Calm at Sunset, Calm at Dawn

by Paul Watkins

  ‘Few contemporary novelists have the ability to grab readers by the throat with such intense storytelling power and not release them until the final page has been turned.’ Sunday Times

  ‘We are carried along by the sheer force of the writing.’ Times Literary Supplement

  ‘Reminiscent of Hemingway, he explores the clash of the masculine virtues of courage, loyalty and endurance with treachery and fear.’ Daily Telegraph

  ‘There is a horror sleeping in Calm at Sunset, Calm at Dawn which becomes restless as the book progresses until it explodes into spectacular life.’ Time Out

  Calm at Sunset, Calm at Dawn

  PAUL WATKINS

  DAUNT BOOKS

  Contents

  Title Page

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Afterword

  About the Author

  Also by Paul Watkins

  Copyright

  One

  I spent my time in the frozen air.

  The walls were covered with ice.

  I sat on a wooden crate, staring through a thick plastic curtain that separated me from the rest of the East Bay Fish Packing Plant.

  Through the foggy screen, I watched a Vietnamese man unloading salmon from an air freight box. The salmon had come in from Alaska that morning.

  The man lifted each silver-grey fish from the ice and set it in a plastic tub. Now and then he looked around, to see if anyone was watching.

  Once I saw him bring his face close to the pink, gutted flesh of a salmon’s belly and smell the meat.

  I knew what he was thinking.

  When he came to the last box, he set one big salmon aside. When he thought no one would notice, he cradled the fish in his arms and crept out of the warehouse.

  The floor manager let the Vietnamese man get ten paces into our parking lot. Then he grabbed a mop and chased him across the compound, out into the street, past the dockside restaurants and halfway up the main road out of Galilee. All this time, he was slapping the man with the mop.

  Finally, the Vietnamese dropped his fish on the hot black road and kept running.

  The floor manager walked back with the salmon. He smoothed away the dirt as if the silver scales were coins that needed polishing.

  *

  Then two trawlermen dragged a swordfish off one of the boats. The first man held its tail and the other gripped it by its sword. They heaved the fish onto a cutting table and fed it to a band saw.

  I watched the swordfish turn into a puzzle of steaks.

  The cutter set its severed head upright on the floor, sword pointing at the ceiling. A boy weighed the fillets and packed them into tubs. In red marker, he wrote down the day’s date and type of fish.

  The boy had to stand on a crate while he worked. He had a birth defect that made his legs about the length of a man’s forearm. Normal feet. Normal upper body. But his legs were stumps, taken up mostly by the chubby balls of his knees.

  I had the worst job at the East Bay Plant. I sat in the freezer all day preparing orders for shipping. Even in a heavy jacket, I was always cold.

  I had instructions to wipe off the old dates marked on tubs of fish and replace them with today’s date. That way, the market receiving their order thought they were getting fish fresh off the boat. Sometimes the tubs had been sitting there for weeks. On the cardboard shipping boxes was a picture of a trawler hauling in its nets and below that the East Bay motto: ‘Always Fresh Today’.

  The floor manager said if I ever told anyone about changing the dates, he would beat me up and fire me and make sure I never found work on the docks again.

  I rode the bus home to Narragansett each afternoon at five, my palms smeared red with ink.

  Everything I owned smelled of fish.

  Clothes I’d never even worn to the plant smelled of fish.

  Fish scales fell out of my hair each time I scratched my head. Even after showering and washing and combing they still flickered down onto my shoulders.

  In my dreams, I became a fish and swam down to the wreck of my grandfather’s trawler in the deep water off Block Island. I finned along dark corridors, staring at the algae-covered skulls of his crew.

  The curtain blew open and a boy named McFarlane tripped into the room. He fell face down on a sack of oysters.

  The floor manager strode in, lifted McFarlane by the collar and set him up against the wall. ‘I swear to God I’ll fire you right now!’

  ‘Go ahead, Ramsey.’ McFarlane squinted down at the little red-haired man. ‘You can’t find anyone else who’d take my place.’

  McFarlane’s job was to wheel a trolley back and forth between the plant and the dock. On his trolley he carried fifty-gallon drums of fishguts left over from the cutting line. He dumped the guts in the bay.

  ‘I could get one of the Vietnamese to do it.’ Ramsey stepped back and wiped his hands on his trousers, trying to remove the stench of guts that McFarlane always carried with him. ‘The Cong will do anything I tell them to do. At least, they would if you didn’t chase them all away!’ Then Ramsey jumped forward again, remembering his anger. ‘I’ll fire your ass!’

  ‘What did he do?’ I didn’t bother to get up from my crate.

  Ramsey wheeled around. ‘How come you aren’t working?’

  ‘I’m waiting for orders.’

  ‘I’ll fire you too!’

  ‘Tell me what he did and then fire me.’

  Now that Ramsey had stopped bullying him, McFarlane took a crumpled sandwich from his pocket and began to eat.

  Ramsey walked to the plastic curtain and stared through it at the warehouse floor.

  ‘So what did McFarlane do? Are you going to tell me or not?’

  Ramsey sighed. ‘He puts on a pair of green trousers and a green jacket and he goes up to where the Cong are working and stands there like a Department of Fisheries officer. Then he yells, “Freeze! I want all of you to show me your work permit cards!”’

  ‘They took off like a stampede.’ McFarlane laughed with a small snuffling sound.

  Ramsey nodded. “And of course none of them have any work cards because they’re all illegal immigrants.’

  ‘That’s why the company only pays them a buck fifty an hour.’ McFarlane picked a gaff hook off the wall and used it to tap his knee and test his reflexes.

  “So they all took off through the side door and ran away into the swamp and off down the road and drove away in their cars …’ Ramsey sat down next to me on the crate. He didn’t look angry any more.

  ‘They ride about twenty to a car.’ McFarlane picked bread crumbs off his jacket.

  ‘Did they come back?’

  ‘Some of them did.’ Ramsey turned away from the plastic curtain. ‘The ones who figured out who it was.’

  ‘They were saying “Mafawene! Mafawene!”’ McFarlane blinked slowly and grinned. ‘But Vic’s not going to think it’s funny. Soon as he finds out’ – Ramsey levelled his finger at McFarlane, ‘you’ll end up packed away in one of these tubs.’

  Vic Vogel was owner general manager of the East Bay Company.

  If I asked him a question for which the answer would be yes, he’d say, ‘That’s a rog.’ If the answer would be no he’d tell me, ‘Negatory’.

  He hardly ever came down to the working floor. Instead, he watched us from a room built up near the roof. It had a huge glass window. The secretaries worked there.

  Vic hired Vietnamese people to work on the squi
d line, packing the pale pink bodies, like sausages with eyes into boxes marked ‘East Bay Company’ and ‘Always Fresh Today’. Vic and Ramsey called them the Cong straight to their faces.

  They wore blue bath hats and their clothes were always stained black from squid ink, which dripped off the conveyor belt and spread across the wet concrete floor. Sometimes ink reached all the way to the other end of the fish house. I watched it seep slowly under the blur of my ice room curtain.

  Whenever the real Department of Fisheries officers arrived on inspections, the Vietnamese disappeared.

  Ramsey would order McFarlane and me to stand at the conveyor belt. We pretended to box squid while the officer, carrying a gun and a billy club, paced through the warehouse with his hands behind his back, nodding and moving on. Always nodding and moving on.

  Squid piled up at the end of the belt. They slapped down to the floor and lay scattered with bath hats dropped by the Cong.

  I heard that some of them used to be rich in Vietnam. Some had been officers in the South Vietnamese army. One man, who wore a fake leather jacket with ‘Mr Sensible’ written in white paint on the back, claimed he’d been a general.

  I squinted at Ramsey’s handwriting on an order form. It looked as if he’d been taught to write by making letters out of matchsticks.

  The order was for a hundred one-pound bags of oysters. Each bag had to be weighed individually on a tiny kitchen scale, which was all Ramsey would let me use.

  On the seventy-ninth bag, Ramsey walked in. ‘Order’s cancelled.’

  I looked up. ‘You’re fucking kidding.’

  ‘Never do.’ He spun on his heel and walked out.

  I stood up from my crate and pounded the walls. Slabs of ice crashed down to the floor. I stamped my feet in the slimy water and yelled at the gloomy-eyed fish laid out in rows like cannon shells. None of what I yelled made sense. I picked up a frozen flounder and spun it across the room like a dinner plate. Then I slumped down on my crate and sat huddled in my coat, listening to trolleys drag past outside the freezer.

  McFarlane’s blurred face appeared on the other side of the screen. ‘Secretary wants to see you.’

  ‘Did she say what for?’

  ‘There’s been some layoffs. Maybe you’re next.’

  I held out one of the yellow slips of paper. ‘Fill this order for me, will you?’

  McFarlane took the yellow slip. ‘Will do.’

  When I first arrived at the East Bay Company, I saw how people spent their time breaking each other down.

  It all worked on instinct. You had to carve out a space for yourself and make sure people left you alone in that space.

  My space was the ice room.

  McFarlane’s space was his trolley and the fishgut barrels. During my first days, McFarlane came to the ice room and gave me a hard time, telling me to do his job while he took a break.

  I knew if I gave in and did what he said, that soon I’d be little more than a slave. He’d have me crushed into a space so small I wouldn’t be able to breathe.

  So I was as mean to him as I knew how to be and he backed down. In time, I started moving into his space and keeping it for my own, as if it had always been mine.

  Emily met me halfway down the stairs that led to her office. She was one of the secretaries. She was also Vic Vogel’s daughter.

  I couldn’t understand how such a pretty girl came from such an ugly man.

  She ran her fingers through my hair and said we were going to the depot again.

  The depot was a warehouse where the East Bay Company stored spare equipment for the fish house. It was also where the Cong disappeared to whenever the Fisheries men came by.

  I knew Emily before I came to the plant. I had known her for years. Over a couple of months in our last semester at high school, I knew her very well. This didn’t last. I stopped knowing her very well and went back to just knowing her. But now things were starting again.

  When I began the job, I didn’t know she’d be working for her father at the plant.

  People said she and Vic were too close. He pawed at her and slapped her bottom when she walked by. I heard a rumour they weren’t even related.

  We walked out to a parking lot behind the warehouse and sat in her rusted black Camaro. We left the doors open. A smell of low tide blew in off the beach.

  Heat curled up from car roofs.

  Trawlers jammed the dock, most of them empty.

  Fishing had been going badly for a while now. Around Christmas time, Ramsey said, the boats used to come in loaded down with yellowtail flounder. Trawlers hit schools of them so large their nets tore out. Then the yellowtail disappeared. Nobody caught more than a couple of hundred pounds a trip, and these fish were small and sickly.

  It happened sometimes, Ramsey told me. The fish would vanish for years at a time and then suddenly reappear in sizes bigger than anyone had ever caught before. Nobody seemed to know why.

  *

  Most times Emily and I left for the depot, we never arrived.

  Usually we drove in the opposite direction and spent our afternoon on the sun deck of a restaurant in Narragansett, drinking dark beer in the shade of big umbrellas.

  Sometimes we just sat talking in the parking lot.

  ‘I could get you a raise, you know.’ She straddled where I sat in the Camaro, knees pressed into the seat on either side of my waist. She hooked her hands behind my neck and scratched at my head with her nails, making goosebumps show on my arms.

  ‘You could get me killed if Papa Fish finds out how many times we leave for the depot and how many times we actually get there. If I was him, I’d fire me too.’

  ‘Don’t call him Papa Fish. Only people who hate him call him that.’ She pulled off her sweatshirt, showing the dent of her belly button and the smoothness of her stomach, and leaving only a tank top with no bra. She moved the hair away from her eyes. ‘Which depot shall we go to today?’

  ‘Any depot where it’s happy hour.’

  She looked past me at the watch on her wrist. ‘Too early for happy hour.’

  She started the car and drove out of Galilee. ‘So when are you going to ask me out on a date, James Pfeiffer?’

  I laughed and smiled, then turned my head away. A few minutes later, when she asked me again where I wanted to go, I looked at her and realised the same awkward smile was still stitched to my face.

  She stopped the car in a parking lot near the Dunes Club in Narragansett. We sat with the windows rolled down, hearing the sea roll and crack on the shore beyond the dunes.

  The club hadn’t opened yet for the season. It was still too early for summer people. Too early for the rich boys dressed like poor boys, who spent their time skateboarding up and down the Narragansett boulevard.

  ‘I’m going to have a hard time clocking out. It’s almost four-thirty already.’ I took off my watch and wound it, the leather band dotted with fish scales. ‘Everything’ll be closed when we get back.’

  ‘I have the key. I’ll just write your name down. Nobody checks.’ She was in charge of the payroll as well as the phones. She leaned past me and flicked a cigarette out the window.

  ‘And how are you going to raise my salary without getting both of us killed?’

  ‘Easy.’ She leaned over and kissed me once. ‘Six dollars.’ She kissed me again. ‘Seven dollars.’ Again. ‘Eight.’

  ‘You should give your dad some credit.’ I twisted the key in the ignition and turned on the radio. Then I reached outside and played with the coat hanger aerial to find a station clear of static. ‘Your dad knows what’s going on.’

  ‘Starting to lose your nerve?’

  ‘No, I’m starting to lose my job.’

  My father said you couldn’t trust Vic Vogel. He told me Vic wasn’t smart but he was sly. He never did anything for anybody else that wasn’t first weighed up and primed for payback.

  Emily offered me a cigarette and I shook my head. Then she offered me a stick of gum and I didn’t want tha
t either. ‘My dad likes people who like his daughter. So make me like you, Pfeif.’

  She looked tanned for this time of the year, pale the way I was only in the webs between her fingers.

  I knew she’d been down at the salon, lying on one of those purple-glowing beds and wearing plastic cups on her eyes so as not to go blind from radiation.

  ‘If I didn’t have this job, things would be different, Emily. If my father hadn’t found me work at the East Bay Plant as a punishment for getting kicked out of college, then things wouldn’t be the way they are. But this is a last straw for me. I just can’t afford to get fired. When it’s over, I promise things can be different.’

  She started the car and spun it as we left the parking lot. ‘Don’t worry about when things are over, James Pfeiffer. They’re already over.’ She talked over the sound of gravel cracking off the axle. ‘This has nothing to do with my father or your father. This is all to do with you and me.’

  A couple of times a day, I walked across the warehouse floor to fetch more shipping containers.

  Past the cutters, slicing apart mackerel and scup with long knives and singing to the music on their Walkmans. They flipped the peeled skin and heads into barrels next to them and fed lozenges of pale meat to the conveyor belt. At the head of the belt was a tank where the fish were washed in a weak chlorine solution, then shovelled onto the belt by a woman who used to be a belly dancer. Her nose had caved in from years of snorting cocaine.

  I walked past the birth-defect boy, who stood marking tubs with red ink.

  Past the jabbering Cong.

  The box room was above the fish house floor. An old woman named Claudette worked the place by herself.

  She never allowed anyone up there. If I wanted a box, corrugated cardboard with wax lining and ‘East Bay Company’ printed on the side, I took a broom handle and banged on a trap door in the ceiling. Then Claudette would open the trap door and throw down as many boxes as I wanted.