The Last Run (15 page)

DeCapua came in.

“Well?” Mork asked him.

“Water was up about a foot and a half. Don’t worry. I pumped it all out. Wasn’t that some swell? Monster son of a bitch. I’m telling you, these ain’t no seas to be setting in.”

“Anybody want a cigarette?” Mork asked.

“I’ll take one,” DeCapua said. Mork gave him an evil eye.

“Dave?”

Hanlon shook his head. Mork shoved the cigarettes in his shirt pocket. “Dave,” he said, “I want you and Bob to finish this last skate. And you, Mike, get yourself ready to coil. We start pulling that second string in ten minutes. You hear me?”

He went topside.

They had the starter buoy aboard but the main line was coming in unevenly, in spurts. The seas were stacking higher still and the main line was going taut, then slack, then taut as the boat pitched up and down. There was a danger in having too much slack in the line; it was apt to wrap itself around bottom rocks and snap with the boat heaving as it was.

Gig Mork was on the winch, but he was having trouble finding a rhythm. He was cursing the fish and cursing the seas and cursing the machine. The first skate of the string was a near disaster. If they had pulled a dozen half-size yellow eye they would have been fortunate.

Mike DeCapua had just finished coiling the first skate and Bob Doyle was gathering the lines to run them to the bait shed when he heard the winch stop. Mork pushed past him.

“Hey, Gig.” Mork did not answer him. He scuttled up the ladder to the pilothouse.

“Say,” Bob Doyle said. “What’s with him?”

DeCapua snickered. “Main line’s fucked.”

They still had seven skates out, all of them with new hooks and leaders. Mork came back down.

“So, what does the big man say?” DeCapua asked him.

“We’re going to find the other marker buoy and pull the line in from that end.”

“Okay,” DeCapua said. “Now I got just one more question for you, Giggy.”

“Shoot.”

“Do we get overtime for rain?”

Darkness had settled over them by the time they spotted the floating flag of the end marker. It had drifted a quarter mile from where they had originally set out. Morley tried to steer them alongside the marker so they could fish the buoy out using the bull hook. But he could not get them close enough. The seas were over twenty feet by now, each swell bigger than the last, and the buoy kept dropping, then rising almost to within reach, then dropping away again. Sometimes they overshot the buoy and other times, when they threw out the engines to let the float catch up to them, they took combers over the stern.

At one point, everybody was out on deck throwing loops and line and hooks, trying to snag the float. Finally, Morley said, “Forget it.”

“What?”

“I said to forget it. Let it go.”

“Come on,” Mork said, “we’ll get it.”

Morley shook his head.

“Let it go, Giggy.”

Mork went topside to take the helm. The rest of them took a coffee break in the galley. They had a fifteen-skate string baited and had just started baiting another ten-skater.

Morley turned to DeCapua.

“All right,” he said. “You two clear the deck and lash everything down. Then I want you back in the bait shed helping Hanlon ready that fifteen-skater. We’re going to set it.”

“What?”

“I want to put out another string.”

“What for?”

“Don’t ask me what for. We’re going to get that fifteen-skater out and then we’re going to head in to Graves Harbor. We already got half a string out there. We’ll leave this one out there with it.”

DeCapua scowled. “What’s the sense of throwing out more gear if we ain’t gonna pull it?”

“It’s our last string. It’s baited. It’s going out.”

“But we’re going in.”

“We’re going to let these two strings fish for us and come out tomorrow night and pick them up. We got nothing to lose. The worst that can happen is we pull them up and get nothing.”

“Oh, fuck.”

“What’d you say?”

DeCapua had a cigarette in his mouth and was lighting it. He exhaled.

“Nothing.”

Morley gave him a steely look. “Anything else?” Bob Doyle shook his head. DeCapua glared at him.

“Get going, then.”

Once Morley had climbed upstairs, DeCapua grabbed Bob Doyle by the shoulder.

“Hey, what’s your problem?”

“How do you mean?”

“I want to know what your problem is. You’re licking his ass so much I think you’re starting to like the way it tastes.”

“Go to hell, Mike.”

“I ain’t got far to go,” DeCapua said.

The fourth string had been set and they were back in the bait shed stowing gear.

“You know,” Mike DeCapua grumbled, “that’s the last time we see those strings.”

“What do you mean?” Mork asked.

“You know what I mean.”

Bob Doyle said nothing. He was sitting on a crate. The nonstop rolling was working on him. His head was groggy and loose feeling.

DeCapua said, “Look at the seas out there, man. We’re on the lower west bank of the Fairweather Grounds, setting straight out into the Pacific.”

“So?”

“So the current is pulling hard. Real hard. That gear is gonna slide right off the edge of the shelf. There ain’t no reason to come back and look for it. You know?”

“Sure, I know.”

David Hanlon stood up and went for the door. “Be right back,” he said, and ducked out.

“What’s with him?”

“He’s sick,” Bob Doyle said. “I saw him lose it a couple of times already.”

DeCapua turned back to Mork. “So the plan now is, we’re going to Graves?”

“That’s right,” Mork said. “Graves.”

“We should have been there already. We could be fixing this fucking boat’s problems.”

“Problems?”

“Like the stove.”

“What wrong with the stove?”

“It don’t work. Remember dinner?” Earlier, Morley had made them a halibut casserole with potatoes au gratin, carrots and peas, but it was cold.

“What about it?”

“Listen, I’m a cook. And that shit we ate wasn’t cooked. That fucking thing hasn’t worked right since it caught fire. And the generator is fucked. Which means we got no heat. Which means I’m going to be in a cold, wet bunk tonight. I’m wet all day, and then I gotta be wet at night.”

Mork said nothing.

“Fucking boat,” DeCapua said. “Leaks over my bunk. Leaks in the galley. Hell, I go to bed with the heater on and I wake up three hours later with nuts like ice cubes. Shit, not even the head works.”

“Hey, that’s enough.”

“What?”

“You snivel too much.”

“I got a degree in sniveling.”

“Hey, listen,” Mork said. “That’s my buddy up there. He’s a good skipper.”

“Is that right?”

“That’s right.”

“Well, I’m having trouble believing that, Giggy. Okay? The guy could be a great cod fisherman. I don’t know. We haven’t tried to fish that. But I’m watching him rockfish and he’s not doing the things that successful rockfishermen do.”

“Like what?”

“Well,” DeCapua said, “for one thing, he don’t use rocks for anchors.”

“A lot of guys use steel anchors.”

“Fine. But he’s always looking for pinnacles to set. That’s what guys do when they first start rockfishing. You know? They always look for pinnacles, thinking, ‘This is the
magic pinnacle
no one’s ever seen before.’”

Mork said nothing.

“There is no fucking pinnacles out here with fish on them anymore. You know why? We
killed
all the fish. Killed them all twenty years ago when they paid us six cents a pound. That’s right. That’s why we had to fill our boats with fish to make a buck. Now they’re two bucks a pound. And you know why? ‘Cause there’s none left.”

He stopped.

“You done yet?” Mork asked.

“No.”

“Listen, Mike,” Mork said. “That last set—sure, maybe you’re right. Maybe it’s gonna drift off.”

“See?”

“That ain’t the point. What matters is we only got a few more days to fish. And then we got to take the boat back to Juneau. So let’s just fish. Okay? Let’s just fish.”

DeCapua said nothing.

“Get some sleep,” Mork said. “I got first watch. Then you, then Bob, then Dave.”

“Just one more thing,” DeCapua said.

“No,” Mork said. “No more. Finish.
Finito.
The end.”

“All right. But later —”

“Okay,” Mork said. “Sure. Later. But not now. No more from you right now.”

T
hey drifted offshore a half mile in the dark. The swells had calmed down a little and the tide was running in fast. They could see tiny keys at the mouth of the bay, rising out of the water like black hedges, and hear the faint crashing of surf on the shore. The wind was still twanging the wires and the boat lurched with each slap of wind.

“I can’t figure it,” Gig Mork said to Mark Morley. “You better go down and take a look.”

“Fuck.”

“Keep your head on. It’s gusting a little and we got no steerage right now. But these seas ain’t that big.”

“What do you think it is?”

“I don’t know. We got plenty of gas.”

“And the generator?”

“It quit with the engine,” Mork said.

They had no electronics or lights so Morley studied the charts with a flashlight. Judging by the chart, they were drifting in fifty fathoms of water.

“What time is it?”

“Almost three-thirty in the A.M.”

Graves Harbor was the first good cove to lay up in along the Fairweather coast south of Yakutat. It had two arms. The South Arm was wider and better protected. The North Arm was more exposed to the gulf. But both channels had plenty of rocky heads. Around the bay were spruce and pines and above them the Fairweather Range, standing so high and bulky and white that sailors got dizzy looking at it from up close on a clear day.

It was a pretty bay to ride out a storm in the daytime, but it was no place to be at night without a generator to run radar, a searchlight or a depth finder.

“Watch her,” Morley said. “I’m going down for a look. When I’m ready I’ll give you a signal to start her.”

He went down below.

“Bob,” Mork said.

“What?”

“I want you guys to keep an eye out for shoals or rocks or any other nasty shit.”

“Okay.”

“You see anything, you holler. You got that?”

A few minutes later Mike DeCapua came up the outside ladder and poked his head in the side door. “Skipper says for you to roll the engine over, then to wait ten seconds, and then to do it again.”

“Okay.”

Mork hit the starter key. The engine chuffed and coughed but the motor didn’t roll over. He tried it again and again but it would not catch. Again DeCapua came up the ladder.

“The skipper says to hold off.” They heard boots along the companionway, and then Morley shouted to them from below on the foredeck. “That lousy piece of shit motor ain’t getting any gas,” he said. “How’s our heading?”

They had already passed the island at the mouth of the cove and the swells were brushing them in toward shore.

DeCapua said, “There’s rocks all over the place in here. This is no place to be without a sounder.”

Mork put his head outside and shouted, “I say we get the anchor down right away. We got to stop our drift.”

“Then get on out here and get the anchor down,” Morley called to him. “There’s forty, maybe fifty fathoms on that anchor line. At some point it’s got to catch. We’re in trouble if we get anywhere near that beach.”

“Coming down.”

Bob Doyle said to Morley, “Hey, listen. I got an idea.”

“What is it?”

“How about getting some tarps up and making a sail in our forward section?”

“How’s that?”

“We can rig some tarps up between our cranes and booms up forward, real high up. They’d make a decent sail. It’s gusting all around but there is a steady breeze blowing offshore. The tarps might catch that wind and keep us off the rocks.”

“That’s a fine idea, Bob. Okay, go get Mike and Hanlon and have them help you. Where the fuck is Hanlon anyway?”

“In the bait shed.”

“Well, Jesus Christ, tell him to get the fuck out here. We need him. If any of you guys so much as sees a pebble sticking out of the water, I better hear yelling.”

Bob Doyle nodded.

“And one more thing,” Morley said. “What do you think as far as the Coast Guard goes?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, we may have to call them at some point. We’re not a navigational hazard or anything, but we might blow up on the rocks.”

“I’d call right now. Let them know to stand by.”

“Think they’ll come out in this shit if we need them?”

“Sure,” Bob Doyle said, “they always got a ready crew.”

Morley looked at him. “Do me a favor, Bob. Get them on Channel Sixteen. Give them our position. And tell them we may need them soon.”

Morley was in the engine room and the others were hurrying to rig up the tarps. They were having a time of it. The boat was still pitching badly enough. Not so distant now, they could hear waves beating on rocks.

Mork said, “How far are we?”

“Half a mile,” DeCapua said, “no more.”

They punched holes in the tarps, looped rope through the holes and secured the tarps to the booms and crane. Once they hoisted the tarps the wind filled them and the boat leaned to starboard.

“It’s working! It’s working!”

“Shut up!”

It was hard to tell, for sure, how fast the boat was drifting; they could not even see mountains. Bob Doyle scampered up to the wheelhouse, updated the Coast Guard and then rushed down to the engine room to find Morley hunched over the engine block with tools and rags and tubes scattered all around.

“How’s it coming?”

“Almost there.”

He climbed up on deck.

“How’s he doing?” Mork asked him.

“He thinks all the knocking around loosened up sediment and shit in the fuel tanks. It probably clogged a line or a filter.”

“How close is he?”

“Close.”

There was nothing to do but stare into the blackness and listen to surf smacking on the rocks.

Mork called out to DeCapua, “How far?”

“Anytime.”