Ryan Lockwood - Below

To the camera, he said, “I think I just saw something big. Maybe a Humboldt squid. I’m going to lean out for a closer look.” Bracing his knees against the side of the boat, Joe stretched out over the water. He still couldn’t quite get a good angle to film under the boat. He leaned out farther. An instant later, a rogue wave abruptly lifted the opposite side of the seiner. Joe lost his balance and instinctively grabbed for the side of the boat with both hands. He watched helplessly as the expensive camera dropped into the ocean.

“Fuck!” He held his breath for several seconds, waiting, until he saw the camera bob back up to the surface. Apparently the air trapped inside the waterproof plastic housing made the camcorder buoyant.

“Hey, guys? A little help?” Joe looked over his shoulder. The captain and his big deckhand were nowhere in sight, and Val and the Swedish researcher were inside the wheelhouse. Joe scanned the deck for something to retrieve the camera and saw a long wooden pole with a large hook on the end—maybe an oversized gaff. He dragged it over to the side to find the camera still visible, but now slamming up against the hull.

He could fish the camera back on board if he could snag its shoulder strap, but doing that was harder than it seemed. The camera kept moving in the surging froth, all the while moving steadily aft. Dodging equipment as he stumbled along the side to keep up with the camera, he tried several times to snatch the camera, but missed. The captain yelled at him from up in the wheelhouse, wondering what the hell he was doing, but he ignored him. If he didn’t retrieve the camera pretty quick, it was going to vanish into the darkness behind the seiner. He stepped up onto the side, almost to the stern end now, and thrust the pole tip under the water, jerking upward once, twice, three times.

He felt resistance. He had it.

Slowly, he lifted the camera up. As he reached to grab it with a free hand, he heard the squeak of ungreased hinges and turned just in time to see a large, rusty pulley swinging toward him.

Suspended from the towering boom by cables, the heavy pulley struck his shoulder, disrupting his balance and forcing his upper body out over the water. He tried to turn and grab at the pulley, but couldn’t reach it.

As if in slow motion, he felt himself falling over the side.

His left shoulder hit the cold water first and he plunged below the surface. In the brightly lit water beside the boat, he thought he saw shifting movement below him that contrasted with the blackness of the deep. He kicked up to the surface and frantically grabbed at the side of the seiner with both hands, not pausing to look down. He realized that he couldn’t climb up the featureless metal side of the vessel, which rose five or more feet out of the water. He kicked for the stern, only a few body lengths away, but it was as sheer as the rest of the boat. He heard shouts from up on the deck.

Then something tugged at his right leg.

He looked down and saw something pale moving below him in the dark water. Something big. Suddenly the thing wrapped tightly around his leg and pulled.

Yelling in fear, he kicked at it and clawed at the side of the seiner. The captain’s face appeared above him, and a second later a rope landed on Joe’s head. Just as he grasped for it, the tugging increased on his leg and he went under. He reached up over his head with his hands and managed to get them around the rope.

He had been a pretty good rope climber back in junior high, beating most of his gym classmates as they raced to the top. He was in worse shape than he’d been all those years ago, but he would have dominated his younger self in this particular rope-climbing competition. He exploded out of the water and, using all his strength, he pulled, kicked, and clambered up the rough metal until he tumbled headfirst onto a stack of netting in the stern of the Centaur . Sprawled out on the rigging, Joe looked at his leg, expecting to see the pulpy body of a squid affixed to his calf. But he had come out of the water alone.

“Jesus Christ!” Joe pushed himself to his knees, water pouring off him onto the deck. He rubbed his hand over his wet pant leg, but saw no damage or sign of injury. He felt a hand on his shoulder. It was Val.

“Are you okay—?”

“You damn fool!” the captain yelled. “Almost became a meal for our squid, eh? Looks like I need to be babysitting this head-in-his-ass copper.”

Joe crawled off the stacked net, grateful for the hard wooden surface of the deck beneath him. He looked at Val and began to laugh.

“My camera?” she said.

“Shit. Your camera. Sorry, Val.” He laughed again.

He wouldn’t have thought a few minutes ago that he could actually be happy to be on the rusty old seiner.

“What the hell were you doing, you fool?” Captain MacDonald squinted down at Joe, sopping wet and shivering at his feet.

Joe could hardly stop laughing. “Thanks, Captain.”

“You deaf, lad? What the holy Moses happened? Looks like you aren’t going to be filming after all, eh?” The captain began to laugh, too.

“And my goddamn cell phone was still in my pocket.” They both laughed harder.

“You two think this is funny, but that was an expensive camera.” Val crossed her arms.

“Too bad, ain’t it, losing that camera? Would have made some nice video.” The captain spit tobacco onto the deck. “Tomás knows how to handle a skiff. I’ll wager he closes off the net before the shoal sounds, and lands us some squid.”

“I guess I owe you a camera,” Joe said.

She sighed. “Well, Joe, we can—”

“You owe them a camera, son!” the captain shouted. “Now get the hell away from my net and get out of the way.”

There was a whistle, and Joe realized that Tomás was already pulling up to the Centaur with the lead end of the net. Val grabbed Joe’s shoulder and together they hustled away from the stern, climbing the short, steep staircase to the wheelhouse platform to get out of the way. Karl stepped out of the wheelhouse to join them, and from the raised deck they watched the action unfold.

The bigger deckhand, Ari, hurried down the gunwale to meet Tomás. In a few moments they had secured the lead end of the net to the seiner’s machinery. Using a hydraulic power block mounted to the long black boom, the big man began to wind the weighted cable at the bottom of the net through the boom, the machinery groaning under the strain. If there was anything inside the net, as Karl assured Joe there would be, they would soon find out.

“The weighted lead line will now be cinched tight. This will close off the bottom of the net and prevent the escape of what is inside, ja ?” Karl ran his hands around and under an invisible vase, clinching his fists below it. “They will then stack the net as they draw it in and—how do you say?— squeeze our catch in the ocean alongside the seiner. You see?”

“How do you know so much about this, Nikkola?”

“Well, Joe, I am from a family of fishermen. And I have been before on vessels such as this one.”

With the net apparently secured and on its way in, Captain MacDonald climbed up to the wheelhouse and shouldered past them. He stepped into the cabin and came back with a dry towel and threw it to Joe. Joe realized he was shivering. After drying his head and neck, he followed the others inside the wheelhouse as the deckhands continued to work.

Joe said, “So what now?”

The captain looked down at Joe’s feet and frowned. Joe realized that he was dripping all over the floor.

“Put on some dry clothes, lad, before you drown my boat. I’ve got a clean sweatshirt under here somewhere….” The captain leaned down to fish through the mess underneath the helm. “What we do now, you say? We wait. Closing a net that size takes time.”