Raiders

by William B. McCloskey

  Meanwhile, Oddmund, who owed his own life and that of another native crewman to Hank’s rescue, hinted that the native corporation might find a way to take over the remaining bank loan on the Jody Dawn if this liability could be separated from the others. But nothing budged, while expenses continued.

  Eventually Hank’s night duties at the cannery expanded, per Odd-mund’s intervention, to include jobs freeze-packing and simple mechanics when there were no holds to be cleaned. The shift provided his steady income although, with his will and energy revived, he also now found daytime work. Lost sleep meant less than making money to cover legal fees, and keeping busy. While nobody could bail him out of his troubles, friends, even casual ones, helped in ways he could accept. He realized that he indeed was part of a community. He also found that the work skills all fishermen needed to teach themselves in order to survive away from land, as well as the skills he’d acquired building his home, had equipped him to handle nearly any job he was offered.

  When late-winter weather permitted, a builder friend hired him intermittently to lay foundations and do simple carpentry. He turned down another offer to clerk in the supermarket. That job alone, even though it meant staying dry and warm, seemed to him a loss of pride, to wait on people he knew. And a friend at one of the boatyards—the one that had repaired the Jody Dawn—took him on part-time to weld and to power-scrape rust from hulls.

  During the two months that passed, physical work helped him forget his anger for hours at a time. His bleakest despair left him, although not the sadness nor the guilt toward Jody.

  Jody for her part found extra work grading high school papers at night. She never spoke of the way he’d lost their house. They heard, but tried to forget, that assessors had evaluated the house and land. The auction was delayed only pending better weather, when the long potholed road to the house would not be made more treacherous by ice.

  A judge finally dismissed as frivolous Jason Shub’s lawsuit against Hank, but not without time-consuming testimony and confrontation. The Kodiak lawyer had predicted this, but his fee for success was more than two thousand dollars (which he claimed was giving them a break). The bill consumed what Hank had earned at the cannery.

  Adele Henry stayed in San Diego since her house was occupied, but she phoned regularly and made it clear that she missed the children. Jody told her some details of their situation and Adele assured Hank that Jones’s boat was at his disposal.

  The limit seiner Adele H was indeed Hank’s potential escape if he could free himself of legal tangles and accept the loss of his larger Jody Dawn. While Jody had captained the boat for salmon during the two previous summers, and Adele had once let a pickup crew work it intermittently with cod pots, the boat now lay idle at the pier pending routine maintenance for the next summer’s salmon runs.

  But all plans remained in limbo. Somehow the unimaginable became routine. “It’s nice having you around every day,” Jody soothed. “The kids have gotten to recognize your face.” Hank knew this to be true. At times he could disentangle it from what was happening and enjoy his family in gaps of time between work and sleep.

  When the Shelikof roe pollack season ended in April the local boats returned to town. Hank watched them steam down the narrows from the hillside construction site where he was laying cinder blocks one afternoon. The converted crabbers of Arne Larsen and Joe Eberhardt would have gone home to Seattle. But there was Gus Rosvic’s smaller Thunder, and many other local boats he recognized.

  Suddenly, in the distance through mist and shoreline spruce, there came his Jody Dawn. Before other details became clear he recognized her lines and the silhouetted extra antenna he’d added. His throat tightened. How she could cut through the water! As she neared he cupped hands around his eyes to see whether she’d been cared for properly. Scuffed, of course, from heavy weather. Needed paint. His hands ached to do it. But— strange line of letters on her bow. They’d changed her name, with a new letter over each of the letters of “Jody Dawn,” to Amer Vict! He checked the boat’s details, then checked again. Yes. His Jody Dawn! (And what kind of sappy name? He remembered Tsurifune once suggesting “American Victory.”) The new outrage rekindled all his anger.

  “Would you want them to keep your old name?” asked practical Jody.

  “I don’t know what I want, except to have her back.”

  The lawyer Sollers phoned from Anchorage. “You’re not going to like this, but I might as well tell you straight.” The Tsurifunes had sold the Jody Dawn. The Japanese company remained adamant about also selling the house. “Then you’ll have a settlement, and I expect we’ll get you back a few thousand dollars. Our hands are tied because of the wording of your signed contract.”

  Hank handed Jody the phone and left the house.

  Past midnight, having finished cleaning a ship’s hold at the cannery with an intensity that broke two long scrubbing brushes, he punched out and trotted the half mile to the docks to find the Jody Dawn. The boat’s noble bow rose in its graceful arc as always, but she was no longer his to climb aboard. He walked her length along the pier, touched her hull, smelled her odors. His hand rested on welds he’d soldered himself. The boat’s new name had been painted crudely on a swath of white paint that covered only lightly the letters for “Jody Dawn.” He resisted tearing at them, and forced himself to walk away.

  He knew where to find the Adele H at an adjacent float among the seiners. It occupied the same slip as in the days of Jones Henry: the slip where Jones had thrown his great boat-christening bash and from which Adele gave his ashes their final send-off. Her bow rose less grandly than that of the Jody Dawn, and quarters were cramped in comparison, but her design had the feel of being at one with the water.

  How often, Hank thought, have I told myself that all I wanted as a fisherman was to stay with a boat this size? Jones had once tried a larger craft, then faced the fact that his ambition was limited and he had no taste for Bering Sea dangers in million-dollar vessels, and returned to fishing around Kodiak. His one later venture away from the island, in a different boat, had killed him.

  Hank climbed aboard. The cabin and wheelhouse were padlocked, but he walked the open deck. She wasn’t a boat sized for ambition in far places where greatest opportunity lay; she’d been built to make a steady living in water sometimes rough but close to land and all its supports. Hadn’t Jody, and he himself, fished well in her?

  But his Jody Dawn! He’d designed and nursed her to completion himself. None other should have her. It was the vessel of his earned experience, of his hopes and ambition. He returned to the float where Jody Dawn lay moored, sat on the pier with his back pressed against the boat’s hull, and held his face in his hands.

  A flashlight beam shone. “Hank? Now what the hell, son!”

  Hank jumped to his feet, embarrassed to be discovered. It was Gus Rosvic, who explained, “I just happened to be taking a piss call from my deck and saw somebody snooping on the Adele H. You don’t look good. Come on back to my cabin.”

  Hank followed, swiping a hand over his face in the dark to clear it.

  Gus had already closed down the jointly owned trawler Thunder to return to his seiner Hinda Bee and prepare for longlining black cod. The Hinda and Adele H duplicated each other enough in size and layout that Hank felt comfortable at once in its galley.

  “Too late for coffee by my book,” drawled Gus. “But, now, a little medicine in port won’t hurt nothing.” He produced a fifth of bourbon from his cabin, opened it, banged down two glasses, and passed Hank the bottle. “You young fellows fancy scotch like its the second coming, but the stuff tastes namby-pam to old-timers like me. Now tell me what’s happened. Start by why you smell like a bin of dead fish this late at night. Jody didn’t finally get smart and throw you out, did she?”

  Hank had recovered enough to make a joke of his account, and to tell it with a shrug, although Gus listened with grave attention. The whiskey sent relaxing fingers through his body, and he was grateful for Gus’s easy
reality, but he decided quickly not to accuse the Japanese of cheating and start a drumroll among the anti-Jap forces. No reason, he thought as he gained back perspective, to hurt those innocent in Japan who had treated him well. Let the government sort it out. His own fight was with the Tsurifune team, and what if they were the only cheats?

  When Hank had finished, Gus said, “Well, that’s too bad. Now what do you plan to do? Become a star fish-plant worker?”

  “Up to this point I’ve stayed close to town hoping for some way to get back my Jody Dawn. ” The immensity of his loss rolled back over him.

  “I know, I know. Nothing worse than to lose your boat.” After a silence, he added, “Except maybe lose your Jody. Some I know, they’d give up the old lady first. You ain’t that dumb?”

  Hank shook his head.

  “Since I caught you snooping around Jones Henry’s seiner, you may not have gone completely daft. That loud wife of Jones’s has already made conversion for halibut longline, hasn’t she? Needs smaller hooks for black cod, but you should be an expert on that by now. And you should’ve got used to it by now, to run a boat that’s had women crawled all over it. The boat ain’t turned over yet so she probably won’t. Though it’s a shame to see such a fine old superstition gone wrong.”

  Gus drank a single shot of whiskey neat, then pushed away the glass. Hank had diluted his drink with water. He poured himself another.

  “Time you stopped fooling around with one foot on both sides, Hank. Get with the rest of us here in your own country. Go convert Jones Henry’s old boat, get out there and fish her for black cod against the foreigners for a change, and stop feeling sorry for yourself.”

  Hank listened to words that he suddenly wanted to hear.

  “Maybe you’ve been with your banzai friends over there so long,” Gus continued calmly, “that maybe you don’t know this is the year we’ve all decided to push the black cod so hard we’ll catch the whole quota, and settle this argument about giving fish away to foreigners. Last year we tried and didn’t make it. Didn’t come close. What’s got us fired up this year is, our own government says we can’t do it. Fellows here now, who never thought of converting their seiners and such to longline for other than halibut, they don’t think much of a government tells them there’s something they can’t do.”

  Three refills for Hank later, around 2 AM, he shook Gus’s hand— pumped it until Gus asked if he planned to give it back—and wove home. He stopped on the hill to Aleutian Homes long enough to look down over the darkened town and harbor, and thought with a rush: it’s still my time. And wherever I live here, this is my place. In answer, clouds blew free to clear a nearly full moon. The silver light etched rooftops, masts, and sea ripples. “Hey there, my place!” he shouted. After a silence it seemed right to shout again and wave his arms besides.

  Next day, diplomatically through Oddmund, Hank quit the cannery and put behind him the penance of cleaning fish holds. He kept such daytime work as friends provided, and in between started reconverting the Adele H to longline. The boatyard friend who had hired him part-time allowed him free space for the work. To his gratification, a local banker said, “Sure, Hank, your credit’s good again now we see where you’re headed. Everybody knows you deliver,” so that he had the funds to buy gear as well as to cover some home expenses.

  He saw Swede again while ordering hooks. The man’s detachment appeared so great that Hank turned away. Yet, then, Swede walked down the aisle beside him and without stopping muttered, “Stay in town a while longer, Crawford.”

  One by one his old crew reassembled around him enthusiastically. First came Seth with “It’s about damn time,” then Terry with a joke, then Mo and Ham tumbling over each other together while their latest girlfriends kept a distance. Hank hesitated to contact Tom, who had found a secure enough berth to have rented his own room in town. One late afternoon Tom approached the boatyard, stood with hands in pockets watching the Adele H and the others working over her, and finally said to Hank, “Guess you’re filled up, Boss.”

  “Except for your berth waiting if you want it.”

  “Oh, I do!” Tom leapt aboard and pitched in at once.

  The new atmosphere also brightened Jody and the children. As April drew to a close and daylight savings began, the afternoon light lengthened further every day. It left less dark time to brood and made the Tsurifune business seem less overpowering, even though nothing there had been mitigated. Hank learned to pass his Jody Dawn in harbor, obscenely renamed and idle, with only sorrow in place of devastation.

  The sorrow increased when he and Jody read the auction notice for their home. Jody went to the cannery office for one more appeal. Rider the lawyer had returned to Seattle and Swede reoccupied his old office. No one seemed willing to talk. John Gains, it seemed to her, elaborately failed to notice her from his open doorway. Swede, their once-dependable friend for all seasons, came from his closed office at last. “It’s in the hands of the bank,” he said curtly. “I hope you and Hank are weathering this.”

  Jody turned cold. “We’ve managed.”

  “That lawyer Sollers I recommended—has he helped you?”

  “Prompt with bad news and his bills, if that’s what you mean. Not much else.”

  Swede hesitated, then suggested that it would be good for Hank to stay in town. “No harm for him to keep on with odd jobs. Just hold off on the Adele H for a while.” Jody realized that he had followed their activities, but she remained cold. Swede quickly terminated the conversation.

  Only the pending auction kept Hank from going to sea, so that he could be with Jody. On the day before, he took her to lunch on the side of town farthest from the road to the home he’d built. They spoke little, but he felt that their thoughts were the same.

  “Excuse me,” said a voice. They both looked up. It was John Gains, suited soberly as usual. “Hank,” he said. “Go out to the red pickup for a minute. Excuse me, Jody.” And he left.

  Swede was in the truck. When Hank approached he pushed open the passenger door and motioned Hank in. Gains was already driving away in another vehicle.

  “What’s this?” Hank demanded. “Trailing me?”

  “Don’t think it’s been easy finding you alone, Crawford.” Swede handed him a thick envelope. “Take this to Sollers right away. He’s waiting. You haven’t been here with anybody but your wife today. Scoot.”

  “Ha,” said the lawyer when Hank delivered the envelope. “Now I have work to do, so please leave.”

  Before the day had ended, the auction notices were taken down. In the evening, at the rental house, someone knocked on the door. Hank opened it in time to see a car drive away. A note fluttered to his feet. It read:

  You’ve got your house back, Crawford. Don’t ever sign anything again without two independent lawyers. You’re not smart enough.

  Sollers phoned soon after. “You have friends in high places,” he said. “The papers you delivered to me today were enough to convince certain parties in Seattle that they might get reasonable. The lien on your house is lifted and back home you can go. Stop in here tomorrow for the keys. No. Can’t tell you more tonight.”

  The news was too great for noisy rejoicing. Hank sat by Jody in the temporary living room, and together they watched their children frown over homework.

  Next morning Sollers would say little to answer Hank’s questions. “Right now,” he warned, “the best favor you can do anybody who might have helped you is to say nothing. Some careers are walking a delicate balance, and some people in Seattle and Tokyo, I believe, are pissed as hell.” He handed Hank a note. “You’re to read this, then tear it up and throw it in that wastebasket there.”

  The note, in a scrawl that Hank now assumed was Swede’s although they had never exchanged letters, read:

  Go fishing now, Crawford. If your Jody Dawn is lost, get over it and be glad you can start again with Jones Henry’s old boat. Some fools aren’t so lucky. Have your glory dreams another way until you learn to read a
contract.

  “I want to keep this,” said Hank. “Like to show it to my wife. I’ll guard it.”

  “Wastebasket, sir.”

  27

  EPILOGUE: SONS

  ANCHORAGE, SEPTEMBER 1984

  More fishermen than usual left their boats for the occasion. They crowded into narrow chairs and stood along the sides of the meeting rooms in the Anchorage hotel that hosted the September sessions of the North Pacific Fishery Management Council. Many had wives elsewhere in town shopping, since they’d be off to Hawaii as soon as Council adjourned. For the first time in years, wool shirts with shoulders bulging against them were as much in evidence as trim dark suits.

  And there were grins. As one of Nels Tormulsen’s longline crew put it, “We just want to fuckin’ hear it for ourselves.”

  Dr. Lester Kronman of the Scientific Committee took it in stride without losing his dignity. He paid off a bet forced on him the year before by a then-indignant spokesman for the longline fishermen. “Conceded. I didn’t think you could do it, so it was reasonable for me to vote negative.” But he added, “Now that you’ve won, see that you don’t waste the resource.”

  The spokesman pocketed Kronman’s twenty dollars with a grin and answered in kind. “We will embrace the resource, sir.”

  The victory was complete and spectacular. American fishermen had rallied together, concentrated forces, and harvested the entire 6.7 million-pound black cod optimum yield in the western Gulf of Alaska. Only the year before, their catch had been less than a quarter of that. It left nothing for the Japanese, who had hoped that by agreeing to wait until early October there would still be tons of fish for them to catch.

  Hank came to the Council dressed in jeans and a plaid shirt like the fisherman he again considered himself. He stayed at a cheaper hotel near the large one where the meetings were held, since most of what he earned continued to pay debts and lawyers’ fees.