Calm at Sunset, Calm at Dawn

by Paul Watkins

  She had heard from friends that her husband was seeing a woman at a bar each night. She pieced together what she overheard in gossip and felt sure he was having an affair. And when Pittsley wouldn’t tell her where he went at night, she became positive.

  She was sent to a home for the criminally insane and ate a lot of lithium.

  The whole thing hit the papers and stayed in them for weeks.

  Pittsley got no peace. Journalists called him at all hours of the night and waited by his car to ask him questions and flashed cameras in his face when he left for work in the morning.

  Some accidents scared trawlermen like my father away from fishing, but left them no other trade to practise. The way of life was already too deep-set in their minds. It forced them to return. It was the same with Pittsley. He had no place else to go. The death of the detective and the loss of his wife sent him out to sea for good.

  Pittsley hated land the way my father said he hated the ocean.

  While the Grey Ghost stayed in Newport, Pittsley lived on the boat. He stood on deck talking to himself among the dredges going rusty, or he drank himself stupid up at Mary’s bar.

  ‘I don’t want you telling anybody what I said.’ Kelley jabbed a finger against my arm. His cheeks looked red from the sun. ‘You keep your mouth shut. Now you know why everybody’s good to Pittsley. Because they’re afraid if they don’t treat him kindly, that the same thing could happen to them.’ Then Kelley stood and hammered the pins and needles out of his legs. ‘And don’t you go nuts like him either, because people won’t treat you well the way they treat Pittsley. You haven’t earned their respect. They don’t like you so much.’

  ‘Gil likes me.’ Hearing about Pittsley’s wife being as messed up as Pittsley hadn’t made me feel any respect for the man. It only made me sorry for him, to learn about his Mekong Delta days. I felt sorry for Kelley as well, who had built Pittsley up into his private hero.

  ‘Gil likes you because you’re still a little kid.’ The pins and needles in Kelley’s legs were too strong for him and he had to sit down. ‘He thinks you need taking care of. The only friend you got on this boat is me.’

  Being friends with Kelley didn’t amount to much.

  Out to sea, I usually felt too tired to ask him the right questions or listen to his stories and pay attention all the time. And on land I didn’t like getting drunk the way Kelley did, ending up with no money after three days of alcohol and cocaine.

  Always in the back of my mind and in the back of his was the knowledge that he had been working longer. He would always be senior to me.

  It seemed that no one stayed really close on a boat. The best a person could do was work alongside a friend on the water, and then get drunk with him at the dock.

  People who stayed together as friends on a boat set themselves apart from the rest of the crew, which made for friction in a place where we didn’t have the energy to waste on arguing and fighting.

  There was no middle ground where things were calm and unhurried and in focus.

  I would have been lonely on the boat without Kelley, but I never told him that.

  ‘I told you about Pittsley so you won’t think he’s just an idiot for no reason.’ Kelley moved a strand of hair to the other side of his head, then smoothed it down with his palm. I could tell he wished he’d never mentioned Pittsley. The story didn’t come out the way he wanted it to. After a few minutes of breathing in and sighing, he walked into the bunk room. I heard him singing softly to himself.

  I went up on the bow and watched the sunset. I was always calm then, in the marmalade light, and always calm at dawn, when the sun stayed weak and pretty and new.

  The feeling never lasted long, as the heat of day arrived or the sky turned purple with the closing in of night.

  Kelley rolled a joint made with sinsemilla.

  He shared it with Howard and me. The three of us lay in our bunk room. The light was still on. None of us had the energy to get up and turn it off.

  Kelley’s hand swung down from the bunk above mine, the white stick billowing smoke between his fingers.

  ‘Nobody talk. I don’t want to hear anybody talking.’ Howard hadn’t taken his clothes off all trip. His shirt looked moulded to his body like another layer of skin.

  None of us had showered. Sometimes we combed our hair before going in to eat, and we washed our hands and some of us brushed our teeth, but otherwise we didn’t have enough time between eating and sleeping to stay clean.

  I had lost track of time on the boat. It was all I could do to remember how many hours we had left on each watch, from the bleeding of sunset and the colours of dawn splattered on the sky.

  For a while the sinsemilla didn’t hit me. I talked with Kelley about our time at Gunther’s, my voice choked from holding down the smoke and trying to speak at the same time.

  Then the drug pushed through my head and blew my brains out through my ears, leaving behind an empty, vibrating space.

  I concentrated on the knots of wood in the ceiling of my bunk. As I watched, the knots became stars. I felt myself racing toward them, vertigo shuddering against my nerves. As I neared these stars, they stretched into the long bars of hyperspace and turned into the strands of a spider web. I dodged past the strands, which changed colour and became the hair on a person’s head. My own head. Then I felt myself step back, leaving my body and seeing what appeared to be me riding a horse across a field. The horse jumped hedges and fences that sprang up in the way. Through all this I was not afraid. The horse moved so fast that gradually the skin began to peel from its body. After a while, I was riding on bones; which fell away and left me spiralling toward the same knots of wood I had seen in the beginning.

  I had to go out and get some air.

  I walked into the galley. It was empty and dark except for the stove’s blue flame under the always-brewing coffee pot. I made myself an enormous sandwich out of bologna and lettuce, and ate it sitting at the galley table.

  Then I climbed the ladder to the wheelhouse and stood behind Gil, who hadn’t noticed me come up.

  He sat in his chair, feet against the wheel, watching a game show on his television.

  People on the show were guessing the prices of items on display. Whoever came closest to guessing the price won the item and a chance to spin a big roulette wheel to win more money.

  Gil pointed to a set of screwdrivers on the screen and yelled, ‘Twenty-five dollars!’

  To his left, a gauge that mapped our course over the sea had run black lines back and forth over the same place until it seemed the page had worn through. Beyond him, our grey bow snubbed the horizon.

  ‘Sure is a lot of water out there.’

  Gil turned around fast in his chair. ‘What? Something wrong? Did the air conditioning fritz out again?’

  I stared at him, feeling my eyes dry out. ‘Hello there, Mr Gil.’

  ‘Get out of my house.’

  I stood on the bridge, watching fog roll by the boat. The sun was a weak ball the colour of cantaloupe in the clouds. Suddenly a huge sailing ship cut past the stern. Its sails bowed out in the breeze. The ship made no sound and I saw no one on its deck. The hair bristled at the back of my neck. The ship appeared transparent, the mist a grainy filter surrounding it.

  ‘That’s the Coast Guard training ship out of New London.’ Gil was standing behind me. ‘See the blue and orange slash on the bow? That means Coast Guard. Are you feeling all right, Pfeif?’

  I nodded, climbed down to my bunk and fell asleep with my eyes open.

  Seven

  ‘They’ve killed him.’ I stood on deck with my hands over my face, slowly letting in the light. ‘They’ve killed Marco.’ I peered around again, but only saw Pittsley and Nelson cutting scallops at their pen.

  Kelley pointed to a padlock that had been run through the lazarette hatch to a cleat on the deck. ‘I don’t think they bothered.’

  When Marco crawled out of the dust and heat of the lazarette, his lips were fused w
ith spit. Nelson handed him a can of soda, which Marco drank after spending five minutes trying to pull the tab. His skin was peppered with rust. No expression showed on his face.

  Pittsley ignored Marco completely. He bagged the scallops by himself and then ordered Nelson down into the ice room. Marco slowly handed the fat bags down to Nelson and waited until both Pittsley and Nelson had gone in to eat before taking off his boots and following them.

  I looked down into the lazarette and felt the heat still rising, saw coils of chain and rope like the opened belly of a whale.

  While we waited for the next haul-back, Kelley, Howard and I sat on the ice hatch. We stared blank-faced and calm at the horizon.

  Bottles often came up in the dredge. Old medicine bottles with a marble inside, which allowed for the correct dose to be poured out when the bottle was turned upside down. Three-cent milk bottles with wide mouths and crabs living in them. Sometimes the crabs had grown so big they could no longer get out. Once I found a hermit crab that had made a house out of a small jar. His fragile innards were visible through the glass.

  We pulled up the skull of a dog miles and miles from any land.

  A popped balloon came up among the scallops. Attached to it was a card written in indelible ink from a Hebrew kindergarten in Far Rockaway, New York.

  Mounted on the wheelhouse wall was a plate that had been pulled off the bottom two years before. The centre of the plate showed a beehive. Around the beehive, in dark red letters, was ‘British-American Steam Packets’. The other side had a Staffordshire maker’s mark. Gil said it dated from a time when the Americans and British used to deliver mail across the Atlantic by steamship.

  On his mantelpiece at home, Gil said he had the rusted remains of a whaling harpoon, pulled up off Shinnecock in the winter of 1979. The metal stem of the harpoon was twisted like a corkscrew. Gil brought it to the Nantucket Whaling Museum, and they told him the harpoon was twisted that way because the whale thrashed in the water after it had been struck. They showed him other harpoons bent and curled the same way. Gil said he had never seen anything that told him more about pain than the ruined harpoon which came up in the dredge.

  We pulled in old fishermen’s boots, full of mud and with sprigs of weeds growing from the soles. Even after so much time on the seabed, some of them were still in better condition than the ones Marco wore.

  Howard collected the boots, claiming they were good luck, which brought back the argument that a person could only do bad luck things on a boat.

  This ended with Howard and Kelley throwing monkfish at each other across the deck.

  I sat on the ice hatch, shouting out the score of who hit who. Then a monkfish bounced off my shoulder with a rubbery slap.

  Gil had thrown it. He climbed down from the bridge and joined the game of monk throwing until all the fish had either sailed overboard or slid under the winches, out of reach.

  Gil said he’d had enough fishing for now. Tomorrow we’d be going in.

  I was happy to be going home, and grinned like an idiot as I chopped ice with a heavy iron pick down in the hold.

  No one else seemed to care, so I hid the smile and flailed harder at the ice, sending white chips up over my shoulders and across the floor.

  Howard gently laid the scallop bags side by side on a fresh bed of ice.

  I noticed he was giggling. ‘What are you laughing about?’ I stopped work. Steam rose from my sweaty arms.

  He shook his head and kept giggling. After a minute, he was laughing so hard that he had to sit down. ‘I always get this way when we’re going in. I feel like such a fool but I can’t help it.’

  I nodded, then sat down next to him and felt the grin spread on my face.

  The moon looked yellow and diseased. It burned through black clouds and wallowed on the horizon.

  We passed the Brenton Reef Light at two in the morning. The light stood on heavy metal stilts. Iron buoys floated nearby. Bells attached to the buoys clanged as each wave beat against them.

  Newport looked dark, except for street lamps and the necklace of the Newport Bridge.

  I watched car headlights swing past on Ocean Drive, like animals that came to spy on us and ran away again.

  Gil slowed the Grey Ghost just outside the harbour and we brought our outriggers down. I did my job of standing on deck, arms raised at the angle of each rigger, calling out if they lowered unevenly.

  Marco’s face had deflated a little, but his nose was still a bubble. He walked on deck when we came in sight of land. Nobody pushed him to work after he crawled out of the lazarette. No one had to, since there was no more work to do.

  We passed a couple of small lobster-boats heading to their pot lines in the coves and off the local beaches. Each boat had one- or two-man crews. They waved to us as they sped by, strong motors pressing their open sterns close to the water.

  They’d be back with their loads before the markets opened.

  I thought of the lobstermen, close to shore and running their own businesses without the worry of being caught in storms or handling large crews. I thought of them walking through empty streets down to the docks in the early morning and coming home to their houses at the end of the day.

  The times I had watched boats from the beach and wondered how it was to be a fisherman, it was lobster-boats I saw. When Joseph and I talked about running a boat, it was a lobster-boat we had in mind.

  I decided to stay with Gil until I had the money to buy a small boat for myself. Then I’d set down lobster-pots and start a business of my own. If I was wrong, I could turn around, sell the boat and go back to college.

  It was the first time I had thought of school in ages. My memory of the place and the classes and the people seemed old now. Already they were vague and yellowed, packaged away and unimportant. I realised then that I wouldn’t be going back in the fall. It came to me so calmly and clearly that I felt as if I had always known.

  The heavy smell of land reached me from across the water. A heavier smell than the sea. Sitting thicker in my lungs, as if I didn’t need to breathe as much of it to keep myself alive.

  We tied up at Sabatini’s, and Gil said for everyone to be back on the boat by seven a.m.

  Howard left for home and Franklin went to find his girl. The rest of us sat at the galley table, eating whatever we could find in the food lockers.

  Kelley made a sandwich out of white bread and cake frosting.

  The sight of him putting it away made me feel ill, so I walked out on deck.

  ‘Where you going to, Pfeif?’ Gil stood on the bridge with a six-pack of beer dangling from his hand.

  ‘I guess I’ll sleep here if it’s OK.’ I peered up into the work lights.

  A can of beer sailed out of the dazzle and I caught it.

  ‘You can stay here if you want. Live on the boat like the others if you need to.’

  ‘Do I get to keep my job, then?’ I had been worried about losing my spot on the crew, and was waiting for the right time to ask.

  ‘Do you want to keep it?’ He switched off the deck lights. The huge bulbs died.

  ‘I’ll keep the job as long as I can.’ I pulled the tab and beer shot up in my face.

  ‘Are you just a summer kid? I’ve been meaning to ask. Are you planning on just a couple of trips and then blowing away and I don’t see you until school gets out next year? I like things to run smoother than that.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I like a smooth-running machine. If I keep switching crews, things’ll never settle down. Enough things go wrong when I think I’m doing them right. So do me a favour and let me know if I can count on you for more than a couple of trips.’

  ‘I’m saving up for my own boat.’

  ‘What kind of boat?’ He crumpled an empty can in his fist.

  ‘I’m thinking about a lobster-boat. Small one. A boat I can run by myself.’

  Gil nodded, chewing at his lower lip. ‘I’ll put you on full share. Then you can earn your boat.’


  I opened my mouth to say thank you.

  Before I could speak, Gil walked into the wheelhouse and shut the door. The light in his cabin blinked on and then off. Marco appeared from the galley and climbed on to the dock. He turned and looked at me without speaking.

  Beer dripped from my eyebrows. ‘Are you coming back?’

  He picked at the tar on a piling. ‘Gil gave me a hundred dollars and said he was being fair.’ He looked up suddenly. ‘Do you think he was being fair?’

  I drank from the can and shrugged. If he had given Marco nothing, I would not have been surprised. ‘You have to take what he gives. Are you pissed off about it?’

  ‘I don’t know yet. My nose hurts and I can’t think straight.’ He walked off the dock and up toward Severn Street.

  A flashlight beam shone from Lester’s boat. Lester shouted ‘Private dock! Fuck away!’

  Marco reached Severn Street.

  I bet myself a dollar he’d turn right.

  He turned left and disappeared.

  I took a dollar bill from my wallet and dropped it into the water.

  I didn’t think Marco would come around again. I knew it. I was sure.

  Steam rose from the concrete ice room floor.

  Muffled sounds filtering down from the deck.

  I used a hammer to chop ice from around the bags of scallops.

  Nelson lifted the bloated white sacks and handed them to Kelley. Kelley brought them to the scales where Howard hovered over the dock boys, making sure there was no cheating.

  Suddenly Gil yelled, ‘Damn you!’

  When I looked up, he was staring down at us. His face had puffed up red with anger.

  I couldn’t tell whether he was yelling at Nelson or at me. I shifted my eyes over to Nelson, as if to guide Gil’s stare toward him.

  Gil’s body blocked out the light as he swung down the ladder.