The Last Run (20 page)

He lunged and sank the bull hook into the fish, dug his boots into the no-skids and yanked the yellow eye free of the hook and up and over the railing. It landed on the deck with a heavy thud.

“There’s a forty-dollar one!”

Bob Doyle skipped over, lifted the gills and jammed the blade in deep. The fish shuddered.

“She’s a beauty!”

“Coil coming!”

“Ooh, ooh! Look at the size of this son of a bitch! Just look at him!”

“Yeee-haaa!”

Just then the lingcod broke the water. It was long and round as a saw log and it writhed and twisted as though it wanted to take Morley back into the sea with it. Bob Doyle marveled at the fight in the fish; he could see it was hooked in the side of its mouth and still it was writhing, trying to wriggle free. It was one fine lingcod, all right.

Two hands gripping the gaff, his muscles rippling taut and burning, Morley lugged the wriggling fish in and hurled it on the foredeck.

“Gut him, Bob!” he yelled. “Stick the son of a bitch!”

Bob Doyle had one arm and a knee on the fish, and was trying to go for its gills, trying to get the blade in the head, missing, stabbing again, missing again as the flailing, squirming lingcod wrenched at his arm. Then he felt a quick cutting and the skin across the back of his hand open.

“Cocksucker!”

“Stick him!” Morley shouted. “Stick him!”

Mike DeCapua was in hysterics.
“Ha! Ha! Ha!
He’s beating you, Bob!”

“Shut up!”

“Watch out for his mouth, Bob! Those teeth are sharp!”

The fight dragged on. Bob Doyle pressed his knee into the wriggling, snapping fish. As he tried to jam the blade into the fish’s head, the lingcod bit him.

“Bastard!”

“Quit fucking around, Bob!” Morley shouted. DeCapua had not stopped laughing.

“Shut up, Mike!”

Mangled, its guts spilling out, the cod thumped one last time and went still. Bob Doyle collapsed, sucking air.

“Gee,” DeCapua said, catching his breath, “that was pretty, Bob.”

“Fuck you.”

“Aw, don’t get sore,” DeCapua said, and he laughed until he coughed. “There’s plenty more.”

There was, too. Sometimes Morley did not hit a fish right and it would slap back into the water and float with its bladder out. David Hanlon would lean over the railing and scoop the dying fish out of the sea with the other bull hook. Later, while they were finishing the first string, another heavy lingcod ripped the aluminum gaff right out of Morley’s hands. The fish and gaff went cleanly into the sea. It made Morley sore; from then on he had to use the heavier, wood-handled gaff.

Then seagulls started attacking the catch. They went for the eyes and Morley swore at them and tried to scare them off with the bull hook, but they only flapped their wings and hovered just beyond his reach, squawking, and then attacked as soon as he went back to operating the winch.

All the while the breeze was stiffening and the sea building. And the fish kept right on coming.

“This is fucking crazy,” DeCapua said. “I’ll bet we got more than a ton on these strings.”

“Those fish bins hold eight hundred pounds,” Morley said. “How is it, Bob?”

“I’m almost filling the second bucket now.”

“Damn,” DeCapua said.

They worked at a breakneck pace: Morley gaffing and hauling without letup, hooting and dancing a jig and chanting, “Hey, ho, up she rises”; Bob Doyle, stabbing and kicking fish into the bins, his arms and hands stinging from the slashes left by the lingcod; DeCapua, coiling in the same mad, fluid motion, shrieking with laughter when a lingcod bit his partner; Hanlon, scampering the length of the ship, gathering line and running it back to the shed to clean and bait it; Mork, working the boat into the current, backing her down to ease the drag on the line, jogging her in the swells, which were considerably higher now than they had been when they first set the gear a couple of hours earlier.

“Hey, Giggy!” Morley called up topside. He held up a yellow eye, a thirty-pounder. “Look here!”

“This is better than sex!”

“Hell, yeah!”

“This fucker is finally paying off.”

“Fucking A!”

Once all the skates were up, they stuffed ice into the mouths of the fish, iced them in the bins, then sealed the totes and lowered them into the holds. Then it was back to fixing the broken snaps and gangions, scraping bait hooks, before setting out again.

“This,” DeCapua told Bob Doyle in the shed, “is how the
Min E
could have produced, Bob, if Phil had ever decided to bust his ass.”

“Think so?”

“Oh, I
know
so. That lazy prick.”

“Old Mike.”

By six-thirty that Friday morning, the thirtieth of January, they were hauling the second pair of strings. These had even more fish than the first two skates and there were fewer sand sharks and halibut to throw back. They filled two more totes, solid, with yellow eye and topped off their second tote of bycatch, which met their quota. There was no more need to bring aboard the lingcod.

“Breaks my heart,” DeCapua said.

“Go to hell,” Bob Doyle said.

The skipper had planned a bacon-and-eggs and hash-brown breakfast for his crew. But the stove went out again. There was no time for bitching; they munched on peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, bananas, baloney and mayo on English muffins, and went right back out.

All this time, the seas were picking up. The skies were unloading a driving gray rain that raked them like buckshot, and what had earlier been a soft breeze was now a stiffening southwesterly greater than ten knots, with the occasional odd gust from the east.

But the fish kept coming.

By daybreak, they were lowering into the holds three more totes crammed with yellow eye. This brought their total catch to five thousand pounds. The extra weight made the stern sit even lower in the water. Even the medium-size curlers began bursting on the railings and lifting sheets of spray over the rear deck. It was streaming out the scuppers, but more water was finding its way into the engine room.

The two bilge pumps down below were not keeping up with it, so Gig Mork had Bob Doyle and Mike DeCapua help him lug the backup generator down below. They set it up on a wood pallet beneath the stairs, attached one end of a hose to a suction fitting, ran the other end up and out the hatch and over the side railing and began using the generator to pump the bilges.

Later, they were in the galley, smoking. Morley came downstairs and asked about the generator.

“It’s helping,” DeCapua said, “but we’re gonna have to keep an eye on the water down there.”

“It’s supposed to get snottier,” Morley said. “They’re calling for twenty-footers later this afternoon and winds up to thirty knots. What I’m thinking is to put out one big string right now—a twenty-five-skater —and pull it before it gets really shitty.”

“How big?”

“I said twenty-five.”

That was more than five miles of longline. To set it would take at least ninety minutes; to haul it back would be another three hours.

“Dave tells me we got thirty skates ready,” Morley continued. “So, what we’ll do is set out a twenty-five-skater, then cut the motors and drift right off the end of the line. We’ll wait an hour, then haul the sucker and scoot.”

“I don’t know,” DeCapua said.

“Giggy likes the idea,” Morley said. “What you think, Bob?”

“Sure.”

DeCapua grunted.

I
t was rough setting out the big string. They kept going weightless between the big swells and it was hard to hold their footing even inside the bait shed. The baiting went slowly. David Hanlon did not look good. His face had gone pale as scraped bone, his eyes barren and rimmed a dusky red, and a number of times he dropped the line he was working on and ran outside to get sick. Now the waves came arching over the bow railings, thudding on the deck with a hard, white burst, and swamping the decks in a broth that froze their legs up to the thigh. With the larger swells the fan-tail lifted clear of the water and they heard a high-pitched, unsettling screech of the driveshaft and felt the breath-stopping emptiness of sudden weightlessness. Each second they went weightless was a lost second for setting gear; the knots were rushed, the skates tangling and snarling in the chute. A lot of the hooks hit the water without any bait. But they did get the entire main line out.

Once it was out, Mark Morley said to Gig Mork, “Okay, let that sucker fish for an hour, but no longer.”

“All right.”

“I’m gonna lie down. I’m whipped. Take the helm for me. You know how it works. Stay close to the buoys and get me up when we’re ready to pull.”

They looped around the set, circling the orange buoy markers, riding in the belly of eighteen-foot swells. Mork would point the
La Conte’s
nose into the oncoming swells and jog her for a while, and then swing the boat around and follow the seas. David Hanlon never left the bait shed, except to get sick, and Bob Doyle and Mike DeCapua took care of clearing the decks and lashing down the pallets, buckets and loose fuel jugs. They tried to keep focused on their jobs, but every so often Bob Doyle felt his gaze drawn overboard, to the ocean building around them.

At noon, Mork woke Morley and the skipper came down to the foredeck and manned the winch. At first, things looked promising. Their first several skates had a decent number of yellow eye and a few sand sharks. But after the fifth skate the numbers dropped off and they pulled more snarled, knotted balls of line from the water than anything else.

“Storm’s coming fast,” Morley shouted to DeCapua over the shrieking wind.

DeCapua shouted back, “No kidding.”

Just then a terrific wave rose up off the bow. It towered over the railing like a huge oak tree, hanging for a fraction of a second, and then fell forward in a gray-black roar that made the deck roll under their knees. Morley crumpled under it and for the longest moment, Bob Doyle lost sight of him. Then the deck waved up again and Bob Doyle saw the burly back lifting through the foamy water.

He sloshed his way over toward the skipper and steadied him by the elbow.

“You okay?”

Morley could only nod, pull off his glasses and wipe the brine from his eyes.

Rushing, they pulled the last ten skates without a hitch and brought on several hundred more pounds of yellow eye. Now hail the size of quail eggs was coming with sheets of rain, the wind slinging it all into their faces.

Mike DeCapua had been coiling quietly, precisely, head down to keep the hail out of his eyes, butt stuck to the wood crate on which he crouched despite the freezing seawater, which was now above his waist. When he wrapped up his last skate and shoved the coil along the deck to Bob Doyle, he took a moment to look out over the port railing.

The barrels of the waves were big enough to swallow a house. But what startled him was the line —a line darker than ash that stretched along the length of the western horizon.

He struggled to his feet.

“Skipper!”

He stumbled over to Mark Morley and grabbed the skipper’s arm. “Hey!” Morley, who was sweeping fish into the holds, did not look up.

“Hey!” DeCapua shouted. “We got to get out of here!”

“Why?”

“That’s why.”

He pointed to the horizon. The black line now was twice as thick.

“So?”

“So?
So?
Man, in Alaska if you see a line like that out there, you get the fuck off the water!”

Morley hadn’t stopped tossing fish in the bins.

“Hey! Hey!” DeCapua snapped. “Listen to me. I ain’t shitting you. That line is going to be on us in an hour.”

Morley gave the horizon a fast glance. “You ever been in a storm before?”

“Yeah.”

Morley leaned over and grabbed a yellow eye by the gills. “It ain’t gonna be any worse than around Coronation.”

“This ain’t Coronation.”

“Hey, Bob,” Morley said. Bob Doyle turned around. “Go back aft and ask Hanlon how long it’ll be to get another string ready.”

“Hey, I don’t think you heard me,” DeCapua said to Morley. Bob Doyle had gone to get the gear. “Tell me you’re shitting me.”

“No.”

“Listen,” DeCapua said. “We’ve lost almost all our anchors. We’re eighty frickin’ miles from the beach. It’s gonna take us an hour to just throw out a string. Then we gotta let it soak. That’s another hour. Then we gotta pick it up —”

“What’s your point?”

“Why don’t we check the weather before setting out another one?”

Morley glared at DeCapua with his mouth closed so that his lips made a tight line, like the mouth of a fish. He looked to westward and sighed.

“All right. Wait here.”

He went inside and up into the wheelhouse. Bob Doyle came back. “Hanlon says we can get a ten-string up in less than an hour,” he said.

“Shut up.”

Just then a wave pummeled the bow and the deck dropped off and away from under them. They threw themselves down on their stomachs and grabbed the hatch to keep from being washed off. The boat heaved, wallowed and finally stabilized. Morley came back down.

“Say, Bob,” he shouted so as to be heard over the wind. “How much fish we pull on that last string?”

“Enough to fill a tote, maybe two.”

“All right,” Morley said. “You win, Mike. We’re going back. No sense getting beat up and losing gear for another tote offish.”

“Hallelujah.”

“What we got is respectable. Get these decks tightened up. Get this shit iced. Afterward, you guys hit the rack.”

They wound up leaving the catch out on the foredeck. It was too risky to be operating the cranes with the boat pitching and rocking so violently. Mork and Hanlon lashed the fish down with netting and threw ice on it while Bob Doyle and DeCapua stowed the gear in the shed.

“It’s about fucking time we got out of here,” DeCapua said. “I swear to Jesus that guy’s got a fucking death wish.”

Gig Mork threw open the bait-shed door.

“What you say?”

DeCapua turned around. “What?”

“You lousy son of a bitch. I told you to shut the fuck up. Know what that means? Shut the fuck up?”