Soundkeeper (10 page)

“We’re going to have a memorial service on Sunday at the old Sheldon Church,” Silas continued. “She really liked you. I don’t know if she ever told you that.”

“I liked her a lot too,” Hall said. He wished he’d told Gale.

They went back outside and Silas locked up the office. Persimmon clouds with cinnamon edges seemed reluctant to surrender to the twilight. The beauty of the sunset was too sensational to rush past, even as hungry and tired as he was. While Hall loitered on the dock he wondered if the display was a salute from God, a tribute to someone who cherished His creation and looked after it so well.

Chapter Seventeen

At three a.m. the alarm clock blared for half a minute before Hall woke up. He stumbled to the dresser and turned it off, trying to remember why he had set it for such an inhuman hour. Then he noticed there was a dripping sound coming from the kitchen. That meant the roof was leaking again which meant it was raining. It took all of his discipline to keep from getting back underneath the warm, dry blankets.

A hot shower (inside) and two cups of coffee made him feel like a new man. He moved Belker’s water bowl to catch the raindrops, and took his rain slicker off of the hook by the back door. During the spring and fall shrimping seasons he was expected to perform boardings and inspections of commercial fishing vessels. He needed to inspect a few more vessels by the end of the month. The state fishery agents also checked the commercial boats but had no authority to enforce federal regulations. The Georgia state line was less than ten miles away and a favorite tactic of captains wishing to avoid being stopped was to fish a zig-zag pattern back and forth between the two state boundaries. They were often surprised when a Fed stopped them. He knew his presence on the boats was tolerated only because the fishermen had no other choice. He understood their feelings. It was a little like driving around with a state trooper in your backseat.

The rain was steady and the sea rolling gently in the dark sound as he approached the Atlantic Ocean. He scanned the horizon with his binoculars, and saw the lights of a dozen shrimp boats. The coffee rumbled in his stomach and he wished that he would have eaten something before he left his house.

Miss Agnes was his first target. He pulled behind the boat when her nets were being brought in and hailed the captain on the radio. A line was thrown to him and he tied it to the bow cleat of his patrol boat. He timed his jump carefully, not wanting to go for a swim or get squashed between the two boats. He would check their harvest totals, Turtle Exclusion Devices, and federal and state fishing permits before he moved to another boat. If the boat seemed to be in poor condition he would check their safety equipment and report them to the Coast Guard if the boat didn’t appear to be seaworthy. Once he was safely aboard the shrimp boat, the shrimpers would continue dragging their nets so the inspection would be as unobtrusive as possible.

The first stop was usually the most productive, because within minutes of boarding Miss Agnes every boat in the area would know that Hall was checking the shrimpers today. Jimmy once told him that he stayed in the cottage one rainy day and pretended to hail a shrimp boat on the marine radio. He knew anyone fishing illegally would high tail it out of the area and he didn’t even have to leave his kitchen.

The deck crew of the Miss Agnes surprised him. Two of the four fishermen were women.

“Dis my wife, my dotter, and her husman,” the old captain explained.

His daughter looked to be forty and his wife twenty years past that. Hall wondered how productive their day would be.

A novice waterman, Hall did not lie down and wake up with the weather. He saw only the rain and decided it was a rainy day. He failed to take into account the low pressure system that brought the rain also produced the accompanying wind and high seas. A few minutes on the internet checking the wave heights at a few of the offshore weather buoys before he left his house would have told him that it was a bit lumpy out on the open ocean today. Soon enough he would learn to live by the barometer as sailors before him had for centuries.

At twelve tons empty, the Miss Agnes went through the three foot high swells of Port Royal Sound with no rocking and very little spray coming over the bow. As soon as they cleared Joiner Bank and turned south they began to take the wind and waves on their port side however, and the old wooden ship began to creak and moan as she rolled back and forth. Hall struggled to keep his footing on the slippery deck as he walked from the pilothouse toward the stern of the boat. His shoes seemed unable to get any purchase on the wet deck.

“Keep your feet farther apart,” the younger of the two women advised him when she walked past. He was amazed that she wasn’t holding onto anything and was carrying a bundle of fishing net that was bigger than he was.

Even in calm seas the deck of a fishing boat is a dangerous place to be. Hall knew that and found a place to stay out of the way while the captain gathered his papers. The hold was empty, so there were no shrimp for him to estimate their catch. Gradually he acquiesced to the rhythm of the ocean and began to feel more comfortable. As the light began to build in the east he saw the hotels and condos on Hilton Head Island begin to emerge in the growing dawn.

Although the captain didn’t touch the throttle, the old boat slowed to a crawl when the great nets were lowered into the ocean. Thick steel cables went from a large winch that was mounted amidships to two tall booms, one port and one starboard. Two large wooden “doors” were attached to the outer portion of each net and acted as planers, dragging the nets off of the deck and spreading them open in the water. The nets actually dragged the ocean floor which was only twenty-two feet below the surface this close to the shore. The location of every rocky outcropping or shipwreck in these waters was well known and avoided by the shrimpers, who dragged their nets with trepidation after a big storm moved a shipwreck or uncovered a stony projection.

The old diesel engine kept time with its steady beating. The waves breaking against the bow sounded like muted cymbals and the wind played the strings, singing and whistling through the rigging and lines. Hall thought it was mesmerizing.

After thirty minutes the powerful winches pulled in the nets, and the crew prepared to receive the bounty of the sea. Hall saw the captain shake his head and asked him what was wrong.

“Comin’ up too fast,” he answered.

Hall understood what he meant when he saw the mostly empty net. They harvested less than three bushels of shrimp and several dozen small fish. The small fish that fell from the net were crescent-shaped in death and missing their eyes. Hall recognized pinfish, juvenile snapper, and many mullet. He walked over and picked one up.

“Why didn’t the crabs eat these fish?” Hall asked out loud.

“Dunno, Bossman,” the son in law of the captain said. “Mebbe dey don taste no good.”

He didn’t have any evidence bags with him so he collected two fish from each species and put three in one of the pockets of his rain coat and three in the other pocket. He took a notepad made of waterproof paper out of his shirt pocket and scribbled down two pages of notes. With the boat now pitching and rolling he thought anyone reading them would have thought he was drunk when he was writing. He glanced inside the wheelhouse, but didn’t see a GPS display or a depth finder. The only electronics were an ancient marine radio and a brand new color television that was tuned to the local morning newscast. He looked at the shoreline and did his best to estimate where he was.

When he was finished taking notes Hall watched the male crewmen use an aluminum grain shovel to scoop up the fish and throw them overboard. A single common tern among a screech of laughing gulls dove and tried to pluck one of the dead mullet out of the water. The fish was too heavy for the small bird so he dropped it and chased one of the seagulls, trying to snatch a piece of its meal from its beak. Hall checked on his boat as it bobbed up and down behind them, close enough to the stern of the shrimp boat to stay clear of the nets.

While the nets were in the water they steadied the boat by softening the rolling from side to side, and all Hall had to contend with was the up and down movement as the trawler crested and broke through the oncoming waves. Now, with the nets out of the water, the boat pitched sharply from side to side in addition to the up and down movement. He knew that the stern of the boat moved the least, and he moved to the back of the boat and tried to focus on the horizon. His mouth was dry and tasted like stale coffee, and the tiny buildings on shore went up and down, up and down. This was a lot different than being in the protected inshore waters in his small boat.

The nausea wasn’t overwhelming until they changed course and ran with the wind. The exhaust fumes hung in the air and traveled with the boat. Hall struggled for a breath of fresh air, but the combined effect of movement and diesel fumes put him over the edge. He barely made it to the back railing of the shrimp boat before he spewed.

Mercifully, the crew ignored him until he was done throwing up. Hall wiped his mouth on the wet sleeve of his rain slicker and wished he was back on solid ground. Like anyone else who had ever been seasick, he just wanted everything to quit moving. Too embarrassed to go back into the cabin, he stayed out on deck and tried to keep his face in the wind, which seemed to help a little. The captain’s wife came outside and gave him a jelly jar full of ice water and a sympathetic smile.

“You ain’t the first to get sick on dis old boat,” she said.

Hall thanked her and looked behind the shrimp boat at the dark wake that trailed behind them. Then he noticed that he had puked all over the front of his patrol boat.

Hall overheard the captain talking with another shrimper on the marine radio and soon they drew near several other shrimp boats. To his great relief, the boat steadied when the nets were let back down. Everyone on board saw the good catches of the neighboring boats and was anxious to check their nets. After what seemed like an eternity, the nets were hauled back in.

Even Hall could tell the nets were recovered much slower than before. The rigging groaned under the stress of a good catch, and soon over a ton of shrimp was wriggling and sliding across the slippery deck. Hall struggled to write down some notes while the ship pitched and heaved. The crew was all business, shoveling the valuable cargo into the belly of the ship.

Three more times Hall got sick over the side of the boat. The last time it was only dry heaves and if he remembered correctly from his early college days, his gut would be sore tomorrow. The other casualty of the day was his shoes. Looking at his ruined leather docksiders, covered with shrimp parts, fish blood, and vomit he understood why the fishermen all wore white rubber boots.

It stopped raining before he got home, and everything that was plastered to the front deck and windshield of his patrol boat was dry and stuck on like glue. A dolphin surfaced in the channel near his dock and chirped at him. This time he was certain it was the same one because it had the scar on its back near its dorsal fin. He could understand why people found it hard to resist the urge to feed the friendly creatures.

It took him an hour and a half to remove everything that had once been in his stomach from his boat. After putting his ruined shoes in a trash can he walked barefoot to his cottage and picked up three sand burrs for his trouble, one of them lodging in the fresh cut in his instep.

He showered outside in his clothes again then remembered he didn’t have any more fresh uniforms to change into. When he took off his wet pants his cell phone fell out of the pocket and clattered on the concrete and oyster shell floor of the shower. He flipped it open and the screen was blank with no signs of life. He doubted if a biologist ever had a morning like this.

The phone in the cottage still worked, and after answering its ring he drove his patrol truck to the visitors’ parking lot to meet a lady whose station wagon had been broken into. He was wearing a pair of gym shorts and a US Fish and Wildlife Service sweatshirt since he didn’t have any clean uniforms, and she made him show her his identification before she would believe he was an officer. Someone had smashed a window in her car and took a GPS unit that had been attached to the windshield with a suction cup. He took all of the information from her that he needed for his report and gave her the case number for her insurance company.

She said “You people should let everyone know it’s not safe to leave things in your car here.” It was clear to Hall that she believed her loss to be his fault. He pointed to a sign posted in front of her car with that exact warning.

“You should make the sign bigger,” she said as she drove away.

Chapter Eighteen

All morning long the rain had beaten down on the tin roof of the old fish house. Puddles on the floor that corresponded with the holes in the roof, and Gale had to move her bedroll three times to keep it dry. After Arnold and Blondie left yesterday, and she was certain that the old barge was far enough away, she called for help. After her voice gave out she beat on the floor with a piece of wood until her hands were tired and swollen. No one heard her. It was hot now in the old building since the clouds lifted and the sun filled the air with humidity.

No matter how hard she tried she could not reach the window or the door. The chain allowed her a circle of movement that kept her several feet from all of the walls. More than once she saw rats scatter around the room or run across one of the rafters, but it wasn’t the four legged vermin that concerned her. She looked everywhere but couldn’t find anything small enough to try to pick the handcuff lock with. There was a pile of electrical wiring next to the television that looked promising, but it might as well have been the key itself. It was too far away. She would have to wait until she was free from the chain to make her escape.