Alex Scarrow: A thousand suns

It had been a poor day.

All in all it had been a pretty shitty week. By a rough reckoning of the last five days’ haul he had maybe broken even on the diesel they had burned cruising up and down this stretch of the banks off the New England coastline. Then there was the cost of the food for the three lads he had aboard.

Maybe he’d break even, if they could pull in something decent. Four tons of catch, be it mackerel, cod, herring, tuna, swordfish, whatever… was break-even point roughly. If it were mostly tuna, you could say three tons. It would be impossible to weigh the haul until they returned and offloaded it, but Jeff could guess the weight from the space taken in the ice lockers. They needed another ton before they could start thinking about turning a profit.

One last run this evening and then I’m taking her home.

He hoped this last roll of the dice would end his week-long run of bad luck. It would be a good way to draw a line under their profitless trip, to pull out a full net tonight and end on a good note. Even if all it did was cover his costs instead of leaving him hundreds down on the whole trip.

It wasn’t exactly the easiest way to make a living.

He took a final pull on his cigarette, watching it glow brightly in the gathering dark, and then tossed it out into their churning wake.

It wasn’t the easiest way to make a living for his lads either, that much was for sure, but then it had to be better than wearing a stupid paper hat, a plastic name tag and serving fries.

The boys on his boat were young. All three of them were under twenty. Jeff took them on instead of the more experienced crew because they were happy to work for a percentage only, instead of a retainer and a percentage. Young fellas, not one of them had properly finished school, leaving them all with few options to choose from. Round here it was either catching fish or stacking shelves. And catching fish paid better.

He remembered when he was twenty: no bills to pay, no family to provide for and little to lose. Percentage-only worked just fine. A good trip and his boys saw good money, far more than is decent for a kid without a high-school diploma. A good trip, three to five days away from home, could bring in up to 2000 dollars each after Jeff had subtracted overheads.

A bad trip?… well that’s the way it works. Some good, some bad, you throw good dice then you get the super-big dollar prizes, you throw lame dice…

Well, look at it this way; at least you’ve been out in the fresh air.

Jeff smiled. That was something his old man used to say.

That’s the only game going round here, and them’s the rules.

That was another.

All three of the boys still lived at home with their folks as far as he knew. All the money they made was pretty much fun money. Booze, bikes, smokes, whatever.

Ritchie Bradden, a lad who used to crew for him last season, called it his ‘screw you’ money. He’d taken five days’ sick leave from his seven-dollars-an-hour job at Wallders, only to come back at the end of the week and walk off Jeff’s boat with nearly 3000 dollars in his back pocket. His first stop was Wallders to say ‘screw you’ to the store manager. Since then Ritchie had stuck with fishing.

Percentage-only worked just fine.

Jeff watched the line descending from the outrigger silhouetted against the last light on the horizon. It twitched and began to pull backwards with a creaking that could be heard above the chug of the engine.

‘Hey! We got a catch!’ one of the lads called out.

Jeff watched as it tightened. A school of mackerel could do that. They were dense, tightly packed. You knew it when you scored them.

The net suddenly drew fully taut, and the port outrigger bent alarmingly.

Jeff jumped to his feet and hastily leaned over the port side. He could hear the twang of nylon fibres stressing and snapping.

The net was beginning to tear.

‘Stop the boat! It’s ripping!’ he bellowed towards the pilothouse.

The trawler’s engine kept the same monotonous note. The outrigger looked like it was beginning to buckle.

‘Shit! Tom! Stop the goddamn boat!’

The trawler continued at a comfortable six knots.

The young lad at the helm turned wearily around, and raised his eyebrows questioningly at Jeff as he wrenched the door to the pilothouse open and stormed in. He angrily pulled the boy aside and immediately grabbed the throttle and threw it into neutral. Tom pulled his headphones down off his ears and Jeff could hear the irritating sibilant hiss of rock music played too loudly.

‘What’s up, Skip — ?’

‘Dammit, Tom! How many times have I said no music when you’re on the wheel?… Huh? How many?’

The young lad fumbled for his Walkman to turn it off. Jeff reached for it, tucked into the gathered swathe of the slicker tied up around the boy’s slender waist. He pulled it out and threw it on the floor. Its cheap plastic casing stayed in one piece, but from the internal rattling sound it made as it slid across the floor of the cabin Jeff didn’t think Tom would be getting much more rock music out of it.

Tom opened his mouth to complain.

‘I wouldn’t worry about your tape recorder if I were you. That’s the least of your worries.’

He grabbed the boy’s shoulder, turned him round and pointed at the buckling portside outrigger. ‘If the net’s screwed, I’ll fucking throw you over the side.’

‘I’m s-sorry, Skip… I — ’

He watched the young man’s mouth open and close silently as he struggled for something useful to say.

Jeff turned abruptly and left the cockpit, cursing his stupidity and weakness for promising to take the boy on. Clearly the fool would much rather be at home (in the warmth) with his feet up on his mother’s threadbare furniture and staring lifelessly at the drip feed of daytime cable.

But a promise was a promise.

Tom’s mother had pleaded with him to take the lad along, with a beseeching smile that seemed to promise a little more than gratitude for his troubles.

She’d wanted to shake the idle waster out of the rut he’d comfortably rolled into. She was confident that a few days of hard graft rewarded with several hundred dollars of his share on the catch, maybe even a full thousand for him to play around with, would be the kick in the pants he needed.

Next time, you idiot, Jeff muttered to himself, let the Big Head do the thinking.

Outside he walked across the aft deck towards the portside outrigger, where the other two members of his young crew were leaning out studying the net with the aid of a torch. Ian and Duncan were cousins, or second cousins or something. They seemed to come as a pair, neither prepared to crew without the other. Which was fine. They were both good workers, he’d taken them on over a dozen trips before, and they’d made good money on all of them.

‘Net’s rigid, Skip,’ said Duncan as he passed the torch to Jeff.

Jeff shone it on the outrigger, which was bent like a fully drawn bow and buckled near the end. That was going to cost a little to straighten out or be replaced.

He panned down to the net. It was as taut as cable wire and beginning to fray.

‘Shit, we better back up a little before something gives.’

He turned towards the pilothouse to see Tom standing in the doorway, shuffling from one foot to the other guiltily awaiting instructions and, it seemed, eager to make amends.

‘Put her in reverse… gently,’ he shouted. Tom nodded eagerly and went back to the helm. The trawler shuddered as gears engaged and the gentle diesel rumble changed to a rhythmic chug. Slowly the boat eased back, the outrigger swung with a metallic groan and the net slackened.

Jeff waved his hand at Tom, and the rhythm of the engine changed again as she went back into neutral. The trawler drifted a few more feet backward under its own momentum and then came to rest.