How to say the rest in Mom’s ordered living room, Hank wondered. Kodiak might lack old class, but in Alaska a fisherman had a place in any society he might choose. “I’m sorry, Dad.” “Don’t be. Don’t let being sorry trap you.”
On the day before Hank’s return to Kodiak his dad felt well enough to declare that they’d go to the Merchant’s Club for lunch as in old times. On the way to the car the elder Crawford stumbled on the doorstep and tore a ligament. He took the accident in good spirits, but Hank, seeing his mother clearly upset, canceled his flight and rebooked three days later. He could still reach Anchorage in time for the Council meeting and whatever face-off awaited with Tsurifune.
During the next day, while his father napped with his cast-covered leg resting on an ottoman, Hank wandered old haunts and found a few friends who had not drifted to other places. Each encounter confirmed that his life and future lay north, with no regrets. He became restless and it showed.
“Take the car tomorrow,” urged his father. “Find some fishermen. Kent Island, say, a couple of hours from here across the bay. We see fishing boats there when we drive to Rehobeth.”
“We’ll be fine,” his mother added. “And I’ll have a big dinner waiting when you get back.”
Next morning Hank took the time to help his father downstairs and settle him before leaving, so that it was past noon by the time he crossed the Chesapeake Bay bridge to the Maryland Eastern Shore. He followed a dirt road branching from the highway and found a pier. Sounds of activity came from an adjacent low cinder-block building. A pale sun shone, but frost remained on the gravel still shaded by the doorway.
Inside a long chilly room stood a few women shucking oysters. Most were black. They wore bandannas, and had plastic aprons tied around their bulky middles. Muddy heaps of the mollusks lay on the table before them. Their gloved hands speared open the shells with thin knives, then sliced the limp creatures inside into shiny metal cans of gallon size. Their work had the concentrated speed of a factory line, and none looked up, but they appeared relaxed and in good humor.
An overweight man in a checkered shirt strode through with a shovel. He frowned. “He’p you?”
“Mind if I look around? I’m a fisherman myself.”
The man’s glance traveled doubtfully over his city clothes. “You don’t want to get in the way,” he said, and continued outside.
Hank followed him to the pier, where a low boat was unloading. Its stern bore the name Clara. A black man in coveralls on the deck below shoveled oysters into a bucket. After he had filled each bucket he made a circle with his hand, the worker above him on the pier who had spoken to Hank called “Yo!”, and a crane raised the load. The worker tipped the oysters into a bin mounted on a forklift, then shoveled up the spillage. The leg of another man, who operated the crane and apparently tabulated the delivery, protruded from the open door of a small shack with smudged windows.
Another boat eased in from around a point of low pines. Like the one delivering, it was about thirty feet long and painted white, with high sides and a small cabin forward. An engine housing, capped by a rusty exhaust pipe puffing gray smoke, crowded much of the deck space. When the boat came closer, Hank saw its name, Aggie. He grabbed the mooring line thrown by the younger of two men aboard. They acknowledged with a nod but called over the engine noise only to those they obviously knew on the pier and the other boat.
Aggie down there. Howdy,” ventured Hank when the engine stopped. “Good haul today?”
The older man looked up. A toby-jug nose dominated his wind-reddened face beneath a black wool cap. “Come back, sir?”
Hank waited, then realized he’d been asked to repeat the question. “Just wondered how fishing was out there today.”
“Eighteen-nineteen bushel apiece, sir. Quota’s twenty-five bushel, so you go figure.”
“Too bad.” Hank felt self-conscious but still he added, “I’m a fisherman myself, so I understand low catch some days. I fish in Alaska. For a living.” “That so? Alaska. Be a piece from here.” He said it with no particular interest but the younger man looked at Hank sharply.
Hank’s hands sought his pockets as he watched them shovel their oysters into a bucket. He hadn’t dressed for the raw chill that breezed from the water. When they finished, the younger man climbed to the pier and limped toward the shack.
“Tom,” called the older in a voice mild but full of gravel. “You ask has he got coal oil. Half can’ll do. F’ar’s gone out to the stove, I forgot to check ‘im.”
“Right, Dad.”
“Just pass up that can while your boy checks the weights, Cap’n Bart,” said the man on the pier. “I’ll go fill it.” They spoke in an easy cadence. After the man named Captain Bart handed up the can he drew a bucketful of water and splashed the deck. He seemed friendly. Hank asked if he could come aboard.
“It won’t but mess your feet, sir. But come down if it suits you.”
Hank jumped aboard. Since the captain had now begun to sweep mud and shell, Hank drew up more bucketfuls of water and sloshed the debris through a scupper.
A voice came from the pier, “Yo, Cap’n Bart. Got you helper there.”
“Ain’t it though!”
At least he was now acknowledged, and surrounded by their voices even though nobody addressed him directly.
“Tell him come yere when he’s done with you,” called the man aboard the Clara.
“I’ll do that, Bernard.”
When the deck had been cleared Hank asked if he might look around. “He’p yourself, sir. She’s a deadrise maybe forty year old but I keep her good. Don’t leak neither drop.”
Thick paint on the boat’s housing appeared to be only a few months old, but it covered tenacious flakes of former paint that had layered high enough to cast shadows. The rails, scuffed to the wood, were built wide enough for a man to stand on. Hank raised the engine cover, avoiding the exhaust pipe that remained hot. The engine looked like it had come from a car. A jerry-rigged wire replaced a bolt on the assemblage that connected the choke cable to a lever at the rail. Hank smiled to himself. Funky by Alaska standards, but done with the ingenuity of real fishermen.
He needed to step around pairs of wooden poles that lay the length of the deck. He lifted one. Heavy! He balanced it with respect. Places on the grain had worn smooth where hands must have gripped thousands of times. These were tools of fishermen who worked hard. Chunks of black mud clung to metal teeth on the end of each pole. An oyster shell poked through one chunk. Hank pulled it free. Its surface was gnarled and mostly gray, with sharp edges that held grit beneath like dirty fingernails. Hank bounced it in his hand. More weighty than it appeared. Creature inside. Something more than the “rock” he had termed it.
Tom the son returned with a slip of paper and some dollar bills. He handed the money to his father who put it in a plastic bag, then turned to Hank. “You say you fished in Alaska?
Before Hank could reply, Captain Bart declared, “Guess we’ll go now, mister.”
Hank started to climb to the pier, considered, and turned. “Any chance you’d let me ride out with you tomorrow?”
Father and son exchanged glances. The son nodded.
“It’s early time, sir,” said Captain Bart. “We gen’lly leave shore ‘bout five. Around to another creek from here.”
“Tell me where.”
“We bring our own sandwiches and thermos. Ain’t no cooking stove yere.
“I’ll do the same.”
“I’d dress warm if I was you.”
They mapped out the roadside place that opened early for watermen. Hank felt more lighthearted than he had in weeks. On his way back through the city he found a surplus store and outfitted himself with padded coveralls, boots, and gloves. At home, in time for the evening highball and dinner, his bright mood affected both parents so that it became the most convivial evening of his visit.
His father noted, from a piece in the Wall Street Journal, that two days hence the Senate C
ommerce Subcommittee that Hank had once testified before would hold an open session on fishery updates. “You might be interested.”
A few hours later Hank sped back toward the bay on dark empty highways, while blanking out thoughts of the approaching showdown with old Tsurifune as best he could. He reached his destination only three minutes late. It was the only lighted building within sight. Pickup trucks filled the entire space in front of a porch and spilled back beyond the illumination. He parked his dad’s Mercedes as unobtrusively as possible between high truck panels.
The wooden steps were icy. Inside it was warm and smoky, with odors of soap and brewed coffee. Hip boots hung from the ceiling among shelves of cans and bottles. A counter lined one wall. Men in baseball caps and heavy jackets occupied nearly all the stools in front of it. Their thick backs formed another wall.
“Now didn’t I say he’d come?” declared Captain Bart. “Sit right here, sir. Saved you a chair. The man needs coffee there, Ruby.” The mug was already on its way.
“Need anything else?” asked the pleasant fat woman who delivered it. Hank asked what sandwiches she could make. He’d slapped together only two of leftover pork roast and he already had an appetite. “Baloney and cheese, honey.” Hank ordered four. He added packages of cakes, asked for his coffee in a carryout cup, and told Captain Bart he was ready to go.
But there seemed no hurry after all. The talk along the counter continued at an easy rhythm among blacks and whites together. Some of the drawls were so thick that Hank lost entire sentences, but the subjects never seemed to stray from boats and gear any more than with fishermen in Alaska. He felt both a stranger and comfortable among his own.
“This man yere’s from Alaska,” Captain Bart volunteered at last. “Says he fishes there.”
“Name’s Hank. Hi.”
“Alaska, now,” declared a man halfway down the counter. His elderly face was lined and jowled, but his shoulders looked still able to carry heavy weight. “They got crabs up there too, do they? Not good as ours, I judge.”
Hank smiled. “Both pretty good.”
The man persisted. “I’d say ain’t neither crabs beats a Maryland jimmie.”
“Leave the poor man be, Cap’n Billy,” said Captain Bart.
“Now what you use for crab baits up there in Alaska?” asked Bernard, the black man of the Clara. “They got chicken necks way up there?”
The questioning lasted only a short while before the talk returned to local matters. Maryland’s limit on a boat’s daily oyster catch affected them all. Hank gathered that the oyster and crab populations had plummeted in the lifetime of all the older men. The men disagreed on whether the catch limit would do any good, and who was to blame—maybe it was Virginia people farther down the bay. All concurred that the politicians in Washington, D.C., wanted to get rid of watermen so they and their rich buddies could play-fish what was left.
“Bureaucrats might say arsters is scarce,” Captain Bart said, pumping a fist on the counter. “And it may be, but not because they say it. Lazy, those boys? They never been to all the places I could show ’em.”
“You could show ’em places not yours to show,” observed Captain Billy.
“Now what you mean by that?”
“Guess you know what I mean.”
After an uncomfortable silence: “Come on, Cap’n Bart,” said another. “You catchin’ like your daddy did? Crab and arster ain’t like they was.”
“I know. Maybe not. I know.” Captain Bart spread out his thick, puffy hands. “Ain’t nothin’ you can do about it. Got to live. City people retire down yere with money, they ought to be made to stop building houses one-two-three right along the water, that’s one thing. Then they complain that the boats we fish from smell bad next to their fancy boats. But who’s going to stop them? Other bureaucrats?” Several of the others grunted agreement. “And then let’s say you start to fish good again. Uncle Sam ain’t goin’ to let you keep it. Make it, you’re still goin’ have to give it back.”
“That’s a fact, Bart.”
“Nothin’ on this earth you can do about it.”
One of the younger men, muscular and ruddy faced with his hair in a ponytail, rose and threw a dollar and change on the counter. “Don’t give it up like that, Cap’n Bart. Listen to Larry Simns and his Watermen’s Association when he calls us to go to legislature like your boy does. We can go worry hell out of the politicians, that’s one thing. Then bureaucrats and scientists got to listen or lose their soft jobs.”
“Ssshush, Henry,” said Captain Bart in a voice easy and reasonable. “You’re a good boy. But all that time you and my boy Tom and others spent up there in Annapolis? What good it do? They still regulate. And arster still scarce as pearls.”
Tom had risen. “Daddy. Oysters don’t come from talk at Miss Ruby’s.”
“That’s true, boy.” To Hank: “You ready, sir?”
“I’m ready.” He kept it light. “And my name’s Hank.”
“Well, now. Hank it is then, sir.”
An icy slick covered the boards of the pier and the Aggie’s wide rail. Tom walked with a limp, but after casting off the forward line he bounded aboard with boots barely touching the sides. He played a flashlight beam along the wood while his father grunted over seat first. “Step careful,” he advised the guest. Hank debated his own seaman’s image, chanced it with a leap, and landed successfully on deck.
Flashlight beams wandered the structures of other boats around them, and engines started with general coughs and rumbles. An oily smell permeated the Aggie, but Hank enjoyed it, along with the feel of his feet on a deck about to put to sea. He took stock in the dark and wondered where to be useful. Everything was cluttered and cold to the touch. Captain Bart entered the cabin. (No lock on the door, as they increasingly needed in Kodiak.) A match glow showed he was firing the kerosene stove. Tom moved a crate holding down a tarp and raised the engine cover. Hank recognized a routine, and backed out of the way.
The engine started with a rattle, knocked a few times, then leveled out. Its chug reverberated throughout the boat. They moved from the pier. A dim orange first light silhouetted trees, houses, and low spurs of land, and slicked the top of ripples in the black water churned by a boat ahead of them.
Their motion generated a chilly breeze. “Warm yourself in yere to the f’ar, sir,” invited Captain Bart from the cabin.
Hank thanked him, but moved instead to stand by Tom at the tiller and watch the water. The son stood erect with his hand on the controls, looking straight ahead. Hank raised his voice above the engine noise. “Guess you could steer in and out of here in your sleep.”
“Yup.”
“Been at it long?”
“On and off, sir.”
Hank tried another tack. “Does the water here ice up, later in the winter?”
“Happens.”
They both stared ahead. Tom shifted course to skirt a point of land. Hank decided not to press conversation and to enjoy whatever part of the ride he could.
Minutes later Tom volunteered, “Put us ice sheathing to the hull two years ago. Lets us go out except if shore ice goes thick.” Suddenly his voice turned hard. “Mister, you come down here from the gov’ment to spy on my old man?”
“No! Hell, no. Listen. I carry my Alaska fishing license in my wallet. I want you to see it if you think such a thing.”
There was enough light for them to study each other’s faces. Tom’s eyes were clear and direct. His tension faded. “Well then, sir, I’ll take your word for it.” Slight smile. “Guess I never seen a gov’ment spy help wash the deck. Hank, is it? I’ll take your word.” He added: “Alaska!”
Hank wanted to ask why they so feared the government, decided against it. His own caution against bureaucrats was nothing compared to this. Were they hiding something? It wasn’t his business.
His reassurances relaxed Tom enough to talk. He volunteered that his dad, now seventy-seven, could have retired long ago if he’d chosen, what wi
th arthritis and enough other ills, and with savings and Social Security enough to maintain the four-room house he’d bought after the kids grew up and left. “But the ol’ man ain’t chose to sit home and get on my mother’s nerves.” Tom’s voice softened. “Not him.”
The sun began to rise in a glowing ball. It bathed Tom’s face and made him squint so that lines appeared on it everywhere. His face had scars along the hairline that Hank hadn’t noticed before. The sun’s fresh warmth, or the companionship of a stranger close to his age who lived too far away to carry tales where it mattered, made Tom voluble. He had three other brothers, and at twenty-six he was the youngest. “We all followed the water. Once I thought I wasn’t. Which is why I own just two-thirds of the ol’ man’s boat and still buying it by the piece. But keeps him going, the ol’ man. Except he ain’t used to all the regulations now. In his time he’d go out, shaft-tong oysters all day winters, crab summers, work rockfish or eel times between, take where he found it and as he pleased. Me and my brothers, each in turn, be in boat with him from about age eight, nine, weekends after school and summers. That’s how it was. Hard work sometimes. But oyster and crab there for the taking and no bureaucrats. No needing to go stare at politicians in the legislature and what good does it get you?”
They were chugging with other boats across an expanse of water. The shoreline dimmed, but remained close enough to show trees and the occasional white of a housefront. One stretch had several housefronts, and a marina with cabin cruisers. Tom pointed. “Outsiders moving in who don’t work the water, just pleasure theirselves on it. Take pictures of us in our boats but only talk to theirselves.”
Raiders Page 31
