Lord of the Deep

by Graham Salisbury

  Bill stuck his head out the cabin window. “Let’s take her in.”

  Mikey, still on the bow, untied the Crystal-C and tossed the mooring line down into the skiff.

  He turned and nodded to Bill.

  Bill throttled up and swung the boat around, standing at the wheel in the dim yellow cabin light. Lord of the deep. It was kind of a joke, but that’s what Mikey called him, because as far as he was concerned, Bill was the best deep-sea charter-fishing skipper there was.

  Mikey took up the neatly coiled dock line and stood with it in his hands. Like springs, his knees rode the easy rise and fall as Bill walked the boat toward the pier.

  Mikey breathed deeply, sucked in the salt air. For long moments he studied the fishing boats in the bay as the Crystal-C eased past. Marjorie-Ann. Iwalani, Tiara, Magic, Lynell. My boat will be moored here someday. Maybe I’ll drop a hunk of concrete out near Bill’s, hang my buoy there. Mikey wondered what he’d name his boat. So far he liked Kaiolohia, which meant calm sea, as in the early morning.

  One light illuminated a circle of concrete, a single bulb under an aluminum reflector high on a post. Its yellow glow made Mikey imagine boats and oceans and faraway ports of call.

  Back in Lahaina before Bill, his world was different. Near the sea, but not of it. There he had two good friends, Ricky and Elroy, and his mother and a black cat named Raisin. He had a grandmother, too, but she lived on Kauai, another island.

  Then Bill came and everything changed. Mikey’d liked him right away, mostly because of two things.

  The first was, when Bill came over to see his mom, he actually sat down with Mikey and talked to him—asked how he was doing in school, what his friends were like, did he like surfing, and, of course, was he a fisherman. The other guys that came around never did that.

  And two, Bill took him out on the Crystal-C. Right after he met Mikey’s mom, Bill said to him, “Come. We go holoholo. Take out the new boat. Just us men. What do you say?”

  Mikey smiled, remembering.

  Just us men. He’d never forget that.

  Bill edged the boat up to the pier on the starboard side, facing the ocean. Mikey jumped off with the bow line and secured it to a black cleat.

  The Crystal-C had been chartered for three days straight by two brothers from Colorado, Cal and Ernie Flynn. Yesterday was the first day, and they’d caught nothing. Skunked. That happened to everyone, even the best. Fishing was like that. But these guys wanted action, and it worried Bill, because they were the kind who’d come back year after year to charter his boat—if the fishing was good.

  They were big guys, in their late thirties, Mikey guessed. This was their first time in Hawaiian waters.

  Mikey liked them well enough. Sort of. They were kind of weird. One of them drove you crazy with his really bad jokes. But they told stories about elk hunting in Utah, freshwater fishing in Alaska, river running in the Grand Canyon, and rattlesnake hunts in the Arizona desert. They stretched the truth by miles, Mikey had no doubt about that. But so what?

  Today Cal, the older brother, would be bringing his daughter along. Mikey looked forward to having a little kid aboard. He could tell her stuff he’d learned from Bill.

  Mikey went about readying the boat as Bill had taught him to do—wiped salt off the windows and morning dew off the seats and the fish-fighting chair with a clean towel, chopped up the ice for the drink cooler.

  Bill studied his drawer of lures, setting some aside.

  Mikey looked up when Eddy Shin and his garbage truck came grinding out onto the pier. The truck crashed and banged and mashed the contents of the pier Dumpster into its belly, then headed over toward the Crystal-C.

  Eddy shut off the headlights and the engine and got out. His neck was as wide as his head, and his arms were so packed with muscle they stuck out to the side when he walked toward the boat.

  He grinned, looking down on Mikey with his gloved hands on his hips. “Shee, how come one runt kid like you got a job on this fine boat, huh, you tell me that?”

  “Because I’m good,” Mikey said.

  Eddy laughed. “I believe it.” He grabbed the starboard outrigger and stepped down onto the boat. “Where’s the boss?”

  “Down in the engine room.”

  Eddy pulled off a glove and reached out to Mikey. “So how’s it going?”

  Mikey shook Eddy’s huge, rough hand. “All right, I guess. Except the guys we’re taking out are kind of weird.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. Bossy. One of them tells really dumb jokes.”

  Eddy shook his head. “That’s why I like my job, yeah? Don’t have to deal with guys like that. So what you been catching these days?”

  Just then Bill came up the companionway. “Hey, Eddy. What’s new?”

  “Well, seven fat papio, that’s new. Caught ‘em down Keauhou last night. Best fishing I had in a month.”

  “Using what?”

  “Black squid lure.”

  Bill nodded.

  Mikey wondered what the black squid lure looked like. And what it was like casting off the rocks at night. He’d seen guys out along the coast with torches.

  Eddy said, “I hear you got some bozos on board today.”

  “Yeah, but they chartered the boat for three days straight. They said next year maybe they’ll book us for five days.” Bill shook his head. “But we got skunked yesterday.”

  “That happens, sure,” Eddy said.

  “They want marlin.”

  Eddy nodded. “That’s why they come, yeah?”

  “Problem is, it’s quiet out there.”

  “You should try live bait, what Black Bart used to do. Catch ’em all day long.”

  “He was before my time. But I’ve heard of him.”

  “I think he’s in Florida now. But man, the guy could bring in marlin like no one I ever saw in my life. Four, five, six hundred pounds. When every other boat was getting nothing, he still caught ’em. The guy was unreal. His first year he caught eighty-seven swordfish, eighty-seven! Chee. That’s what, six a month? Seven? Lucky if you get three a month.”

  Wow, Mikey thought. You’d get anglers from all over the world with a record like that. You could make a fortune. And talk about building a rep. Jeez.

  “Make sure the rods and reels are good and dry, would you, Mikey?” Bill tossed Mikey a fleece mitt.

  Mikey slipped it on.

  “So what you going do about these guyses’ big fish?” Eddy said.

  “I still got today and tomorrow. If I get skunked three days in a row, I might as well sell the boat, huh? But we’ll see some action. I can feel it in my bones, something good.”

  Eddy ruffled Mikey’s hair. “With a deckhand like this, how could you lose?”

  “Can’t.”

  “I heard you hired somebody, but I didn’t know it was Mikey.”

  “I didn’t think he’d be ready for a while yet. But he’s proving me wrong.”

  Eddy made a fist and Mikey tapped it.

  “How’s little Billy?” Eddy said to Bill.

  Bill looked down, then up. “He’s doing fine.”

  “You making ends meet?”

  “Yeah . . . thanks to Mikey. He’s working for tips.”

  Eddy clapped a hand on Mikey’s shoulder. “You one lucky man, Bill Monks.”

  “I got a whole family of luck, Eddy.”

  Eddy nodded and looked across the water toward the lights on the other side. “Well,” he said. “Gotta go. Hey, Mikey. How’s about sometime I take you night fishing? Show you how for catch papio?”

  Mikey grinned. “Yes sir, that’d be great!”

  “Fine. I call you up.”

  “But I don’t have a spinning rig,” Mikey said.

  “I give you one. I got six.”

  “Really?”

  Eddy glanced up at Bill. “I think this boy going be one of us, yeah? Look his eye. See that light? One of us, all right.”

  Eddy tapped Mikey’s shoulder, th
en lumbered off the boat. Mikey could have hugged him, garbage smell and all.

  CHAPTER 2

  MIKEY STOOD with the fleece mitt on his hand. In the dim morning light he saw three people walking along the seawall. Cal and Ernie. And some lady?

  This was Cal’s daughter?

  Huh.

  As she approached he saw that she was more like his own age, or a little older.

  Bill put his hand on Mikey’s shoulder. “Now listen, I want you to talk with Cal’s daughter today. Don’t just go off and sit by yourself. Make sure she has everything she needs, all right?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Good. What we’re doing now is trying to build a relationship with these men. You’ll understand what I mean when you get your own boat.”

  Mikey quickly wiped down the fishing rods that Bill had set on the bunk. He threw the mitt into a drawer. Keep busy, he thought. Don’t just stand around looking like you don’t know what you’re doing.

  He picked up the length of loose rope he’d been trying to splice into a loop for the past two days. Bill had been showing him how. It would be cool to be seen doing that when Cal and Ernie arrived at the boat.

  Mikey squinted, trying to get a better look at the girl. But she was hidden behind the men. He wondered if she’d be easy to talk to. Did she like fishing, or had she come along only because Cal made her come? He’d seen that before. Last week some guy’s wife came along, but it was obvious that she didn’t want to be there. She didn’t say a word to anyone the whole day.

  After they’d come close enough to see him splicing the rope, Mikey tossed it back into the drawer. He went over and snugged the starboard gunnel up against the truck-tire bumpers on the pier. Bill stood next to him with his arms crossed.

  Cal and Ernie looked down on them.

  “Mornin’, Billyboy,” Cal said.

  Bill smiled and said, “Men.”

  Cal and Ernie wore shorts, leather deck shoes without any socks, and gaudy Hawaiian shirts Mikey wouldn’t wear in a thousand years. In the gap below Ernie’s chin was a chain with a shark’s tooth hanging from it. He hadn’t had that yesterday. Cal didn’t have one of those, but he did have a gold ring with a red stone the size of a fish eye on his finger.

  Cal was some kind of scout for a hunting and fishing club that could send more business to the Crystal-C than Bill ever dreamed of—if the boat could produce fish, of course. Well, it would.

  Ernie had three white box lunches tucked under one arm. Cal carried the beer—two six-packs, same as yesterday. He stepped aside and turned to look back at the girl.

  She was fifteen or sixteen, looked like, wearing jeans shorts, white canvas deck shoes with socks, and a blue tank top. Her hair was long, straight, and golden. It fell nearly to her elbows.

  She was carrying a paperback book and a tablet of some kind. And a small pouch that looked like a purse.

  Cal said, “Hold these a sec, would you, Ali?”

  She tucked her things under her arm and took the beer from Cal.

  Cal pulled a cigar from his shirt pocket and peeled away the cellophane wrapper, glancing around the pier as he did. He lit the cigar with a wood stick match, then crumpled up the cigar wrapper and dropped it.

  Mikey watched it fall. “Billyboy, Billyboy, Billyboy,” Cal said, in a long sigh.

  As an afterthought, he nodded to Mikey.

  Mikey didn’t miss that Bill ignored all the “Billyboy”s. Bill said that most of the time he got great anglers on the Crystal-C. But sometimes he didn’t. He once told Mikey, “Just send whatever you don’t like out the other ear.” Then he laughed and added, “As long as they’re paying the bill, of course.”

  The girl pursed her lips and stooped down. She grabbed the cigar wrapper, balancing the beer on her knee, then stood and jammed the wrapper into her pocket.

  Cal let out a smoky puff.

  He shook out the still burning match and flicked it over the boat into the water. With the cigar in the middle of his mouth, he said, “Fine day, fine day.”

  Bill smiled up at him. “I smell action today, men, I do smell some big action.”

  “Action would be a real good idea,” Cal said.

  Bill grinned.

  Cal took the six-packs back from the girl and handed them down to Mikey. Mexican beer. Tecate.

  Bill reached up for the box lunches.

  Cal put a hand on the outrigger and stepped down onto the boat. Ernie followed in the same way.

  Ernie dipped his chin to Mikey. “Get that on ice, boy. Beer ain’t no good warm. And bury ’em deep, you hear?”

  “Yes sir, deep.”

  “All right.”

  Mikey glanced up at the girl, still on the pier.

  She looked back at him. Not smiling, not frowning. Just looking.

  Mikey took the beer to the cooler.

  He wasn’t sure how he felt about another pair of eyes watching over everything he did all day long.

  The first bottle of beer he took from the carton slipped out of his hands. It clanked on the deck and rolled away.

  “Jay-zus, boy, you want that thing to explode in somebody’s face?” Cal said.

  “Sorry, sir.” Mikey grabbed up the bottle.

  Bill held the stern line taut and reached up to help the girl aboard. She took his hand and stepped down onto the boat.

  With five people aboard, the Crystal-C suddenly felt a whole lot smaller to Mikey. Out on the water, the deck of a boat was all the world you had. What was he going to say to this girl, anyway? What Bill would say? That didn’t help, because he knew what Bill would say—all kinds of ocean stuff that Mikey still had to learn. Why can’t we just go on out and fish? Who needs to talk? But Bill had said, “Charter fishing is as much about people as it is about fish, Mikey. Don’t forget that.”

  Ernie rubbed his hands together. “Let’s go. We’re burnin’ daylight.”

  Mikey glanced toward the mountain. Daylight was a while away yet.

  The girl headed into the cabin, brushing past Mikey. Her eyes were blue, and so pale they surprised him. He wanted to stare at them. You didn’t often see eyes like that. He tried to smile. Probably looks as fake as it feels, he thought.

  Her face flushed slightly. She looked away, then sat at the table. She set the tablet down. And the book, The Agony and the Ecstasy. Mikey’d heard of it, but he didn’t know what it was about. It was kind of fat.

  Bill went to the wheel.

  Out on deck, Cal stood gazing at the black silhouetted mountain above and beyond the village, rising into the purple gray sky. “We’d better catch something today, by God,” he mumbled to Ernie. “This is . . . embarrassing.”

  “Ain’t that the truth,” Ernie said.

  Mikey looked into the cabin to see if Bill had heard. If he had, you couldn’t tell.

  “Set her loose, Mikey,” Bill called.

  Mikey scrambled up onto the pier. He untied the bow line and threw it aboard, then ran aft and untied the stern line and tossed it down on deck. He leaned out over the gap between the pier and the Crystal-C and shouldered the boat away and jumped aboard.

  Bill throttled up and headed out of the harbor.

  The engines grumbled, sickly sweet diesel exhaust swirling up and into the stern cockpit. Cal stood looking back, his knees pressed up against the transom. Ernie sat on the fish box.

  Mikey stepped up onto the starboard gunnel and quickly spidered his way forward. There he coiled the bow line and laid it neatly on the deck near the forward hatch cover.

  He then worked his way aft and coiled and stowed the stern line, doing it all perfectly, doing his job.

  He wondered if anyone had watched him.

  CHAPTER 3

  THE SKY TURNED A PALE GRAY VIOLET, and golden light fanned out behind the island. Soon the sun would burst up over the mountain and flow down onto the silver black sea and turn it blue, and the island would ripen to greens and purples and browns.

  Behind the boat, the village grew small. Scatt
ered lights along the shore winked like campfires. It wasn’t possible that the world could be more beautiful than it was from a boat in Hawaiian waters, Mikey thought.

  Well, from what he knew of the world, anyway.

  Mikey shook his head.

  Better get to work. What to do next?

  Get the rods out and put them in their chrome holders. But which ones did Bill want to use? Every day was different. Bill made his choices by the weather, the currents, the shape of the terrain in his depth recorder. Even superstition.

  Mikey went into the cabin.

  “Which rods should I take out?”

  “Let’s run four lines for now,” Bill said. “Two one-thirties and two fifties. I’ll come back and pick out the lures in a minute.”

  Bill glanced over at Cal and Ernie, now at the table with mugs of steaming coffee, both of them squeezed onto the bench seats with the girl.

  She looked bored, gazing out the window at the dark coastline. Or was she watching everyone in the window reflections? Watching him?

  “I figured we might troll on out to the marlin grounds,” Bill said. “That okay with you?”

  Some fishermen wanted to get out to the grounds right off, go straight for the big fish. Bill thought that was a waste of ocean. Not far offshore there was a shelf where the currents often churned up a morning of exciting action. Smaller fish, but scrappy fighters. Some anglers, though, wanted swordfish—the other name for marlin—and nothing else. Big game.

  “I guess,” Ernie said. “You’re the one supposed to know these waters.”

  Mikey studied Ernie, his big arms and balding head. Maybe these guys knew about lakes and streams, but they sure didn’t know much about saltwater game fishing. They thought they did, but they didn’t. They had no idea that they would never in their lives fish with a skipper more skilled than Bill Monks.

  Ernie saw Mikey looking and said, “Hey, boy, got another one for you. Why do they put bells on cows? You know that one?”

  Mikey shook his head.

  “Because their horns don’t work.” He laughed at his own dumb joke as if it were the funniest thing he’d ever told.

  Mikey half smiled. It was way too early for this stuff. Jeez.