The Last Run (6 page)

She laughed at that. So he repeated the question. She stopped laughing and asked if he was joking. He said not really. She told him to cut it out. He said the Turk was a nice guy. She told him to go to hell. He said the money was nice. She told him to really go to hell and stay there for a while. He said take it easy, put that suitcase down, calm down, calm down. She didn’t say anything for a while. He said pardon me and then grumbled, hell, I was just thinking we’d make a few bucks. That’s all.

Since he had lured Robin up to Alaska, Mike DeCapua felt it only fair that he marry her, which he did shortly thereafter. Then he bought a boat. It was a dory, twenty-seven feet long, flat-bottomed, with flared sides, and in need of some sanding and paint. The trailer was no place for kids, he reasoned, and so one morning he piled his family into the
St. Pia
and set sail for Pelican, a clump of cabins at the toes of a fjord, a skip from Glacier Bay.

The country was as grand as it had been in his dreams. On both sides of the Lisianski Strait the mountains stood up proudly, clothed in dark, jagged spruce whose fragrance came out in the drenching rains. The trees changed their character many times during the course of a day; at times they seemed to brood, at times they waved and shone like running water, or a candle’s flame. Sometimes they felt quite close and other times, quite far away. There were trees that looked like the double sails of an old schooner and others like the serrated forms of black cod. On clear, cold nights, when the light was dying, it was as though a thin, gold line had been drawn along the tops of the mountains. Finally, when night fell, the fjords looked like immovable black waves against the sky, and every sound — every murmur of the channel, every beat of a bird’s wings —seemed to travel a great distance.

If the art of moving gently, without suddenness, is the first to be learned by the hunter, then Mike DeCapua learned the benefits of patience by watching humpbacks seine herring in the channel. The silvery giants would glide up on their prey in a wide circle and time their burst from the water, seemingly taking the channel up with them as they rose, true silver, flukes unfolding and spreading in flight, the spray on them sparkling as though they were studded in diamonds; and then falling back with a splitting clap, the whales would throw geysers of water that stunned the herring and made them a cinch to catch.

And so it was there, in Pelican, that he found his one, true calling—fishing. After a trip in which he caught nothing and lost all of his gear, Mike DeCapua took a job as a deckhand on a longliner owned by a Swede named Ing. Together with a man who called himself Barry the Englishman, they fished the nooks and crannies up and down Alaska’s southeast archipelago and, later, the open gulf, in search of gray cod. That they regularly went three days with no more than an hour’s shut-eye each day meant little to him; for the first time in his thirty years, he loved his work. His thoughts did not jump around. His breathing came easier. He did not feel cornered.

With time, Mike DeCapua grew into a solid deckhand. Coiling was his forte. He could sit at a shiv, wrapping up incoming longline for thirty-one hours without a break, and after a two-hour nap do it again. It was tricky business. Many a coiler had lost eyes, noses, fingers and ears to leaders and hooks gone awry, and he had his share of close calls, too. But coiling seemed to fit DeCapua. He was fast. He was so smooth that Ing kept him on for three years. It improved his reputation as a deckhand, though it did not do his marriage any good. After three months of no Mike, Robin packed her bags and put herself and the kids on the ferry to Sitka. Winter was coming. She was pregnant with his son and she’d had enough of sleeping on a dory. He returned from one of his fishing trips to find the
St. Pia
empty, bumping against the dock.

One day a letter arrived in his post office box. He read it over carefully and showed it to Ing. Idaho wanted him back. It had taken the authorities three years to extradite him but they had finally gotten around to doing it. Apparently, he’d been sentenced in absentia to eighteen years for jumping parole. The Alaska authorities were to return him at once for a hearing.

A month later, Mike DeCapua was back in Boise. Before his hearing began at the Idaho superior courthouse the judge called him into his chambers.

“They tell me you’re a fisherman,” the judge said.

“Yes, sir.”

“Like some coffee?”

“Sure.”

The judge poured and then sat back in his leather chair and considered him.

“You know,” the judge began, “I’m an angler myself.”

“Sir?”

“I’ve always wanted to fish in Alaska. Tell me, now, from one fisherman to another —is it as good as everyone says?”

If Mike DeCapua was good at anything, it was telling people what they wanted to hear. And he really heaped it on this time. At length, the judge sat forward, his bristly eyebrows bunching.

“Tell me something, Mr. DeCapua,” the judge said. “What will you do if I let you out?”

“I’ll go fishing in Alaska, Your Honor.”

“I have your word on that?”

The sentence was commuted to a year, and after ninety days Mike DeCapua was released for good behavior. The police escorted him to the airport. They wanted to make sure he was on the plane when the cabin door shut.

His ticket to Sitka was one-way.

T
he couch at Georgia Kite’s remained Bob Doyle’s refuge through the rest of November. The days grew shorter and the nights colder still. The snowlines on the mountains were lower with each dawn. Before daybreak a frost would leave thin ice on the porch steps and whiten the branches of the big tree out back. There were no flowers to see anymore, but by late morning the frosts would go as if they had never come, leaving beads of liquid like tears welled up on the leaves of bushes and on the fallen spruce in the forests.

Then the solstice came and went, and Christmas, too. It had been snowing in the mountains. Rangers closed the access road to Cascade Park a third of the way up the mountain because of the drifts, but hikers were still allowed to roam about the Old Mill Site out toward Herring Cove. After a heavy rain the trails would be softer to walk on. But if the air hardened with a cold front, the pleasure of feeling the forest give a little under his boots would not be there and it felt as though he was walking down a damp gravel driveway or a field of frozen crickets.

By now Bob Doyle had met most of the flophouse mainstays, though there was always another newcomer who had fallen among them. Harvey Kitka and Spoon Davis still had enough of their summer fishing shares left over to keep the beer kegs filled. Dirty Dick was still fighting his weekly showers, though he’d given up trying to hide his beer, and Sue Nelson, who lived four doors down, was still fighting with her husband, Perry, about her drinking. She was in the habit of stopping by the Basement at night, wearing tight sweaters and laughing that smug little laugh of hers and making eyes at John Gino so he would let her swig his vodka. A homosexual had made a pass at Dirty Dick, which in turn threw Sue Nelson into an uproar. A couple of sisters from Jackson College had been trying out for size most of the fishermen in the Basement bedroom. Rob Kite was still bringing weed up from down south, but having a hard time undercutting his competitors.

It was a slow time of the year for fishing, and Mike DeCapua was getting a little cranky about having to stay put in port and do boat repairs—busy-work, he called it—while his skipper waited for a window of clear weather between blows. The boat he’d been on, a longliner called the
Min
E, hadn’t been pulling much and he was in an increasingly evil mood. He was in a very evil mood the afternoon he banged down the stairs of the Basement and found Bob Doyle shooting a rack of pool with Norm Niessen, a friend who lived in the woods out off Sawmill Point Road. Niessen had moved up to Alaska from South Dakota years earlier. He was describing what it was like to live five years in a dilapidated school bus.

“Is he still talking about his days in that fucking bus?” DeCapua said.

“Kiss my ass, Mike,” Niessen said.

“Sorry, Mom.” DeCapua turned to Bob Doyle. “It’s just that I’ve heard that one about a zillion times.”

“I said kiss my ass,” Niessen said.

DeCapua smiled. “You know what I call this guy, Bob? I call him Perfect Mom. Tell him, Norm. Tell Bob here why I call you that.”

“Quiet, Mike,” Bob Doyle said. He was leaning far over the table, lining up his next shot.

“Listen,” DeCapua said. “All you dumb fucks ever do is shoot pool. Fuck pool. Say, Bob, do you want to play pool all your life?”

“You know something better?”

“How about fishing?”

DeCapua told him that one of the deckhands on the
Min E
had gotten into a scrap with the skipper over holiday time. The skipper was not letting crewmen go for the holidays. So the deckhand split.

Bob Doyle looked at DeCapua good and hard.

“You’re shitting me.”

“I ain’t.”

Bob Doyle lowered the cue stick.

“When does the boat leave?”

“New Year’s.”

For two days they untangled snarls in longline gear, stocked up on fuel, groceries, and tweaked the engine. Before daybreak on the first day of January 1998, the day of a rockfish opening, the
Min E
sailed out of Sitka Sound.

It sailed right back one night later. The rockfishing was horrible; after thirty-two hours of haulbacks, they’d barely pulled three hundred pounds.

Bob Doyle was not nearly as upset as the others. He had made it through his first commercial fishing trip without a major screwup. And he felt he had hit it off with the skipper, Phil Wiley. After they had tied up, Wiley walked up to him and invited him to stay on another month, and to sleep on the boat, too, if he liked.

“Phil’s got a crush on you,” DeCapua said. He and Bob Doyle were walking back from the ANB to the Basement. “What you do, anyway? Give him something special in his rack?”

“He’s a good guy.”

“He’s a cocksucker.”

Wiley, he explained, had shortchanged him out of three hundred dollars after a trip the previous year. Once they had beached and the rest of the crew had split their shares and gone to the Pioneer Bar, DeCapua pulled Wiley aside.

He told him, “Okay, I don’t care what you do to the rest of the crew. They’re not here. It’s just you and me.”

“Go on.”

“You owe me three hundred dollars. I want my three hundred dollars. You give me my three hundred dollars and I keep my mouth shut and go home. You don’t give me my three hundred dollars and I’m going to the crew. First I’ll tell them what a retro check is. Then I’ll tell them you owe them a retro check. Don’t think I won’t. I got all the catch figures. I want my money and I want it now.”

Wiley looked blankly at him. “Is that it?”

“That’s it.”

“Fuck off.”

So Mike DeCapua marched back to the Basement, pulled out a phone book and called every marine insurance company listed in the yellow pages until he found Wiley’s. He told the agent that his client was a high risk.

The agent asked him why.

“Well, your guy is not paying the crew. Which makes the crew mad. And they’re going to retaliate by hurting the vessel when Mr. Wiley is not around. And you are the ones who are insuring him.”

“I see.”

“You guys are going to wind up paying that boat off to the bank because it’s going to get lost at the dock sometime because of his behavior.”

“I see,” the agent said.

“And what’s more, that vessel ain’t safe. Her mast is unsteady, her deck is loose from the rails, and she needs extensive hull work. And he ain’t doing it.”

Three days later, a marine architect showed up to inspect the
Min E.
He took some notes, made out a report and sent a letter to Phil Wiley not long after. It said that unless repairs were affected, the boat would no longer be insured.

The repairs, DeCapua said, set Phil Wiley back a bundle.
^*
Still, he did not fire DeCapua.

“But he sure made me pay,” DeCapua muttered.

“How do you mean?”

“Well, when Phil takes me out, we work just enough to get a small catch, to cover some expenses he’s got, and then we come right back in. There’s never enough left over for me to get a good paycheck.”

“Oh.”

“He can be a bastard, all right.”

The
Min Ety
sailed again on January 15. Bob Doyle and Mike DeCapua were on it. They worked the lower half of the Chatham Strait and returned to Sitka with one thousand pounds of black cod.

“That bastard,” DeCapua muttered. He and Bob Doyle were walking up the dock. “That fucking bastard did it to me again.”

“Listen, Mike,” Bob Doyle said. “I don’t know if he’s doing it on purpose. I mean, I don’t see the sense in it.”

“In what?”

“In shooting himself in the foot,” Bob Doyle said. “I mean, why would he do that?”

Mike DeCapua laughed.

“People do it all the time,” he said.

T
he morning after the
Min E
returned to Sitka from its second bad trip in as many weeks, Bob Doyle went to the Halibut Hole to look for Mike DeCapua. He was not there, so Bob Doyle sat down and had a coffee and a black bean soup with cheddar crackers. He read the previous day’s paper with the coffee and smoked a cigarette. It was raining out and there were large, oily puddles in the street. Two young women came out of a hairdresser’s shop next door, touching their necks and laughing, and picked their way around the puddles. More people went by the window on the sidewalk. Most wore slickers and boots. A man was carrying a little girl on his shoulders. The way the girl’s blond bangs stuck to her forehead and the terribly bright smile on her face sent a chill through Bob Doyle so he ordered another cup of soup with crackers and lit another cigarette.