“No.”
Hank bounded down the ladder. The men were already around their bunks rummaging through seabags for papers. “Hear this! Jody’s along only as a passenger. She hasn’t handled gear, she’s not fishing. No license. Got it?”
“Might have known,” said Seth.
Mo and Ham exchanged puzzled glances, then understood. “Don’t worry, Boss,” soothed Mo, and Ham echoed with, “Sure, Boss, sure, we got it.” Mo continued elaborately, caught up in the situation. “Your lady, Boss, she’s just come along for the ride, that’s exactly—we’ll be cool about it. Whoever saw a lady like that work a plunger, huh? But can we say she makes coffee and stuff like that?”
Hank looked around for Terry as he muttered, “Coffee, does dishes, sure, sure, if anybody asks.” Suddenly their enthusiasm warned him. “No. Don’t say anything. Let Seth and me do the talking. Understand?”
He hurried astern, where Terry had just caught a line from the Fish and Game’s rubber dinghy, and clapped Terry on the shoulder. “Jody’s got no license,” he whispered. “We say she’s just along as a passenger. Understand?”
Terry squinted and frowned. Had he heard the words clearly? Hank wondered. Too late to repeat as the dinghy brushed alongside and two officers in khaki shirts with green insignia jumped aboard. Hank knew them. They all shook hands.
As Hank predicted, the inspection was a routine perusal of the boat’s papers and fishing licenses, along with a look at the fish in their hold. Jody sauntered to deck smiling, and stretched as if she’d just come from bed. She had found some clean clothes not stained from fishing. “Heey-y, Jody,” said one of the officers. “Life of leisure, eh?”
“Never slept so much in my life, Charlie. How’s Edna?”
“There’s a rumor back in town. We thought maybe you were already skipper here and telling Hank what to do.”
“Got that one wrong,” muttered Seth.
“You know about rumors, Charlie,” said Jody easily, flashing her smile.
“Comes of a widow gotten kind of confused, eh? Suddenly gets crazy ideas. Poor old Adele, she needs time. Jones Henry wasn’t that easy to live with, I hear. Best thing, she’ll sell the boat.”
Jody stretched like a cat. “Wouldn’t be surprised at anything. But better not call Adele old to her face.”
“Commit suicide? Not me.” Officer Charlie drew Hank aside from the others. “I’m not asking unless she’s got one, but does your good lady have a license?”
“Nope.”
“Urge you call somebody in town, run ’em to Fish and Game and get her one fast. Anybody out here with binoculars knows Jody’s working nets alongside your guys. I’ll talk to the clerk by radio. With a guy, even you, I’d have to write a citation, but with a woman—”
“Appreciate that. Will do.”
The officers left with a wave, and: “Jody, enjoy your sleep.” They straightened back to official staunchness as soon as their dinghy headed for other inspections.
“I’ll be damned,” declared Jody. “They didn’t even consider if I handled gear or had a license.”
Hank shrugged in sympathy.
“Guess that settles it,” said Seth, pleasant for once. “Your wife takes it easy till we get back to shore.”
2
JUMPER’S SONG
UGANIK BAY, LATE JULY 1982
With the urgent radio call to buy Jody’s license, Adele Henry, back in Kodiak, learned that Jody had decided to take up her invitation. “Oh, Jody, I can’t believe it!” she exclaimed. “No—yes I can, yes I can! Poor Daddy, what he’d have thought, poor man. I’ll just have to get over that. Now. Wait. Let me get something to write with. I’m excited as a baby.”
So it happened. Mrs. Judith Sedwick Crawford would take command of the fifty-eight-foot limit seiner Adele H to fish salmon around Kodiak Island for the rest of the summer. To see it through safely, Hank recruited half of his own deck—Terry and Ham—to crew for her. When the word spread in town it amused some, wives and husbands both, but appalled others.
The once-unthinkable to Hank became his concentrated project for the next several days: to hone his deckwise wife to the mysteries of spotting and capturing humpie salmon from the viewpoint of the wheelhouse. He took on the job in orderly military fashion, as befitted even a one-hitch naval officer with a year of Vietnam service. She paid attention soberly, although sometimes the enormity of the new venture troubled her enough to escape into lighter talk than he thought appropriate.
Seth O’Malley, age thirty-two, Hank’s second and his fishing companion for more than a decade, watched glumly. Despite coming from southern California where anything went (and where he’d spent a restless year as a freshman at UCal Berkeley), he’d acquired an opposite outlook in Alaska. For him, the whole process of letting a woman run a boat undermined a man’s position in town. (Unless she failed.) If he was ever dumb enough to marry, Seth told himself, it wouldn’t be to a woman who jerked him around like that. His woman would keep house, raise kids, and come no closer to the boat than to wave good-bye. Jones Henry had that one right. Maybe the old pisser was right in a lot more ways than anybody ever gave him credit for. Seth’s face, in the old days puplike—as had once been his nature—behind a shaggy beard, was now shaved and square, weathered brown around eyes known for their glare. Given his height and shoulder breadth and his deep voice, he had become a presence, and knew it. His nature in the process had grown brusque, or, as he saw it, responsible. “When you know firsthand like I do the tricks the ocean can play,” he’d say gravely if twitted, “you don’t laugh at nothing about catching fish.” Thus, he seldom joked, never felt like joking in light of how the world banged you down if you let it.
Big Mo Wheeler, age twenty-seven, Seth’s shadow for years since Seth as deck boss had trained him, felt obliged to echo Seth’s disapproval when the two talked—or rather, when Seth sounded off in private. But Mo’s loyalty to Hank as boss, held in awe, kept him ready to cooperate. Mo was not, in any case, a man of independent opinion. He worked hard and well, and had mastered all fishing-boat skills that required practical reflexes. He did as he was told with consistent good humor—glad enough not to still be on that Iowa farm and expected to go to Methodist this and Methodist that after long days of work—happy to be on a high-line boat under one of the best captains around, and therefore, a man respected on the Kodiak docks.
Ham Davis, also twenty-seven, was Mo’s buddy and carbon copy in both build and obliging temperament. He, too, had escaped from the fields, although he remembered his Idaho farmboy days with greater warmth than Mo. Now they even had girlfriends ashore who looked alike. But Ham came to the crew with different loyalties than Mo. Circumstance had shunted him from crew to crew. Originally, he had been Tolly Smith’s man aboard the Star Wars, but that meant nothing when the king crab stocks collapsed in 1981 and Tolly lost his boat to the bank. Hank, Tolly’s old friend, had persuaded Jones Henry to take Ham aboard. Now, after the way it had all happened like a nightmare, Ham would revere the memory of Captain Jones forever; would choke with tears whenever he remembered that Captain Jones might still be alive—still bossing him sharply, which would have been fine, fine—but for the disaster, when he’d forgotten his survival suit and Captain Jones made him take his own, leading to Captain’s freezing to death in the water. Never forget it. If Captain Hank’s wife was going to run the boat for Captain Jones’s poor widow, and they wanted him aboard, that’s all there was to it, no matter that he’d rather work under Boss in a crew with Mo. It might even be his rightful punishment. The main thing: He hoped guys ashore wouldn’t make fun of him for having a lady skipper. Fights were a lot of trouble and sometimes hurt your knuckles.
Terry Bricks, twenty-five, from Oregon, watched it all as lightly as a grasshopper on a weed. However this wind blew would be all right. He owed nothing to Jones Henry’s memory but a chuckle over how things were turning out with Jody and all, Captain Jones being such a lady-hater—at least on the boats. That Jody was
something, holding out like she did. Boss had his hands full with such a lady, but he was plenty lucky. If he himself had been so lucky, he wouldn’t now be divorced and lonely each time they came to port. At least he’d finished with saying yes to a woman who’d complained right after the wedding that his clothes smelled fishy, and started in on him right away to be some gas pumper or shoe salesman ashore so he’d be home nights. When Boss himself asked if he’d crew for Jody and make sure the engine stayed running, it was easy to say sure and mean it. Jody wasn’t like some ordinary broad anyhow. Maybe you’d never agree to call her Boss, but the way she looked you in the eye, you knew she could take charge. And for once he’d be with somebody as short as he was—maybe not when on deck with big Ham and all, but in the wheelhouse and around. He and Ham together, they’d protect Boss’s lady and make sure she did all right.
One evening Hank pulled them into the Uganik cannery and delivered pierside to give Jody docking experience. He accompanied her from frame building to building along the boardwalks, suddenly nostalgic. Unlike the dozen canneries in Kodiak town itself, seasonal canneries in remote places like Uganik Bay on Kodiak Island were self-sufficient villages, and Hank enjoyed them as such. Little but the paint had changed since his greenhorn days here stapling boxes and forking fish from hopper to slime line. In the long warehouselike processing station, it could have been the same Filipino men as two decades ago who stood shoulder to shoulder in long green oilskin coats. They lined the conveyor belt leading from the iron chink that lopped fish heads and tails. Their same lined faces—or duplicates of a next generation—stayed frozen in the same scowls while their hands, with factory regularity, cut fish carcasses or hosed and scraped them. “Just think of it,” he muttered. “Thousands and thousands of humpies through their hands, their lifetime summer after summer.”
“So?” Jody shrugged. “Then they can pay their bills and be home with their kids winter after winter.”
Farther on, clattering machinery stamped cans into shape and pushed them along overhead racks to belts where chattering native women filled the cans with fish. Odors in the warehouse building progressed from brassy slime to heavy fish steam down by the retorts that cooked the sealed cans. Nothing had changed. Hank started to explain the operation.
“You don’t think I’ve worked in a salmon cannery?” said Jody dryly. “Just not this one where you say you came of age.”
“Every smell takes me back,” said Hank, unabashed.
“You can play wistful, but you wouldn’t want to be back here any more than I would.”
“But. . . we were so free.”
“Speak for yourself. No foreman ever tried to paw you.”
Across the ramp leading to the piers, another building housed a newer operation to freeze the fish. Along these belts stood kids of a college brightness. They giggled and kidded above a blast of rock music while their hands, in heavy rubber gloves, scraped the usual fish guts and blood. The girls wore kerchiefs and the men white paper caps, but they all looked fresh from the campus.
Just how I started, thought Hank. Summer adventure from Johns Hopkins U with never a thought of staying. Then Jones Henry took me on his boat. The cycle of years with Jones, first as mentor, then partner, then rival and antagonist, made his throat tighten. He needed to turn away.
“The girls may be dressed for sloppy work,” observed Jody, “but most have sneaked a little lipstick, I see. Just like we did.” With hands on hips, she added, “As for the boys, not a bad crop of young studs there, beneath those oilskins. The lipstick might just pay off.”
Hank disliked remembering that part of Jody’s life before she took him seriously. But okay, he’d play her game. “Yup. I remember once putting on a slimy wetsuit to dive beneath floating offal and free some clogged scupper. Volunteered in fact, to impress some sweet little—successfully impressed, I might add.” She merely raised an eyebrow. He should have kept quiet. “Oh man, we were young!” he added quickly.
“Speak for yourself.”
They separated. Jody went to the little cannery store for toothpaste and for work clothes to replace the borrowings she had been wearing. As Hank headed to the machine shop to grind down a winch guard that chafed, he continued to enjoy memories. Some of the steamy odors might have been miserable throughout those fourteen-hour days sliming fish, but now they evoked younger times. On the boardwalk, a short Japanese in a hurry nearly bumped him as they passed. The man’s crisp brown cap and shirt each bore a round Japanese insignia. That had changed! How freely they’d once talked of distant Japs who “raped the resource.” Now, he was in their debt (although friendly enough), and on automatic to not even think the word Jap.
In the machine shop they loaned him goggles to use the grinder. He had finished and turned off the machine when a voice behind him growled, “Surprised she’s not doing that for you.”
Hank turned to face Gus Rosvic of the Hinda Bee. He braced for a showdown. “Hello, Gus. You have a problem?”
“Only with the memory of poor Jones Henry.” Up close the man’s lined face didn’t seem hard, only troubled. What showed of his hair beneath the worn cap was more gray than brown, and turned white at the shaggy sideburns. Rumor had it he’d passed seventy. A slight bend of shoulders didn’t keep him from standing erect.
Hank eased. “I loved him too, Gus. But he’s dead. I’ve got other things to consider.” A burst of metal hammering drowned Gus’s reply. Hank motioned him outside, using the time to choose his words. “I respect you, sir. But sometimes old ways don’t work in new times. I’m sorry.”
“I heard it at Jones’s funeral, all the talk. How you tried to save him. Good for you. And I see that shoulder’s still in a cast.” Gus looked up at him with clear eyes surrounded by wrinkles.”But son—let a woman on poor Jones’s boat, and now they say she’s going to run it? That ain’t right.”
Hank had no answer since nothing was going to alter. “I’ll do this. I’ll see that Jody keeps Jones’s boat away from yours as much as possible. Two of my best guys are with her. They’ll keep her out of your hair.”
“However you do, it ain’t right. And I think you know it.” Gus started away, then turned back. “And son, I know it ain’t my business. But all this going to Japan that Jones told me you do. You’re too young for Pearl Harbor, that’s the trouble. Or you’d never have anything to do with those little yellow killers. You ain’t in their pocket now, are you?”
“Take it easy, Gus.” Hank left him quickly.
He headed toward the mess hall where the crew was to meet for an off-the-boat lunch that he’d arranged at the cannery office. Just put Japan out of mind today, he told himself. Time soon enough to face it. He looked around him. So little had changed—same net lockers, dorms, laundry shack—except in himself. Near the mess hall a circle had gathered. Seth’s unmistakable voice roared, “Break it up!” Hank hurried over.
Inside the circle Ham and the Hinda Bee’s crewman, Buddy, glared at each other, fists clenched, blood on each of their faces. Seth stood between them, glaring around. “Nothing here for you,” he barked at a knot of curious cannery workers. “Go back to cuttin’ up our fish or whatever you do.” His tone backed them off: pale kids in floppy landsman boots with heads in paper caps and kerchiefs. Seth gripped Ham and Bud by their shirts and pulled them one on each side toward the back of the building. They followed docilely under his authority, trailed by fellow crewmen of both boats. Seth appeared enough in charge that Hank felt no need to intervene.
“You want to fight, now you got it,” Seth continued. “But you take on all of us.” His glance included Mo and Terry, who stepped forward gravely, while the men of the Hinda Bee nodded in turn. “Me, I’d rather save my hands for the nets, and settle it next winter in Kodiak.”
Zack of the Hinda spoke up. “First time somebody’s made sense.”
“Okay,” said Ham. “But Seth, you tell ’em to stop mouthin’ off like that.”
“We’ll fuckin’ do it like we please,�
� said Bud. He was not as big as Ham, but probably just as strong. “Our skipper says it’s only days or even hours before she screws up, and we’re making it interesting is all.”
Terry sauntered up. Although he was shorter than the others, they knew him enough to listen. He held up two twenty-dollar bills. “It’s all I got here in my pocket, but call each one of these things witch’s dough, each a hundred bucks. It says that, starting today through the rest of this opening—since both our boats are empty now, we can count from zero—we highline you guys out of the water. Out of your pants! End of opening, we check it out fair from our delivery tickets. You takin’ me on, or are you scared a lady’s going to beat you?”
“You’re on. Fuckin’ right, you’re on,” declared Zack, picking through his pockets. “Got bucks here somewhere says kiss your two hundred good-bye.”
Terry held out his hand. “Then shake on it, and I don’t need to see your money.” Their hands met, and pumped in decisive jerks.
“You and me started this, Bud.” said Ham. Another two hundred for me if you got the guts. I don’t have it here but I’m good for it.”
“You got it!” They shook. Each began to squeeze the other’s hand. Neither let go. Their mouths tightened and their solemn looks fixed into glares.
After a minute Terry stepped in lightly. “At three both you apes let go, ‘cause it’s a draw. Understand?” Each nodded, their glares still rigid. “One. Two. Three!” He slapped the gripped hands and they parted. Both seemed relieved.
Hank saw Jody coming down the boardwalk. She walked purposefully but with a lilt. “I’ve been having a good time,” she announced happily. “You’ll never guess who I saw.”
A sudden hand tousled Hank’s hair with the force of a wire brush. The man wore a gold earring and coveralls. Merry eyes peered beneath a shag of graying hair tied in a ponytail. It was Tolly Smith.
Raiders Page 3
