The Last Run (17 page)

It would be nice to do a hot tub in Tenakee Springs right now, he thought. But I had many chances to soak my body before starting this job and I am really fishing now. There will be plenty of chances to go tubbing when we return the boat. And I haven’t missed the drinking yet. That’s good.

He pulled the edge of the sleeping bag up to his nose, and lying in the dark, the warmth coming back to his split, blistered lips, he tried to let himself slip down steeply into sleep.

Now
in his mind he saw the two-story house on Davis Street with its gutters piled with snow and the yellow lamplight coming through the front bay window. It was early for such a snowfall in Vermont and it had caught the Bellows Falls Fire Department by surprise and the trucks hadn’t been out to clear the streets. Everything was so white and clean-linen looking. It was still falling, lazily, the flakes dropping diagonally through the bare branches of the oak and melting on his cheeks and forehead. He was standing out in the front yard, just beyond the reach of the porch light. He couldn’t quite see his mother’s face. Her arms were crossed.

Where have you been?

In the canal.

The canal?

He only nodded.

And that?

He held a tiny cat, pressing it tight against him. The cat was soaked. Its black hair clung to its bony back.

Do I
get an answer?

It was in the canal.

In the canal?

Yes.

And you went in after it?

Yes.

Oh, God. Don’t tell me you went into the canal near the power dam. You did, didn’t you? Oh, God. Oh, oh, oh.

She put her hands to her face and turned and went inside. He stroked the wet cat. After a few minutes his mother returned with a big white towel. The sternness was gone from her voice.

Come here, Bobby.

He did not look up as she wiped the cat with the towel.

Weren’t there any grown-ups that could have jumped into the canal?

Yeah.

Go upstairs. I’ve started a bath. Get out of those wet clothes and get in that tub.

He hesitated. His mother looked at the cat. It was a sickly looking little thing. Not a fluffy, fat cat.

All right. She sighed. The cat, too.

At first light he woke again and after breakfast walked into town to fetch drinking water. They spent most of the morning hauling buckets of water from the community hall to the boat. Once the freshwater chest had been topped off, Gig Mork spread the oldest, rattiest gear they had out on the dock and told them to pull up a bucket and get to work repairing it.

Mark Morley had gone off to pick up some extra engine parts and to buy some new tools. He had flown into a rage that morning while fixing the stove. He could not figure out why the burners would not ignite. After dismantling and reassembling the thing several times, he stood up and began hurling tools into the channel. He threw wrenches and adjustable sockets and screwdrivers and clamps and pliers and he had grabbed the stove itself and was hauling it out on deck to toss it overboard, too, when Mork ran over and stopped him.

By the time the skipper had gone into town the sky had turned to a dull, uniform gray so that the sky hung soft and heavy, cutting off the tops of the mountains. Soon a light snow was falling. The flakes dropped in swirls, not diagonally like hail but softly, like rose petals, and the crew sat on the dock, untangling and splicing line and watching them come, circling, from above.

“Why doesn’t it snow out at sea?” Bob Doyle asked.

“It does,” Mike DeCapua said, “only there’s too much humidity near the water. By the time the shit gets down low, it’s already turning to rain.”

“Too bad it doesn’t snow out there like this. It’s pretty.”

David Hanlon stood up, climbed onto the boat and went back to the bait shed. “He never talks much, does he?” Bob Doyle said to Mork, who was chopping a snarl off the line.

“No.”

“He’s got a funny walk, too. I just noticed it.”

“His back is fucked. That’s why he don’t winch or gaff. He’s strong as shit but he’s got that back.”

“How did he do it?”

“Says he came in from a trip once, in Ketchikan, and it was dark and he climbed up the ladder and didn’t see the hole in the pier. In went the leg, all the way up to his balls. He never got over it.”

“Nasty.”

“Takes all kinds of pills, gets all kinds of treatment, but you know doctors. Take your money, never make you right.”

“Man.”

“Hand me one of those hooks.”

A troller was moving up the channel. The men on it were sweeping the snow off the railings. They waved at them.

“Bob,” Mork said, “don’t make your splices so fat. They can’t be that big. Try to keep them smaller than the diameter of the line.”

“Sorry.”

“And that section there is fucked. We can’t use it and we ain’t going to make it right. Here. Use this and cut it off.”

They kept working as the flakes circled and drifted down around them. They smoked and told stories to pass the time and at one point Mork asked Bob Doyle if he had ever been to Pelican and Doyle told him he had passed by it a few times but had never stopped there. Mork said it was as good a town as any you could find in southeastern Alaska, that when you lived there you felt a part of one, big family. Nobody was ever in such a hurry not to stop and say hello and everybody who was part of the family got a nickname at one time or another. Bob Doyle asked him how they got a nickname like Gig out of a first name like William.

“First word that come out of my mouth,” Mork said.
“Gig.
My parents just started calling me it.”

Pelican, he said, got its name from a packer boat. That was a century earlier. His grandfather was one of Pelican’s first settlers. His name was Nels Hjlmer, and he was a Norwegian who came to America on a merchant’s ship at fifteen. The army officials could not pronounce his last name, so he gave them the name of his family’s farm in Norway, Mork. Later, he took a Tlingit woman for his wife, had seven kids and built a big farmhouse for them. He never finished the inside. Too much fishing, too much drinking. After old Nels split with his wife, she and the older kids went to work at the packinghouse, sliming and freezing fish. Twelve-hour days. For a summer’s work, the kids got paid twelve dollars and a pair of boots.

In those days, he said, the fishing was good everywhere. The seiners jammed the docks and the fishermen packed the cathouses. There was a big float house moored just off the pier that featured lots of kittens. After selling their catch the deckhands always rowed straight for it. One fisherman, the story went, fell hard for one of the kittens. One night he returned from a trip and found her servicing another client. No, he did not do anything stupid or make a mess; he untied the float house from the pier, towed it into the gulf and let it go. Just let it go. The float house drifted for two days.

Finally, some of the other fishermen starting feeling bad for the kittens—and lonesome —so they sailed out, hooked up the float house and towed it back to Pelican.

“They must have been happy to see those fishermen,” Bob Doyle said.

“Nobody got a freebie, if that’s what you mean,” Mork said. They all laughed. Hanlon returned with a bucket of hooks and sat down.

“You ever been to Rosie’s Bar and Grill?”

“Not yet,” Bob Doyle said.

At one time, Rosie’s was just a warehouse. Then somebody turned it into a bar. Then Rosie bought it. She decorated it real sweet, with fishing gear and antiques and big, old wood tables and iron lamps and a huge sign outside with the name carved into it by a few loggers. It was big and dark inside and smelled of stale beer and sawdust. There were bunks in a cabin out the back and Rosie let the miners crash there if they had nowhere else to stay. On real busy nights, she had guys sleeping on the pool tables and in the booths.

It was more than just a bar, he said. It was a radio hub for fishing vessels. A marine radio was set up at the bar so that skippers could call ahead to place a supper order, or to let Rosie know about an emergency, or a serious injury on a vessel. It was the place fishermen without families passed holidays. It was where they held their funerals, baptisms, weddings. Rosie’s youngest, Sassy, tied the knot right under the brass bell.

When Gig Mork was old enough, he tended bar at Rosie’s in the evenings. He wore a white shirt with pearly buttons and blue jeans, a red bow tie, red garters and a white apron. If there were more than five ladies in the bar Rosie would politely ask him if he would not mind giving the girls a little show, and he would have a few drinks, then a few more, to help him over his shyness, and before long he would be up on that bar flipping off one shoe, then the other, then one sock, then the other, and, gyrating his pelvis, peel off his shirt and jeans and let them fly.

“You’re kidding me,” Bob Doyle said.

“Hell, no.”

When he was in a groove, he would swing his hips and bump and grind and played peekaboo in such a way that a few of the really juiced ladies tried to pinch him. One time while he was dancing a woman snuck up behind him with a pair of scissors. Rosie grabbed the woman and restrained her just as she was about to pounce; apparently, the customer wanted to snip the strings holding up Mork’s apron.

“Hell,” DeCapua said, “why do women always screw up a good thing?”

Then DeCapua told them about some of his most colorful capers, including the time when he was fifteen and he hit Andy’s Foodtown in Hartford. His plan was to hide in the crawl space above the ceiling until the supermarket closed, then slither along the ceiling to the manager’s office and drop down on the safe —so as not to trigger the floor alarm.

“How’d you get the combination?”

“I watched him open the safe from the crawl space,” DeCapua told them. “I had binoculars.”

“How’d you get caught?”

Waiting for the employees to clear out for the night, he did a whack of heroin and, as he was nodding, leaned back and tumbled through the ceiling tiles. He landed smack in cold cuts.

“Worst part was I hate fucking baloney,” DeCapua said. Everyone laughed.

Then Mork told them a story about the night he drank himself to sleep while bartending at Rosie’s, only to wake up in a booth wearing nothing but a sheer, red baby-doll nightgown. At that, Bob Doyle commented that there was nothing quite like the feel of satin once you were shit-faced. DeCapua asked him how he could know of such things, being as he could not get his own wife to put out, to which Bob Doyle replied that at least he did not chase hookers away simply by removing his boots. DeCapua denied that was true, but added that if a whore had ever complained he would have told her, “You’re just smelling money, honey.”

“Money?” Bob Doyle said. “To me you smell like a monkey with no money.”

“Listen, shiny head,” DeCapua said, flapping his ponytail at him, “at least something’s growing on top of my head.”

“Fuck your ponytail.”

“Baldy here is mad,” DeCapua said to the others, “because cue balls don’t get pussy.”

“And you do?”

“Ah,” DeCapua said, “who the hell wants pussy, anyway? Pussy. Let me tell you something about pussy. It’s totally overrated.”

“What?”

“You heard me. Overrated. Who in hell needs to fuck? All that does is get you child-support bills. I’ll attest to that. Kissing, too. It’s all shit. Love. You know, World War Two was when they started in with all that love crap. Prior to that, in the movies, if you married a guy you were stuck with a guy. The good guy in the flick had to kill the bad guy to get the wife from him. You know? But then after World War Two they started telling everyone in America, ’You gotta be in love. You shouldn’t stay married to him if you don’t love him.’ So now they get married for
love.
And then what happens in a month? They realize they ain’t gonna change the beer-drinking son of a bitch. Then they say: ‘I don’t
love
him anymore. So I’m going to move out and take the kids.’ And the kids suffer. We got this idea that
I
must be in love all the time.
Well, sorry, baby. I don’t care how much you think you love him. There’s going to be mornings you’re going to wake up and not even
like
him. And nowadays when that happens, what do women do? They get a divorce.”

He had a captive audience now and he knew it.

“Marriages overseas are still arranged,” he said. “Both parents have to give a blessing or it’s over. Here, we got Jerry Springer and Oprah telling everybody how to stay married. What a joke. Now, let’s say you go to have sex with your wife, and she acts with reluctance. Okay? Well, if you’re a man, the way you handle that in Europe is, you quietly go off and get somebody on the side. You work a few more hours in the office for the money to pay for a mistress. And you don’t bring it home and you don’t rub it in her face. And your old lady goes out and gets a little on her own, and she don’t bring it home and make an issue of it. See? There’s ways to get around the
love
thing. Ways that have been working for hundreds of years.”

“You done?”

“None of this
honey
this or
honey
that for sex. Fuck that. I’d rather pay for it and get what I want.” He paused for a breath. “And quit giving me shit about my feet.”

“They could use some soap and water.”

“Fuck
that.
The only thing I need cleaned is my knob. And bitches are going to take care of that, anyway. They ain’t gonna be sucking on my toes. Which leads me to my final point. You know what the two best things in life are?”

“No.”

“Blow jobs and beer —in that order.”

“Oh hell.”

DeCapua stood up.

“Where you going?” Mork asked him.

“I’m sick of this shit. I’m going into town. This is busywork. I ain’t here to do busywork. We got plenty of gear. I’m a fisherman. I’m here to fish.”

Mork glared at him. “Sit down.”

“I’ll work when I’m on the boat but I ain’t on the boat right now.”