by Paul Watkins
I walked around removing the scupper plates so water could drain out. When I had finished, I saw a movement on the bridge.
It was Reynolds. He only wore a pair of shorts. His stomach was dappled with puncture scars. ‘I was just going to pull out the scupper plates.’
‘I saved you the sweat.’ I hurt my eyes in the dazzle of the work lights.
Reynolds drummed his fingers on the rail of the bridge. ‘You better put on a coat. You’ll catch cold.’
When he had gone, Kelley appeared from the galley. ‘I was wondering where you’d got to.’ He sat on the deck between the two dredges, took off his shoes and picked between his toes. ‘How come you’re out on the water again?’
He didn’t know I’d been to college. He didn’t know I went to school at all.
‘So how come, Pfeif?’
‘I’m poor.’
‘Stay with us and you won’t be poor long. This captain, all he thinks about is bringing in the scallops. We’re always making the best catch at the dock. He likes everything clockwork on his boat. He won’t screw you. At least he hasn’t screwed me yet.’ He stopped picking his toes and put his shoes back on. ‘I been making good money this last couple of months. But I’ll be getting a new job soon enough.’
I nodded and tried not to laugh. Almost every day at Gunther’s he talked about quitting. He often lost his temper at the dock. He’d take his ice shovel and beat it on the floor until it broke and then stamp off the wharf, yelling that he was finished. Gunther’s dock boys would start clapping and shout, ‘See you tomorrow, Kelley.’ And they were right. He always came back, until Gunther fired him. He’d been fishing ever since he sawed his thumb off. At Gunther’s, they’d heard it was the same up there in Maine. Always about to quit. Every tree his last.
How Kelley managed to stay on at Gunther’s as long as he did without getting caught stealing I couldn’t figure out. He tried so hard to look innocent and harmless in front of Gunther that everyone else knew he was thieving. Kelley would walk off the dock at the end of the day with ten pounds of bass stuffed down his pants and put such a lot of energy into looking casual that Gunther must only have felt sorry for the man not to have busted him any earlier.
‘So this is your last trip, eh Kelley?’
He slapped at his gut with both hands. ‘I’ll be calling it quits soon enough.’ Then he wandered back inside. I stayed sitting on the ice hatch. In each moment of quiet a picture of my mother sitting by herself in the garden shifted into my head. It spread and distorted and worried me.
*
‘You all right?’
I opened my eyes.
Nelson, the only black on the crew besides Franklin, was shaking my arm. ‘You all right?’
‘I was asleep.’ I sat up and rubbed at my face.
‘Are you a friend of Kelley’s?’
‘I guess.’
‘Because of him, I just lost all my damn money.’ He stood with his hands on his hips. ‘Him and Gil ganged up on me in the card game and took all my money. They didn’t take it exactly, but they pretty much did. I’m going to get it back. No question about that.’
He sat next to me on the hatch. ‘Kelley doesn’t even know how to play cards. He just pays attention to Gil and Gil tells him what to do. I saw them. Winking and kicking each other under the table. How the hell do they think I didn’t see them?’
‘I didn’t know there was a card game.’ I wished Kelley had asked me to play.
‘You’re safer out here.’
I took the fish knife out of my boot and began to sharpen it with my pocket stone. I thought he was going to ask if he could borrow some money.
Instead, after tapping a cigarette out of a packet and lighting it, he told me the police had a warrant out for him and he’d probably be arrested when he got back to port.
He said he had a friend named Marty, who dated a girl who used to go out with a Navy man from the Newport Academy.
The Navy man caught up with Marty and the girl in a bar called The Griffon. He sat down with them in their booth, Marty in jeans and a head band and the Navy man in his white academy suit. The Navy man said there had to be some mistake, his girlfriend sitting with a nigger. Definitely some mistake. Why don’t you take your black ass away from this place, nigger?
Marty made a few calls and later that night the Navy man got jumped in a parking lot.
Marty’s friends spread the man’s left hand on the pavement and broke each of the fingers with a hammer. Between smashing the fingers, they said to the man that there had to be some mistake. Surely he wasn’t the one talking about niggers and black asses. No, there was some mistake here, they told him as they crushed his knuckle joints.
The week before Nelson started working on the boat, he and Marty and the girl were driving through town in Marty’s jeep. Up and down Severn Street, all drunk on a Monday night.
Marty pulled up to a light in from of the post office, and while they were waiting for the green, Nelson heard a bang, which ruined his ears for a couple of days.
The girl began screaming.
When Nelson looked over, he saw Marty shot through the forehead with the Navy man’s 45 and the Navy man in the next car over.
Nelson got out of the car and ran away. He left the girl screaming and Marty dead and took a flight down to Alabama for a few days to be with his brother. When he came back, he heard the police were looking for him.
‘As yet,’ Nelson set his hands on his knees and rocked slightly on the hatch, ‘I have not informed Captain Gil of my situation.’ He cleared his throat. ‘I didn’t know it was a damn federal offensive to be running the hell away. I didn’t do nothing. Wasn’t me with the gun. Didn’t anybody tell me about a two-to-five for not reporting the crime and leaving the scene.’
‘You could talk your way out of it.’
‘I’m fixing to. I’m practising. But I can’t talk my way out of a federal offensive. May as well jump over and splain it to the fish.’
*
I lay half asleep in my bunk, hearing waves like cannon fire on the hull. They raised my head from the mattress and threw it back again.
Kelley swung his leg down from the bunk above me and stuck his foot in my ribs.
I didn’t hear him speak or see his face, but I knew it was him because he had his name written in marker pen on the toe of each sock.
I looked at my watch. It was the middle of the night. Kelley said we’d be taking first shift.
I sat on the floor, rubbing my eyes to wake up. ‘How much time do we have?’ When there was no answer, I looked up.
He’d already gone out on deck.
In the last few seconds before I crawled from my bed, I thought of my mother and Joseph asleep at home. Then I thought of my father, who never seemed to sleep, out here in the dark someplace and riding the sea in his boat.
Five
We sent the dredges down. They disappeared into the choppy sea and their cables shuddered through the waves.
I walked the deck, tossing over beer cans that had gathered in corners, the stems of welding rods, a tube of lipstick left behind by someone who spent a night on the boat.
When I looked up, a crewman named Howard was staring me in the face.
He smiled and showed his teeth.
It looked to me as if he’d been a rat in another life.
He and Kelley and I made up the first watch, with Gil in the wheelhouse.
While Howard swept a pile of cigarette butts out through a scupper, Kelley put his hand on my shoulder and talked in my ear. ‘You see how thin he is?’
I nodded.
‘His wife is so fat she has to go to a special store to buy her clothes. You see them together and it’s like looking at your reflection in two funhouse mirrors. I figure she lives in their car. I never once seen her get out of the thing.’ He straightened up and shouted at Howard. ‘Quit sweeping the deck, Stick Man! It’ll be dirty again soon enough.’
Howard stopped swishing the stub of b
room across the deck plates. ‘It’s for luck!’ He had dentures, which he could dislodge and jerk out from his lips. He did this absent-mindedly as he swept, as if it helped him think.
Kelley slapped his knees. ‘There’s no luck in sweeping. Only bad luck things you can do on a boat.’
‘It’s good luck to sweep the deck clean before you start work. I know it is.’ Howard set the broom aside and sat next to us on the ice hatch.
‘Sweeping’s just going to wear you away more than you already are.’
Howard showed us his biceps. ‘I got muscles from sweeping like that.’
‘Alls you got is bones and hair. And some false teeth.’
‘If you’re so hung up on bad luck out to sea, Kelley, then what are you doing here?’
‘Even more bad luck on land.’ Kelley held up the remains of his thumb, a purple-white ball of skin.
Then while we sat waiting for the signal from Gil to raise the dredges, Kelley explained all the bad luck that he said lived on the water.
You can’t say ‘pig’ on a boat. The reason is that a pig can’t swim. Kelley told us he didn’t know if there was another reason, but he knew for sure you couldn’t say it.
Pig, I started thinking. Pig. Pig. Pig. The word flashed in my head.
You couldn’t turn the hatch covers upside down, because it was like the motion of a boat capsizing.
You couldn’t whistle. Whistling brought the wind.
If you ever pulled up human bones, you had to go straight home or the dead would walk your deck.
Never stick a knife into the woodwork of the boat. This would piss off the captain and amount to the same thing as bad luck.
If a land bird came on deck while you were out to sea, clean water and food should be set out for it, or you’d have bad luck when the boat got back to shore.
Kelley said he didn’t know if he believed in all of it, but there was no sense going around mumbling ‘pig’ just to see what would happen.
‘And if you ever see a boat fishing nearby that you never seen before, look at its name and remember it. Then when you get into port, look it up in the log book at the Seamen’s Mission.’ Kelley nodded and was quiet after that. He looked down at his rubber boots and kept nodding, wide-eyed, until Howard had to finish the story.
A few months earlier, when Kelley worked on a boat called the Lobsta, out of New Bedford, he saw a Galilee trawler named Aggressor fishing close by, and just happened to remember its name.
The next time in port, he was arrested for starting a fight in a bar and didn’t make bail before the Lobsta left on another trip.
The Lobsta went down off Tuckernuck, Nantucket.
A cargo ship received the Lobsta’s last message. It said, ‘If we get one more wave on our deck, we’re going down.’
Kelley began searching for another job. None of the boats in Newport needed or wanted him as crew, so he took a bus to Galilee and asked in the bars and the Fishermen’s Co-op if anyone would hire him.
One man he met offered to walk him down to the docks and ask a friend of his. He said it would give Kelley a better chance that way.
To make conversation, Kelley mentioned having seen the boat from Galilee named Aggressor.
The man stopped walking and asked him to say the name again. Then he pointed to a small patch of neatly cut grass next to the Co-op. Sunk in the grass was a gravestone:
In memory of the crew of F/V Aggressor. November 1978.
Save us when we cry to thee, for those in peril on the sea.
Placed here by family and friends.
The Aggressor had been gone almost a decade. Kelley promised himself that if he saw something like that again, he’d quit the boats and go back to lumberjacking for ever.
‘After he saw that stone’ – Howard slapped Kelley on the arm and grinned, ‘he couldn’t even light his own cigarettes, his hands were shaking so much.’
The wind does come if you whistle.
It rides the flat water towards you. Dusty looking and hard. It hits, moves through you and keeps going.
Then you know who brought the wind. You start wishing there was something you could do to make it go away.
Kelley had no front teeth and most of his hair was gone. He combed the strands in strange patterns across his head to make it seem like he had more.
I heard it fell out after his divorce.
He had a wife and a baby in the days when he cut timber full time up near the Quebec border, in Jackman, Maine.
After a couple of good seasons, he had enough money to build a new house for himself. He wanted it constructed right next to his old house, which was beginning to fall apart and would be knocked down as soon as he finished the new building.
He was away at a town planner’s meeting, applying for final approval for sinking a new well on his land while his wife carried boxes from one house to the other back and forth, making a path through the snow.
She left the door open and the baby got down from its crib. It crawled outside.
She didn’t check to see if the child was in its room when she returned. She fell asleep on the couch waiting for Kelley to come home.
Kelley arrived drunk and lay down next to her after putting a new log on the fire.
In the morning, they found the baby frozen up like a small piece of sculpture. Its crawl prints circled the house, stopping at each window on the ground floor.
His marriage didn’t last much longer after that.
Gunther told me this when I worked for him. He cornered me on the dock one day and hooked his thick arm around my neck. He pulled me to him so I had to breathe his breath and smell his hair, and he told me for no reason at all, except that by then Gunther must have known Kelley was a thief and didn’t like me working alongside him. He told me never to mention it to anyone, so I still didn’t know if the story was true.
I hoped I could work the two dredges.
The Ocean Horse had only one, and a smaller one as well. The dredges on Grey Ghost were twenty-one-footers.
I didn’t ask Kelley for advice. I didn’t want to owe him. As soon as things started, I told myself, it would all fall into place.
Resting my forearms on my knees, I looked at my boots, wondering if they would stay waterproof the whole trip.
Instead of buying a decent pair, I had the kind made in Korea that were shiny black with dull red trim. They rarely lasted a week when I worked on the trap boats, and then my feet would stay wet until I could afford another pair. After that, the only way I could keep my feet dry was to wear the plastic bags from loaves of bread over my socks. I scrounged them from the coffee-and-doughnut lady when she came by in her truck, and held them around my ankles with rubber bands.
And I thought of the impossibly long time it would take before I could run my own boat, with the chance always there of being cheated by the captain, or fired, or giving up and admitting I did not know what was best for me.
After the dredges had been down an hour, Gil called ‘Haul back’ over the loudspeaker and the cable drums started turning. He worked them from up in the wheelhouse. The noise was loud enough to be painful for a while.
Howard and Kelley unlocked the drum brakes and the cables began rolling back, crackling as they threaded over the cylinder.
I leaned over the port side and watched cable stretch from the water.
Beyond the work lights I could see only black. Oily-looking waves barged from the dark and slapped at the hull.
After a few minutes, I made out the shape of a dredge.
It rose through curtains of green, broke from the water and crashed against the side. All along the base of the triangle, the brown metal had been rubbed shiny silver where it dragged across the ocean floor.
A few fish escaped from the dredge bag. Catfish, their guts burst from the change in pressure, floated upside down on the surface, slowly shaking the life out of themselves.
Sand filtered out in a white haze.
I set the winch hook in a ring a
t the top of the dredge. Kelley called it the bull ring. Then I ran to the other side of the deck, hooked up the starboard dredge and backed away.
Kelley and Howard locked the cable drums and worked the hydraulic winches, raising both dredges above the deck. The black sky on either side was gridded out by the chain mail of dredge bags.
The bags looked only a little filled. White-brown discs of scallop shells. Monkfish. Catfish. Crabs. Rocks. Sea sponge, the smell of it rotten and suffocating.
The dredges swung over and down on the deck.
I removed the hooks and attached them to a bar at the end of each bag, the cat bar. When this was lifted, the contents of the bag would pour out on deck.
The sound of scallops falling was like the clatter of dropped china.
Some shells and fish remained caught in the bag, so I raised my arms, hooked my fingers around the rings and rocked back and forth until the rest were dislodged.
As I swung, I looked at the huge bar and the finger-thick cable holding it up. I wondered if there would be any chance of getting out of the way if the winch cable snapped.
Attached to either side of the deck was a chain with a large clip at the end. The clips had to be attached to the dredges before they were set over the side again. A pin held the clip shut. The pelican clip. When it was closed, it looked like the bill of a pelican.
Kelley and Howard raised each dredge until the only thing holding it over the side was the clip.
The boat idled and Gil appeared from the wheelhouse to see what had been brought up. He walked the deck with hands in pockets and toed the scallops and monkfish, which lay with their jaws locked open, a froth of fat teeth in their mouths.
A second after he disappeared back in the wheelhouse, the boat kicked out of neutral and swung around, engines deafening and diesel smoke billowing across the deck.
Stars cartwheeled past. We turned to plough another strip of ocean floor.
I stood between the dredges, holding a big hammer. My job was to knock out the pins in the pelican clips and send the dredges down again.
