The Last Run (12 page)

“That’s good baiting,” Mork said to Hanlon. Mork had just come down from the pilothouse. Hanlon did not look up.

“How about I give you guys a hand,” Mork said.

“Sure,” Bob Doyle said.

The three of them built skates. The herring they had was not fresh. Fresh herring was easier to impale on the hook. Maybe that’s why it’s more expensive, Bob Doyle thought. This bait had been frozen and thawed, probably more than a few times. But it was all right. A yellow eye would snap at it if a hook came down and smacked the fish on the snout. The boat swayed back and forth, and they kept on working. Every so often Bob Doyle would jab his finger on a hook or catch his rubber glove in a stainless-steel snap. Hanlon worked without saying anything. The tips of his fingers went white as snow. But they kept gliding along on the gear.

“What’s the matter?” Mork asked Bob Doyle.

“Ah, it’s my hands. I’m cutting them up good.”

Mork went on baiting. “Tonight, after we’re done, go out on deck and take a nice, long piss on them.”

“What?”

“That’s right,” Mork said. “Fish are full of bacteria and shit. You got any cuts, they’ll get infected. Poisoned. So make sure to piss on your hands later on. Cleans ‘em out good.”

“I will,” Bob Doyle said.

Outside it was getting cold. They turned on a light and could see their breath in it. Bob Doyle worked awhile, baiting, until the sweat on his forehead began to chill. The wind whipped at the corners of the shed. A draft was coming under the door and down the walls.

The door swung open and an icy wind rushed in, followed by the skipper’s head. Bob Doyle saw it shadowed against the dark. “How about some sound, fellas?” Morley asked.

“How about some heat?” Mork said.

“Got no heat.”

He drilled three small holes through the aluminum walls behind the door, poked some copper wire through them and twisted the wire around the contacts of two speakers. Then he hung the speakers from nails.

“You guys like the Stones?”

“They’re all right.”

Morley went back out and a few moments later Mike DeCapua returned. He pulled up a bucket, plopped himself down and took up a line. The album
Let It Bleed
was playing. The speakers sounded a little tinny, but the sound was coming through clear enough. DeCapua started whistling. He liked to whistle. He whistled louder when “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” came on. Before long he was crooning the refrains, humming the lyrics he didn’t know and keeping time with the drums by bobbing his head and tapping a steel hook on the side of the bucket.

When the song ended DeCapua jumped up and threw a handful of herring on the floor.

“Fuck this.”

“Where you think you’re going?” Mork asked him.

“Coffee.”

The door banged shut. Bob Doyle looked at Hanlon. He had not missed a beat. His hands were still playing that invisible harp.

By two-thirty they had thirty skates done. The herring had run out and they were baiting now with chums. They had a lot of it. Every so often Mork would go up to the pilothouse to update Morley and check their position on the charts while the rest of them baited. Mike DeCapua was telling stories of coke parties, his days as a train hobo, how he camped in the “jungles” near the rail stops and made friends with brakemen by sneaking them dope, and how he and the rest of the “Bad, Bad Boys from Dog Patch” at the ANB Harbor once pooled fifty bucks and bought a 1948 aircraft hangar and converted it into a floating no-tell motel. Bob Doyle kept sticking his fingers with hooks. When he cursed the gear he got a rise out of everybody, even a faint smile from Hanlon. Mork would offer the others cigarettes and bring back mugs of coffee. It felt good to hold a warm mug.

At one point Mike DeCapua said, “Hey, Giggy, what’s with the chums?”

“What?”

“Ain’t there any more herring?”

“No.”

“Beautiful.”

Mork scraped a hook with a file.

“Fucking hands,” DeCapua said. Mork looked at him and went on scraping. DeCapua opened and closed his fingers, slowly. “My hands are fucking numb.”

“Want me to piss on them for you?”

The others snickered.

“How many skates we got left?” DeCapua asked.

“Well,” Mork said, “there’s all this here and that old stuff in the buckets.”

“I ain’t doing that.”

“Hell you ain’t.”

“Hell I am.”

Mork jabbed the hook through the chum’s mouth and out its gills.

“Hell you ain’t,” he said quietly.

DeCapua looked down into a bucket. “Who the fuck would do this to longline?”

Mork pulled a pack of Marlboros out of his shirt pocket.

“Have a cig, Mike?”

“What’s that?”

“A cigarette. Want one?”

“Yeah, I’ll take one.”

Mork drew a cigarette from the pack.

“Need a light?”

“Sure. Gee, thanks, Giggy.”

Mork held out his lighter, flicked it and waited until DeCapua took a puff.

“Now,” Mork said, “shut your fucking yap.”

They smoked and baited. Mork offered Hanlon a cigarette, but he said no thanks. He used to smoke, he said, but not anymore. He used to drink, too. For a long time he was a rummy. A whiskey rummy, a beer rummy, a rum rummy, a pretty much anything rummy. But he did not drink anymore, he said. Not for six months. Going on seven.

“How did you stop?” Bob Doyle asked him.

Hanlon looked up from his gear. “I don’t know,” he said. He shrugged his big shoulders. “I just stopped.”

“Did you go somewhere?”

“A place in Sitka,” Hanlon said.

“And how was it?”

“Not bad.”

“But how did you stop?”

“I don’t know,” Hanlon said. “I wanted to, I guess.”

Mork asked him where he had fished and Hanlon told him pretty much everywhere. He was from Hoonah. His father was a Tlingit leader there, of the Shark Clan. He was also an established commercial fisherman, with several large vessels. One of them was the
Claudia
H, a fifty-eight-foot seiner. His father was a proud man. He took him out to fish for the first time when he was thirteen. His older brothers had been fishing since they were six.

“Why did he wait till you were thirteen to take you out?” Mork asked him.

“I was sick a lot,” Hanlon said.

“What did you have?”

“Anemia.”

He told them his father and brothers had fished everywhere around Glacier Bay. Up and down Chicagof Island, the Icy Strait, all the way up to Yakutat and the Fairweather Grounds.

“He was a great fisherman,” Hanlon said. “He knew the tides. That’s what it’s all about. Knowing the tides. You know the tides you catch the fish.” He looked up. “That’s what my father always said.”

Bob Doyle said, “Where’s your father now?”

“Dead.”

They went on working.

“So how’d you meet the owner?” Mork asked him. Hanlon stuck a hook through a bait.

“In Sitka.”

“Yeah?”

“During my rehab.”

“Oh, what the hell, Giggy,” DeCapua said. “Why don’t you just ask him why he’s really here?”

“What?”

“You want me to ask him?”

“What the fuck you talking about?”

“You don’t know, huh,” DeCapua said. “How about the skipper’s cell phone, for one thing? It rings all the time. Whenever we’re in range that thing’s ringing. That’s the owner calling, isn’t it?”

He turned to Bob Doyle.

“You just go up to the wheelhouse?”

“Yeah.”

“Hear the phone ringing?”

“Yeah.”

“Didn’t answer it, did he?”

Bob Doyle looked away.

“See?” DeCapua said. “He don’t answer his phone. Told me not to answer it, too. Why? Huh? Why don’t he want to talk with the owner?”

“That’s enough,” Mork said.

“What?”

“Shut up.”

“We’re fixing shitty gear and baiting shitty chums. Why are we fishing with chums? They’re cheap. Owner gave them to us for nothing. But we aren’t talking with the owner. Why not?”

Mork dropped his skate. He squared his shoulders and fixed his dark red eyes on DeCapua. His lips were working.

“Oh shit,” DeCapua said. “Mom’s mad.”

“What you say?”

“Nothing.”

“You say another word I’ll kick your ass.”

DeCapua looked down at his skate and whistled. Bob Doyle waited for it then. But nothing happened. Mork just sat there on his bucket with his face twisted in disgust. DeCapua put his hands on his knees and stood up.

“Hell,” he said. “It’s time for my watch.”

“Is he always like that?” Mork asked. DeCapua had already gone out.

“He’s a talker,” Bob Doyle said.

“He’s a pain in the ass.”

“Sometimes.”

“All the time.”

“Don’t let him get to you,” Bob Doyle said. “He likes to talk. Most times he talks for the sake of talking. He’s not so bad. And he’s good at what he does.”

“He gets on my nerves.”

“Well, don’t let him.”

With his lips, Mork drew another cigarette out of the pack, lit it and let a curl of smoke slip between his teeth. He said, “Let’s just get our twelve thousand pounds and get the fuck home.”

Bob Doyle nodded.

“That fucking asshole,” Mork said.

Then he reached down and picked up another line.

T
hey had finished a supper of casserole and soup and Marlon Brando had just appeared in
The Godfather
when Mike DeCapua banged down the ladder to the galley and told everyone he was done with his watch. Bob Doyle picked up a pack of cigarettes, fixed himself a mug of coffee and climbed up into the wheelhouse. He looked into the partition behind the skipper’s chair. Mark Morley was lying on his side, snoring. Bob Doyle sat down in the chair and looked out to sea.

The boat was on autopilot, so he sat watching the wheel move itself. It was a strange thing to be sitting at the helm of a ship that did not need to be guided through the night. He sipped his coffee and smoked. There were a few stars out. He could not see the swells but he could feel the slow lift of the boat and the soft, heavy settling of the stern when one passed underneath. The
La Conte
was taking the swells on her quarter, settling nicely as the swells rolled by, and he sat in the high chair and looked for a light, something to break the blackness.

After a half hour he saw a flicker of light, like a firefly in the woods on a muggy night, to starboard. It was such a small point of light that he wondered if it was a ship at all. In a few minutes he saw it was a fishing boat, and as the ship grew closer he saw that its outriggers were up. They’re heading in, he thought. They’re running a slot to Cross Sound. I wonder if they filled their totes. I wonder how many totes they have. I wonder if they were out on the Fairweather Grounds. I wonder who is waiting for them at home.

Every now and then he would glance over at the computer. On the laptop you could monitor the
La Conte’s
track. It showed that the ship was following a true course, driving just east of the thousand-fathom line of the Alsek Valley along a four-hundred-fathom gradient. Where they had sailed appeared as a solid black line. Where they were going appeared as a hash line. The seafloor showed in reds and browns and blues. That’s a whole other universe down there, he thought. It was a world of canyons and plains and mountains and deserts. He tried to picture how it would be down where the rockfish were swimming. It would be quiet, of course, and dark. It would be very cold, too, he thought.

He noticed a gray silhouette on the screen, and beneath it the words
Submerged Wreck.
The gulf was peppered with explosive dumping areas, cables, sunken destroyers and cruise ships. This one had the shape of a fishing vessel. He wondered how long ago it had sunk. The vessel looked like it had turned on its side. There was the outline of her tail and her propellers, stuck in the mud. He imagined a boat covered in barnacles and coral and waving plants, a dark, watery tomb.

He settled back in the seat and sipped his coffee and lit another cigarette. He heard a cough and watched Mark Morley shuffle out the side door and climb down the outside ladder. Within a few minutes he heard boots on the stairs. He glanced at the video plotter and rubbed his eyes.

Behind him, he heard Morley say, “So, how’s it looking, Captain Bob?”

“A boat passed us a half hour ago. Looks like we’re going to be alone out here.”

“When was the last time you checked the bilges?”

“An hour ago. They were just a few inches up. I pumped them out.”

“Good.”

They stared out at the perfect blankness ahead.

Morley said, “I really hope this works.”

“Me, too.”

“I really mean it. I hope this trip works for all of us.”

“I do, too,” Bob Doyle said. “I really do. And I hope you keep me in mind for that tendering job in February. I’d like to work with you on that.”

“I know.”

“Hey,” Bob Doyle said, “that was a lot of fun yesterday out at Whale Park.”

“It was, wasn’t it?”

Morley removed his glasses. When he did Bob Doyle could see the dark pouches under his eyes that the thick lenses had hidden. He thought the skipper’s eyes wandered a little, too, almost like a blind man’s eyes.

“So,” Morley said. He put his glasses back on. “What really happened?”

“With what?”

“Your wife.”

“Oh,” Bob Doyle said. “She had an affair and we split up. It was an enlisted man. A flight mechanic on the base.”

“Feel like talking about it?”

“Not really.”

“All right.”

“There’s not much to tell,” Bob Doyle said. “She went for this big, twitchy fucker who collects guns and plays around on the hangar decks with laser-dot scopes.”

“Damn.”

“One time the prick shot himself by accident through the hand with his own forty-five automatic.”

“Wow.”

“He wanted me to take a poke at him so he could court-martial me. I was an officer and officers can’t pick fights. You lose everything if you do.”

“You didn’t hit him, did you?”

“No.”

“That’s good. Violence doesn’t get you anywhere. One minute you think you can do some good kicking somebody’s ass, next thing you know you’re worse than the thing you’re fighting. Take it from one who knows.”