by Paul Watkins
‘I understand.’
‘Ocean Horse is a goddamned raft.’
‘I know it.’
‘So you want me to put you to work and if I think you’re better than him, I take you on?’
‘It’s just that I need a job.’ I stood still on the hot whiteness of the bow, head tucked into my chest to dodge the glare. I waited for the fat man’s word.
He balled the hamburger wrapper and flipped it into the harbour. He tapped the soles of his deck shoes together, mumbled to himself and sighed. Then he looked up suddenly, as if surprised to see me still there. ‘Why don’t you take that other boy and go clean out the lazarette? Clean it and tidy it real good. What are you named?’ He said it the same way a man would ask, What does your master call you?
‘James Pfeiffer.’
He nodded, turned away and coughed something out of his throat.
I dumped my gear in the wheelhouse and didn’t look at the crew as I walked across to the lazarette.
I waited for the new boy to raise his head. He moved the knife back and forth along the stone set across the top of his thigh.
When my shadow crossed his legs, he looked up: ‘Something the matter?’ He blinked, eyes crushed tight together from the sun. His hair was dark and curly. Thin body, small bubbles of pec muscle behind his nipples. ‘Aren’t I doing this right again?’
‘Captain says we have to clean the lazarette. So get up.’
The lazarette on a boat is a junkyard. Things are put there that should have been thrown overboard or taken to the dump. Chains. Nets. Cogs from machines. Lumps of whalebone that came up in the dredge and were forgotten by the man who hid them. Rope. Beer cans. All of it pasted with dirt.
I pulled the steel hatch off the cover hole and stood back. Hot air rode up, carrying red dust with it.
‘My name’s Marco.’ He wiped his palms on his trousers so as to give me a clean hand to shake.
I climbed down the hole.
Crouching in the waist-high place, I tried to make out where the walls began and the chain and rope ended. My wrists dangled from my knees. The place looked like a giant bird’s nest.
Dust drifted into my lungs and clogged them. I tried to breathe through my teeth.
Marco jumped down beside me and moved on his haunches into the dark. ‘Let’s get this done fast so we can go back in the sun.’ He dragged some chain down off the pile and it unravelled at his feet. ‘Let’s go, buddy. What do you say?’
I turned to the other corner and peered into three milk crates filled with bolts and loose dredge links. I began to move the bolts and links a couple at a time, sorting them into separate crates.
‘Get this done real quick and get out of here.’ Marco dragged the chain around behind my back. ‘Put this right here. This over here. Get this mother untangled.’
I breathed very softly in the red air and tried not to think.
A block of blue sky showed at the top of the cover hole, crossed now and then by the crooked chevron of a seagull. I dug my fingers into the grit of bolts and links and no longer bothered which pieces went where.
‘Hey buddy. Give me a hand, will you?’ The grinding of chains stopped and I heard him sit down.
‘Busy.’ I rattled the bolts.
‘Jesus, it’s hot in here. What did you say your name was?’
Heat. Making its way up through the iron plates of the hull. Dribbling down from the sky. Faraway crying of gulls.
My nose began to bleed. My skull seemed to expand and contract, putting pressure on my eyes.
Marco crawled past me, up the ladder. ‘Hell with this. I need some fresh air.’
I waited, then heard the captain shouting at him to get back in the lazarette and finish his job.
Marco tried to reason with the man. His voice was calm and quiet. The noise of the captain’s yelling faded as a shadow passed over the cover hole and someone leaned down to look at me.
I picked a handful of bolts and began sorting them.
‘Want me to get you out of here, Pfeif?’
I looked up and saw it was Kelley from Gunther’s dock. He gripped the metal rim of the hatch hole, the thumb missing from his left hand. He had cut it off with a chainsaw working as a lumberjack in Maine.
‘Where’d you come from, Kelley? You looking for a job too?’
‘I already got one. I been on this crew a couple of months. You’d have seen me if you weren’t so much in a hurry to get down here and bake like a potato.’
‘I heard Gunther fired you.’ I wiped the blood on my shirt-sleeve.
‘It had to happen sooner or later.’
‘Who’s this Marco man?’ Rust trickled down into my eyes.
‘He says he knows how to fish. Captain was going to take him out half share.’ Above Kelley’s voice, I could still hear the captain yelling at Marco and Marco talking back. A pendant on a chain around Kelley’s neck dangled down into the lazarette. ‘You got a nosebleed, Pfeif.’
‘It’s stopping.’
‘Want me to get you out of here?’
‘Is the captain going to send Marco down again?’
Kelley looked up, then down at me. ‘Believe so.’
‘Then I’d better stay. At least until Marco passes out.’
‘Good enough.’ Blue sky slid back over the hole when Kelley moved away.
Marco climbed into the lazarette and waddled across to the chains. He began dragging them back and forth. ‘He just wasn’t listening to me. I explained how it is down here but he wasn’t listening. How long you been on this boat anyway?’
‘First day.’ I picked another handful of bolts and sorted them.
‘Yeah? Mine too.’
Somewhere in the corner of my sight I noticed his hand, which he held out for me to shake.
For a while after the captain let us up on deck I couldn’t see. I walked across to Sabatini’s fish house, holding my hands in front of me like slats of wood, and washed them in water from the hoses. I pressed my palms to the wet floor and then held them to my face.
The captain said his name was Gil.
He said he had heard from Kelley that I could fish, so he was going to give me a break and put me on half share for the first trip. If I was worth more, I’d get more. He told me the only reason I could come along was in case this Marco boy messed up.
‘We’re leaving tonight. On the night tide. You got your gear?’ He sat in the galley under a clock with a beer logo on its face and little beer cans at the ends of the hands. He drank iced tea from a blue plastic mug. The galley smelled of bleach and fried eggs.
‘My gear’s up on the bow.’
‘You got gloves and a scallop knife?’
‘I’ll buy them from the army/navy if you give me a couple of minutes.’
‘Go at lunchtime. Find yourself a bunk in the forward room.’
I nodded, feeling the water dry on my face. ‘Do you have any employment forms for me to fill out?’
Gil squinted down at the table. Then he stuck a finger in his ear and twisted it round. ‘I don’t think I’d know an employment form if it hit me on the head. Listen, Pfeiffer. If I say you can work for me, you can work for me. I don’t need anyone else’s permission.’ He nodded, pleased with himself. ‘Kelley said he wanted you in his bunk room more than the other guy.’ He sucked at the ice cubes in his mug. ‘Good friends, you and Kelley?’
‘Not the way you’re thinking, Cap.’
‘I hope not. I can’t deal with that stuff. Least of all out to sea. You hear me?’
‘It’s nothing like that, Gil.’
The beer clock hummed in the quiet.
He narrowed his eyes and fished an ice cube from the mug. He crushed it with his teeth. Then he walked out on deck and left me alone in the stale air of the galley.
The bunk room was like a family crypt. No windows. Each bed in the shape of a coffin with one side torn away.
I picked a bunk that didn’t look owned. It was at floor level and had a slab of foam f
or a mattress. I lay on it, giving myself a minute to rest before going out on deck to help the crew.
Next to my head, wedged between the mattress and the wall, was an old mayonnaise jar filled with cigarette butts. Someone had played noughts-and-crosses about a dozen times in charcoal pencil on the ceiling of the bunk.
I worked next to Kelley all day.
From him, I learned the names of the others and how they were likely to treat me.
Kelley sat on a bucket and held out two finger-thick steel rings. When these were linked together, they formed a large bag attached to the end of the dredge. This bag collected scallops as the dredge moved along the seabed. I fitted metal links around both rings and squeezed them shut with heavy pliers.
Sometimes I raised my head from the web of metal and watched yachts move past the dock. Men in white shorts and bare feet catwalked the decks, shouting orders at each other.
Kelley followed my gaze to the yachts, then turned back to his bucket full of rings. ‘Don’t let Gil see you slacking off. He won’t get mad if he sees you working slow, but he’ll rail on you for staring at the rich men’s boats.’ Then he smiled, fat cheeks almost closing his eyes. ‘We’re going to have fun with this Marco.’
A black man sat on the bridge peeling potatoes.
Grey hair grew like mould on his head.
I watched him, watched the even movements of his hands and the knife across the potatoes. He was far off in daydreams, I could tell.
Kelley nudged me. ‘That’s Franklin. He’s the cook. He’s been on the boat as long as Gil.’ Then he looked across at Marco and grinned. Suddenly he snapped his fingers. ‘Boy!’
Marco pointed to his own chest. He mouthed the word ‘me?’
‘Yes, you! Go into town and bring us back some scallop powder.’
Marco checked his wallet, a polished block of leather which had left permanent creases in his back pocket. ‘Does it cost much?’
‘No, they’re having a sale. Don’t come back until you have some. You hear?’
‘I won’t come back until I have some.’ Marco jogged into town.
The other crewmen watched blank-faced until he was out of sight.
Franklin dropped a potato and the peeler in his bucket of water and shook the drops off his fingers. ‘Every time.’ The crew snickered into their armpits.
I kept my mouth shut, concentrating only on squeezing links and tried not to catch anyone’s eye. I thought they were laughing at me.
A while later Kelley whispered, ‘No such thing as scallop powder.’
*
At two o’clock, the crew knocked off for lunch. They bought a case of beer and drank it in half an hour. Then they fell asleep in a pile on the dock.
Gil jumped down from the wheelhouse and swore at them.
When he saw it was no use, he walked up to Mary’s bar at the end of Sabatini’s parking lot.
I watched this from the door of Sabatini’s fish house, where I sat in the damp and shade of an empty ice cart, eating a bag of cookies I’d taken from the galley.
‘Does Mom know about this?’ My brother sighed into the telephone receiver.
I heard him pacing back and forth. ‘I told her this morning.’
‘Does she know you found a job?’
‘That’s what I’m calling to say.’ I leaned against a phone booth bolted to the corrugated metal of the fish house.
The sun went down in a row of silent explosions through the girders of the Newport Bridge.
‘Is it a good boat this time?’
‘Good enough.’
‘I’ll tell her it’s a very good boat, if you don’t mind.’
‘Fine.’
‘How do you expect things to be when you get home, James?’ His voice was tired and angry. ‘I don’t think Dad’s going to go for being dumped on twice. You can only stretch things so far.’
I stayed quiet.
‘You still there?’
‘Still here.’ I set my back against the fish house and slid down into a crouch. Across from me on the other dock, a woman in a bathing suit and white bathrobe walked across from one yacht to another. Her legs looked very long. The wharf was a tangle of lights.
‘Mom’s out sitting in the yard.’
‘What’s she doing out there?’
‘Just sitting. She has her hands on her lap and she’s just sitting there. You want me to get her to the phone?’
‘No. No need. Just tell her I got a job and I’ll be back in a week or so.’
He sighed again. ‘I can probably get you a job at the car place when you get back. Think about it. I sold five Rolomatics today.’
‘Five boxloads?’
‘No. Five Rolomatics.’
‘Is that good?’
‘No, actually.’
Gil and Franklin walked past me and down to the boat. ‘My boat’s leaving, Joseph.’
After I’d hung up, someone trotted across the dockyard and shone a light in my face. ‘Private dock! Mr Sabatini don’t like punks hanging around his property. So fuck away!’
When I heard ‘fuck away’, I knew the man was Lester. Sabatini let him hang around as a human watchdog. He lived in a little grey boat, permanently moored out of the way near the land side of the dock.
Lester was bones spray-painted pink with some eyeballs stuck on for effect.
‘What do you need a flashlight for, Lester? It isn’t even dark yet.’ I shielded my eyes from the glare.
‘Eh?’ The light wavered and came closer. ‘How’d you know my name? I don’t know you.’
‘Everyone knows you, Lester.’
‘Eh? That’s for damn sure.’
‘I bet even the President knows you.’ I pushed the light away from my face.
‘Don’t be wise butting me! Now, fuck away!’ He held the flashlight down at his side, shaking it slightly in the way Joseph and I used to swing a light quickly back and forth in the dark to pretend we were in old movies.
‘Watch your mouth, Lester, or I’ll sink your boat.’
‘You better not!’
‘It’s too late now, Lester. Your boat’s as good as at the bottom of the bay.’
‘Quit kidding around.’
‘Wait and see if I’m kidding, Lester.’
He turned off the flashlight. ‘You’re just joking, right? Boat’s all I got. I don’t got a house. You’re just making fun, right?’
I turned once as I walked through the quiet, hissing canopy of the fish house to the Grey Ghost. Lester still stood where I left him, mumbling at me and wanting to know if I was only kidding about his boat.
Leaving the harbour, Kelley and I watched the lights of Newport growing small.
Yachts with their sails down and running on inboard motors passed us going home. The noise of our engines was loud. The yacht people called and waved to us. I couldn’t hear what they said.
One crewman stood in the middle of the deck. He wore a blue shirt buttoned up to the throat. Now and then, he jerked his head to one side, as if he heard a noise but couldn’t tell where it came from. He caught me looking at him and glared back. A line of teardrops was tattooed down his cheeks.
I spoke to Kelley through clenched teeth. ‘Don’t turn around. Just tell me who that guy is who’s wearing a blue shirt. He looks mad as hell about something.’
Kelley turned around. ‘Hey, Pittsley. What are you pissed off about?’
‘Jesus, Kelley.’ I sighed and let my head fall forward.
Pittsley shook his head. ‘I’m not pissed off. Who says I’m pissed off?’ He faced the other way, arms folded and singing to himself.
We rounded the point at Fort Adams.
‘So who is he, Kelley?’
‘That’s Pittsley. He’s a psycho left over from Vietnam. He doesn’t mean any harm.’
Gil aimed his boat at open water and hammered up the engines. To the right I saw the cliffs of Jamestown and sometimes the lights of a car on one of the beach roads. The lawns of Newport’s mansions wer
e crowded, always crowded with parties in the summer.
The crew prepared to set down outriggers, which stabilised the boat in rough weather.
‘I wondered what they were for.’ Marco peered into the rigging. He wore a down vest with the collar turned up. ‘You’ve never been fishing before, have you?’ I watched to see if the outriggers went down evenly. My job was to stand in the centre of the deck with arms raised at the same angle as the outriggers and to call out if one moved more quickly than the other.
‘I been fishing. I went out with my uncle. He has a twenty-foot dory.’
‘Starboard rigger coming down too fast! Hear me?’
‘Slow down starboard rigger!’ the mate called to the crew.
Kelley hadn’t told me much about the mate, except to say his name was Reynolds. Several times that day, Reynolds had walked across the deck to us and asked if we needed any help. Always, Kelley lowered his head and mumbled no. Then Reynolds would stay for a moment, his long arms hugging his ribs. It was as if he wanted Kelley to say something else, something to start a conversation. But Kelley told him nothing, and walked back into the galley.
I turned to Marco. ‘Have you ever been on a trawler?’
‘No, I never been fishing like this. Alls the captain asked me was if I been fishing and I have. Want a cigarette?’
‘You told Gil you could work the dredge, didn’t you? How can you do that if you’ve never been out on a trawler?’
‘I pull the winch handle one way, it goes up. I pull the other way and it goes down. How much more do I have to know?’
‘You kidding me.’
‘Hey, don’t tell Gil.’
‘You should tell him yourself or someone could get hurt.’
‘If I can’t do it, I’ll tell him.’
I looked back at the lights of Newport Bridge. Strips of beach glowed in the dark.
After the last lights had tipped into the sea, I realised I was the only one on deck.
The wind picked up and the work lights closed me in. Beyond our boat I could make out only the grey of ocean and a paler grey of sky.
The first waves broke on our bow and sprayed across the deck.
