The River Killers (6 page)

That's what Christine used to say to us every week as we were trying to calculate our crew shares. And Mark would laugh and say, “The only bank I care about is Goose Bank where you get the big halibut.”

There were a few more questions and then none, from which I deduced that the conference had ended. Everyone knew the fishery was a ways off so no one was panicking yet. I descended from the wheelhouse and went out on deck. I could see the
Coastal Provider
about a quarter mile off our stern. As I watched, there was a scurry of activity as they launched their power skiff. It started up with a roar and headed straight for us, in contrast to most of the other power skiffs, which were heading toward the Shearwater Pub. As it got closer, I could see Mark at the wheel, and when he came alongside, I grabbed his tie-up line.

He was still clean-cut, dressed well for a working fisherman, and exuded mature responsibility. Occasionally, he had allowed us to drag him out of that grown-up persona, but it was still his default character. He grinned at me. “I knew they'd kick you out of Ottawa. Swansons aren't allowed there. No logs to haul or fish to catch.”

“But you meet such interesting people. Just a few days ago, I was having cocktails with Fleming Griffith.”

“I hope they pay you extra for that. Hey, jump in. We'll go for a beer.”

“I don't know if I should be seen with a lowly fisherman.” I was joking, but many in
DFO
were serious about what they saw as fraternization with the enemy.

“I'm the one who's got to worry about his reputation. Drinking with a
DFO
guy. What would my mother say?”

I climbed into the open aluminum skiff, powered by a diesel engine only slightly smaller than an icebreaker's, and we headed for the famed Shearwater Pub. The place was packed with noisy fishermen reliving their biggest sets. The older guys were using mugs of beer to illustrate the positioning of various boats they'd outsmarted to get their nets around a disputed school of fish. The younger guys were already on to shooters.
No sign of poverty here
, I thought, and then remembered that everybody was spending their grub money.

Grub money, enough to last the season, is advanced by the processors. But no one seemed worried about having to pay it back. After all, there's no way in hell, everyone thought, that we won't make enough money to cover expenses. Unfortunately, the cold math showed quite plainly that if everyone caught the area average (the total quota divided by the number of boats), everyone would lose money. To make money you had to get your share of fish plus someone else's. Thus the feeding frenzy that was herring season.

I saw a few familiar faces and nodded greetings. My cousin Ollie sat at a table under the
TV
. He'd spent years on a seine boat and suffered a crushed foot en route to earning enough money for a shrimp boat and license. I waved at him and he saluted me with his mug. There were no free tables, or even empty chairs, so Mark and I leaned against the bar.

“You know who else might show up here?” he said. “Christine. She's on the
Racer
and they're on their way up from the Gulf. We'll have a real reunion.”

The
Racer
was the Coast Guard ship that Christine served on. They usually stood by during major fisheries to help patrol and rescue anyone who needed rescuing. And there were always a few rescuees, even in calm weather. Fishing was an intense industrial activity that took place on slippery decks on bouncing boats in a highly competitive situation. Somebody always got hurt. We just all hoped no one would get killed.

Unfortunately, there was already one missing in action. Les Jameson had left Port Hardy two days previously, headed for Shearwater in his super punt, but never arrived. They'd found the high-speed punt drifting in Fitz Hugh Sound, but no sign of him. I'd never much cared for Les. He was a scab and a
DFO
pet rock. But still, he deserved to live. I guess.

“I even heard that Fergie might be here on a gillnetter,” Mark said. There was a moment's silence as memories sparked between us and we both thought of the one who wouldn't be here: Billy. I was tempted to tell Mark about how our Igor had made a mystery appearance in the
DFO
database, and that I was sure Billy had delivered it to the West Van lab before he went missing. But something made me hold back. Instead, I gestured to the waitress for a couple of pints and steered the conversation in a safer direction. “So, who'd you have to kill to get the herring job? Don't tell me you bought your own license.” Anyone with enough money to buy a herring license would never waste the former by buying the latter.

Mark shrugged. “You know how the game works. I've got a pretty big halibut quota. So I hire as deckhands two guys who fish salmon for Jimmy Patterson. So I suggest to them they should tell Jimmy I'll deliver to him if he lets me run one of his herring boats. And they do and he does. So here I am.”

“Nice one. But I don't know if I could take the pressure.”

“Yeah, that's the toughest part of the game. But I'll try it for a couple of seasons, and if I don't like it, I'll stick to fishing the flat ones. At least I've got a fallback position.”

I nodded. That made things easier all right. “How's your love life? I hear you split up with Shirley.”

“Aw Christ, I've taken a vow of celibacy.”

“That's a bit extreme. You never used to go more than half a day without drooling over some young lovely.”

“That was the old days, Danny. What I've learned is that sex leads to relationships and relationships lead to problems and problems lead to a guy having to sleep on the boat and that leads to smelling like stale diesel, which means you don't have a hope of getting laid, so why bother in the first place?”

Jeez
, I thought,
the
breakup with Shirley must've been tough.
My journey through the nineties had left me, in my humble opinion, a caring and sensitive guy. But it's easier to be sensitive with casual acquaintances than with real friends. So in a sensitive but cowardly manner, I declined to ask about it or to commiserate. And Mark declined to query my single state, which was an embarrassment to my mother and a puzzlement to me. I told myself I was in that awkward stage of being beyond casual pickup dating, but not ready for serious relationship-type dating. An image of Bette flashed through my mind, and her closeness to me in the back of an Ottawa cab.

Thankfully, Mark interrupted my musings by changing the subject. “Hey, you must know Alistair Crowley. He lives in a float house just around the corner in Yeo Cove and fishes prawns. But he used to be a top-notch biologist in the West Van lab. Left or got fired. Rumor has it, he was messing around with superfish, doing gene splicing and shit like that. He's a strange guy but I sometimes trade him halibut for prawns. You know who I'm talking about?”

Crowley was the stuff of legend. He haunted the annals of
DFO
lore like Marley's Ghost. He had done brilliant work, first on acid rain and then on Pacific Ocean regime shifts. After those peer-acclaimed works, he had retreated deeper into the basement of the West Van lab and had begun experiments that few understood and even fewer approved of. And then he was gone. Fired? Quit? Medical leave? The rumors were numerous and unresolved. But he'd still been there in 1996 when Smiling Billy had, presumably, turned up on the doorstep with a large mutant fish.

“Yeah, Mark.” I tried not to appear too eager. “I'd love to talk to him. Let me know when you're headed his way.”

The raucous noise of the bar suddenly increased by a factor of, by God, the Kairikula brothers. They burst through the door like a Force 8 storm, yelling and insulting all and sundry in a generically malign fashion.

“Shearwater is the asshole of the world and the whole goddamn herring fleet is five fathoms up it.” This from Hari.

The punch line from Jari. “So that makes everyone here a hemorrhoid.”

Gleeful laughter as they swaggered toward the bar. The Kairikula brothers were, in their eyes, the pride of Sointula, and the product of a century of Finnish lineage. Some would say they were the product of a restricted gene pool. But I'd fished with and around them for years, and my many painful attempts to match their capacity for vodka had resulted in a typically shipmate-fisher-guy sort of bond.

I both cringed and delighted when Hari fastened his eyes on me. Hari to Jari, “Look who's here. It's Swede Swanson, the wannabe Finn. Hey Danny, you're a good guy. Gimme fifty bucks and I'll get you a Finnish passport.”

Jari to Hari, “No fucking way. He's good for a Swede but not good enough to be a Finn.” He elbowed through the crowd and threw his arm around me. “But he's good enough to buy me a drink.”

Mark smiled to himself and leaned against the bar. It was starting to feel like old times. “Okay, guys,” I said. “What can I get you? Virgin Chi Chi?”

Jari waved at the waitress, and she responded amazingly quickly with two double vodkas. The brothers and their tastes were well known from Steveston to Prince Rupert. Vodka and water on normal occasions. Vodka and Carolans for special occasions.

Hari downed his drink and looked at me sternly. “Haven't seen you around for a while, Danny. Someone said you came out of the closet.”

“That's right,” Jari said. “He joined
DFO
.”

“Ohmigod, if there's one thing worse than sucking cocks, it's just sucking period.” They guffawed and gasped for at least three minutes over that one. They recovered their breath and gazed reverently as the waitress removed her sweater to reveal a “Spawn Till You Die” T-shirt.

Mark interjected calmly. “I was just telling Danny we should run over to Yeo Cove and get some prawns off Alistair.”

Hari looked at him. “You guys didn't hear? Sonofabitch blew his head off this morning. Crazy prawn fisherman, they're all the same. Traps, all they do is set traps, and fight over turf until they start goin' squirrelly.”

I looked at Mark and saw shock deaden his face. “I saw him yesterday. He was as happy as I've ever seen him. Talking about getting a bigger boat.” He paused. “Jeez, I've still got a box of his stuff. He lent me all his journals and records so I could study the local herring movements. There's no monetary value to it, but I should return it. It's part of his estate, I guess.”

I was curious. “Let me look at it and I'll see it gets into the proper hands. It could be
DFO
property, or at least they might want it for their database.”

The noise of the bar now seemed intrusive rather than welcoming. I looked at Mark. “C'mon,” he said. “Let's get back.”

Outside the bar, it was chilly and still. As we walked down the dock, I looked up at the cloudless sky. Unaffected by urban haze, the stars were clear and bright and compelling. They posed a question I didn't understand and twinkled an answer I was afraid I did.

Mark steered the power skiff for the
Coastal Provider
where he jumped aboard and quickly returned with a cardboard box full of journals. “This is Alistair's stuff.” Then he roared me over to the
James Sinclair
and nodded goodnight as I climbed aboard.

I took the box to my stateroom and started going through it. There were seventeen lined journals, each one evidently covering a year of observations. They started in June of 1987, when I assumed Alistair had arrived in Yeo Cove. The last one had entries up to April 12, the day before Mark had borrowed them. But, as I continued putting them all in order, I came across one that didn't fit the sequence. It was undated and I opened it with curiosity.

It was unlike the others, which consisted of daily entries of environmental conditions correlated to fish counts and movements, the mundane observations of a working scientist. But this journal was full of pasted-in printouts from various databases and programs. I couldn't make heads nor tails of it. Bette crossed my mind again. She was the only person I knew who might be able to make sense of this stuff. And I thought there might be more data as well as other clues back at Alistair's float house. What we needed was some sort of whaddayacallit, that thing they used to decipher hieroglyphics—oh yeah, the Rosetta Stone. I would try to run over there in the morning.

I tried to sleep but couldn't. Long dormant thoughts about Billy's disappearance re-awakened old memories and they triggered a new resolve to get some answers, and that made me wonder what I would find at Alistair's float house. As the queries chased answers that refused to come out and play, my mind tired of the game and settled into more comfortable thoughts of warmth and softness, and then I suppose I slept.

The next morning exploded with
a roar. Huge diesels thundered to life and shattered sleep into shards of confused consciousness. My noise-bludgeoned brain placed me back on the
Maple Leaf C
. A few seconds passed before the starting roar subsided to a comfortable throbbing. I switched on the light and surveyed my stateroom. If this had been the fo'c's'le of the
Maple Leaf C
, the space would have been smaller, the occupancy larger and the odor greater. Four bodies would have been bumping into each other as they groped for pants and shirts and gumboots. I felt a little alone as I donned my clean and non-smelly
DFO
fleecy gear.

Upstairs on the bridge, I could have been back on the
Maple Leaf C
or any seine boat. It was still dark, and the only light was the green glow from the radar, blue and red from the sounder, and yellow from the instrument panel. Five radios crackled with static and snippets of conversation. Four of us stood quietly, grasping steaming cups of coffee as we completed our transition to full consciousness.

One of the radios hissed static and then burst into speech. “
James Sinclair, Western Marauder
. You guys awake yet?” One of our test boats. I reached up and grabbed the mike.