Billingsgate Shoal (5 page)

He told me to leave my name and number and a certain
Lieutenant Disbrow would be in touch with me. I thanked him and
proceeded on to the harbor. I headed over to Bill Larson's little
shack. He's the official harbormaster of Wellfleet and also operates
a small emporium selling marine paints, hemp and nylon lines,
caulking compound, basic marine hardware in brass, aluminum, bronze,
and the like. I asked him who owned the green dragger that had pulled
in two days previous.

"Didn't think to get his name, Doc. I was about
to head out to her in my skiff to see what the trouble was but they
beat me to it—came right up here in a little boat and asked me
where the nearest weld shop was."

"Yeah I saw it. What happened to her?"

"Said an old seam had worked loose between a
coupla plates. She'd been shipping water since she left Boston so
they thought they'd better stop and have her sewed up. Seems to me
they didn't stop any too soon either."

"Did you know they were out on Billingsgate at
dawn?"

"Hmmmp! Well whaddayuh know—"

"Where was the repair made? I'd like to get the
owner's name if possible."

"Right over there. Reliable. See it?"

"Oh yeah. Did they say anything else, like
having seen a guy in scuba gear?" ·

"Oh you mean the Hart boy? Too bad, eh? Nope.
Didn't say anything about that."

He worked at an eye splice with his big wooden fid.
"I'm sure they got the owner's name because they did the
repair."

I entered the barnlike structure from the street side
and looked into the gloomy cavernous interior. Straight ahead of me
was a set of railroad tracks that led down into the water. Winched
halfway up this tracks was a big cradle, empty.

"Help you sompin?" asked the bearded old
man at the workbench. He was busy fitting a new head gasket to a long
marine engine that stood near the bench, hung in a frame made of
giant I-beams. I counted six huge holes in the block. A straight six,
and each of the cylinders seemed big enough to hold a bowling ball.
That's what gave the draggers their spunk. I described the boat that
had visited them.

"Oh yeah. Gash in the starboard side just
forward of the beam. 'Bout as big as a cigar box, only longer."

It didn't sound like a weld seam working loose. But I
decided to keep this tidbit to myself.

"Was it high up, or toward the keel?"

"Pretty high up, Just below the waterline. Wish
you could talk to Sonny. He's not here now though. Sonny did the job,
less than forty-five minutes."

"That seems mighty quick for a weld job that
big. Sonny must a run a good bead."

The old man nodded triumphantly.

"Yup! Good bead all right. Real good bead."

He reached around behind the bench and pulled out
what looked like a giant Fourth of July sparkler.

"Uses these certanium production rods. Best
welding electrode made. He can run a bead three yards long without a
rod freezing. He had a good teacher. Me. I'm Sonny's daddy, mister.
Who in hell are you?"

I explained that I was an interested bystander.

"You seem to know welding, mister. Ever done
it?"

I answered that I once worked a summer in Peoria as a
welder at the Caterpillar Company. I said that welding was one of the
very last Skilled Occupations. That a good welder was worth his
weight in gold ingots. This seemed to please the old man, who grew
talkative.

"But what was odd, mister, was this: that boat
was pretty tore up, but her skipper didn't want nothing but a fix-it
job. You know, enough to get her back home. All Sonny did was slap a
sheet of quarter-inch plate over that hole, then run his bead around
the edge. Slick as a wink, you know? We charged him ninety-nine
dollars and ninety-five cents, you see?"

"No I don't see."

"Well by the law any damage to a vessel over a
hundred dollars must be reported to the Coast Guard. It's just like a
car accident. Well, a lot of skippers don't want the hassle, so we
just charge ninety-nine ninety-five."

"That's a nice cheap fee."

"Well sure," he cackled, "but the
hauling charge makes up for that. You see we charge a fee for hauling
the vessel out so we can work on her; Hauling fee is a hundred bucks.
But that's like a tow truck: ain't got, anything to do with the
damage, you see?"

"Ah, now I see. . ."

"But strange thing was, mister, this boat dint
want no decent job. Just what we call a jury-rig—like I said,
enough to get back home on."

"Which was Boston?"

"Don't know."

"Well it said Boston under her name."

"What was her name?"

"Penelope
."

"So you know her name and port, so why'd ya ask,
mister?"

"I'd like to get the owner's name. Call him. You
know that kid who drowned? Well I want to know if anybody on the boat
saw him; I think he might have gotten swept up in the propwash. Can I
have his name? Would you mind?"

"Don't have it."

"Well didn't you till out a work order'?"

"Naw. The guy showed us his money and we went to
work. What makes you think the boy got in trouble with her?"

"I'm not sure. I just want to check. I want to
reassure myself he didn't get in trouble under her."

He spat a thin stream of dark brown juice over the
engine block. He cocked his head slightly with an amused look. Then
he shook his head just a tad.

"Mister, I don't know much about you, but I'll
say this on a hunch: you overthink things. Right? Am I right? Now
when you take a leak, do you think about your kidneys working? Yeah,
I bet you do. I don't, mister. That's the difference. This is a hard
business. Somebody comes to you, you take them on. You don't have
time to think. You've gotta make the buck. Savey-voose?"

"I understand. I just want to know one more
thing. Did they say what caused the damage?"

"Yeah. Said they hit something."

"Well what?" .

"Now there you go 0verthinkin' again, mister. It
wasn't my business. Why don't you ask him?"

"Good idea. How?"

"You got the boat's name and her home port. Go
to the Coast Guard and look up the registry. But he never said his
name. I didn't ask either. He paid cash and left. Nice new bills. .
.could've been ironed they were so crisp."

"Thanks for the help. I'll go to the Coast
Guard. But you can't remember any other detail that might help me?
Anything?"

He picked up the gasket and placed it on the engine
block, then hefted up the massive head and placed it over the gasket.
Sonny's daddy· was amazingly strong. He had also apparently reached
the end of his hawser as far as my presence was concerned. He flung a
set of engine bolts into his left hand and held a big Snap-On ratchet
wrench in the other and glared at me.

"Mister, I'm a busy man. I've told you all I
know about that gawdamn boat. If you want to talk to Sonny, come back
on Tuesday. We're closed Mondays. Otherwise, please git. Know what a
rottweiler is?"

"Uh huh."

"Good. Know what they can do when they're
angry?"

"I've heard," I answered, and began to scan
the place.

"Well we keep one out back. Name's Roscoe. Turn
him loose in here at night to keep an eye on things, ya know? Well he
likes to meet people, but usually it tums out they're not so tickled
to see him—"

I thanked the man and left. I didn't dawdle. I hadn't
the slightest interest in meeting Roscoe, dog lover that I am. I got
in the car and cast a final glance at Reliable Marine Service. I
started up and did a circle on the pavement.

"Toodle-loo Roscoe," I whispered, and
headed up toward the Coast Guard station at Nauset Beach. A gash and
a torn seam weren't at all the same thing. I found that interesting.

When I got there the beach parking lot was jammed. I
knew it was a tiny station; there was a chance they couldn't help me.
I parked and fought my way through throngs of vacationers to the tiny
office at the base of the lighthouse. There was a transmitter there
and a young man in uniform behind a government-issue gray metal desk.
The black plastic tag on his right shirtfront said McNab.

I identified myself as the person who had reported
the stranded vessel. He retrieved the report instantly.

"Here it is. Shortly after you called we
diverted one of our aircraft to the site. The pilot tried to raise
the skipper on the distress frequency but there was no response. Nor
was there any distress call, for that matter. We sent the plane back
as the tide rose, but the vessel was gone. We're assuming the
grounding was intentional."

"She limped into Wellfleet all right, Just
barely, but she got there. I want to get in touch with the skipper.
Can I look up the boat?"

"Sure. She'll either be registered with the
Commonwealth of Massachusetts or another state or, if she's over five
tons, she'll be in one of those big books there on the shelf. Do you
know her name?" `

We. thumbed through Merchant Vessels of the United
States, an enormous two-volume tome that listed every vessel in
American waters engaged in commercial activity that was over five net
tons. Penelope was a popular name for boats. I counted over sixty of
them, arranged alphabetically by their owner's last name. There was
no Penelope that listed Boston as her home port.

"Do you think she is over thirty-two feet? It's
at that length usually, that a vessel approaches five-ton capacity."

"Over. Positive. I put her length at forty or
maybe a bit more."

"Hmmmm. Then she could be new, just documented.
Or she could be a noncommercial vessel. You can have a hundred-footer
and not have to document it if it's not used for commercial
purposes."

"Like a yacht?"

"Exactly. And quite a few trawlers, or
trawler-type vessels, are converted into pleasure boats."

The first Penelope listed was owned by Jack Babcock
of Newport, Rhode Island. The second was owned by Jesse Bullock of
Galveston, Texas. Probably a shrimper. And so it went. There were
Penelopes
that caught
salmon and crab out of Seattle,
Penelopes
that hunted sailfish and marlin out of Key West,
Penelopes
that seined for smelt from Sheboygan, that shoved coal barges down
the Illinois River, etc., etc. There were seven
Penelopes
in New England, but none of them were from Bean Town. I copied down
all the information listed after each name. This included the
vessel's dimensions and tonnage, and her documentation number—which
is not the one you sometimes see on the boat's bows. The
documentation number is engraved or embossed into the vessel's main
beam below decks.

"There's one other thing," said McNab,
leafing through the book. "The boat could have listed her home
port on the transom instead of her hailing port."

"What's the difference?"

The hailing port is the one that should be listed
under the vessel's name. It's the place where she berths, where her
skipper lives . . . her home. The home port may not in fact be the
vessel's true home—"

This enigma was sounding more and more as if it had
been created by government bureaucracy.

"—but is the port office where the vessel has
filed her papers. This is technically not kosher, but some boats do
it, particularly ones that tramp around the seaboard a lot."

"So you're suggesting that one of these other
Penelope
s could be the
boat I saw?"

"It's possible. There are ten documentation
offices in New England, and so ten possible home ports. But a boat
can be documented in one port and show another on her transom."

"But wait a minute. Boston is a home port,
right? So if a boat berthed in Boston and was also documented in
Boston, then we'd see her listed in this book, right?"

"Uh, right."

"If a boat has been documented in Boston but
berths in, say, Nahant, then she would still be listed here under
Boston, right'?"

"Uh, yeah. Even though her transom would say
Nahant."

"I'm sorry, Mr. McNab, but this is getting
murkier instead of clearer."

"OK tell you what," he said. He tapped a
pencil, eraser side down, on his blotter officiously, he scowled
profoundly, and cleared his throat a few times. I was waiting in the
wings. Pretty soon now, he was going to explain it all.

"It's uh, confusing—" he ventured.

"Do you have the slightest idea what's going on
about this?"

"No."

At least it was a straight answer.

"Let's try this: supposing a vessel is
documented in one of the nine New England ports other than Boston,
but spends a considerable amount of time in Boston, OK? Suppose she's
documented in New Bedford but hangs out around Boston. Would she then
list Boston on her transom? Is that what you were thinking'?"