by John Rocco
“Hey, Jake, I found you!”
“Get in the boat. Can’t you see I’m working here?” I yell at him.
“I’m just out here to help. Chill out.”
“Come on, get on board.” I lift him up by the arm, and we pull the kayak up and lash it to the bow of the Hawkline. When that’s done, I start working the rake again, and Tommy sits on the rail looking at me like, What’d I do?
“These guys are all staring at me already, so I’m a little self-conscious. That orange kayak got them all laughing at you, and I guess they’re laughing at me too, that’s all.”
“What do you care what those other guys think?” Tommy looks around at the pack of boats surrounding us.
Tommy is right. I actually don’t care what these other guys think. “Yeah, you’re right. Sorry.”
Then Tommy starts looking at all the quahogs in the boat. “Holy crap. Did you catch all these?”
“They didn’t just jump in the boat. Are you sticking around? I could use the help . . . and the company.”
“I’m in as long as you need me,” he says, slapping his hands together and giving me a Where do we start? look.
“We’ve got a long day ahead of us, and I’ll make it worth your while.”
“I’m not doing it for the money, Jake,” Tommy says, waving me off. “This’ll be fun. What do I do?”
I’m relieved that Tommy’s going to stay. It gives me new energy.
“Okay. When I say Ready up, grab that rope and haul it in as I pull up the pole, until the rake comes up to the surface.”
“Got it,” Tommy says, getting into position.
“Ready up!”
Tommy grabs the rope and starts hauling.
“Toooooo fast! Slow down!”
The rake busts the surface, and the pole is nearly bent in half from the pressure of the line.
“Come on, Tommy! You’re gonna break my poles.”
“Geez, man, just tell me. Don’t get so touchy.” Tommy looks like a beaten dog with his head hanging low as the other quahoggers look on.
“When you are out here working in this boat, I’m in charge, so you got to listen to everything I tell you and don’t take it personally. Everything has to go right out here, or stuff gets broken and people get hurt. My track record sucks with people getting hurt.”
“I know. So, just tell me what to do and I’ll do it . . . Captain.” Tommy gives me an exaggerated salute.
“Don’t call me that,” I say, thinking of George. I dump the rake onto the culling board. “First thing is to get rid of anything that’s not a quahog, and pull out the undersize quahogs.” I hand him the set of steel rings and point to the smallest one. “If any of them fit through that, throw ’em overboard because they’re undersize. Anything else that fits through this bigger one goes into this bucket.”
“Tiny ones overboard; everything else in the bucket. Got it.”
“But you got to count them too. When you get five hundred in the bucket, you got to bag them.”
“Where do these big ones go?” Tommy asks, holding up one of the large chowders.
“Just put them in the red bucket. We don’t need to count those.”
I kick one of the full white buckets. “This one’s ready to be bagged. Just lay one of those red onion bags across the lip and flip it with your wrists.”
“Like this?” Tommy flips the bucket and the littlenecks rattle into the bag.
“Yeah, like that. Cool. No one ever gets the first one! Great!”
Tommy looks over his shoulder, pleased with himself.
“You’re now officially a picker, Tommy. You know the only thing that’s lower than a picker?”
Tommy is not looking up; he’s just shoveling quahogs, moving rocks. He says, “No, Jake, what’s lower than a picker?”
“A snot.”
I’m laughing so hard I can barely pull the rake.
This is fun. It hurts, but it’s fun.
Out of the corner of my eye, I see a brand-new boat slinking through the pack, searching for a space to drop anchor. The guy steering the boat is about twenty years old, pudgy, hair slicked back with gel, and he’s wearing a bright-blue tank top. I watch him as he dumps his anchor to the port side of me. His boat is clean, without a speck of mud on it, and it looks like he just launched it for the first time today. He lets out his line and settles in right next to us. Our boats are nearly touching, and he’s no more than ten feet from Cliff Olson’s garvey. Cliff doesn’t say anything about him invading our space, so I don’t either.
The pudgy guy glances over at me as he’s setting up his rake. He’s doing it exactly backward, attaching his rake first and then trying to hold on to it as he attaches the other sections of pole. His face gets red with strain as he tries to set up. He’s swearing and muttering as he struggles.
“Check it out. Trust Fund Guy is going to dig with the rest of us today,” Tommy whispers to me.
“He looks like he needs some help.”
Just as I say this, the guy drops both his pole and rake into the water. In a split second he loses two hundred bucks’ worth of equipment, and it looks like he’s never dug a quahog in his life. He might not get the chance today.
The guy starts stomping around the boat, throwing his screwdriver against the console, shattering a full bottle of beer in the fancy cup holder. Then he throws another section of pole onto the deck, and it makes a metallic, clattering noise that startles the rest of the diggers. He slumps down on the gunwale, looking completely dejected. I know how he feels. I’ve totally been there.
“Tommy, come hold the rake for a minute.”
“You want me to dig?”
“No, don’t pull it or you’ll mess it up. It’s half full.” I jump onto the bow and pull out a set of scuba fins, mask, and fifty feet of coiled rope from the storage hold.
“What are you doing?”
“I’ll be right back,” I say.
The pudgy guy’s boat is so close it’s almost touching ours. I get his attention by clearing my throat loudly.
“Can I come aboard?” I ask.
“Sure, but I don’t know what you’re gonna do. I just lost the friggin’ rake, pole, and clamps. All gone!”
“I know. I saw it happen. The good thing is you’re on an anchor, and you haven’t moved, so it’s probably right under us,” I say, jumping aboard his boat. I take a look around, and this guy is set up. Everything looks like it just got unwrapped from the store: new poles, perfectly clean rubber deck mats, pristine white fiberglass culling board, even the buckets are new. Who the hell buys their buckets? I ask myself.
“So what’re you gonna do? Dive for it?” he asks, eyes wide.
“Yeah. Unless you’re going to do it,” I say, holding the fins out to him.
“Dude, I can’t even swim,” he says, shaking his head.
“It’s settled, then. But we got to be quick. Those boats are drifting back on us, and they’re not going to be too happy with us just sitting here.” I nod toward the two boats in front of us about twenty yards away.
Stripping down to my underwear, I put on the fins, tie a snap hook to one end of the rope, and hand the other end to the guy.
“What do I do with this?”
“Just hold on to it. I’m going to hook the other end to your rake,” I say, snapping the hook.
“Why are you doing this for me? I don’t even know your name.”
“I don’t know. I guess I just know what it’s like to be stuck in a bad situation,” I say, looping the rope around my waist and stepping over the side. “My name’s Jake Cole.”
“I’m Paul,” the guy says quietly, almost embarrassed.
“Okay, wish me luck.”
I jump in the water and take a couple of huge breaths as I try to determine where the rake might be in relation to the boat.
Right under me.
I dive straight down into the dark. The sound of outboard motors and the clanging of poles against boats is a dull roar in
my head. Fifteen feet down, my hands hit the muddy bottom, and I pinch my nose and blow out to relieve the pressure. My ears pop with a loud squeak, and immediately I begin to sweep my hands across the surface of the mud, searching for Paul’s rake. I can feel the quahogs all clustered together right under the surface, and part of me wants to start picking them up. Keep searching. You’re running out of air. My lungs are burning, and there is a convulsive tug in the middle of my chest that is telling me to get to the surface. I take one more sweep with my hands and feel nothing. I kick hard toward the surface.
“Holy crap. You were down there for like an hour! How’d you do that?” Paul is leaning over the rail, looking pale and worried.
“My dad,” I say, panting, “would get me to swim underwater . . . retrieve things under the dock . . . I just got used to it, that’s all.”
“Yeah, my dad makes me retrieve things too,” Paul says with a curious smile.
“I can’t see a thing down there.”
“It’s no use, man. I’ll just head in,” Paul says, slapping the side of the boat. “My dad is going to kill me. He just bought all this stuff for me last week. Said it would be good for me to earn a hard day’s pay. This sucks.”
“I’m not through trying. I can get it.” I look over at Tommy. “How we doing? Those boats getting close?”
“You’d better hurry up,” Tommy says nervously. “They’re starting to give me some nasty looks.”
I head back down, popping my ears on the way. This time I find the section of pole on my first sweep. Bingo. I feel my way down the pole till I find the rake and grab it with my left hand, using my right hand to unhook the rope around my waist. I snap the hook onto the rake and begin my ascent.
Suddenly, everything goes wrong. A sharp web of rope hits me, and I spin around, twisting through the murky water. There’s a sudden tug on my leg as it wraps me in its noose and pulls me back down, dragging me across the bottom. I frantically pull and tear at the rope around my leg, kicking the fins off as my breath leaves me in a flurry of bubbles.
I’ve got to free myself.
All I want to do is breathe.
I can’t breathe.
I can’t breathe.
I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die.
I feel two hands lift me up, and then I see a flash of knife slicing through the murk, and then lots of bubbles as the hands push me up toward the light. My head bursts through the surface, and I suck in air with a roaring noise. Cliff Olson pops up next to me, with the knife still in his hand.
“Jake! Jake!” Tommy is screaming at me from the boat. “What happened?” He lifts me into the boat with some newfound power I didn’t know he had.
“I’m all right,” I gasp, dropping the mask to the deck. “I just got caught up in some guy’s drifting anchor line.”
I look over and see Cliff climbing back into his garvey, like he does this kind of thing every day. Paul jumps over into the Hawkline with a towel and my clothes.
“Jesus Christ, that was some crazy stuff ! You nearly got yourself killed.” He is visibly shaking, and his eyes look like they are going to pop out of his head. “I thought you were just playing a joke like you were some kind of Harry Houdini, until this dude comes jumping across the two boats and dives in with a knife between his teeth.”
We all look at Cliff, and he’s already back on his rake and pulling in a steady rhythm. “Hey, Cliff !” I yell over to him.
“Yeah, Jake?”
“Thanks. I owe you,” I say, still panting like a dog.
“Don’t worry about it, Jake.” He points to a red boat about fifty feet away, where another digger is hauling up his anchor line. “That guy was dragging his anchor because it was caught up in a bunch of old eel traps. I guess I cut you both free.”
“Well, then, he owes you.” Tommy laughs, pointing to the guy in the red boat.
Cliff and I are nervously laughing it off, but Paul looks pretty freaked out.
“Did you pull up the rope?” I ask, smiling at Paul.
“What?”
“Your rake, did you pull it up?”
“No way.” He rubs his face with his fat fingers like he can’t believe it. “You clipped it?”
“Yeah. But this time,” I say, “start putting it together from the handle end first. Put the rake on last, and make sure you tie a damn line to the end of it because I’m not diving in after it again.”
“You’re un-freakin’-believable,” he says, pulling his wallet out of his back pocket and grabbing a wad of bills. He holds the money out toward me.
“Seriously, don’t worry about it,” I say, handing him the towel.
“Unbelievable,” he says again as he jumps back into his shiny new boat.
Tommy and I get back to work, and I can still hear Paul muttering to himself. I thought I would be exhausted after nearly drowning, but for some reason I feel even stronger.
“Why did you help that guy?” Tommy asks me while dumping another bucket of littlenecks into a bag.
“Because he needed it, I guess.”
“But the guy is clueless,” Tommy says under his breath.
“Hey, you were clueless when you first paddled out here in that kayak.”
“Yeah, that’s true,” Tommy says, nodding.
“Sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do.”
By 11:30 a.m. the rakes are no longer coming up full. I move up on the anchor line because there’s nowhere to move behind me.
“Are you still catching?” I ask Johnny Bennato.
“Seems everybody’s coming up with about half of what they were catching an hour ago,” he says.
“Me too.”
“Say, you all right?” Johnny asks. “I heard you ran into a little trouble over there. I was so busy dealing with these bozos in front of me, I didn’t even see it.”
“Yeah, I’m fine.”
“We’re awesome!” Tommy adds, throwing his skinny arm over the console.
Bennato’s pushing the handle of his rake forward with his hips, just like me, really sweating to make the rake work, and he’s pissed off as he starts pulling it up to the surface. “Friggin’ bottom’s all chewed up. There seems to be plenty of stuff, but it’s like working in a newly plowed cornfield. The rake keeps popping out.”
The wind from the north has died, and there’s no tide. All the boats are starting to drift around at different angles.
“The tide should be going out for another hour.” I say this to nobody in particular.
Tommy has caught up with me, and he has everything culled out, and all the buckets are bagged and stacked. Not a good sign.
“I’m thinking of moving,” I say real quietly.
“What?” Tommy looks at me like I’m nuts. “Where are we going to go? There are boats everywhere.”
“East of here. There’s no one working over there.” I nod with my chin toward Rumstick Rock.
“Don’t you think there’s a reason no one’s working over there?”
“Listen.” I lean in close to Tommy. “The wind is going to pick up any minute, and we’ll try working that mud drift out there.”
“Wind?” Tommy licks his finger and holds it up into the stagnant air.
“Trust me, it’s going to blow, and all these guys are going to end up in a tangled mess.”
“You’re the boss,” Tommy says.
As I look back at the mountain of quahogs we’ve caught, I don’t feel like a kid anymore. I feel like I’m a Hi-Liner, like Dave Becker. Gene would be proud of me. So would my dad.
“Let’s just pull up to the top of our anchor line and eat some lunch.”
“Sounds good to me. I’m starving.” Tommy pulls most of the anchor line in as I rinse my hands in the water. The salt stings my palms. There are three burst blisters on each hand. The skin is hanging off in little flaps, and I try to press them back into place, but it’s useless, so I just bite off the extra skin and spit it overboard.
“I hope you got more fo
r lunch than that,” Tommy says, leaning into the anchor line.
“Nope, that’s it,” I say, offering him my hand. If Tommy weren’t here, I might have gone home by now.
We tie off, and I hand Tommy a loaf of bread and open the other can of beef stew. We eat as if we are starving, scarfing down the bread and stew without taking time to breathe.
“Gene always says that August is the only time when you can really predict the weather out here. The mornings are cool with little wind, and then in the afternoon you get a warm southerly breeze.” I hand the jug of water to Tommy. “That’s what we’re waiting for, so let me know when you feel it.”
“Yeah, right.” Tommy laughs. “I can’t feel anything. My arms are blasted.”
As his words empty into the air, a southerly breeze comes, slight at first, just a tickle on the back of my neck. It’s as if Gene is right here with me.
“Haul the anchor, Tom. Haul it fast.”
I smack the rake into the rake holder and resurrect the engine. The smoke and noise from the engine arouses everyone’s attention. I can hear a guy from Greenwich Bay in a light-green boat talking loudly.
“It’s about time this place clears out of all these kids and peckerheads.”
“Hey dick-for-brains,” Bennato yells at him. “My money would be on the kid. He’s outcaught you, you jackass.”
The Greenwich Bay guy starts throwing his rake around and smashing stuff on his deck. I decide to swing the boat by Johnny Bennato, when I notice Tommy stacking the bags in a big mound to show off our catch.
“Don’t do that. Lay them out flat,” I call back to him.
“Why? It looks wicked awesome.”
“We’re not here to show off. Just get them down low.”
Tommy reluctantly pulls the bags down and lays them in two rows of ten bags each at the stern.
“Where are you going, Jake?” Johnny asks over the engine noise.
I kill the engine and slide right by his starboard side, speaking in a hushed voice.
“I’m setting up for the mud drift out east of here because the wind is going to blow this afternoon from the south. Gene and I killed them in the mud one foggy day near the line out east. I figure it’ll be even better than here.”
