Calm at Sunset, Calm at Dawn

by Paul Watkins

  Howard and Kelley held on to the brake wheels of the cable drums, like two race car drivers waiting to start.

  When the boat had gathered speed, Gil shouted ‘Set them loose’ over the loudspeaker.

  I waited until we rolled deep in the trough of a wave. Then I struck the pin and jumped back. The clip thrashed out and down on to the deck.

  I kept my eyes closed as I jumped, as if the skin of my eyelids would protect me.

  When both dredges had gone, I stood for a minute catching my breath, then set the hammer down and felt my fingers still locked in a grip.

  The cables paid out. Humming.

  Kelley threw me a basket for collecting the scallops. It was grey plastic with orange handles.

  I set the basket between my legs at one end of a pile and began flipping scallops into it. I rummaged through stones and fish, hauling the monk into the centre of the deck for cutting.

  Kelley and Howard rammed their fingers into the fish’s eyes and used the sockets as holders.

  With my rubber-gloved hand, I prodded a few times at the green eye of a monk but couldn’t bring myself to do what the others were doing. I ended up kicking my fish over to the pile.

  I learned to turn my head from the yellowtail and fluke as I reached for them. As soon as they felt my fingers, they exploded into flapping. The first few times I fell back with grit in my eyes. So I scooped them up fast or punched them dead, seeing their backs arched, fins spreading in a fish’s scream.

  When we had gathered the scallops and fish, we shovelled out what remained through the scuppers. The three of us paused for a second on the rail before getting back to work, heads down and no talk, watching the sea cut past in waves and white foam.

  I dumped my scallops in a metal pen under the canopy of the bridge, where we could work in the storms without fear of being washed overboard. It was loud under the canopy. The hammer of engines echoed off the grey iron plates, and diesel fumes seeped from the engine room.

  Kelley worked at one end of the pen while I worked at the other. He busied himself with the cutting and we didn’t speak until it was over.

  Howard worked by himself at a pen on the other side of the deck.

  I held each scallop flat side up, stuck the tip of my knife in a joint where the two shells fused and drew the blade once under the top shell. This severed the muscle. Then I flipped the top shell and guts over the side. I scraped the milky white cylinder of muscle off the bottom shell and into a bucket set next to me in the pen.

  A scallop knife was different from a fish knife. The scallop knife had a blade not more than a couple of inches long and thin in the middle. The handle was wrapped with black electrical tape that moulded to the cutter’s hand. After a while, I could tell knives apart by the different palm imprints of each crewman.

  Over the first hours, I learned to cut scallops fast so I could rest before the next haul-back. When Howard and Kelley had finished what was in their baskets, they set their knives down and sat on the ice hatch sharing cigarettes, while I continued cutting.

  I didn’t expect them to help. I’d have told them not to if they tried. This would have set me apart at a time when it seemed the most important thing to do was fit myself smoothly into the running of the boat.

  In the mechanical motion of cutting out scallops, daydreams came to me. I snapped out of them only when I began to fall over, amazed to find myself on the boat and not just passing through another dream.

  ‘I’m having the strangest thoughts, Kelley.’ I leaned against the rim of our scallop pen as a wave pitched onto the deck. It swirled at our feet before spilling out through the scuppers.

  ‘Thoughts?’ His head jerked up and he looked across at me. It was as if he’d been asleep. ‘What thoughts?’

  ‘I’m having daydreams. I hardly know where I am.’ I watched the white cube of a muscle cringe as it slid off the shell into my bucket.

  ‘It’ll be that way for a couple of days. Always is. But then you get too tired to keep thinking up new things and you’ll start running over the same dreams. Over and over. Then after a while you can’t remember what day it is anymore. Can’t remember how long you’ve been out here. After about a week, everything just fizzes out and you walk around like you’re brain dead.’ He didn’t look at me as he spoke. As he picked each scallop from the pen, he was already checking for the next one.

  We took turns cutting the monk.

  People eat monk when they go to seafood restaurants. On the menu, they see a fish with some half-human smiley face and wearing a sailor’s hat.

  But the monk was the ugliest animal I’d ever seen. It made me ill just looking at it.

  Some of them were the length of my leg. They lay on the deck with mouths open and clamped down on anything that got in the way. Sometimes their mouths were filled with other fish or sand, which made them almost impossible to lift. They were all head and tail. Nothing in between.

  I lifted each monk on to the rim of the boat for cutting. I held them by their eye sockets. There was no other way.

  I made two diagonal slashes from the base of the fish’s head to its gill openings. Then I punched the spine at the place where the slashes joined, breaking its back. Clear liquid splashed out from its spinal cord. One more cut under its belly to sever the intestines and I stepped back to let the guts fall out. Its tail, the only part we kept, slopped down on to the deck, and I sent the head spinning into the waves.

  Kelley used a Marine Corps Kabar knife, which was too short and messed up his hands on the belly cut. I used a British commando knife, bought years before at the Newport army/navy. It has a long stiletto blade which made the job cleaner and stopped them thrashing the way Kelley’s fish did. He twisted the knife in the wreckage of their bodies mauling them to death with the fat blade.

  Marco walked out on deck and was seasick.

  He stood at the stern wearing only a T-shirt, rubber boots and his underwear. The boots didn’t match. He didn’t bring any with him for the trip and had to find some used ones down in the lazarette.

  He stayed for a minute with his hands on his knees spitting the taste of acid from his mouth.

  Half an hour later, he came out again. This time he wore only one boot. He didn’t speak to us. Perhaps he thought we were only part of a bad dream he was having.

  Kelley nudged me and smiled as Marco hobbled back inside, wiping his mouth and swearing to himself.

  While we rested between haul-backs, on the ice hatch or squatting on old milk crates from a dairy in Providence, Kelley and Howard told me about Gil. They took turns shouting above the rumble of the engines.

  All he cared about, they said, was the regular heartbeat hum of his machine. He weighed everything on a scale in his head, balanced the effective running of the Grey Ghost against any possible change and mistake.

  The more I heard of this, the sorrier I felt for Tony the captain of the Ocean Horse. He could never take any pride in the precision of his own boat. It was a piece of garbage and he knew that, but he’d probably sunk all his money into the trawler and had no other way to make a living.

  I saw him once, after he fired me. He was using a staple gun to nail down shreds of wood that had come loose from the hull while the Ocean Horse was out to sea.

  He must have known how everybody made fun of him each time his boat dragged itself out of port, how people fell on their hands and knees laughing after the canopy for his scallop pen tipped into the bay.

  I made up my mind not to let that happen to me. To follow precision and allow for no mistakes. As I made the promise, I realised how many other promises I’d heard from people on the docks that could not and never would be kept.

  The first I saw of dawn was a blueness in the sky. It smudged to grey and then to yellow.

  I watched the light change in puddles on the deck as I moved hunchbacked over piles of scallops.

  The sun came up fast from the horizon. For a moment it stayed thin and rose-coloured, the pale dome of sky overhea
d. Fragile. A slab of cracked turquoise.

  The next time I looked, pausing with my basket of scallops at the metal pen, it burned at my eyes and stayed burning when I blinked.

  Each time I set my hands on the rim of the boat to rest, Kelley rapped them with his knuckles.

  I was too tired to tell him to stop.

  It seemed to be a game he had invented, like a game he had from the year before on Gunther’s boat. He’d sneak up on me as I slept next to the wheelhouse, with an oiler jacket pulled over me to keep out the chill. He took a crowbar from the engine room and slammed it into the metal next to my head. The noise was so loud I couldn’t hear anything anybody said for half an hour afterward.

  The one time I tried to pay him back, he was waiting for me. He grabbed my wrists and held them until I thought the bones would break.

  After the fifth time of rapping my knuckles, Kelley shoved me. ‘You aren’t getting it, are you?’

  ‘Getting what? Getting any fun out of your game? Well, bust me up, Kelley, I guess I’m not.’

  ‘I’m not playing. I’m trying to teach you not to hold your hands over the rim. See, when the cable comes in like this’ – he pointed to marks where the cable had rubbed against the side and run a groove through the metal – ‘when it hits a rock down there, it jumps and swings right into the rim.

  Take your fingers clean off. Or worse, it just grinds them into garbage and there’s nothing anyone can do to put them back together again. You keep your hands like this.’ He showed me how to keep my palms hooked on the inside of the rim.

  Franklin came on deck and stood with his hands on the small of his back.

  Then the mate, naked except for his boots.

  I could see Kelley trying to think of something funny to say.

  As the mate walked past and Kelley turned to speak, the mate said, ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ which shut Kelley up.

  Pittsley carried out a little shaving bag, sat on the lazarette and tried to shave, looking at himself in the mirror from a woman’s compact. Then he cut himself and gave up, his face still half stubbly. He sat on the lazarette hatch and smiled so much I knew there must be something wrong with him.

  I tried not to stare at Marco when he walked out from the galley. But everyone else was looking, so I gave up and watched as well.

  Kelley had a bet with Howard that Marco would be ill again.

  Marco tried to be sick, the muscles of his stomach slamming up into his rib cage, jaw locked open, but he had nothing left inside.

  Howard walked over to our pen, wiping his forehead on his arm, blue rubber gloves like flippers on his hands. He held a flipper palm out to Kelley. ‘Pay me.’

  Kelley raised his eyebrows. ‘I won that bet.’

  ‘I didn’t see him doing it. Pay me, Kelley.’

  ‘Course he was doing it. Wasn’t he doing it, Pfeif?’

  ‘’Pends what you call doing it.’

  Howard put his fisted flippers against his waist. ‘I won that bet.’

  Kelley pursed his lips. ‘I don’t think so, Bubba.’

  Marco watched us, squinting. His fuzzy-curly hair was squashed on one side and looked wind-blasted on the other. ‘What you talking about? You talking about me? Did I do something wrong?’

  After the last haul-back on our watch, we dumped our scallop meats in the washer, a tub made of stainless steel with holes at the bottom to let water drain out.

  I stuck the deck hose in the mass of white cubes and washed them while Kelley swished his hand back and forth through the scallops, looking for chips of shell and shreds of gut.

  The meats gave off a musty smell.

  Kelley picked one up and put it in his mouth.

  The scallop bags each held forty pounds and were sealed with wire ties. I twisted them tight on to the bags, bruising my knuckles with the rusty, hooked twister.

  When the scallops had been collected, Kelley and Howard climbed down into the ice hole to make a bed for the bags.

  I walked the deck picking up yellowtail with a fish pick, a hammer handle with a nail driven through the end.

  When I was out on the Ocean Horse, I swung at a fish with a pick, missed and drove the nail into my foot up to the wooden handle.

  I eased over to Tough. ‘Help me get this out, can you?’

  Tough wondered out loud whether he should pull the nail out fast so it wouldn’t hurt as much, or slowly, to risk not tearing a bigger hole.

  I set my good foot on the toe of my hurt foot and pulled the spike out myself.

  Reynolds sat alone at the galley table, eating grits and bacon. He wore some clothes now, white jeans and a T-shirt cut off at the navel.

  I stared at the scars on his stomach.

  Old wounds. Knots of white skin, crumpled and deep in his flesh.

  He caught me staring as he sat mopping the last of his grits with a slab of brown bread. He turned his head sideways and peered at me, frowning. ‘Something I can do for you?’

  He polished his plate clean with the bread.

  ‘I was just looking at the scars.’ My neck felt suddenly hot. ‘I didn’t mean to be rude.’

  He made a small noise in his throat and went back to his meal.

  When he looked up again, I was still staring at the scars.

  ‘What?’ He narrowed his eyes.

  I flinched. I opened my mouth to say something. Then I just shook my head.

  He told me that three days after his nineteenth birthday he was running up a hill in Vietnam. A Cong jumped up out of a hole in the ground, not even ten paces away, and shot him seven times in the gut. The rounds went through his flak jacket. One of the bullets tore through his clothes, nicked his side and killed the man running behind him.

  He was flown to Singapore and stayed there six months going through one operation after another. He had a bag on his left side for piss and a bag on his right side for the rest. After Singapore, he was flown home and spent another year in a military hospital in Maryland.

  Gil paid him cash, so he could still collect disability pay that the Army sent each month.

  I leaned across the table. ‘Did you see the man who shot you?’

  ‘Hell, yes. I got the fucker’s ears on a piece of string in a shoebox back home.’

  I mouthed the word ‘Oh’. Then I looked down at my hands.

  He cleared his throat. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘James Pfeiffer.’

  He held out his hand. ‘Ernest Reynolds.’

  I’d never seen people do this on the docks before. My father never shook hands with anyone. Nobody at Gunther’s did. I shook the mate’s hand and felt the warmth of his palm and did not like it.

  ‘How old are you?’ He narrowed his eyes when he spoke.

  ‘Twenty.’

  He breathed out slowly through his nose. ‘You like it out here?’

  ‘I guess.’ I picked at my nails. I could feel his eyes, making me nervous.

  ‘If you have any problems, you come and talk to me.’ He dabbed at his lips with a paper napkin. ‘All right?’

  I looked up and met his blue eyes. ‘Sure.’

  Franklin set a plate of eggs, bacon and grits in front of me, then took a knife and fork wrapped in a napkin out of his pocket and set them next to my plate.

  ‘Coffee or ice tea?’

  ‘Coffee.’ I focused past the grey blur of his hair to the beer clock with beer can hands.

  ‘Coffee every day?’

  ‘Every day. Cream. No sugar. Please.’

  ‘I like people who say please. You say please to me and we’ll get along fine.’ Franklin wrote down how I took my coffee on a notepad glued to the fridge.

  He cleaned off the breakfast plates of the other watch and fried up another package of bacon for Howard, Kelley, Gil and me.

  Up in the wheelhouse, Gil hawked and spat someplace. He yelled down for Franklin to bring him his food.

  Franklin stood at the base of the ladder that led up to the wheelhouse. ‘If that was yo
u spitting on the floor again, young man, I am not cleaning it up. Hear me?’

  Franklin had been Gil’s cook for years. Before that, he cooked for Gil’s father, who also ran a boat.

  Kelley told me that Franklin was always getting drunk and quitting the crew, then coming back when he ran out of money and begging for his old job. Each time, Gil made a fool of him, telling Franklin if he wanted his job back, he would have to stand on the table at Mary’s bar and sing ‘Mr Bojangles’. And if Gil wasn’t satisfied, he made Franklin pretend to be a washing machine. The bar would fill with people who crowded around Franklin as he sat on a chair, rubbing his stomach in circles, making rumble and bubble noises.

  Franklin had a girl in Newport, a pretty girl if you compared her to how ugly Franklin was. He brought her down to the docks and made people jealous, since fishermen had a hard time finding and keeping friends who were girls and who were not whores.

  Kelley said the only reason she stayed with Franklin was because he paid her a hundred dollars a day to go with him, not including food and a place to stay.

  It could have been a lie. Kelley was more jealous than anyone, and he always made up lies, repeating them so often he no longer remembered where the stories came from, and convinced himself they were true.

  The mate took a piece of bacon off my plate and ate it. He smiled at me as he chewed.

  Outside I could hear the whine and clank of dredges coming up on deck. The next watch’s first haul-back.

  Kelley and Howard burst into the galley. Both had ice chips in their hair.

  They grabbed their plates of food from Franklin and stood by the table. Kelley wore a napkin tucked into his collar.

  ‘Excuse us.’ They looked at the mate.

  The mate swung out from the galley table and climbed up to the wheelhouse.

  Kelley aimed his fork at me. ‘You stay out on deck until all of us are ready to go in. You don’t quit work until we do. That’s fair. That’s the way it is. Understand?’

  I nodded, my mouth full of food. Then Kelley tapped my leg under the table. ‘What did Reynolds say to you?’