The Last Run (14 page)

“One skate away!” Mork called up, and Morley gave him a thumbs-up sign. The others had bunched along the railing to watch the second skate as it rushed out. This one went into the water at a more urgent slant.

“Ease up on your drag a little!” Mork shouted to Morley. “Watch the line!” Then, to David Hanlon, “Get that third skate over here and get it tied on.”

Morley throttled the motors down a touch. If he eased up just a hair on the gas the angle would lessen on the line. But he could not afford to slow the boat too much or main line would start looping and snarling. All this time, line kept shooting out taut and steady.

“Tight skate, this one,” Mike DeCapua said.

“Real nice,” Mork said.

“Who’s is it?”

“Dave’s.”

“Nice fucking skate.”

Bob Doyle looked off astern at the point where the ocean seemed to suck in the string. The line was racing into the curl of the waves that the wake raised. He could see the baits clinging tight to the hooks even after they exited the chute and he noticed the hooks glinting in the deck lights just before the froth swallowed them.

“Oh shit,” DeCapua said, pointing. “This one’s got to be Bob’s.”

The next skate was going
thunk-thunk-thunk-thunk
as it passed through the drum. Chunks of herring were whipping off the hooks and some of the hooks were embedded in the line itself.

“Sloppy.”

“Most of the herring’s off that one.”

“That one ain’t catching shit.”

“Waste of good bait.”

Even though he was standing in a raw, cutting wind, Bob Doyle could feel his cheeks and forehead burning in embarrassment. He had worked extra carefully and taken longer to finish his skates, hoping to impress the others. But most of the hooks on his skate were going into the water without baits. Hanlon tapped him on the shoulder.

“Where is your other skate?”

Bob Doyle nodded at the bait shed.

“Let’s take a look at it.”

The line kept jerking out and down, out and down. Mork and DeCapua were fastening a small anchor to the middle of the string to keep it on the seafloor, where bottom fish hid in crevices and caverns. In the meantime, Hanlon reworked Bob Doyle’s second skate. He worked with the speed of a seamstress; there was no keeping up with him.

“Ah!” Bob Doyle yelped.

He had been trying to get the hook through the frozen salmon and the bait had slipped. The hook had gone instead through the flesh between his thumb and forefinger.

“Hold still,” Hanlon said. He turned the hand over. “That’s nothing.” He tugged at the hook.

“Christ!”

“Imagine how it’d feel if your hands weren’t cold. How’s that?”

“Good Christ!”

“Watch yourself next time or you’ll lose a thumb. You’ll be okay. Go to the galley and wash that out good. Wrap it in gauze. Later on you can wash it out with alcohol or iodine. I’ll handle the rest of this.”

Just then they heard Mork call out. “You girls plan on getting me some skates anytime this year?”

The seas were eight feet and breaking a little higher now on the port bow and tightening the drag on the main line. When the line went too taut, Morley let up on the gas and coasted. When it went too slack he nudged the
La Conte
ahead as softly as he could so as not to catch or snap the line.

By the time Bob Doyle had come back out on deck, the fifth skate was almost done. Hanlon had brought out the rebaited skate, tied it off the last of the fifth and set it in a pile on the deck.

“Let’s get a flag on the end of this one, here,” Mork said to Hanlon. “Bob! Get me another pole marker near the bait shed.”

“Right back.”

Alongside the bait shed he found the aluminum pole marker. It had a flag on top that was easily picked up on the radar, and a float on the bottom. Their routine was to fasten markers to both ends of a string. That way they could track the drift of the string, or find both ends of the line if it parted. He carried the float up forward.

“Last skate in the chute!” Mork called up to Morley. “Last skate!” Turning back: “Quick, let’s have that highflier.”

His thick little hands worked fast, hooking the highflier to a hundred-yard stretch of line with a barrel knot before tying this line to the last of the outgoing skate. He stood up.

“Help me get this over,” he said.

They hoisted the marker up over the gunwale and pitched it overboard. Then Mork and Bob Doyle tossed over the steel anchor. Mork called up, “Last anchor’s out!”

Morley swung the boat around softly and easily so the stern hardly disturbed the calm sea. He stuck his head out of the wheelhouse.

“Good stuff!” he shouted. “All right, go take a piss or pull your puds or whatever else you do when you take a break. We haul back in twenty.”

Mork and DeCapua went to the galley table for a smoke and a coffee, and Hanlon returned to the bait shed. Bob Doyle went to his cabin. He held his hand up in the light. It could have been worse. It could have gone through the palm. His fingers were cut and bruised and blistering. That was all right. He still had them. Not every deckhand could say that. He looked at the warm, sticky streak for a moment. Then he went to look for some Mercurochrome and gauze.

It was raining now and the first gusts of the squall were coming.

“This one’s already fished what it’s going to,” Morley said. “Let’s pull the fucker.”

“All right,” Mork said.

“Giggy,” Morley said, “I want you to take the helm for this set, all right?”

“What for?”

“Nothing special. I just want to work that winch and the gaff a little. Why don’t you take a break and steer a little?”

“Okay.”

“And get Bob to pull that buoy out first.”

“I’ll get him on it.”

Their first two pulls hadn’t been bad. They had hauled about three hundred pounds of prime yellow eye. Some tigers and calico had come up and every fourth hook was a sand shark. There were also some halibut and lingcod. The lingcod most likely had spotted the smaller rockfish in distress on the hooks and attacked them. It was a real bastard of a fish. Even with the hook in its own mouth, the lingcod would still chew on the rockfish. Morley had to club them several times just to get them on board.

For supper they kept a few halibut, the badly mauled ones, but knocked off the rest. They were catching far more halibut than yellow eye, but by the opening rules, they were not allowed to keep any of it, only lingcod bycatch.

“Watch my hand signals,” Morley said to Mork. “If you see me give you the slack sign, ease up on the throttle. And watch those following seas when you cut the engine. We’re getting knocked from behind on some of them.”

“All right.”

“Also, let’s not try to do this too fast. What you want is to keep the boat as parallel to the strings as you can. And keep an eye on the tides. They’re running goddamned strong. Those buoys are drifting faster now to the west, too.”

This third set had not been soaking even a half hour, but they had noticed that sand fleas and lingcod were getting at the catch so they had decided to begin hauling back sooner. They might not get as many bites as they would by letting the gear sit for an hour. But what they did catch would be worth more at market.

They went back to work, hauling the line out of the water at a thirty-degree angle. The first half-dozen hooks came up bare, and then they started to pull yellow eye. It was a pretty fish in the light of the search lamp, its gills as bright and orange as a hot poker, its body lithe and gleaming with white droplets, its eyes bulging and mouth working. The only sad thing was seeing the bladders; from having been surfaced so quickly, they had swollen like water balloons and popped and stuck out from their bodies. But that’s the risk they took when they bit at the bait, Bob Doyle thought. They didn’t know it then, but they sure know it now.

A large yellow eye, a thirty-pounder, hit with a
whump
on the deck. Morley whooped.

“Now,
that’s
a fish,” he shouted. “Damn, I’ll bet we get forty bucks for her.” He swung his arm at the wheelhouse so Mork would slow the spool.

“Giggy, back her down!”

Bob Doyle watched the skipper lift the bullhorn gaff with the oak dowel like it was a thirty-four-inch Louisville slugger, and then with a wide, flat swing, sink the curved metal hook into the yellow eye’s head. It made a noise like hitting a pumpkin with a club. Morley jerked the fish off the hook, turned and cast it on the deck. It landed with a satisfying
whump.

“Bob,” he said, “all yours.”

The yellow eye had only a shake or two left of fight. Bob Doyle stepped over, lifted the gills, popped free the serrated knife that dangled from a cord around his neck and plunged it into the fish until the blade disappeared. Before he pulled the knife out the eye of the fish had gone flat.

He kicked it down the hatch.

“Sweet Mary,” Morley said, “yes, yes, yes. Here, we got another customer.”

Now the real work began. All the miles, chores, discomfort, planning—all of it had been in preparation for this: haulback. They had to haul up two miles of line as quick as possible without mauling the catch. They worked furiously yet smoothly, timing one another as though they had been longlining together all their lives: Mork, keeping them at six knots and on a straight course; Morley, working the winch and snapping yellow eye and lingcod onto the deck; DeCapua, looping and coiling line, ripping off old bait and readying the hooks for more; Bob Doyle, killing, then sweeping fish into the hold and running the coiled line back to Hanlon in the bait shed so he could check it, splice it and rebait it. It took more than an hour to finish pulling the third string. No one was happy with it.

“Son of a whore,” DeCapua grumbled under his breath. He slapped a yellow eye in a bin. He and Bob Doyle were icing the catch and lowering the totes into the forward hold.

“What is it now, Mike?”

“We didn’t get a pound over a hundred on that pull,” DeCapua said. “A fucking waste of time, that was. A fucking waste.” He coughed and spat. “Where the hell’s that guy got us setting, anyways?”

Bob Doyle did not answer him. “Hey, let’s put some more ice on top of this row here.”

“Ice we got,” said DeCapua.

I
t was daylight now but raining harder and they could not see the buoy markers until they were nearly on top of them. They had laid another set just north of their first, had hauled in the first string and were motoring around to pick up the second. A heavy northeaster was blowing. Late in the morning the wind strengthened to thirty knots and began twanging the stay wires and shearing the tops of the waves. The seas had stacked up to eighteen feet and were breaking against the hull, throwing clouds of spray over the railings and flooding the foredeck silvery.

They were wet to the skin. White, salty rings crusted around their eyes and mouths. It was hard to breathe. The rain was sharp and driving gray and they could see only the roaring white of the breakers past the railings. It was as though a monsoon had opened up, or a sandstorm had erased the sun. The
La Conte
keeled sharply, shook with each big comber. When the deck pulled out from under them and dropped away they tucked in their chins, doubled over and leaned heavily into the roll to keep from skidding off. The squall was so violent and the rain so intense that trying to see the markers from twenty yards was like trying to see flags behind a waterfall.

The first string had gone badly. First a line anchor went missing, and then the wild, leaping seas began twisting the leaders and causing the main line to loop and come up in big knots. There was nothing to do but chop off and discard all of the snarled bits of line, pull off the hooks, tie and bait them again. They were going through an awful lot of bait. They were also losing large stretches of main line, though they did manage to salvage a good number of snaps and leaders.

“I swear to holy Christ,” Mike DeCapua said, “this ain’t no goddamned day to be making sets.”

He had just walked into the bait shed and was shaking water out of his gloves. Gig Mork and David Hanlon were splicing and baiting gear. Bob Doyle was stripping ice off chum baits he had cut from a block.

“Bob,” Mork said, “give me some more of them baits.”

“It’s crazy setting out in this crap,” DeCapua said. “No, this ain’t crazy. It’s fucking insane.” He looked at Hanlon and Bob Doyle. “What the hell are you guys doing, anyways?”

“What does it look like?”

“Baiting.”

“Mike,” Mork said. “Do me a favor and go down and check the bilges. They probably need pumping.” DeCapua went out.

“I swear to God,” Mork said to Bob Doyle, “one of these times I’m going to kill the fucker.”

“He’s not that bad.”

“Oh no, he ain’t that bad. He’s fucking poison, is what he is. He’s also a good coiler. If he wasn’t, I’d already have thrown his candy ass overboard.”

“Let him talk. He likes to talk.”

“He talks a lot of shit.”

“Let him.”

“I just don’t like him mouthing off to the skipper the way he does. Always asking questions. Always telling the skipper to do this or do that. Fuck that.”

“He’ll settle down.”

Just then a huge swell passed under the boat. It lifted them up, up, up, the floor sliding out and away from under them and for a moment Bob Doyle felt out of himself, hanging in time and air, breathless, heart fluttering, dry-mouthed, like floating in a dark, cool, quiet water tank; and then the deck came up in a rush. The bucket he had been sitting on slammed into his rump as the boat walloped back into the ocean with a swell-splitting crash.

“Grab the lines!”

Seawater was flooding into the bait shed, sweeping gear and bait and coils of line back and forth.

“Okay, get them up here,” Mork said. “Man, that was a nasty one. Dave, you all right?”

Hanlon looked at him and nodded. There was a paleness in his face that had not been there earlier. He was bailing water out the door.

“Christ,” Mork said, “I can’t stand this shit. All right, that’s enough of that. Just—let’s just hurry up and get these skates baited and tied.”