The sun was just beginning to low over Mount Edgecombe, illuminating the camel humped horizon. It was weird looking. The clouds didn’t look like cotton balls. They didn’t look like clouds at all. More like bleached out peacock feathers disintegrating into the sunset. I looked out at them over the rails from the main deck and wondered how I could feel so at home in this place that was also so far away and foreign from any home or comfort I’d ever known before. I did feel at home, didn’t I?
Last week, when we were out at sea fishing black cod, we had an accident on the boat.
We were five or six days into what turned out to be a ten day trip and something besides the seas had been building up for a day or two. Premonitions. The seas were big and the work was hard and everybody was on edge, and making mistakes. It was just there, in the air or in the subtle energies that you felt but never articulated. Looking back it seems easy to align a narrative to it, to go back into what I was seeing, Albatross flying in mysterious, prophetic arcs over the building waves, and take auguries.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
It was still the middle of the day when it really felt like it might be coming to a head. I was at the roller, the side of the boat where the line is hauled over the rail by the hydraulic winch (or gurdy) about five feet behind me and I wasn’t fully paying attention. All the gear, the line between the anchors that catches the fish, was up, and now I was only hauling the buoy line, which connected the anchor at the bottom to the buoys and flag on the surface. It was about half a mile long.
So I was waiting. Waiting for the fat lady to sing. Waiting for the mouse to grow wings. Waiting for the trap to spring. Waiting for the waiting to end.
And I was probably thinking about girls.
There was that one night the year before in Homer when we’d planned on leaving first thing in the morning the next day. Naturally, we went over to the bar for one last hurrah.
You never quite knew what you were going to get at The Salty Dog. It was either full of tourists looking to see what the real Alaskan fishermen were like or it was full of locals who for the most part really were Alaskan fishermen. As one of them myself I felt somewhere between an exhibit in a zoo and a boy in his dad’s work clothes being in there. But it was usually a good time and I liked the place.
We recognized a few guys when we walked in, and we knew the bartender, Jolene. She smiled at us as she reached for the bottle of Pendleton behind her and said “let me guess.”
“Bless you nurse,” I grinned, “and two IPAs.” She poured doubles like an angel.
“Here you go, boys. Keep it open?”
I passed her my card, nodding profusely. “Thanks, honey,” she winked.
Then we sat down next to the guys. They were off a Seattle boat we knew called The Golden Chalice. “What’s up Clint, how you doing?”
We started bullshitting, mostly talking about our catches, how the season was going, how much more we had to catch. Talking shop. Continuing our mutual sedation. I was bored immediately
But, but, there were some girls sitting at the bench behind Clint and his guys. Anybody could tell that they must have been from one of the neighboring Russian villages like Soldotna or Seldovia by the matching homemade dresses and hats the three of them wore, if not by their thick accents. And they were kind of cute.
One of them, who I had determined to be the cutest of the three, made eye contact with me a few times and I was wholly focused on figuring out what her deal was. Having spent the past two months fishing in the Aleutian Islands, it felt like a lifetime since I’d seen a girl. They say that a beautiful woman is hiding behind every tree out there. But there aren’t any trees that far West. In any case, I was dying for it.
To my complete surprise the girl I liked got up and plopped down across from me right and beside Clint. Really I could not believe this. There was absolutely no way I would have gone and talked to them on my own accord, regardless of my animal desperation.
She said her name was Yvonna. Y-von-na. I liked that name. I tried to get something going with her, but before I knew it Clint had snuck his southern charm into the mix and boxed me out. I told myself I didn’t care too much and gave up entirely, looking down at my beer and beginning to think about something else. I tried to ignore them.
They were talking about arm wrestling or something. And then commercial fishing. Then more arm wrestling. I assumed it was another classic case of somebody trying to assert their own toughness in the presence of fishermen and decided not to return my attention to the present just yet. I couldn’t stand for that shit.
But then she pointed at me and said that she wanted to wrestle me.
All the guys were laughing now and I reddened. I had become the butt of some joke I didn’t quite understand.
“She wants to arm wrestle you Sam you little pussy…. you’re the only one of us she thinks she can beat!” They all cackled and clapped and coughed and I scowled.
“No not arm wrestle for him. Wrestle in bedroom.”
Now they all shut the fuck up and opened their eyes wider. Now I was the one smiling.
“Oh do you now?” I said.
“She is slut,” one of her friends interjected from behind.
“You are whore. Do not listen to her, she is crazy whore,” the other corroborated.
Now I was interested in what was going on. “So you wanna wrestle me, huh? You don’t look like too much to me.”
“You will be surprise.”
We kept on flirting like that a bit longer until Jolene started to get agitated, reminding us that the bar was closing in five minutes. “Let me get one more round real quick,” I implored. “Nope, get out.”
So it was finished, and I was sad. The Russian girls recovered their wayward friend and sauntered through the rickety bar door without us. We sucked the last drops out of our glasses dejectedly and followed suit. As we walked out the front door, we saw them getting into a fancy new lifted Dodge double cab, black.
I couldn’t explain then or now exactly why I acted so uncharacteristically, but as soon as I saw the tail lights flick on I grabbed Clint and my captain, Ryder, and said “come on.” I was drunk and horny and feeling brazen I guess.
I walked over, opened the door behind the passenger seat and hopped right into the truck. My girl was sitting in the back with her friends up forward. They couldn’t stop laughing and asking us what the hell we were doing. I didn’t know. “Ok, ok, now you all get out of truck,” the one who was driving said.
I just kept asking over and over again, “where we going now?”
It didn’t take long to persuade them to get a few more drinks up in town at the other bar, Character’s.
I guess the girl in the passenger seat decided she liked Clint, because she swapped her seat with Ryder and crammed into the back next to him, forcing my girl over until she was halfway sitting on my lap. She leaned back against me harder than she had to and looked up the bridge of my nose in coquettish apology. She smelled like beer and body odor and old wood. I put my hands around her belly and she put hers on my upper left thigh. Soft! It felt like I was being electrocuted, tingling shots bouncing all across my body. Meteor shower sensations. This is unbelievable, I thought.
Within a minute or two of driving we were kissing passionately and her friends were making disgusted groans and laughing at us. Little shrieks of pervish delight colored with disapproval. They were drunk too.
I surfaced for air for a moment after I don’t know how long to see Clint like a big bear rolling around with the Russian girl who’d sat on his lap just beside me. For a fraction of an instant, we shared a look that might as well have been a fist bump. The night was turning out to be much more than any of us had expected.
We went to Character’s and bought the girls and ourselves several more drinks until that bar too had reached last call. I had fallen into a stupor of beer and lust and don’t remember much at this stage of the night. I know that when they kicked us out we decided to go back down the spit to the harbor, not knowing quite where else to go.
But first we had to drive about twenty minutes outside town to this massive estate with a separate garage bigger than most houses and a stable next to it. I couldn’t understand how anybody in the Kenai peninsula could manage to have horses out in the open like that with all the bears around. And we were unable to determine who the house belonged to. All the girls would tell us was that they were staying there and we had to be quiet because their kids were inside sleeping.
None of us, not even the girls as they tried to explain, really gave one shit about any of it. We just wanted to get laid.
They ran inside and came back with a very strange but sufficient assortment of beers and seltzers and ciders. It felt like we were in high school. “Let me see that bag,” I said, my fingers opening and closing towards myself. I selected a can of pilsner and let out sigh of relief when I tasted it.
We went back to the boat.
Thinking that I might be able to get this girl down into my bunk, I was advocating as well as I could that we go back to our boat, The Republic. But the Chalice was closer, and Clint won out on that one.
We ended up sitting at the galley table there for the rest of the night drinking beers and eating the scrambled eggs with hot dogs and rye toast that Clint made up for us. Talking, laughing, kissing, howling, dreaming.
When the sun started to poke its head over the glaciers and the snowcaps across Kachemak Bay like the angry spotlights of so many nameless accusers, the girls said they had to leave so they could still make it to church on time. I thought that was pretty funny given the night we’d had and the extremely high likelihood that the three of them were already married. But we acquiesced on the condition that they drop us off on the other side of the harbor by the Republic.
Clint shook our hands and wished us luck with a sad smile like a wounded soldier being left behind as we stepped off The Golden Chalice and headed back for the truck.
In my mind, there was still no question that I was getting laid. This girl had been all over me. All night she’d hardly said much more than “god damn” and then grabbed my ass or my cock. I felt like a supermodel. And I was ready. Church could wait.
But when we got to the boat ramp and Ryder and I began to get out of the truck and they didn’t move, it began to sink in. It was all a ruse. We were never getting laid in the first place. We were just a blue collar kiss-and-fondle joyride for a few orthodox housewives on vacation. Fuck.
“Bye, bye, fisher boys,” the three of them smiled and blew us kisses while we stood there in the dirt watching them go.
As the truck drove away down the dusty road into the sunrise like a row of triumphant cowboys a great melancholy descended upon me and a hangover immediately began taking hold. Forlorn and lone-hearted, we walked down the dock in silence.
This was a great fall from glory. I couldn’t believe my misfortune, and I wished that those Russian bitches had only kept to themselves so that I could have just had a couple drinks and gone to bed at a normal time like a normal person. And I felt guilty, but I didn’t know why or what for.
To feel so alone. So alone. And empty. To see yourself become a shell and helplessly, motionlessly, watch as your dreams and your passions and all that was left of the softness in your heart slide down that hard and lifeless exterior. That’s what you have to do to be tough, right? We all have bluebirds to kill.
I was remembering that feeling of loneliness and anger and rejection which had taken such a strong hold of me as I crept into my bunk that morning while I was hauling up the last of that buoy line and we were tossed up and down by a large wave striking the boat broadside and the line flew over the horns of the roller that keep it in place and, released from tension like a rubber band, it smacked me on the left hand, then the ribcage, and then sent me flying four feet back against the hatch screaming, “SHUT IT OFF.”
When I got up, I yelled at the kid by the hauler for not paying attention and shutting it off sooner. “You can’t be fuckin’ daydreaming over there!” I’d been hound-dogging him for the past couple days. He was trying hard to learn everything, but he wasn’t very smart. I knew he was earnest and really did want to do a good job, a good kid, but I didn’t know how to correct him without making him feel like an idiot. Perhaps it would have helped if I hadn’t called him retarded every time he fucked something up. I just couldn’t help watching everything he did and waiting for him to make the mistake I knew was coming. And he felt that watchful eye, let the unease tremble through him. I saw him falter at everything he tried to do, and waited for my moment to pounce.
It was only making him fuck up more. I knew that and I still couldn’t stop.
Anyway, I managed to get the line back into the roller grunting and then remained silent as I held my hand and watched carefully while the rest of it came in. My ribs felt a bit fresh where the line had struck them, but nothing compared to the pain I felt in my three longer fingers where they’d taken the initial snap right on the nails.
I could hardly feel anything there, only numbness accented by bright intense pain, and I struggled to hold back tears. I couldn’t remember feeling such a terrible agony and I was desperately worried how I would continue on with three broken fingers in the middle of a longline fishing trip.
But, by the time we got the bags and flag on board and I ran back to the galley and took off my rain gear and gloves, the pain began to fade into nothing and I was left with that sensation of absence in its stead. That feeling like hunger when you know you aren’t really hungry, that the food might fill the inexpressible void that has suddenly presented itself.
I smoked a cigarette and wondered if that was all that I had been anticipating. There was still that feeling in the air.
We kept on working that day and I didn’t think much about my fingers for several hours. We started hauling the next string of gear. This time Ryder was at the roller and I was heading fish on the other side of the checker boards (two-by-eights that fit together like lincoln logs to make planter type bins for the fish to go into. One for the fish with heads, one for the fish without.) Blood fell in sticky trickles down onto the deck at my feet.
I yelled at the kid standing by the gurdy again to do something, anything, other than just stand there. Which must have been too much because suddenly, juggling two tasks in his clumsy fingers, he jerked his arm up in a horrible contortion, then yelped “help….me!” I stopped and looked up for a moment unsure of what was happening until, as though somebody were slowly turning up the volume from nothing, Ryder was screaming at me to come help.
The kid’s hand was caught up between the line and the gurdy. I threw down my knife and ran over and began yanking at the line to pull it out of the shiv (the space in between the two large steel wheels where the line fits) and off of his hand.
You have to understand, this was very very bad. Imagine two round and rotating pieces of steel with the line fitting between them reeling up an enormous tonnage against all the tremendous forces of the moving ocean. Thousands of pounds of pressure are on that line. And his hand was between it and the two pieces of steel with that inch wide gap between them. All that weight coming down on his fingers. The effect was that of a blunt guillotine. I couldn’t believe his hand was even attached to his body.
So we pulled as hard as we could, which was pretty hard for two stronger than average guys in the midst of a very powerful adrenaline rush, but to no avail. All we had to do was pull the line out of the wheel. But it was stuck so tight. The kid just kept screaming, “AHHHHH, AHH, MY HAND, HELP ME!!!”
Suddenly, his hand slipped out of his glove and came loose from the gurdy, his three longer fingers on his left hand all bloody and mangled at the tips, exactly as I’d expected mine to be a few hours before when I took my glove off. He cradled it like a child held a sleeping doll.
I looked at my own hand.
Then I chased him back to the galley to see if he was ok. I helped him out of his rain gear and inside the house so he could get his hand under the galley sink. He was gargling and caterwauling inarticulately the whole time. He was in so much pain. It sounded like a wounded coyote. I felt like a coward for the dramatic thoughts I’d entertained about my own hand just hours before.
I got him some medical supplies like rubbing alcohol and neosporin and bandaids and pepto bismol and cough drops and alka seltzers and put a paper towel on his bleeding fingers, where his skin had ripped back on all three from the first knuckle to the finger nail, exposing globules of fat or I didn’t know what. Then, panicking, I ran back out on deck away from him.
“Is he ok?” Ryder asked me.
“Nope. I don’t think so. His fingers look pretty messed up. All pinched in the middle like they had a huge rubber band around them all day. What do we do?” I didn’t mention the way he was crying out in pain. I’d never seen anybody in so much pain before.
“Fuck. I guess we just have to haul the rest of this up.”
That took about thirty minutes or an hour then Ryder went to go check on him. I started to get things put away and dress some of the couple three hundred fish we now had on board and had thus far ignored. Then I went to ask what was up.
“Is he ok?” I asked Ryder through the wheelhouse door. I could hear the kid wailing from the galley behind him even louder than before. It was awful.
“No, we gotta go into town now. Just finish up with all the shit on deck and come back and help, I can’t figure out what any of this medicine is.”
I did that and ran back only to determine that we had antibiotics, aspirin, tylenol, advil, silver sulfide, and a wound cleaning kit. All the morphine had been switched out with allergy pills and a bunch of other useless shit. Decades of drug addicts on board had exhausted the good stuff. We had nothing. We were eight hours from the nearest town that didn’t even have a hospital or doctors, only a clinic and nurses. “We’re fucked,” I said.
But we weren’t at all. He was fucked. His fingers would swell immensely. They would wither and die like fruit on a vine. He would be flown away to the native hospital up in Anchorage, where the doctors there couldn’t help him either. And his torn and ruined fingers, blue and unfeeling and cold, would be cut away and disposed of without ceremony. He would attempt to go on, with one hand impotent, and eventually use the other only to hold his bottle, until he wasn’t able even to do that any longer. He would drift away into the twilight of his life without hardly ever having seen the day.
And I was there, I was there to see you, into you, and you were scared of me and watching me back, and I saw the fear come into your eyes, and knew where the fault was laid, and wished I hadn’t seen or said and that I could just go away.