"Yep, visions of sugar-plum dance in our heads,"
Seth added, and the three of them burst out laughing, even Seth.
They were in a wonderful mood in an exclusive sort of way, nudging each other, exchanging winks, sharing muffled comments and chuckles. The only thing worse than this crew surly was this crew merry. Andy finished his coffee and, reassured by an expansive Harry Gault that the Avilda was staying where she was for the time being, went uptown, probably to work on sniffing out a new berth. Kate put her dishes in the dishwasher and went out on deck to coil shots and chop bait, and plot a chance to locate and find out what was inside the shiny silver suitcases brought on board that morning.
She was still on deck when a pump started below and began emptying the bilge into the harbor. After a while the pump stopped, but in the growing daylight the oily sheen growing from their hull was easy to spot, until Ned came forward with a bottle of detergent and squirted it over the side. It cut through the oil and the sheen floated off. Ned grinned at her. "Slicker'n snot."
"Thought we weren't supposed to pump the bilge out into the harbor," she said in a neutral voice, eyes on the line she was coiling. "Turn the place into a sewer if we all did it."
He shrugged. "Ain't my harbor."
He went aft, and Kate thought that maybe Andy had the right idea.
When the Avilda arrived back out on the fishing grounds Kate was surprised and relieved to find all their gear right where it was supposed to be. The take had decreased, but the lines were intact, the netting unslashed and the buoys whole. It was more than she had expected.
On their two previous trips they had averaged a hundred tanners per pot (or at least that was their average on Pots that had not previously been picked). If the average weight of bairdi was two and a half pounds, at $1.50 per pound that meant each pot was worth $375. Her crew share, eight percent, had been thirty dollars a pot, and they had been picking a minimum of forty pots a day.
Kate began to feel cheated whenever a pot came up half empty, and she got downright surly when most of what was in the pots proved to be garbage.
Apparently Harry Gault felt the same way. He gave orders not to bait and reset the pots as they were pulled, but instead to stack them on deck. Naturally the deck boss didn't bother telling the rest of the crew what the plan was.
Andy finished coiling and stacking a shot of polypro and wandered over in Kate's direction. "What's going on?" he asked in a low voice.
Kate ran a final loop through the frame of the last pot and tested the line. It held firm. She gave a satisfied nod.
"Looks like the skipper's finally noticed we've lost the crab. Best guess? We're going prospecting."
Andy looked confused. "Prospecting?"
"Set a pot here, there. Try to find where the tanners went."
For the next week that's what they did, cruising up and down the Chain, setting a few pots, pulling them to examine the contents, meandering a little farther west, a little farther south to repeat the process in untested waters. Occasionally the fog would clear and a smoking, snowcapped volcano would loom up off the bow. With the amount of weather that swirled in and out in a twenty-four-hour period, it was hard for the crew to tell just what direction they were traveling in, and of course Harry Gault was as garrulous and forthcoming as always, which meant that the only time he opened his mouth was to bark an order.
So immersed was she in her role as deckhand that Kate began to be concerned over the lack of crab in each pot and the subsequent lack of crab in the hold.
The paychecks from her last two trips out were folded away into the pocket of her jeans, where they made a nice, solid weight. Her sleep had begun to be disturbed by dreams of a new truck, a larger generator for the homestead. Maybe even a satellite dish. She liked to watch MTV and VH-I when she visited the Roadhouse, catch up on the latest in music. She used to sing and play the guitar. Singing was out now, as that baby raper's knife had almost taken out her vocal cords, but she still loved music, and her taste was eclectic to say the least. She had recently become a fan of k. d. lang's, and remembered suddenly that on satellite you got The Nashville Network, too. She reached inside her pocket to touch the two folded slips of paper, and dreamed on.
She woke up to realize it was coming up on dinnertime and her turn to cook. She straightened and stretched.
The gray-green gulf stretched out endlessly in every direction, a snowcapped peak with a faint plume rising from it floated in a ring of fog off the port beam, and Ned was emptying a pot on deck.
He was about to toss its contents over the side and she raised her voice. "Hold it, Ned."
"Nothing but garbage," Ned growled when she came up next to him.
Kate sorted through the pot's contents. "We've got four red kings-"
"Not in season."
"-a chicken halibut-"
"Which can't weigh fifteen pounds."
"-and a half-dozen Dungeness. Big ones, too," Kate said admiringly.
"What you want them for?" Ned asked suspiciously.
Kate gave him her sweetest smile. "I'm on dinner tonight."
She found the biggest cooking pot in the galley, filled it with water and set it on a burner turned on high, and went below to assemble the ingredients for the rest of the meal. The industrial-size refrigerator and freezer were located in a small room set down into the hull behind the hold and the engine room. She descended the ladder with reluctance. She hated the small, square, walk-in freezer in the storeroom. The door was so heavy, she was always afraid it would swing shut behind her, that the bar across the outside would fall into its bracket and she would be locked inside, left to spend eternity between the prime rib and the pork chops. The thought alone was enough to send a shudder down her spine, and she snatched up a can of lard and scuttled out of the freezer, kicking the door shut behind her with an explosive breath of relief.
An armful of salad makings out of the refrigerator and dinner was as good as done.
She busied herself in the galley as the Avilda beat to windward, and her crew that night sat down to a dinner of boiled king and Dungeness crab, halibut deep-fried in beer batter, a mountain of mashed potatoes and, for Andy, a tossed green salad. Ned, Seth and Harry took one look and fell into their seats. Pawing through the pile of cutlery Kate had stacked in the center of the table, each man found the pair of pliers that suited him best and began cracking crab with gusto. Mayonnaise mustachioed their mouths, melted butter ran down their chins, crab juice ran down their arms and soaked the newspapers Kate had spread on the floor, and the empty shells piled steadily higher in the emptied cooking pot she had placed in the center of the table for just that purpose.
When they were through, not a leg or a claw or a shoulder of crab was left, nor was a single piece of the halibut. Harry sat back and patted his belly, expressing his feelings with a loud, satisfied belch. This appeared to be the general consensus. "Jesus, that was good," Seth said, and even Ned nodded grudgingly. Overwhelmed by such enthusiastic, unqualified approval, Kate decided she could get to like these guys, given time. Say about a hundred years. She stretched. "Who cleans up?"
Three thumbs jerked at Andy. Kate grinned at his woebegone expression. "Think I'll turn in. Nighty-night."
"Me, too," Harry said, yawning. "Ned, you take the first watch; Seth, you take the second. Roust me out if there's trouble."
Kate hit the rack and fell instantly into a deep, dreamless sleep.
A thump on the door brought her wide awake. "What?" she croaked. There was another thump and she raised her voice. "What, dammit!"
Harry's voice was already receding down the hallway.
"Roll out. We're making ice."
She groped for her watch and saw that it was barely midnight. Her head fell back on the pillow with a thump.
"Oh, shit." An instant later she was up and yanking on her clothes. Andy's face peered down at her with a bewildered expression. "What's going on?"