The Last Run (7 page)

Mike DeCapua did not turn up, so around eleven-thirty Bob Doyle walked up the main street to the Moose Lodge and had a Crown Royal with the barman. DeCapua didn’t show up there either, so he left a five-dollar bill on the bar and thumbed a lift out along Halibut Point Road to a yard where shipwrights welded the hulls of steel boats. He knew that DeCapua used to camp out at the yard, sleeping inside the hulls of ships that had come in for repairs. He asked a couple of the metalworkers if they had seen him. They shook their heads. Nobody had seen DeCapua for months.

In the rain Bob Doyle walked back along Katlian Street. The plywood of the sagging houses looked gray and wet. He turned in at the ANB and was about to take the ramp down to the docks when he spotted Mike DeCapua coming across the parking lot. There was no mistaking his heronlike strut. Bob Doyle called out to him. DeCapua came over and stood next to him under the awning.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” Bob Doyle said. “Where you been?”

“At the bank.”

Bob Doyle gave him a puzzled look.

“Restitution,” DeCapua said. “I pay fifty bucks a month to this joint I hit a while back, the PO leaves me alone.”

“Oh,” Bob Doyle said. “You won’t believe what I did today.”

“What?”

“I think I may have found us a job.”

“No kidding.”

“The job service called me this morning. They got a job for us.”

“Baking cookies?”

“No,” Bob Doyle said. “Somebody posted a job today for two deckhands on a fishing boat.”

“Two hands?”

“I got it right here.”

He felt in his pocket, pulled out a piece of paper, unfolded it and handed it to DeCapua.

“You got a number?” DeCapua asked him.

“I already called.”

“And?”

“The skipper said he’d need two guys. He said he’d take one green hand if another experienced one came along.”

“He did, huh?”

“This could be what we’re looking for. And the best part is that we’d be set for February, too —just tendering fish from the other boats.”

DeCapua was reading the ad again.

“It doesn’t give the skipper’s name,” he said.

“It’s Morley. Mark Morley.”

“Never heard of him.”

“What does that mean?”

“Nothing,” DeCapua said. “Means I ain’t never heard of him, is all.”

“He’s down at Old Thompsen Harbor. He said he’d be there pretty much all afternoon. If we went down there now we’d probably catch him.”

DeCapua was reading the ad again.

“And what’s our take?”

“Ten percent of the catch.”

“Ten each?”

“Yeah.”

“That ain’t bad,” DeCapua said. “But what the hell kind of skipper gets his deckhands from a newspaper ad?”

“It wasn’t in the newspaper,” Bob Doyle said. “I got it from the job placement service.”

“Same fucking difference.”

“Well,” Bob Doyle said, “it could be just what we need to get us through the winter.”

A smirk flickered across DeCapua’s lips. “It would be something to see Phil’s face after we tell him that we’re splitting.”

“So we go?”

Mike DeCapua looked out at the channel. There was a wind rising, a chop building.

“Oh shit,” he said. “What do we got to lose?”

It was getting on evening when they reached Old Thompsen Harbor. The wind was ripping along the breaker wall and the tide was up. They walked down a grated ramp and under the orange glow of the lamps along the main pier. There were not many boats in their slips, but the few left there for the winter were rocking and pitching in the chop. To the left, down the far end of the third dock, they saw the silhouette of a long, dark ship and the dark shapes of two men on the foredeck.

“That must be it,” Bob Doyle said.

“It’s a schooner.”

“Is that bad?”

“No,” Mike DeCapua said, “I like schooners.”

They walked along the dock until they came to a ship with a rounded, black stern, with the words
LA
CONTE painted on it in white. A heavyset man in a slicker and a cap was standing on the slip, handing a bag up to a second man on the bow.

Bob Doyle called out, “Howdy!”

The big man on the dock turned.

“You Mark Morley?”

“Yeah?”

“My name is Bob Doyle. I called you this morning. About those deckhand jobs?”

“Oh, right!”

The man came over, looking awfully big in a sweatshirt two sizes too large for him, and a cap and slicker. He was not tall as much as he was stocky and bull-shouldered, the size and build of a tailback gone a little heavy. He wore his cap cocked way up with the brim curled, like a kid in Little League might, and he had big, floppy ears and thin, wide-set eyes that seemed small behind his thick, oval glasses. Bob Doyle thought he looked like a philosopher in a fisherman’s jacket.

“This here is Mike DeCapua.”

“Good to meet you,” Morley said.

“Same.”

“So, you guys looking for work?” Morley asked.

“Depends on what the work is,” DeCapua said.

“We do gray cod, mainly,” said Morley. “We’ll probably take some dog sharks, too, being that there’s so many damned sharks and that nobody ever misses a shark.” He laughed.

“Who’s he?” Bob Doyle asked, motioning to the man on the foredeck.

“That little guy? Oh, that’s just my manager. What I call him, anyways. His name’s Gig. Hell of a fisherman. You know him?”

“No,” Bob Doyle said.

“I know him,” DeCapua said.

“Hey, Giggy,” Morley shouted. “Come on over and say hello.”

The man walked to the stern of the boat and leaned over the bulwark. He was Native; that Bob Doyle could see straightaway. He was small in height, but rangy and strong looking, with thick, stubby fingers. His head was covered with the hood of a sweat jacket, but out of the sides of the hood stuck tufts of hair, shiny and black as a raven’s wing. But for his mustache, there was something boyish, puppylike, about his face. It might have been the smooth, fair skin, it might have been his eyes, black and long-lashed and wetly shining, like a harbor seal’s. He also had this crooked, shy grin, like a schoolkid who’s just been busted for smoking in the bathroom.

He was wearing one of those grins.

Morley continued, “This here’s Bill Mork, but everyone calls him Gig.” Morley pointed to Bob Doyle. “Giggy, this here’s Bob, and that there’s Mike Dee…”

“DeCapua.”

“Thanks.”

Mork said, “I know him.”

“You do?” Morley said. “Well, isn’t that nice. Just like family.” He laughed. Then, to Bob Doyle, he said, “Giggy knows fishing. Been at it his whole life. He’s from Pelican. He knows his way around the waters here.”

Bob Doyle smiled.

Morley turned to DeCapua. “I hear you’re a pretty experienced fisherman, too.”

“You heard right.”

“Who you been out with?”

DeCapua mentioned the names of skippers and vessels he had fished with, but Bob Doyle could see Morley did not recognize them.

“How’d you get started?”

“On my own boat.”

“Your own boat?”

“Then I realized I was a better deckhand than a skipper, so I went to that.”

“What’re you good at?”

“I can coil. Bait.”

“You know your way around a boat?”

“I know how to make a set. I know what everybody’s job on deck is.”

Morley pushed up his glasses. “I’ll bet you do. I’ll bet you do.” He looked up. “Giggy, you say you know this guy here?”

DeCapua and Mork traded nods. They were not friendly nods, but not cold ones either.

“Giggy and me go back some,” DeCapua said. “We fished all the way from Ketchikan to St. Paul. And man, that fucking St. Paul is a great place to party. You ever been there?”

“No,” Morley said.

“Well, shit, you ought to go. There’s a Native woman behind every tree on that island. Only one problem with St. Paul —it ain’t got no trees.”

They all laughed.

“So what kind offish you like to catch?” Morley asked DeCapua.

“Depends on where I go fishing,” DeCapua said.

“Well, we’ve been doing mostly inside waters,” Morley said. “Chatham. Peril Straits. Tenakee Inlet. Freshwater Bay. Whitewater Bay. Shayek. Places where gray cod hang out.”

“Right.”

“I bet you’ve done some rockfishing, too,” Morley said. “I’d be willing to put money on that.”

“Done my share.”

“I’ll bet you have,” Morley said. He paused for a few seconds, and then he said to DeCapua: “All right. I’d be willing to take you and your buddy, Bob, along with us and give you both a ten percent share of our catch. We’d be leaving day after tomorrow. Probably be gone a week. Of course, if you guys do good work, then I might keep you on through February to do some tendering.”

“Sounds good.”

“Great,” Morley said. “There’s just one thing, then. Old Bob here is an old Coastie. Now that’s all right, but he’s green on a fishing boat. He’s going to need some watching. You’d be willing to keep an eye on him, am I right?”

“Sure.”

“Good. That’s good. All right. Anything else you want to know?”

“I’d like to see the boat.”

“Sure,” Morley said. “I’d be happy to introduce you to the old lady.”

A
s schooners went, she was no beauty. The hull was bruised and loose in spots. The decks were worn, buckling under the weight of too many booms and too much rigging. Worms were eating the frame around the rudder. The hold hatches leaked. Mildew grew up and down the cabin walls and made black spots on the ceilings where water got in. The head was stopped up. The lazarette was a shambles. Water had to be pumped from the bilges every couple of hours, even in dock. The engine room looked as though it had been taken apart and never quite put back together.

Mike DeCapua pulled himself up out of the front hold, clapped his hands and rubbed them on his sweatpants.

“Well?” Bob Doyle asked him.

“I like her,” DeCapua said. He pulled out a pinch of tobacco and rolled himself a cigarette.

“Why?”

“She sits firm in the water. She ain’t tippy.”

“Oh.”

“She was set up as a buyer boat,” DeCapua said. His eyes skipped around the foredeck. “She’s tired, all right. I hate to see a boat get treated bad. And this girl’s been treated bad for a long time. But she’s solid. Notice when I go walking over here, or walking over here? See how she just stays where she is?”

“Yeah?”

“That’s a good boat.”

“She needs work.”

“All boats need work.”

“I guess.”

“She’s got soul,” Mike DeCapua said. “She don’t tip and she’s got soul.” He pinched his cigarette, lit it and looked vaguely up at the rigging. “Fucking people don’t know how to treat a boat, is all.”

She hadn’t always been so tired looking. The day she came out of the Tacoma shipyard, she had the simplicity and sleekness of a kayak and the sweet scent of Washington fir. The G.W. Hume Company, her first owner, named her
Narada.
That was in January of 1919.

Though quite slender, she was seventy-seven feet long and built as sturdy as a pocket battleship. Her deck planks were two and a half inches thick. Her beams were seventeen inches in width; her frames and crossbeams, eight inches square. Her hull, two inches of creosoted, vertical-grain fir, had been overlaid with an inch of ironwood to keep her from bruising on docks. At sixty-six tons—with her holds and fuel tanks empty—the
Narada
was no lightweight, and sat low in the water. Whenever she sailed full offish or tanked down with ice, she looked like a surfacing submarine, her decks constantly awash in frothing brine.

Through inside waters she moved like a saber, her high, up-curving bow handily slicing the chop. But her slender figure betrayed her on the open seas; on the great swells of the gulf or the Pacific she would heave and wallow, and when big combers broke against her hull the full length of her would shudder —a shudder that brought a pallor to the cheek of the staunchest deckhand.

Originally, she had been commissioned to tender fish caught by trap vessels to packinghouses in Ketchikan and Petersburg. In the twenties Alaska fishermen used nets framed in fir and cedar, anchoring these traps at the mouths of bays or leaving them to float in channels or near rivers. They worked so well they wiped out salmon and cod stocks up and down the Inside Passage. By the early thirties the traps were outlawed, leaving most trap tenders, including the
Narada,
sitting in dry dock, as jobless as the rest of the country.

From then on, the boat was revamped, remodeled and refitted so many times for so many different jobs and owners that she lost something—her identity, some put it. During the gold rush of the thirties, the Dupont Dynamite Company chartered the
Narada
to haul barges of explosives to Skagway. During World War II she tugged weapons and military cargo. In the seventies she was converted into a tender, only to be reconverted a decade later into a longliner. Her two original holds were replaced with diesel tanks, which were in turn changed to fiberglass-lined tanks, which were later ripped out in favor of refrigerated holds. Dupont upgraded her engine to a 425-horsepower, Cat-343, but the mechanics dispensed with the muffler to make her go twice as fast as the speed she was built to go, seven knots. A third fish hold was put in, along with a twenty-ton compressor and a new network of wiring and three-inch piping to carry chilled seawater to the holds. Different owners updated her navigational instruments at different times. Her original, spoked wheel was swapped out for a stainless-steel model. Three new cargo booms were added, followed by a second mast, an extra set of rigging, new bulwarks and a bait shed. (Although it could now load fish simultaneously from four different vessels, the extra weight on top made it harder for the boat to recover from rolls.)

Not even her original name lasted; in 1971, she was reregistered as the
La Conte—
the Count.