by Paul Watkins
In the couple of seconds it took him to reach us, Nelson and I looked at each other.
Nelson stood with his arms by his side, mouth half open, snorting small bolts of steam. He seemed to be hiding himself in his own fog cloud.
Gil’s feet slapped on the floor as he touched down. Then he spun around and shoved me in the chest.
I fell over on to a pile of ice, feeling my hands sink into the sharp frozen crumbs.
‘You son of a bitch! Don’t be using a hammer to take out the scallops!’
‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry.’ I didn’t dare raise my head. You won’t fire me now, will you? I thought. Not after you said I could keep the job. You can’t fire me now, Gil.
‘When you take the bags out’ – he bent over me and twisted my shoulder so I faced the scallop pen – ‘you use your hands.’ He made his hands into rakes and dug them into the ice, clearing it away.
Over and over, I rammed my fingers into the ice. I uncovered the pale bags and handed them to Nelson. As if Gil wasn’t there anymore. As if he had never been there and I’d never thought of using a hammer.
Gil watched for a while.
I saw the hair smoothed flat on his arms as I twisted my body to hand the next bag to Nelson.
When Gil finally left, I looked at my fingers. From all of them except my thumbs, fat trickles of blood ran down on to my palms.
‘How long you been fishing, Nelson?’ I tried to make talk now that Gil had gone away.
Nelson shuffled his feet in the ice and rolled his eyes, thinking. ‘Five years.’
When he arrived at Sabatini’s that morning, he was driving a red Trans Am.
Kelley caught me staring at it and said not to be so impressed. To meet payments on that car, he told me, Nelson would be fishing and living with his parents and eating macaroni until his bones grew old and cracked. It wasn’t even a little bit paid for.
‘Have you fished all the time with the Grey Ghost?’ I handed over another bag, cold and heavy.
‘Always.’
After a few more questions, I gave up talking to Nelson. He never answered with more than one or two words.
Pittsley poked his head down into the ice room and grinned at us upside down.
During the night, he got drunk on grain alcohol called Ever Klear. While he was drunk, he decided to shave his head. Now his scalp looked blue next to the red sunburn on his face and neck.
‘Any relation to Russ Pfeiffer?’ He smacked his lips at me.
I nodded. ‘My father.’
‘I worked on his boat. The Glory B.’ He made fun of the name by the way he said it. ‘That was about two years ago. I quit.’
‘Why did you stop working with my dad?’ I looked up at him through shreds of steam.
‘It was an OK boat but he didn’t ever catch any fish. We used to stay out a week and come back with less than other boats made in three days. I swear, he had the worst luck of any fisherman I ever knew.’
I couldn’t tell if he was trying to be mean or just telling me because maybe it was the truth.
‘He put my brother through college and he’d put me through too, if I wanted to go. He does all right, Pittsley. Maybe you just hexed the boat.’
‘Put your brother through college? He was always talking about how his sons would never fish. I remember now.’ He grinned. ‘And there you are down in the ice room of a trawler.’
‘I fish because I want to, Pittsley.’ I thought about saying something to him about his wife and the detective. Something that might end in a fight. Something to hurt him deep. But it didn’t seem he was laughing at me. He had only told the truth and found it funny. ‘My father catches enough fish to put my brother through college. That and keep a house and a wife. That sounds like plenty of fish to me, Pitts.’
Then he smiled with his whole face. ‘He makes his money, he does that all right. But I still quit his boat.’ He went away and Gil yelled down to hurry with the scallops.
It was a bright day outside. The streets were full of Gatsby boys and girls, clean and sharp-featured and hiding their eyes behind aviator sunglasses. They drove up and down on the cobblestones of Severn Street, stopping traffic to talk when they met a friend coming the other way.
Punks on skateboards did tricks in front of the ice cream shops.
*
I didn’t want to call home yet.
I practised the blank stare I would need when my mother and father made up their minds what to say to me. I wondered if they’d figured it out already. Perhaps they had even rehearsed, sat facing the couch where they would sit me down, sharpening their words and making up replies for anything I could answer back.
I remembered the place far inside where I could go and hear their voices only as echoes, hear myself saying, ‘How much can they hurt you now? What damage can they do?’
We sat on the dock waiting for our pay.
Kelley said a crew could never tell what the amount might be, because only the captain knew how much fuel had been burned, whether new parts for the boat had to be bought and whether the price of scallops and monkfish had risen or fallen since the last time in port.
Crewmen who’d been fishing long enough would know if they were being cheated.
But the captain could pay his people whatever he wanted. He could fine them for some made-up offence or lie about the cost of fuel. He could be a pirate to his crew. There would always be new people ready to take the places of the ones who quit. But he ran the risk of having his boat burned at the dock. Or his house torched. Or seeing his car in flames.
It seemed to me that a thieving captain was always paid back with fire. All the stories I had heard of crookedness and cheating ended with gallon cans of gasoline.
When Gil appeared from Sabatini’s office, he walked quickly across the hot tar of the dockyard to our boat. He carried a black trash bag knotted at the top.
He ordered the galley door shut and the wheelhouse locked. Then he sat us all down at the galley table.
He handed out stacks of bills to each of us and said we all were getting the same. Nineteen hundred dollars with no social security numbers taken down, no job forms filled out and no questions asked about where we lived or next of kin. The bills were bound with yellow rubber bands.
Gil told us to be back on the boat at noon in three days time.
Kelley asked me if I wanted to drink with him at Mary’s.
I said I had to go home.
He held my face in his hands and squeezed. ‘Well, you know where to find me.’
I didn’t know where to find him and I didn’t ask. I was thinking too much about going home.
Swaying slightly, I walked across the asphalt towards Severn Street, the motion of the boat still inside and making me move like a drunk.
I recognised the thin shape perched on one of Sabatini’s barrels long before it came in focus.
My father sat with one leg hooked over the other, blinking in the dust and trickling heat that separated me from him. When I came close, he took off his hat and smiled. Then he scratched at his face and stopped smiling. ‘Hundred forty bags of scallops isn’t bad.’ He waited for me to speak but I stood looking at his boots, the tan leather chafed into suede and the toes pointing in at each other. He cleared his throat. ‘Not bad at all.’
‘It was a good boat so I took the job.’ My pack felt heavy so I set it down.
‘Grey Ghost is a fine boat.’ He uncrossed his legs and rocked forward slightly on his hips. ‘Need a ride home or are you going up to Mary’s?’
I thought, You’re showing me that wherever I try to go you’ll be there. Everything that happens you’ll know about. How big the catch. How much money. How good the boat. You’ll want me to think you’ll know what I’m going to do before I even think about it. And maybe you will.
I sat in the truck, hugging my pack to my chest as we drove up the Newport Bridge. Waves on the bay became threads of white two hundred feet below. ‘I’m not angry.’ He looked ahead, hat turned
backward on his head like a baseball catcher, the way it always was when he drove. ‘What I want to know is, are you going back to school in the fall?’
‘I want to buy my own boat.’
He nodded and didn’t speak until we were off the bridge. Then he stopped his truck by the side of the road and turned his whole body to face me. ‘You go out for one trip and you come back wanting your own boat. You expect me to say nothing about that? You expect me not to call you a fucking idiot?’
‘I want a small boat. A lobster-boat. Something that stays in dose to shore which I can run with one other person or by myself. I thought about all the things you told me, about all the dangers of storms and having no family life, and I thought about you drifting out at sea that time you fell overboard. And none of that’s going to happen if I just run a small boat close to shore.’ I sat back and stared at the hood of the truck. It seemed to be dissolving in the heat. ‘I’ve been wanting my own boat since the first week you sent me to work at Gunther’s.’
He stayed quiet for a while. ‘What kind of a future is that? What kind of prospects does that give you?’ I thought then, without speaking, of the way it would be, heading out into the glitter of sunrise each morning, water skimming past the hull, then the ride back, holding tanks weighed down with lobster. I looked at him. ‘I’d start today if I could.’
‘What if it doesn’t work out?’
‘Then I could go back to school. I don’t see what you can have against me running a small boat close to shore, not after all you’ve said.’
‘It’s true you’d be home at the end of the day. And maybe you wouldn’t get yourself killed. Maybe.’ He tapped me on the shoulder. ‘We can talk about this.’ He smiled and tapped me again. ‘At least this is something we can talk about.’
He started the truck engine and just as suddenly he switched it off again. ‘I can’t help you with the paying for the boat. The money’s a little tight now. I haven’t told your mother this, but even if you were going back to school, I don’t know if I could make the payments. I’ve been looking into guaranteed student loans. The fishing is poor right now.’
‘I met a man who used to work with you on the Glory B. He said the fishing’s always poor with you. Man’s a fool.’
‘What’s he called?’
‘Pittsley. I don’t know his first name.’
‘Tall? Black hair and blue eyes? Lost his mind in the Nam?’
‘Him. Yes.’
‘I fired that man.’
‘He said he quit. He’s about the only one on the crew I don’t get along with.’
‘I fired him.’ He turned the key and gassed the engine but it wouldn’t start. He turned it again and it still didn’t start. Then he screamed something that didn’t sound like words and punched the rear-view mirror, which broke and fell at my feet.
I felt my stomach muscles cramp when he screamed. I had thought he was calm and didn’t know what it was that made him explode.
To break the silence as we drove home, I asked him if it was really true that he had bad luck with fishing. He turned to me, lips pulled back over his teeth. ‘What do you care, as long as the money comes in?’
*
At dinner, I told my mother about my idea to run a small boat.
My father nodded. ‘And if it doesn’t work, he’ll go back to school. It sounds safe enough to me.’ She didn’t seem to be listening. She gnawed at a piece of corn on the cob and said nothing. Then she dropped the cob on her plate and stared hard at my father. ‘You’re an old fool!’ She turned to me. ‘And you’re another fool! Make your father tell you about Henry van Gerbig! Tell him, Russ!’
‘I never heard of anyone by that —’
‘Oh, yes you have, Russell! Henry van Gerbig. Used to live in Jamestown.’
‘Oh, I remember.’ He nodded and stood up with his plate, making for the kitchen.
‘You tell James about van Gerbig, or I will.’
He set down his plate and sighed. ‘Man named van Gerbig used to run a small boat out of Jamestown. He sold his lobsters in Newport about twice a week. He worked by himself, had one of those boats with an open back so the pots could slide off easily. Well, one day he must have just fallen overboard and nobody found him. His boat washed up on the south end of Jamestown. We took you to see it. Remember?’
I remembered the boat. It had sunk just short of the beach, and only its mast showed above the water. It looked like a dead tree in a flooded field. We reached the place at twilight and stayed until the mast from van Gerbig’s boat had folded away into the dark. Then we rode home. Joseph and I stood in the back of the truck, our faces whipped by the wind.
Father told the story of van Gerbig and made another move for the kitchen.
‘No! Finish it!’ Mother slammed her hand flat on the table. Our glasses jumped. The milk in them swayed back and forth. ‘Tell James now what you didn’t tell them then!’
He sighed and scratched at the back of his neck. ‘You know how the lobstermen around here set five or six pots on one line and pull them up on deck with little winches? Well, they set those pots down again by putting the boat in gear. They push over one pot and the other ones get pulled in after it. You have to watch the line between the pots because it pays out pretty fast.’ He caught his breath. ‘Well, van Gerbig must have caught his foot in one of the coils of rope and got pulled down.’
‘And what else?’ Mother spoke softly now, seeing that it hurt him to recall the way the man had died.
‘They know it happened that way because one of the cleats on the boat was torn out. He caught his foot in the rope and grabbed the cleat and tore it out on his way down. And there was still signs of blood over the stern where he ripped up his face and his hands trying to hold on.’ Then my father walked into the kitchen.
I heard him set his dish in the sink.
Mother rested her hand on my arm. ‘You see? You see why I made him tell you that? They never found van Gerbig. He ended up as bait for his own traps.’
‘I still think James is on to a good idea, if it’s what he wants to do.’ Father sat down at the table again. ‘There’s a lesson from what happened to van Gerbig, but it’s no reason to go screaming and hollering in the opposite direction.’
‘Are you forgetting all the talks we had when he and Joseph were little. Are you?’
‘Van Gerbig was a drunk. Your father was a drunk. I bet they were both drunk when they died. I bet it was why they died. You’re living in fear of the wrong things.’
I sat through this with my neck hunched down into my shoulders, feeling the air hot with old anger rising to the surface.
My mother dabbed at her mouth with a napkin and then said very softly, ‘Don’t you talk to me about living in fear, Russell.’
He sat back in his chair, the wood creaking with his weight. ‘I’m glad he’s found something he wants to do.’
‘So do it.’ She smiled and clapped her hands. Her face was ugly with sarcasm. ‘Do it today.’ She walked out the back door and I heard her feet crunch on the gravel driveway. I sat for a moment picking at the loose kernels of corn on my plate. ‘I would if I had the money.’
My father looked up and sniffed. ‘I know it.’
I had no idea how long I would be working on the Grey Ghost before I’d have enough to buy my own boat. And then I’d have to work as an apprentice for someone, to learn the ropes. I’d have to buy pots. Find out where to set them down. Buy a licence. Insurance. Rent a spot on a pier.
It all ploughed around in my head and I couldn’t sleep. I blinked dry-eyed out the window at the orange street lamps, feeling my bed too large after the cramped bunk, and strangely naked after days of sleeping in my clothes. My hair was like fluff after the hour-long shower. The only dirt that remained was rubbed into the callouses on my palms.
Joseph had a new plan.
He heard from a friend about people who sold surplus factory items on a television programme called Shopping at Home. Models walked back and fo
rth in front of the camera wearing clothes or jewellery that hadn’t sold in stores, while the announcer worked up his audience by saying that the item’s retail value was a hundred dollars, but anyone who called in the next ten minutes could have it for thirty. Then $30 would flash on the screen while the model smoothed her hands up and down her dress and smiled, and the announcer said he couldn’t believe what a bargain it was.
Joseph bought five hundred copies of a record from a warehouse in Massachusetts. The records cost two dollars apiece and he hoped to sell them for fifteen.
The record was called National Anthems of the World. The cover drawing showed dozens of people in national costumes. They all had their mouths open. Out of their mouths came words in different languages. On each record was a red sticker that said ‘Jumbo LP’.
‘You want “in”?’ He stood in the bathroom while I showered. He had to shout over the noise of rushing water.
‘What’s “in”?’ It was my second shower of the day and my third since coming home. I couldn’t stay out of the water.
‘On the deal. You want a cut of the profits? The records are all set to go on the air tomorrow night. The TV station gets fifteen per cent. It’s all been taken care of. So the hard part’s done. I’m just offering you a cut that’s all.’
I switched off the shower and groped past the curtain for my towel.
He shoved it into my hand. I wrapped the towel around my waist and stepped out. ‘You want me to buy some records?’
Joseph measured a space in front of him. ‘You buy them wholesale and take the profit when they sell on TV. Minus the fifteen per cent of course. I’m only –’ he measured another space, blocking out his deal – ‘only doing this to give you an introduction to business. Maybe talk some sense into you, when you see you don’t have to float around Narragansett Bay for a living.’
‘I’m saving up for a boat.’
‘You’ll get your boat a lot faster my way.’
