to tell a marine that everything stows exact aboard here.”
“Last thing you need to tell me.” Jones found himself snapping it, almost adding the obligatory “sir!” He felt like he was back as a private—at most a corporal—answering to his sergeant again, back before he became one himself. In the years since the Marine Corps, he’d become accustomed to his own authority on the water and to accepting orders from his dad with a shrug toward age and experience. Maybe it was a bad decision to come aboard here, to leave Gus behind. But he remembered the heft and spiny feel of the strange new crabs. As soon as Jake, the other crewman, staggered aboard—swaying drunk—and crawled into his bunk, Hoss started the engine and announced: “We’re off.”
Jones stood with him by the wheel. It felt wrong not to be in charge. As soon as they had left the shelter of the harbor, the boat’s bow pitched and westerly swells began to push them a few degrees off course. Behind the wheel, Hoss corrected easily, but not before they approached a red whistle buoy and Jones automatically let out: “Need to take that to portside.”
“What the fuck you think I’m doing?” Hoss demanded. The course he had set skirted the buoy without issue. “Maybe what you want to do is ready the drag on deck.”
“Figured first off I’d follow how you two did it, since I’m more used to line and seine gear.”
“Then don’t be givin’ the orders.”
Reeling from the sting, Jones clenched his fists. He hadn’t taken officers’ shit since leaving the battlefield. But in all fairness, it was better to follow new gear at least once before trying it alone. Once was all he’d need. He wouldn’t screw it up.
“Think you also need help finding the ice chest topside? You’ll want to get out some hamburger, cabbage, and carrots to cut up. Light up the stove there. Got coffee water to boil. Or you think I’d better show you first?”
Without replying, Jones went on deck and climbed the ladder topside. He squinted into a low sun ahead on the horizon as he pulled the provisions from the neatly ordered boxes. He barely noticing the spray plumes that cascaded from the bow, and he re-entered the cabin, dripping. Before he could search around the sink for a cloth to wipe off with, Hoss remarked, “I don’t expect to slip on a wet galley deck.”
Jones clenched his fists again, ready for the impending battle. Marine horseshit all over again. Then, suddenly, even in his own mind, he shrugged. Damned if I haven’t done this to myself What the hell. He found the cloth and hunkered down to wipe up the water he’d dripped.
It took them only a few hours from Kodiak to reach the deep water where crabs might be schooling. But, two days later, they were still scouting. Their drag brought up bagfuls of fish they didn’t need except for meals, but only a stray crab or two. Skipper Hoss turned more and more demanding. Their lack of any success seemed to spur him on and he drove his two-man crew harder and harder. When the depth sounder suddenly crashed without warning, “Shit! No! We’re not going back to town just to have the fucker fixed, maybe have to buy a new one,” he shouted as much to himself as to the others. “Fuck no—not till we find the crab we came for! I know the fucking crab is here!”
Net-hauls gone wrong didn’t mean slack. When they weren’t hauling web every couple of hours to check it, Hoss had both his men on deck—rain or sun, daylight or dark—heaving hand lines to give him depth. Jones—as the junior man, he was also designated the cook—soon barely had time to render bacon in a pan and throw in slices of fresh-cut fish before he was ordered back on deck. Hoss gobbled his fried fish on the run, lapping up the grease with a handful of bread, and it was clear he expected Jake and Jones to do the same.
“Reason you got aboard here so easy,” Jake muttered to Jones as they stood on either side of the boat, tossing and pulling back hand-over-hand their fathoms of dripping line. “Last guy wasn’t taking any more of this shit. I’d go too but for don’t feel like being on the beach. Salmon boats were all crewed for the season when I got here last month. Work on a cannery line like a gook or a girl. Or college kid? Not me!” He laughed. “After the Marines, I wasn’t going to take shit no more. And now here you see me. At least it’s hard shit, not soft. Familiar. Know what I mean?”
“Mebbe.” Jones swiped a hand over his face to clear a shower of spray. Water in rolls higher than their rail broke across deck. But sun glistened on the wave crests. For reasons he couldn’t explain, Jones was not unhappy—even though his hands ached from the cold water on the line and he’d slept only hours in the past two days.
“Look sharp now!” called Hoss from the exposed wheel topside. “Pull your lines. Make sure they’re coiled proper. We’ll haul again since it feels like we’ve got some drag.”
“Yeah, yeah,” muttered Jake.
“How’s that?”
“Nothing, Skipper.” A few minutes later, Jones and Jake stood opposite each other astern ready to grab and secure the otter boards when they surfaced. The trawl warps clattered up the ramp accompanied by water that sloshed a foot deep around their boots.
When the last strip of marker surfaced on the cable, Jones called, “Twenty-five.”
“Fathom twenty-five,” repeated Skipper Hoss. “Steady as she goes. Stand
by.”,
“What’s it look like we’re doing,” muttered Jake automatically. The wooden otter boards surfaced. Hoss slowed his winch until the boards had thumped alongside port and starboard, then stopped for his crewmen to secure them with chains. “Hustle it,” he called. “Ain’t got all fucking day.”
“Got all fuckin’ day and night,” Jake hissed under his breath.
“What say out there?”
“Nothing.” Jones wiped another gust of spray from his face. The water had slammed him hard enough to enter under his oilskins and creep cold down his neck. Somehow it didn’t feel bad. Maybe even good. The top of the trawl bag broke the surface. Giant crab claws waved through the mesh.
“Well look there!” exclaimed Jake, and to Hoss he called: “Found ’em!”
Indeed, as the trawl bag flattened against the ramp and inched aboard, it was clear that they had located a pod of king crab. The bag undulated with the big restless creatures. It was alive with them. When the bag finally lay on deck, Hoss strode over shouting, “Don’t touch it!” and he pulled
the mouth open himself. The crabs spilled out on deck, crawling over each other sluggishly. When one left the central pile Hoss nudged it back gently with his boot. “Got our week’s money here, boys. Maybe the fucking month’s money if we can sell ’em all.” He peered across the water at a distant gray strip of Kodiak Island. “What’s your last sounding? I’m going down to mark us on the chart. Then you forget this location, hear? No call to have a hundred other boats dragging what we found.”
Jones found himself laughing.
“You see something funny here, Marine?”
Jones returned Hoss’s glare eye for eye. “Funny as hell, marine! But don’t worry.” He strode over and lifted one of the heavy crabs by a leg. He started waving it, enjoying the feel of its weight. “What we found here’s
I 5?
ours!”
“Then put him back on the pile and treat him like food, marine. This ain’t play, you know.” Jones considered, then dropped the crab lightly back into the pile. The creature burrowed in, knocking its big-shelled mates aside.
In another hour they had hosed and stowed their load of king crab. It might have made sense to return to Kodiak, but Hoss declared, “We’ll keep these alive and scout some more.”
It had now turned dark for one of the few hours of Alaskan summer night. Jake straightened his back and stretched. “I’m sacking a few hours and you can sniff it. We’ve been up on this deck twenty-some hours—since before sunrise last morning.”
Hoss glared at him, then said dryly, “Go on then, if you can’t take it, just when we’ve hit what we came for. We’ll manage the next drag without you.”
Jones, too, felt bone-weary. He watched Jake peel off his oilskins and rack them carefully on a hook by the cabin. He disappeared inside. Jones, too, lingered hosing himself down. “Setting again right here, eh?”
“No. I’m scouting. Go on two or three miles, then set again. I need to see the size of this.”
“Well. If you can do it, so can I.” Jones started toward the cabin. “Shout when you get there and ready to set.”
“I expect soundings on the way.”
“Then wait a fuckin’ hour.” Jones opened the hatch door without removing his oilskins and started down the steps.
“Marine! You forget my rules about wet-gear inside?” Jones straightened, aching for a fight. He wore weather gear, yes, but it had now been hosed and dried by the wind. “Call me in an hour, marine.”
In the warm cabin he stretched out on the bench along the table, and fell asleep before his head reached the board.
Crabs pushed against each other, crawled over their fellows. Their shells had faces. Jones recognized his own among them, but he was also outside the pile, watching them struggle, aching, in the pile. Faces of old Marine buddies. They all talked to him at once, while the mouth of his own face moved up and down. But it was warm, nice, because they were all together.
Then the fire started. One by one the faces screamed, burned, blackened, remained screaming. And Jones realized he’d already watched each one of them die at least once before. The fire flickered closer to his own face. Its scorch reached him, closing in on him, and he felt the heat just when he woke. He lay on the galley board, listening to his own breathing.
“Ready to set now,” said Hoss, looking down at him. “Guess I can take the sounding myself.” Jones rose. Relieved to not be burning.
“No, buddy. I’m on it.”
27
SWEDE SEES CRABS
Swede followed three sealed cartons of company documents to the steamer. One of the fishermen, now crewing aboard as part of his contract, pushed the cartons up the gangplank on a dolly. On deck, Swede gripped one of the cartons himself to show that he wasn’t above doing it—but it was, perhaps, the lightest—then returned to the ship’s office for a final check.
“Okay, finished!” he told his assistant. “Office closed. Company’s sending me west for a look at something else. Anything left is yours to care for and deliver safely.”
“Got it.”
Swede went to his quarters to close down there. The day at the end of August supervising the shutdown of the cannery for the season had begun at least twenty hours before. Swede removed only his shoes before he lay back on his bed and fell asleep.
Yet even in his sleep, he continued to run. Everything under his care needed to be considered. Had he really accounted for all of the cartons of tin cans filled with fish? Cans by the thousands. He raced among towers of boxes, checking destinations. And there to halt him was an officer in a green uniform—his chest high as bricks. He stared down. Demanded, “Woher gehen Sie?”
“Nowhere, sir!” Swede declared in Swedish and then added the same word in Norwegian, telling himself all the while that it would have been wiser to answer the officer in German, although he couldn’t remember how. The officer seized his neck in a chokehold and propelled him toward an iron gateway. The grip held him entirely—helpless. His thoughts whirled: Will they torture me with electricity, or fire, or something unknown and therefore worse? Fire indeed glowed beyond the gateway. And screams came from the dark inside. Would he be able to keep the secret that this shipment of fish was not on the books? That it was to not be sent to Germany like the rest but smuggled across the border to the Norwegian fighters and never to be seen again? The officer’s grip transferred to his shoulder, shaking him, a preliminary to the torture.
“Mr. Scorden! Sorry to wake you. Stuff here you forgot to sign.”
Swede bolted upright. Had to shake himself to clear his head. He reached for the clipboard the man handed to him. “Ah. Yes. So.” He scribbled his signature. “So. Yes. Good. Thank you.”
Alone again, Swede tousled his hair askew then pushed it smooth once more. He decided not to try to sleep further. He tied up the laces on his shoes and walked deep in thought back from the cannery living quarters to the office. Rain spattered in his face. He welcomed it gladly.
Inside, Swede surveyed his Naknek office for the last time before closing. Furniture and flooring, now bare to the wood, looked already as bleak as the winter to come. Before he would enter the room again next spring to set it all back in order, cycles of ice would probably have lined the windows and frost would have glistened on the ridges of the desk. Rats would scamper here free from harm.
All creatures should be free from harm. He shrugged to dissipate the remaining cloud of his dream. Except fish, of course, killed mercifully for eating. Naturally . . .
Leave no loose papers—who knew what someone might find? A few irrelevant sheets of paper still lay in one of the drawers. He tore them up and stuffed the pieces into his briefcase. He’d drop them into one of the large, anonymous trash bins by the piers. He even removed the calendar from the wall—no use wasting its remaining pages when he now had an office at the cannery in Seattle.
Down the ramp by the main buildings, he joined the two trusted foremen who were to remain for the final closing of the processing and storage areas. Together they strode to inspect the deserted, echoing spaces where fish had been noisily collected and prepared just days before. All was clean, all scrubbed and disinfected—even down to the concrete flooring. Although, inevitably, there remained the faint odors of fish and machinery oils. Odors not that different from Father’s fish plant so long ago in the old country. Before the German bastards took him.
“Yes. Good. Good. Okay,” he declared, still trying to think past the dream. Nevertheless, he made it his business to stop once to point out a rust stain in the crevice of a heading machine and once for a fish scale stuck to the side of a flume—just to prove to the others that he was alert.
In a few days, a winter watchman would take over to guard against any pillaging at the hands of the villagers. The man had done the job for several seasons as a company employee. He’d fished once—had even prospected for gold, he’d said when he’d visited to arrange his quarters the week before. An unshaven, quiet fellow of the kind they called “old-timer,” with tobacco-stained teeth.
Who knew how he passed his nights? One rumor had it that a Native woman from the village moved in with him after everyone else had left. Well, why not? It might save the fellow from dreams, good or bad. Swede shrugged to himself. After tomorrow, the cannery wouldn’t be his concern again until next April. Meanwhile, the company was sending him off to a different, most curious assignment. Just when he thought all had been settled, this new adventure came along.
Next afternoon, Swede flew from Naknek’s airport at King Salmon to the island of Kodiak, where he’d never set foot before. The flight, which should have taken an hour, stretched into five—with hours of waiting time at the rudimentary airport because of bad weather. At last, with nothing to see along the way but gray clouds below, the plane reached Kodiak in heavy rain.
In the town of Kodiak, he’d need to learn the exact whereabouts of the trawling vessel Deep Sea and at what port he could meet it. His mission was not to spy, exactly. Rather to ascertain and report back to the company in Seattle. The vessel, owned and run by former cannery people, employed Scandinavians on deck, and this was the reason his own company’s vice president for expansion had suggested they send him. Could the notoriously large king crabs—which until now most people had seen only in photos or as meat in tin cans with a Japanese label—become a viable American product?
All offices in Kodiak had closed for the day. After checking in at a hotel barely more elaborate than a cannery bunkhouse, Swede walked out into the rain. People brushed by him in slickers dripping water, joking and seemingly oblivious to the weather. Hardy people, even the women. The single main street had enough shops to raise it a notch above Naknek, but it had nowhere near the scope and variety as in Ketchikan. At least he found a restaurant that had tablecloths. With a flush of anticipation, he ordered the single crab dish on the menu. The crab, served as rounded chunks of meat—as if it had been sliced from a tube—, had a rich flavor that made the accompanying pink sauce unnecessary. Yes, he thought. This was crab that could be marketed.
WARRIORS Page 30
