Raiders

by William B. McCloskey

  “Wow,” Hank cajoled, relieved. “You’ve seen to it all. Good job!”

  “And maybe you’ll notice we’ve got half the old-style hooks shaped like a J, but also partly the new hooks shaped in more of a circle that they say holds the fish tighter. Couldn’t get more than a few hundred circle jobs from any one place because everybody’s suddenly crazy for them.”

  “Good. Good for you. I’m impressed as hell.”

  “Yeah.” Seth seemed mollified. “You just might’ve asked me, that’s all. We don’t need picture books to do this.”

  “Hey!” called Terry’s good-humored voice from the depths of the windlass. “Stop your bitchin’ and hold that flashlight steady.”

  “And we don’t need imported experts, either,” Seth added as his head returned to the machinery. The head popped out again. “Incidentally, boats our size are going out with seven crew for these pushes. I count we’ve got five of our own to do the work, and this one expert. With beefed-up crew on every boat in town, any spare dock rat worth hiring’s taken. Odds came by last week before he went to some meeting in Anchorage, and I told him to come by again if he wanted. At least we know Odds, assuming he’s not gone soft.”

  “Don’t count on his not.” Gone soft, Hank decided, could be the way out of hiring Odds if he really didn’t want him.

  Kodama emerged from below, planted legs apart, and circled his gaze. He had changed from traveling clothes into olive fatigues and a low, flat brown cap. The altered clothing seemed to have restored his old judolike confidence. But good Lord, thought Hank, it also made the man look like a classic Jap from old war movies. And those short boots barely above his shins would ship a sea-sweep in seconds. The guy must never have gone on deck in his days as fishing master.

  Mo, who had finished work on the mast, came over to greet Kodama. Ham followed. All three were large men on the same eye level. It seemed friendly, although, Hank thought, Kodama might have managed a less superior air. As he started over to lighten the meeting, Kodama declared, “Bait table in wrong location. You move from there to here, please.” He pointed, but clearly didn’t intend to help.

  Hank joined them quickly. “You think the bench here’s in the wrong place?”

  “Of course. Line will come in over machinery, coming in straight direction so. So therefore line must be coiled into basket. But table is where basket must locate. Table for cutting bait and securing bait onto hooks must locate somewhere else, but somewhere also away from place where entrails removed from fish.” His hand swept the area. “This vessel is very small, thusly crowded. Therefore,” he pointed far astern, “must carry table over there.”

  “Good,” said Hank, taking one side of the bench. He made his voice firm and looked straight at the Japanese. “Grab your end, Kodama-san.”

  The head jerked back and the mouth tightened with a flash of judo combat. Hank held his gaze. With a curt phhh, Kodama placed hands under the bench and lifted. It was heavy even for two strong men. Automatically Mo and Ham lifted also.

  “Good advice, Kodama-san. That’s just where the baiting table belongs.”

  “Of course.”

  Tell Kodama flat out that he was only an equal among equals? Hank wondered. Or hope he got the message.

  Adele drew Hank aside. “Your friend. Look at those silly little boots. He’ll be wet in a minute. Send him up to Sutliff’s for proper ones and put it on my account. Poor Jones would die to see a Japanese on his boat, but he wouldn’t want him to suffer. Well, maybe he would, but never mind; Daddy’s dead, rest him, and I’m in charge now.”

  Hank caught up with Jody on the dock. “Look, besides Fish and Game, will you take Kodama up to the store? At least find him something other than that Jap army cap, something with a tractor on it, maybe. And denims. And the right kind of boots. Adele says pay for the boots on her account.”

  “He does look kind of. . . Jap. But we’ll pay. Adele thinks she owns everything she buys these days. She’s being wonderful, but we should watch it.”

  It was unexpected how reluctant Kodama was to go with Jody. He insisted on riding in back of the wagon. Hank watched them off. Strange guy in ways not anticipated. Afraid of women? Or just women drivers?

  Hank left to call on Swede Scorden and settle plans for delivery. He strode down the floating piers among the shouts and engine whirrs of preparation. Black exhaust spurted from tailpipes, then cleared, as engines were tested. Men swarmed over decks, more to each boat than usual for seining. They bent knees and grunted up frosty, dripping boxes of bait, or clanged new attachments into place. One crew was removing its seine to make room for longline, hand by hand over the power block into a wide-beamed skiff. Did the whole damned salmon fleet expect to hit the halibut?

  When he passed the Hinda Bee, one of the guys saw him and waved. So did Gus Rosvic watching calmly from a chair crowded against the back of the wheelhouse. Hank returned both waves with a “Yo!” While his own men under Seth’s bark were doing everything right, this crew seemed to mesh without instruction. Indeed, their baiting table was located astern where Kodama had ordered theirs. They’d longlined before and had it together.

  “Wait up, Hank,” called Gus. He climbed carefully down the ladder, then passed from his deck to the pier deliberately with his seat on the rail and legs lifted over rather than with the bounce and jump of younger men. Hank lessened his stride when Gus joined him, but the adjustment was not as great as he’d expected.

  “You’re going to spin for the halibut, eh?” Gus’s words drawled in a comfortable voice that took its time.

  Hank relaxed. “Joining the crowd, Gus.”

  “Nothing wrong with that.” Pause. “Can’t help but think yes and no, about seeing Jones Henry’s boat fish without him. But it still pays his lady’s bills. He’d be glad of that.” They stepped aside to let a man pass wheeling a hand truck piled with gear. Bananas and waterproof gloves drooped over the rim of the top box. “Boat paid all right with your lady running her. Got to admit, Jody done all right out there.”

  “She’ll appreciate your saying.”

  “Now, Jones’s lady. That woman meddling much?”

  Hank grinned. “As we speak, she’s painting the fuckin’ bait box yellow.”

  Gus halted and slapped his knees. “Ah hahaha! You don’t say? Oh my. Somebody’d better park a truck over Jones’s grave so it don’t explode. Yellow, you say?”

  “I’d hoped it might be some new kind of primer, but no such.”

  “Curtains and geraniums yet at the wheelhouse windows?”

  Hank hesitated. He hadn’t meant to make Adele a public joke. “She’s just finding her way.”

  “Well, Adele’s a fine girl. No weepy widow, I admire that. But Lord keep her out of my way! She ain’t going to sea with you?”

  “Not likely.” (What if she ever got such a notion? He’d be firm.)

  They had reached the road, and Gus was headed toward town instead of the fish plants. He held out his hand. It was big, and softened by years of water, but firm. “Good fishing to you out there, Hank.” His clear eyes were calm beneath shaggy brows. “You maybe saved me some trouble in Whale Pass last month. Not that I couldn’t have handled things on my own. Nothing to talk about, but I know it. I’m there if you ever need me. That goes for your lady too.”

  “I thank you, Gus.”

  The eyes squinted as they scanned Hank from head to knees and back again. “It’s just a shame how much more fish my boys is going to catch than your poor displaced crab-pluckers.”

  Hank felt his energy revive. “You Anacortes Slavs would bet on your grandma’s wedding night!”

  “Now Hank, that’s not nice.”

  “How much did you have in mind?”

  “Same as last time wouldn’t hurt nobody.”

  “Done.” Another handshake.

  The gravel road leading from the docks to the fish plants was pocked with holes that held water from one rain to the next. Hank automatically dodged water from trucks tha
t hit the potholes. As he approached the plants, the prevailing odors changed from boat oils and fish from the net to a mash of steamed fish and ammonia.

  The cannery in town that Swede Scorden managed, Pacific Future— which was now controlled by Tsurifune Suisan Ltd.—had a corrugated front visible halfway down the line of low buildings crowded close together. Hank chose to ignore a door cut in the metal, where steps led up directly to the office, in favor of the delivery wharves and bays in back where he could judge activity.

  He heard shouts above the usual hums and grinds of machinery. Rounding the corner he saw people clustered rather than working, while a fork-lift with a pallet of fish stood unattended.

  “All you had to do was fuckin’ look where you was going!” shouted a voice. It came from a beefy young man in denims with a cap pushed back on curly hair.

  “You try run me over!” The Asian facing him was thin and a head shorter. He wore the floppy yellow rain gear of the fish-handling gang.

  “Back in Vietnam, don’t they teach you to look where you’re going?”

  “You try all the time run me over.”

  A half dozen other Asian men watched without speaking. From inside the building several Asian women in hairnets and aprons came out cautiously.

  “Somebody’s got to teach you people to stay clear.” The American jumped into the forklift seat and gunned the motor. The Asian folded his arms and remained in front of it. “Get out of my way or I’ll fuckin’ ram you!”

  “Come on, stop this, back to work,” called Gillis the dock foreman as he hurried over. He was a now-overweight man in his late thirties with whom Hank had slimed big halibut a dozen years before, a drifter from hippie times who’d stayed. “Go on now, go!” The women retreated toward the building and the men backed off, but the two contestants ignored him.

  The American jerked his forklift into gear and advanced until the pallet board in front touched the Asian’s knees. “You don’t think I mean it? I mean it!” When the Asian didn’t move he leapt from his seat and pushed the man aside. The Asian crouched and drew a knife. The American ran to a stack of pallets and grabbed a crowbar. He started swinging it like a baseball bat at all the Asians.

  Foreman Gillis stayed clear. “Knock it off, knock it off!” he cried without effect.

  Hank’s voice, added to Gillis’s, was lost in the general noise. He picked up a board, and decided to thrust it between the two if they closed on each other, but not to endanger himself further.

  “Halt!” Loud, cold voice. The two men stopped. The group of Asians parted. There stood Swede Scorden. He strode to the American by the forklift and, being shorter, looked up at him. The man backed away. “Robbins. Go to the paymaster, then off.”

  “For the day, Swede. Right? Sir?”

  “Fired. Move. Gillis, go with him and make sure. Call security if you have trouble. Robbins, you got warned twice about smoking that shit on the job.”

  “Swede, I only had a puff. These Vietnams, they get in the way like, like fuckin’ ants. I’m just trying to keep ’em clear.”

  “I’ve watched from the windows. Some day with a pea-brain dizzy head you might succeed in running one down. But not on my wharf.” Swede faced the Asian, who had quickly put away the knife and backed off. “Knife again and you’re gone with your whole family, Tong. Understand?”

  “Yes, Mr. Swede.”

  “All of you, to work!”

  They scattered to their jobs. “Sir,” cried Robbins. “Who’s gonna operate forklift without me? I done it all summer.”

  In reply Swede climbed into the forklift seat. He circled the vehicle to stop by Hank long enough to mutter, “Fifteen minutes up in the office, make yourself at home,” then drove into the shipping well.

  Hank lingered instead. He looked down at the seiner that was delivering and chatted with its crew, then walked inside to the conveyor belts and watched gutted salmon flow past the women’s brushes and scrapers. A half hour passed before he walked up the slippery back stairs to the cannery office. The unappetizing odor of steamed fish meat followed.

  Dolores, at the front by the barrier ledge, knew him well enough to say, “He’s back, all right,” and to click open the gate without his asking. He walked past others waiting in chairs against the wall.

  Swede Scorden sat with elbows on desk, calmly checking invoices as if nothing had happened. Glasses on his nose, a new addition to the man, tamed the scowl and set jaw of minutes before. “Yes, Crawford, come in and shut the door.” Hank entered, and wondered if Swede was back to bringing a bottle from the drawer.

  “Sit down.” No bottle.

  Hank settled into the single scuffed chair in front of the desk. Here was the man who had probably saved his life even though Jones Henry died in the same rescue, when Swede boldly drove a chopper through the storm to tow their life raft to safety. How should I thank him? Hank wondered.

  Swede swiveled back and raised the visor of his signature red baseball cap. His square chin was shaved bare, revealing wrinkles and small blotches. Crisp gaze, starched shirt. This was the town-Swede on good behavior. Hank’s Swede remained in the old days, lord of a remote cannery with a bottle of scotch always handy to lubricate negotiations, barking different radio messages at once to a half dozen seiners and tenders, uncanny in his ability to see through walls from his window overlooking the boardwalks and hold everything in motion. The red cap hadn’t changed, but back then Swede had been all stubble and wire.

  Hank cleared his throat. “Did I ever thank you for that wet tow from your chopper?”

  “I trust not. We have enough soft heads.”

  “Where did you ever learn to pilot? You lowered that basket to our raft like a pro.”

  “Know the conditions. Then make it up as you go along. You think daily life’s any different?” The voice sharpened. “I assume you’re still taking out Jones Henry’s boat and plan to deliver here?”

  Hank grinned. “Since gratitude and business don’t mix, it depends on what you’re paying.”

  Swede adjusted his glasses and surveyed some papers. “For you, I’d say ninety cents for halibut up to forty pounds, a buck for those up to sixty, and a buck twenty for bigger.”

  “Wow. A cracked record. That’s what everybody else quotes. What happened to three years ago when—I wasn’t there, but I checked the records— you paid over two bucks?”

  “You figure. More fish now. More boats. Back then halibut was still scarce. Now you could row out to Marmot Bay and shoot one for supper.” He opened a drawer and produced a bottle of scotch and a single shot glass. He held out the glass. “Yes?”

  “What about you?”

  Swede merely filled the glass, passed it to Hank, and returned the bottle to the drawer. “Bring me quality iced, Crawford, and we might adjust a penny here and there. And by the way, cod has its price too, so don’t use ’em for bait.”

  “You mean sablefish, what they’re calling black cod? Or the cod with a little string from his jaw?”

  “I mean the second, the straight New England cod. Black cod has black skin and oily meat—not bad, but it’s not true cod whoever named it.”

  “We’d see one in the crab pots now and then but not enough to matter.”

  “Look sharper now. Your crab-pot world has changed. Crab’s gone and true cod’s taken its place. The one eats the young of the other, so if you clean out crab and weaken the stocks, look for fins in your net. That shouldn’t be news to you, after all the opinions on why crab’s disappeared.” A buzz and he flipped on a speaker. “Yes, Dolores?”

  “Joe Gillis is here. Should I tell him later?”

  “I want him now.”

  The foreman entered, nervously brushing the bib of his coveralls. “I did what you said, Swede, but—”

  “I smelled marijuana smoke this morning, just around the corner from the forklift well. Chased it. Your boy thought he’d gotten away. I’ve warned before. No potheads around machinery. Accidents close processing lines. And accide
nts bring lawsuits, now that everything’s your brother’s fault.”

  “But Swede, we’re shorthanded. All the other young bodies went back to school. What about these big halibut deliveries coming up? The new Vietnamese you shipped in don’t know enough to fill the gap. Besides, Robbie’s a good worker. Knows the forklift. He’s trying to save money so he planned to stay.”

  “He might have been a dead Robbie. Make do. No potheads.”

  “I mean we’re shorthanded. Guys with not much more than a kicker engine now think they’re too good for cannery work, that they’ll go west for halibut. So there’s nobody to pull in off the street. Some other plant gone short is sure to hire him. But Robbie’s settled in here and we work good together.”

  Swede rubbed his chin. The zips of an office duplicator and clanks of machinery below filled the silence. “Take him back, then. Say you begged me as a special favor. No pot on the job, leave the foreign workers alone, one more chance. I’ll be watching.”

  “Swede, you’ve gone soft,” muttered Hank when the foreman had left. Swede turned away, annoyed. “I meant that he might have been dead. Tong was once with Special Forces over there, and I imagine he’s sliced a few throats for the U.S. Army. I’ve committed to helping some of these people who committed to helping us in Vietnam.”

  “Side of you I didn’t know.”

  “Side of me you’d best forget. To anybody but Jody; I’m realistic about husbands and wives and she doesn’t blab.”

  Hank remained thoughtful. “I was so glad to be done with my Navy hitch in ‘Nam and get back to fishing that it’s only now and then that I think of the people who helped us.”