All Due Respect Issue #2 (2 page)

They say Earl isn’t even Earl’s real name.

You hear stories. You keep your mouth shut. You just sit there and listen.

Chad suitcases three kings over the next week. Loses two gaffs in the water. You split the cost of the gear among the crew, split the profits, too. The boat gets half of every dollar. The skipper takes a double share of what’s left. You and Earl and Chad get a single.

“Greenhorns get a half share,” Earl tells you. “Every boat I ever worked on before.”

You say nothing. You’re pretty green, too. Maybe you’re thankful the owner’s son is aboard. You could use the extra money, for sure.

Bottom line is, Chad’s costing the crew. Still can’t tie up the boat properly when you come into harbor. Can’t figure out how to haul the gear without getting it tangled. A liability, without question. Hopeless. N.F.G.

Earl tells a story about a guy he used to fish with. The guy’s neighbor sleeps with his wife, so the guy kills the neighbor. Buries him in a woodlot, figures he gets away clean. Only problem is, some rube sees him as he’s driving away. And the guy’s hard to miss. Six feet tall and built like a redwood. Hairy as a grizzly bear. Big bushy beard.

The guy gets arrested. They bring him to trial. The guy’s lawyer tells him shave up, put on this suit. They bring another guy in to stand in the crowd, bearded guy, burly guy. Almost a twin. Put the witness on the stand, ask him, who’d you see driving out of the woodlot?

Witness looks around the courtroom. Points at the gallery, picks out the ringer. Our man walks away, scot-free.

“So how’d they finally catch him?” you ask Earl.

Earl looks at you funny. “Didn’t catch him,” he says. “The guy’s free.”

So you fish. You fill the boat, despite Chad. The salmon are running. You work in the stern, morning to night. You run the gear portside. Chad runs the starboard. Earl’s in the hold, icing the fish. Days of it. Salmon, fish guts and slime. The waves come in sets, slate grey and ominous. You learn to hold your balance. You learn to handle your knife.

You work to exhaustion. There’s no time for stories. You grab a sandwich at dinner, maybe some soup. Crawl into the fo’c’sle for a few hours in your bunk, stagger out before first light and do it over again.

You don’t talk much. The skipper keeps the radio playing; you keep your head down and work. You steal glances across the cockpit at Chad. He’s still struggling with the gear. He still can’t clean a fish.

You cover for him, best you can. Hell, you’re green, too. Anyway, it’s your money. It’s everyone’s money. The faster you fill the boat, the sooner you head for land.

Then one night, Chad falls asleep at the wheel.

You can’t cover for this. You can’t mop up his mistake. It’s an all-night run up the west side of the island, a fifteen-hour steam. You’re in your bunk when it happens, dreaming of palm trees and potato salad. You hear Earl in the wheelhouse. Then Chad. Angry voices. Earl wakes up the skipper. You lie there and listen.

Cardinal sin on a fish boat, falling asleep on wheel watch. Puts the whole crew in danger. Grounds for dismissal.

It’s just not done.

The skipper talks to Chad. Soft tones. You can’t make out the words. After a while, Chad comes down to the fo’c’sle. He looks across at you in the dim light, and you close your eyes, pretend you’re asleep. You feel his eyes on you for a hell of a time. Then he climbs into his own bunk and is gone.

You lie there, awake, the waves pummeling the boat, the propeller changing pitch as it rocks in and out of the water. You listen to Earl and the skipper above you. Earl’s words are angry, though you can’t make them out. The skipper is quiet. His tone is measured. This seems to get Earl even louder.

But the skipper doesn’t bite. He won’t engage. Earl mutters something. Then he comes down the stairs, makes every step count. You meet his eyes at the bottom, staring out of your sleeping bag. He looks at you, shakes his head, and his expression is dark as he climbs into his bunk.

“Something’s gotta happen,” he says later. Chad’s inside the wheelhouse, making sandwiches. You’re running the gear. Earl’s washing the fish. “You don’t just fall asleep on watch. It’s not done.”

“What’d the skipper say?” you ask him.

“Skipper says we can’t fire him. His daddy owns the boat.”

You nod. You say nothing. You clean another fish.

“You don’t just fall asleep,” Earl says, after a minute. “The guy’s N.F.G. Something’s gotta be done.”

Except nothing happens.

You take a storm day at the hot springs. Run inbound from gale-force winds and tie up at a dock behind a craggy little point, a boardwalk disappearing into the rainforest.

“Closest thing you’re going to get to a shower for a couple more weeks,” the skipper tells you. “Bring your soap.”

Earl goes first. Climbs down off the boat and walks up the dock and into the forest, towel over his shoulder and kitbag in hand. You do the dishes in the galley as the skipper tells a story, a good one, a couple of guys on a sinking salmon troller off the top of the island, just a couple of kids, how the coast guard found them playing Playstation on the skipper’s TV when they flew out a helicopter to rescue them.

“Just holed up in the wheelhouse, survival suits and all,” the skipper says. “Some shoot ’em up game. The boys wouldn’t let the coast guard take them away until they’d beat the last level.”

You laugh. You’ve seen a survival suit, a big, orange, Gumby-looking thing. Be a hell of a time playing
Counterstrike
through the flippers.

Chad’s sitting at the galley table, his headphones in. You can hear the rap music blaring, tinny, incessant. Chad’s not paying attention.

You finish the dishes. Grab your towel and head off to find the springs.

It’s a two-mile hike through the rainforest. Every board on the boardwalk has the name of a boat carved in it, a date. Fishing boats, sailing boats, yachts. Anyone who’s ever tied up at the dock. Some poor sucker’s started carving in a love poem, but something made him quit halfway through the second stanza.

You can smell the sulfur as you get close to the springs, feel the rotten-egg humidity. The forest opens up and the boardwalk dumps you out at the ocean again, on top of a little waterfall plunging down to a few steaming tidal pools in the rocks below. Earl’s in one of the pools, staring out at the sea. He doesn’t look up as you approach.

The waterfall’s scorching hot. You stand under it as long as you can stand, feeling the steam scour the filth from your body. When you’re bright red and gasping, you venture down to the tide pools.

“Thought you were the kid,” Earl says, as you slip into the water. It’s cooler, fed by the tides and the waterfall both. “I was looking around for a big enough rock.”

Out on the open ocean, through the rocks, the wind’s starting to howl. The water’s gunmetal and mottled with whitecaps. “Few more days and the trip will be over,” you say. “Not too long, now.”

“It’ll be over,” Earl says. “One way or another.”

“Don’t think I’m not counting down the days, either, old man.” A voice from the trees, and then Chad emerges from the forest. He picks his way down the rocks in flowered surfer shorts and a hooded sweatshirt. You didn’t hear him on the trail.

Earl watches him, wary, hackles raised. Chad’s all studied nonchalance, the bravado of youth. They’re wild animals at the watering hole, predators, alpha males itching to fight.

“You’re a fuck-up,” Earl tells him. “N.F.G. All you’ll ever be. Sooner or later, someone’s going to get hurt.”

Chad ignores him. Peels off his sweatshirt by the waterfall. You can see the tattoos that cover his arms and chest. Ride or die slogans in black gothic letters. Barbed wire. Crazy patterns. Teenaged gangster shit.

Earl’s staring at him, his lip curled. “You hear me?”

“I hear you,” Chad says. He says it soft. Says it quiet. “I hear you, old man.”

Earl stands up from his tide pool. He’s bare-assed naked, his skin marked with tattoos of his own, mermaids and sea anchors and biker insignia. The tattoos are faded, mostly illegible, but the old man’s chest is still defined and his muscles are strong. You know it was struggle and violence that wore the sheen from that ink.

“Someday you’re going to catch it,” Earl tells the kid. “Do the rest of the boat good to be rid of you.”

Chad doesn’t blink. “So do it, then,” he says, and you can feel Earl’s eyes flick over to you, read his calculating thoughts. You know the fight’s coming. You know if you weren’t here, the fight would happen now.

Earl reaches for his towel instead, his clean clothes. “It’ll happen,” he mutters. “Don’t you worry. It’ll happen.”

Chad doesn’t hear, or pretends not to. Shrugs and ducks beneath the waterfall, hollers and laughs from the shock of the heat. You let your breath out. Feel the tension dissipate. A few more days and it’s over. You never have to go fishing again.

“Don’t dawdle out here too long,” Earl tells you, as he climbs back up to the trail. “Gets damn dark down that path after nightfall.”

You dream of murder that night, a bloody rock by the tide pools and the bellowing wind. You toss and turn, restless in your bunk. When you climb out from the fo’c’sle, it’s morning again, and the skipper has the boat pointed back out into the wild sea.