by Paul Watkins
In order that our net wouldn’t pay out too fast, I stood at the stern and let the net roll over my back into the sea. I gripped a cleat screwed into the rim of the boat and leaned over the side, seeing the water boiling below me in the darkness before dawn.
The man who did my job before me had tried to lean over the side without holding the cleat. It was stormy. He slipped and fell in, floundering in his heavy waterproof gear. The man’s boots filled with water, and by the time the Portuguese turned their boat around, he had disappeared.
When we hauled the net back an hour later, I moved across the deck gathering the fish and sorting them into baskets. Cod. Yellowtail. Fluke.
I washed the fish by spraying the slime off them with a deck hose and stirring their bodies around in the basket with my boot. Then I climbed down into the ice room. It was a space below the deck partitioned off with stalls, as if it had been designed for horses.
I used a pick to hack ice and make a bed of it in one of the stalls. I spread the fish on the bed and waited for Captain Tony to inspect before climbing back out into the warm air and the light.
There was no talk. None of the men spoke with me except when they had to. I found myself talking to the fish, insulting the boat as I hung from my cleat, watching our net straggle down through the waves.
At night, while the two Tonys slept, I kept watch with the third crewman. He still hadn’t told me his name. He only mentioned that he was tough.
After twenty minutes on watch, Tough slapped me on the back and went to bed.
I watched him for a minute, trying to figure out if he should be staying awake with me or whether he had the right to go to sleep.
I waited to catch his eye, but he didn’t look my way. He smoked a cigarette and ate some olives, staring by the light of his cigarette at pictures of naked women taped on the ceiling of his bunk with Band-Aids.
Everything around me was reduced to the solid black beyond the wheelhouse window, which exploded into silver and white whenever waves crossed our bow.
Captain Tony had given me a compass bearing to keep but I couldn’t hold it.
I got seasick about once every half hour until there was nothing left to throw up, but I still hung over the side, fingers dug into the wood for grip, gagging bile into the waves.
Nothing I tried would keep the boat on course. We bucked in circles all night until the captain woke to take my place. He shoved me across the wheelhouse for not holding the bearing, then let me go to bed.
I woke when the captain climbed into his bunk above me after his turn on watch.
In the first grey smudges of light through the portholes, I saw the bunk boards sag down over me with the captain’s weight.
If they broke, the man would kill me when he fell. I was sure about that.
At mealtime, we ate olives and sweet bread and fish boiled in salty water. The engineer named Tony also worked as the cook. He poked me in the chest every couple of minutes to ask me if I liked the food.
I nodded and smiled and threw up off the bow while they played cards at the galley table.
After dinner, we’d go back to work. Often the wind blew hard and broke waves across our deck. Spray gusted in and soaked us.
Captain Tony had built two shelters out of plywood. He set them around the pens, metal tubs where we cut the meat from shellfish.
One of the shelters fell off while we were still in the harbour. The other channelled rain down my back and Tough’s back until he couldn’t stand it anymore and shoved the whole contraption overboard.
Waves sometimes washed us across the deck. In the daytime, at least, I could see them coming, but at night the only warning was a gasp as our hull left the water before a blast of water smacked us off our feet.
Sometimes Captain Tony stood at the wheelhouse door, making fun of Tough because he had nothing better to do and because Tough couldn’t ignore it.
After a while, Tough would throw down his fish knife which he used for gutting the ugly monkfish we sometimes pulled on board. Tough said he was going to fix the captain once and for all. He stamped away into the wheelhouse and shut the door.
Captain Tony would turn on the intercom without Tough having noticed and I’d stand with the engineer, hearing Tough shout. ‘Leave me alone!’ he’d be saying. ‘For God’s sake leave me alone!’
On the third day, sometime in the night, our running lights went out.
I had stopped being sick by then and found myself more hungry than I’d ever been before. I hid whole jars of olives under my mattress and ate them at night, flipping pits out the porthole.
Captain Tony climbed down into the engine room and the engineer followed.
I sat with Tough, playing dominoes by the red light of a storm lantern.
At dawn, the engine failed.
The sound of waves became suddenly loud, each thud on our bow like the blow from an axe.
The two Portuguese climbed up from the engine room and sat next to me at the table. Captain Tony said our engine would be fine if the damn engineer didn’t keep pissing in the bilge.
He did do that. I saw him.
Engineer Tony said it didn’t have a damn thing to do with him and told the captain the whole boat ought to be scrapped and used for firewood.
I agreed with him too.
Captain Tony shoved me and Tough off the table, sending our dominoes rattling across the galley. Then he leaned forward to where the engineer was sitting and punched him in the head.
Engineer Tony touched his nose, saw blood on the tips of his fingers, then reached down fast for something under the table.
I was backed up against the wheelhouse door with Tough. I held on to his arm and he held on to mine. Here we go, I was thinking. Here we fucking go.
Captain Tony saw that the engineer was probably going for a knife. So he took a Phillips screwdriver from a shelf next to the window and nailed the engineer’s hand to the table.
Now Tough and I were behind the wheelhouse door and staring through the plastic screen from the other side.
The engineer only gasped when the spike of the screwdriver came down. After a couple of seconds, he unstuck the screwdriver, held his hand to his chest and walked slowly over to the storage cabinets looking for a bandage.
The captain picked at his nails for a while, muttering to himself. Then he apologised and helped dress the wound. He talked while he wrapped the clean white strip across the engineer’s palm and over the web of his thumb. Blood soaked through each layer, struggling to reach the surface.
The engineer nodded as Captain Tony spoke. When the hand was bound, he lay on his bunk with his back to us. I watched all this in the light of the storm lantern and the glow of sunrise through the clouds.
Captain Tony gave me the job of calling the Coast Guard, since he didn’t think they’d understand the way he spoke. I stood at the wheel, trying to keep our bow into the wind, and called into the microphone that we were Fishing Vessel Ocean Horse and required assistance.
The others crawled around on their hands and knees looking for the dominoes.
For three hours, no one answered. Once we did reach the Coast Guard, it was another five hours before we saw the little speed boat they sent to tow us in. It was white with blue and orange stripes across the front.
It rained and the sea picked up.
Several times, I walked to the engine room door and peered down at the huge, beetle-shaped engine to see if it was on fire or if the hull was leaking. The sound of waves breaking on timbers seemed to me more than the boat could take.
The Coast Guard towed us with a nylon rope. Heavy and white, it chafed a groove in the Ocean Horse’s bow.
The three people on the Coast Guard boat wore blue uniforms and signal-orange life-jackets. They moved across their deck like hunchbacks.
Captain Tony walked into the wheelhouse, where I stood, steering the boat. He shut the door and sat down in the wheelman’s chair, the foam stuffing held in with strips of silver duct tape. Fo
r a while he said nothing. Then he leaned over to me, until I could smell how close he was. ‘You’re a liar.’ He sat back and rubbed his hands together.
I stayed looking straight ahead, holding the wheel, concentrating on the white towing cord. It sagged down into the waves, then snapped taut and sprayed water across our windows.
I’d been thinking he might not have noticed that I had no experience. Or if he had, he would forgive me because I worked hard. But now, with him calling me a liar, I knew it was just something he’d been saving to stick me with when the time came.
He slouched in his chair and nudged my back with the toe of his rubber boot. ‘You told me you could fish. Alls you are is a liar.’
‘I worked hard for you. You know it was the only way I could get a job. You know that. I worked as hard as anybody else on this boat.’
‘I’m going to pay you what you’re worth.’ Then he made a zero sign with his thumb and index finger.
I smiled at him. I smiled, and a couple of seconds later I laughed and turned back to face the wheel, concentrating again on the pale strip of the tow cable. It felt as if little hands were squeezing at my ribs and my lungs and my heart. I closed my eyes and held on to the greasy wheel and tried not to fall apart.
As we came into the shelter of Newport harbour, the storm became a yellow stain in the clouds.
Wind gusted out of the north, tipping waves onto our deck, and then suddenly quit, leaving us cold in an ugly calm before the next gust.
I wanted to jump overboard, swim to shore, walk up on the beach and go home. Only to be on land. To get home and be safe.
The harbour was jammed with boats seeking shelter from the storm. People in rain gear sat on their yachts. I could make out steam rising from their cups of coffee.
Tough and I stood on the bow with the wrist-thick mooring ropes, waiting as the dock pilings came close.
It took only ten minutes to unload the whole catch. The dock boys were laughing about it.
I stood with them at the end of a conveyor belt, sorting the yellowtail and fluke as they slid, clumped in ice, along a tray toward the weighing scale.
Captain Tony stood by the scales, making sure the dock boys didn’t cheat on the weights. And even with him standing there, I saw a fish house boy set his thumb under the weighing plate.
It didn’t bother me that they ripped off Captain Tony.
‘How’s it going?’ I asked the fish-house boys. ‘What happened while I was gone?’
Bright clusters of people moved in the streets. They crowded under umbrellas, wearing khaki and green or blue as if it were part of a uniform.
At a bar on the dock next to ours, men stood under awnings, one hand holding a drink and the other shoved into a pocket, pelvises jutting out for balance.
Women in loose dresses with pretty, wet hair sat at tables, sometimes reaching their arms out into the rainwater that trickled down from the awnings.
Waitresses weaved between them, black skirts on their hips. The skirts were so tight, I knew they had to lie on their stomachs just to do up the zips.
I watched them from under the big hood of my rain slicker and licked at the fuzz on my teeth.
When he came back to the boat, he smelled of vodka and cigars.
He walked straight over to where I sat, on a pile of old fishing net, no longer bothering to stay out of the rain. He handed me a fifty-dollar bill and told me to fuck off for ever.
‘You remember what I told you?’
I folded the new bill and pressed it between my hands as if I was praying. I nodded.
‘I asked if you remember what I said about you lying to me.’
‘I remember.’
‘So you know I’m being generous now; don’t you?’
I looked up and squinted at his face. ‘Are you done?’
He grinned and showed his teeth. ‘You’re the one who’s done. You better find another job.’
I looked around for the engineer or Tough. Someone to put a word in for me. But the engineer had gone to the police station to press assault charges against the captain. He walked off the dock with his hand held out, as if it no longer belonged to him and was only a piece of evidence.
And I knew Tough would be lying in his bunk, where he lived even when the boat was in port. He’d be looking at the porno pictures taped on the ceiling, eating black olives from a jar.
As Captain Tony walked away in his squelching rubber boots, I didn’t raise my head to watch him go.
I had already begun to map out a plan in my head. Calculating. How many times I’d be fired before a boat would take me on full time. How many lies. How many rumours. Weighing and balancing. My mind like an ant hill on fire.
I took a bus home, over the Newport and Jamestown bridges, to Narragansett.
Old ladies crowded the front seats. I knew all of them by sight. They came to Newport in the mornings and stayed all day, rummaging for bargains in second-hand shops. Then they sat around at the Newport Creamery, gumming the plastic spoons that came with their coffee until it was time to go home again.
Captain Tony’s only a poor old fisherman, I was thinking. A poor man, working on a shitty boat with a half-ass crew, who probably takes no pleasure in being cruel. He didn’t mean what he said, I told myself, the fifty-dollar bill crushed in my fist. He didn’t really pay you what you’re worth.
*
‘Sit down.’ My mother pointed to a chair in the living room.
I sat.
‘Do you know what happened while you were gone?’
‘What happened where?’
‘Out on the ocean. While you were gone.” She stood with her hands folded on her head like a person who’s just been arrested. Her lips were pressed tight together and she wetted them with a swipe of her tongue as she spoke.
My father stood next to her. He smelled of gasoline.
They had been fighting earlier. Arguing about what they would say to me.
I saw them at the bottom of the garden, through my bedroom window. They sat in the white metal yard furniture, too far away for me to hear what they were saying. Father set his palm down on the table to make a point. Then Mother turned away with one hand on her chin, showing that she disagreed. Father stood up and set his hands on his hips. He leaned over her and barked, keeping Mother in her seat because she had no room to stand. Then he held up his hands to show they shouldn’t argue any more. He stepped back and she got to her feet. They walked across the dry grass to the back door.
I lay on my bed and stared at the ceiling, in the last few seconds before the call I knew it would be my mother and not my father. Knew the pitch her voice would have, starting off low but rising. Knew the way the word ‘James’ would break from her throat.
‘No. I don’t know what happened while I was gone.’ I put my hands between my legs and pressed them together with my knees.
‘Tell him, Russell.’ She sat down on the couch and stared at me.
My father scratched at his face for a moment as if he couldn’t remember. Then he heaved it all out in a couple of breaths. ‘We read in the papers about some boy the same age as you who went to Yale. He flew out to Alaska to find a job on a boat. Only one he could get a spot on was some junk trawler made around nineteen twenty.’ He sat down next to my mother. It seemed he couldn’t make up his mind whether to be angry or not. ‘Boat goes out and two weeks later this boy’s body washes up in some cove. The only way they could identify him was from a letter to his girlfriend he had in his back pocket.’
‘Where’s the rest of the boat?’ I wanted to be someplace that didn’t belong to them. Someplace where I didn’t feel they grudged me my bed. My jeans were stiff with fish scales and grease.
‘Gone. Whole boat vanished.’ My father took off his baseball cap and set it on his knee.
‘Just like your grandfather’s boat!’ Mother slapped the arm of the sofa. “That boy could have been you! You could have asked us, at least! You could have asked your father for some advice. H
e knows what he’s doing, you know.’
And so do you, I thought. He’s not as mad as you want him to be, so you’re putting words in my mouth to make him pissed off.
‘Boat you went out on is a wreck, James. I heard it broke down three days out of port. Am I right?’ Father raised his eyebrows. ‘Am I?’
‘Yes, sir. It broke down.’
‘Boat you went out on just lost a crewman. Is that right?’
‘I took his place.’ I could see it coming. The methodical build up of questions. I saw it a mile off.
‘They probably didn’t pay you jack-shit either. Am I right?’
‘Fifty dollars.’
‘Little fool.’ My mother slumped back in the chair. ‘You must think your father’s some kind of idiot with his good advice.’
‘Let him speak for himself, Erika.’
‘I am. He is speaking for himself.’ She folded her arms.
‘He hasn’t called me a fool.’
‘He may as well have.’ She nodded at me.
I sat back and sighed loud enough for them to hear.
‘Well,’ Mother stalked off to the kitchen and came back with a chair from the breakfast table. She sat on it, hooking her skirt under her. ‘Well, at least we’re all agreed that James’s trip was not a success.’
My father laughed. ‘You could have made fifty dollars flipping burgers.’
‘I know it. They ripped me off.’ I pressed the blood from my hands with my knees.
My mother pointed at my father. ‘I don’t think it’s anything to laugh about.’
He ignored her and kept looking at me. ‘You should have known they would rip you off.’
‘I didn’t know anything! That’s why I went on the boat. I heard a lot from you, from both of you, but it was mostly the same thing over and over again. I took that job because I wanted to work offshore, and even after all your talk I still didn’t know how it would be.’ I felt myself seal up. A sense of airtight hatches closing and their locks clunking shut. And I seemed then to be sitting in a tiny room far away inside myself, away from anything that could happen. How much can they hurt you, I said to myself in the little, far-away room. What damage can they do?
