“Seaman’s Service—Capt Block, Prop”
was squeaking and scratching as the wind rocked it on rusty hooks. The mussels that clung to the pilings, four feet out of water marking the tide line, whistled and clicked in the sun.
The wind had turned cold and mean, and Billy Bibbit took off his green coat and gave it to the girl, and she put it on over her thin little T-shirt. One of the loafers kept calling down, “Hey you, Blondie, you like fruitcake kids like that?” The man’s lips were kidney-colored and he was purple under his eyes where the wind’d mashed the veins to the surface. “Hey you, Blondie,” he called over and over in a high, tired voice, “hey you, Blondie… hey you, Blondie… hey you, Blondie…”
We bunched up closer together against the wind.
“Tell me, Blondie, what’ve they got
you
committed for?”
“Ahr, she ain’t committed, Perce, she’s part of the
cure!”
“Is that right, Blondie? You hired as part of the
cure?
Hey you, Blondie.”
She lifted her head and gave us a look that asked where was that hard-boiled bunch she’d seen and why weren’t they saying something to defend her? Nobody would answer the look. All our hard-boiled strength had just walked up those steps with his arm around the shoulders of that bald-headed captain.
She pulled the collar of the jacket high around her neck and hugged her elbows and strolled as far away from us down the dock as she could go. Nobody went after her. Billy Bibbit shivered in the cold and bit his lip. The guys at the bait shack whispered something else and whooped out laughing again.
“Ask ‘er, Perce—go on.”
“Hey, Blondie, did you get ‘am to sign a waiver clearing you with proper authorities? Relatives could sue, they tell me, if one of the boys fell in and drown while he was on board. Did you ever think of that? Maybe you’d better stay here with us, Blondie.”
“Yeah, Blondie; my relatives wouldn’t sue. I promise. Stay here with us fellows, Blondie.”
I imagined I could feel my feet getting wet as the dock sank with shame into the bay. We weren’t fit to be out here with people. I wished McMurphy would come back out and cuss these guys good and then drive us back where we belonged.
The man with the kidney lips folded his knife and stood up and brushed the whittle shavings out of his lap. He started walking toward the steps. “C’mon now, Blondie, what you want to mess with these bozos for?”
She turned and looked at him from the end of the dock, then back at us, and you could tell she was thinking his proposition over when the door of the bait shop opened and McMurphy came shoving out past the bunch of them, down the steps.
“Pile in, crew, it’s all set! Gassed and ready and there’s bait and beer on board.”
He slapped Billy on the rear and did a little hornpipe and commenced slinging ropes from their snubs.
“Ol’ Cap’n Block’s still on the phone, but we’ll be pulling off as quick as he comes out. George, let’s see if you can get that motor warmed up. Scanlon, you and Harding untie that rope there. Candy! What you doing off down there? Let’s get with it, honey, we’re shoving off.”
We swarmed into the boat, glad for anything that would take us away from those guys standing in a row at the bait shop. Billy took the girl by the hand and helped her on board. George hummed over the dashboard up on the bridge, pointing out buttons for McMurphy to twist or push.
“Yeah, these pukers, puke boats, we call them,” he said to McMurphy, “they joost as easy like driving the ottomobile.”
The doctor hesitated before climbing aboard and looked toward the shop where all the loafers stood milling toward the steps.
“Don’t you think, Randle, we’d better wait… until the captain—”
McMurphy caught him by the lapels and lifted him clear of the dock into the boat like he was a small boy. “Yeah, Doc,” he said, “wait till the captain
what?”
He commenced to laugh like he was drunk, talking in an excited, nervous way. “Wait till the captain comes out and tells us that the phone number I gave him is a flophouse up in Portland? You bet. Here, George, damn your eyes; take hold of this thing and get us out of here! Sefelt! Get that rope loose and get on. George, come
on
.”
The motor chugged and died, chugged again like it was clearing its throat, then roared full on.
“
Hoowee!
There she goes. Pour the coal to ‘er, George, and all hands stand by to repel boarders!”
A white gorge of smoke and water roared from the back of the boat, and the door of the bait shop crashed open and the captain’s head came booming out and down the steps like it was not only dragging his body behind it but the bodies of the eight other guys as well. They came thundering down the dock and stopped right at the boil of foam washing over their feet as George swung the big boat out and away from the docks and we had the sea to ourselves.
A sudden turn of the boat had thrown Candy to her knees, and Billy was helping her up and trying to apologize for the way he’d acted on the dock at the same time. McMurphy came down from the bridge and asked if the two of them would like to be alone so they could talk over old times, and Candy looked at Billy and all he could do was shake his head and stutter. McMurphy said in that case that he and Candy’d better go below and check for leaks and the rest of us could make do for a while. He stood at the door down to the cabin and saluted and winked and appointed George captain and Harding second in command and said, “Carry on, mates,” and followed the girl out of sight into the cabin.
The wind lay down and the sun got higher, chrome-plating the east side of the deep green swells. George aimed the boat straight out to sea, full throttle, putting the docks and that bait shop farther and farther behind us. When we passed the last point of the jetty and the last black rock, I could feel a great calmness creep over me, a calmness that increased the farther we left land behind us.
The guys had talked excitedly for a few minutes about our piracy of the boat, but now they were quiet. The cabin door opened once long enough for a hand to shove out a case of beer, and Billy opened us each one with an opener he found in the tackle box, and passed them around. We drank and watched the land sinking in our wake.
A mile or so out George cut the speed to what he called a trolling idle, put four guys to the four poles in the back of the boat, and the rest of us sprawled in the sun on top of the cabin or up on the bow and took off our shirts and watched the guys trying to rig their poles. Harding said the rule was a guy got to hold a pole till he got one strike, then he had to change off with a man who hadn’t had a chance. George stood at the wheel, squinting out through the salt-caked windshield, and hollered instructions back how to fix up the reels and lines and how to tie a herring into the herring harness and how far back to fish and how deep:
“And take that number
four
pole and you put you twelve ounces on him on a rope with a breakaway rig—I show you how in joost a minute—and we go after that
big
fella down on the bottom with that pole, by golly!”
Martini ran to the edge and leaned over the side and stared down into the water in the direction of his line. “Oh. Oh, my God,” he said, but whatever he saw was too deep down for the rest of us.
There were other sports boats trolling up and down the coast, but George didn’t make any attempt to join them; he kept pushing steadily straight on out past them, toward the open sea. “You bet,” he said. “We go out with the commercial boats, where the real
fish
is.”
The swells slid by, deep emerald on one side, chrome on the other. The only noise was the engine sputtering and humming, off and on, as the swells dipped the exhaust in and out of the water, and the funny, lost cry of the raggedy little black birds swimming around asking one another directions. Everything else was quiet. Some of the guys slept, and the others watched the water. We’d been trolling close to an hour when the tip of Sefelt’s pole arched and dived into the water.
“George! Jesus, George, give us a hand!”
George wouldn’t have a thing to do with the pole; he grinned and told Sefelt to ease up on the star drag, keep the tip pointed up,
up
, and work hell outa that fella!
“But what if I have a seizure?” Sefelt hollered.
“Why, we’ll simply put hook and line on you and use you for a lure,” Harding said. “Now work that fella, as the captain ordered, and quit worrying about a seizure.”
Thirty yards back of the boat the fish broke into the sun in a shower of silver scales, and Sefelt’s eyes popped and be got go excited watching the fish he let the end of his pole go down, and the line snapped into the boat like a rubber band.
“
Up
, I told you! You let him get a straight pull, don’t you see? Keep that tip
up
…
up!
You had you one big silver there, by golly.”
Sefelt’s jaw was white and shaking when he finally gave up the pole to Fredrickson. “Okay—but if you get a fish with a hook in his mouth, that’s my godblessed fish!”
I was as excited as the rest. I hadn’t planned on fishing, but after seeing that steel power a salmon has at the end of a line I got off the cabin top and put on my shirt to wait my turn at a pole.
Scanlon got up a pool for the biggest fish and another for the first fish landed, four bits from everybody that wanted in it, and he’d no more’n got his money in his pocket than Billy drug in some awful thing that looked like a ten-pound toad with spines on it like a porcupine.
“That’s no fish,” Scanlon said. “You can’t win on that.”
“It isn’t a b-b-bird.”
“That there, he’s a
ling
cod,” George told us. “He’s one good eating fish you get all his warts off.”
“See there. He is too a fish. P-p-pay up.”
Billy gave me his pole and took his money and went to sit up close to the cabin where McMurphy and the girl were, looking at the closed door forlornly. “I wu-wu-wu-wish we had enough poles to go around,” he said, leaning back against the side of the cabin.
I sat down and held the pole and watched the line swoop out into the wake. I smelt the air and felt the four cans of beer I’d drunk shorting out dozens of control leads down inside me: all around, the chrome sides of the swells flickered and flashed in the sun.
George sang out for us to look up ahead, that here come just what we been looking for. I leaned around to look, but all I saw was a big drifting log and those black seagulls circling and diving around the log, like black leaves caught up in a dust devil. George speeded up some, heading into the place where the birds circled, and the speed of the boat dragged my line until I couldn’t see how you’d be able to tell if you did get a bite.
“Those fellas, those cormorants, they go after a school of
candle
fishes,” George told us as he drove. “Little white fishes the size of your finger. You dry them and they burn joost like a candle. They are
food
fish, chum fish. And you bet where there’s a big school of them candle fish you find the silver salmon feeding.”
He drove into the birds, missing the floating log, and suddenly all around me the smooth slopes of chrome were shattered by diving birds and churning minnows, and the sleek silver-blue torpedo backs of the salmon slicing through it all. I saw one of the backs check its direction and turn and set course for a spot thirty yards behind the end of my pole, where my herring would be. I braced, my heart ringing, and then felt a jolt up both arms as if somebody’d hit the pole with a ball bat, and my line went burning off the reel from under my thumb, red as blood. “Use the star drag!” George yelled at me, but what I knew about star drags you could put in your eye so I just mashed harder with my thumb until the line turned back to yellow, then slowed and stopped. I looked around, and there were all three of the other poles whipping around just like mine, and the rest of the guys scrambling down off the cabin at the excitement and doing everything in their power to get underfoot.
“Up! Up! Keep the tip up!” George was yelling.
“McMurphy! Get out here and look at this.”
“Godbless you, Fred, you got my blessed fish!”
“McMurphy, we need some help!”
I heard McMurphy laughing and saw him out of the corner of my eye, just standing at the cabin door, not even making a move to do anything, and I was too busy cranking at my fish to ask him for help. Everyone was shouting at him to do something, but he wasn’t moving. Even the doctor, who had the deep pole, was asking McMurphy for assistance. And McMurphy was just laughing. Harding finally saw McMurphy wasn’t going to do anything, so he got the gaff and jerked my fish into the boat with a clean, graceful motion like he’s been boating fish all his life. He’s big as my leg, I thought, big as a fence post! I thought, He’s bigger’n any fish we ever got at the falls. He’s springing all over the bottom of the boat like a rainbow gone wild! Smearing blood and scattering scales like little silver dimes, and I’m scared he’s gonna flop overboard. McMurphy won’t make a move to help. Scanlon grabs the fish and wrestles it down to keep it from flopping over the side. The girl comes running up from below, yelling it’s her turn, dang it, grabs my pole, and jerks the hook into me three times while I’m trying to tie on a herring for her.
“Chief, I’ll be damned if I ever saw anything so
slow!
Ugh, your thumb’s bleeding. Did that monster bite you? Somebody fix the Chief’s thumb—hurry!”
“Here we go into them again,” George yells, and I drop the line off the back of the boat and see the flash of the herring vanish in the dark blue-gray charge of a salmon and the line go sizzling down into the water. The girl wraps both arms around the pole and grits her teeth. “
Oh
no you don’t, dang you!
Oh
no…!”
She’s on her feet, got the butt of the pole scissored in her crotch and both arms wrapped below the reel and the reel crank knocking against her as the line spins out: “
Oh
no you don’t!” She’s still got on Billy’s green jacket, but that reel’s whipped it. She’s and everybody on board sees the T-shirt she had on is gone—everybody gawking, trying to play his own fish, dodge mine slamming around the boat bottom, with the crank of that reel fluttering her breast at such a speed the nipple’s just red blur!