Джек Кейди - The Jonah Watch

Cutter Abner , en route to the grounds, laid line aboard the trawler Ezekiel , disabled with a cracked piston while inbound with a full catch packed beneath rapidly melting ice. Glass, standing bridge watch on the moored Adrian , was joined by Howard who was taking a break. Glass intermittently checked Abner ’s progress. He switched the radio to the working frequency of 2694.

“They’ll save the load,” Howard said, “if he don’t break his seal too often staring down his hatch.”

“We’ve raised to eight knots,” said the static-crackling voice of Abner ’s captain. “How are you riding, cap?”

“Raise it more if you wa-nt-a.” Ezekiel ’s radio was stronger than the rig on Abner . “This load ain’t too thrifty.”

“We’ll stay with eight,” Abner crackled.

“No sea to speak of,” said Glass, “if they’re shagging it that fast.”

“They better shag it fast. They’re sitting on a perfume factory.”

It was then that Brace, passing a gallon of paint from the main deck to a man on the boat deck, learned that you never lift an open can of paint by the bale.

Glass switched the set back to the faintly popping watch frequency. Through the open hatch, and distant, sounded the snap of the commission pennant, while from the buoy yard a crane groaned and whirred. An engine chugged and idled in the small boat basin. There was a thump, a small confusion of voices, a shout, and then whoops and hollers of laughter which gave way to a heavily trudging step along the main deck. Silence accompanied the walker, and then low laughter resumed as a thin, birdlike whistle of amazement seemed to nudge the heavy steps forward and up the ladder to the bridge.

Brace stepped through the hatch wearing a single wrinkle on his otherwise smooth forehead, and doused with green paint splashed in his hair, across one cheek, and saturating his shirt like a slick lustre of green blood. The paint ran the length of one leg and colored a shoe. Brace looked like a member of the walking wounded, but, though bowed, stood as unrepentant as a cannibal unfairly baptized by a zealot.

“I have,” Brace said, “three years, seventeen days…” He stooped forward like an old man to look at Glass’s wristwatch, “…eleven hours and thirteen and a half minutes to pull in this fun house. I want a transfer to the engine room.”

“That’s the way all thirty-year men talk,” Glass said. “Me, I ain’t a thirty-year man. I’m putting in time ’til the Mafia calls.”

“Stop dripping,” Howard told Brace.

“Let him drip if he wants,” Glass said. “How much worse off can he get?”

“A request mast,” Brace said. “I want to change my rate to the engine room.”

Howard stared at Brace and seemed to be giving the matter his deepest attention. “There shouldn’t be any trouble in getting a mast,” he said in tones that displayed great thoughtfulness. “I hear it climbing the ladder.”

Dane’s slow step was accompanied by puffs of deep breath drawn against rheumatism, and they made mere doom seem like a cheap and silly thing. Dane appeared in the hatch that led to the wing and he squinted. His eyes widened and stared, froglike. His thin mouth was as tight and straight as any line on Howard’s beginning diagrams. Dane blinked, made motion to move onto the bridge, stopped.

No one, in Howard’s memory, had ever before seen Dane speechless. The radio crackled. The commission pennant popped. The indifferent idling of the engine in the small boat basin smoothed and rose with a controlled growl as the boat set off on harbor patrol.

“Illinois,” Dane whispered hoarsely, “I wisht they sent the cow, instead.” He stepped through the hatch and onto the bridge. At first he looked both awed and reverent. Then he eyed Brace in the way that a hungry man might view a pork chop, but when he spoke his voice was low and seemed nearly kind. “I don’t want to know how you did it,” he told Brace. “I don’t want to know why you did it…” He slowly straightened like an inflatable raft filling and stretching toward shape. Howard and Glass watched, backed away, fascinated by the swelling chest beneath the khaki shirt as Dane gulped air to roar from full lungs and a fuller heart—

“But why in the name of God and the Holy Clap did you track it around!”

The radio crackled. The departing boat’s engine was a rhythmic and diminished hum. In the buoy yard the crane snuffled and clanked. Brace opened his mouth to protest, looking like a man trying to spit out too much air as he faced a hurricane wind.

The radio popped, fizzled, settled to a hum as somewhere at sea a transmitter opened:

“Priority. Priority,” said a nervous, frightened voice from Abner . “Nan-mike-fox from nan-mike-fox-two-one… priority, priority.”

Howard stood stunned. Brace drooped. Howard looked at Glass, at Dane, and saw their shocked and temporarily vacant faces.

“Calling Operations.”

“That’s their radioman, Diamond. I’d know that dago’s voice anywhere. That’s a tough dago.”

“Stay on top of it,” Dane told Glass. “I’ll be back as soon as I get this kid to pasture.” He looked at the radio, which, to all but Brace, suddenly seemed like a lethal gray box of fright. He looked once more at Brace, then at paint spills on the matting of the bridge, splashes on the wing, and pools between cleats on the ladder. Brace, his moment of defiance passed, stood miserable. He looked like a half-finished but brightly colored crayon drawing.

Glass pressed a buzzer, bent forward to a voice tube. “We need you on the bridge, Cap.”

Dane took a deep breath, sighed, nodded to Brace. “You don’t clean yourself until after you clean the starboard side. If you get crackin’, you’ll finish sometime this week.”

“A tough dago,” Glass muttered. “He ain’t scared of nothing.”

“He’s scared of something.” Dane absentmindedly gave Brace a small shove, saw green paint on his fingers, wiped the paint on Brace’s shirt. “Get movin’.”

Some days later, with Abner once more hanging on the opposite side of the pier, Howard talked to his best friend, Abner ’s yeoman Wilson. Wilson was a large man with an ordinarily chalky face, and his voice, ordinarily gruff, was still thin with a particular memory.

“The helm couldn’t have been locked tighter if it was lashed,” Wilson said. “He had this crazy quick-release gear that came down over the helm like a pair of hands. I never felt so spooky in my life.”

If a dinosaur had appeared at prayer in Saint Peter’s, it would have been only a little more remarkable than discovering a lobsterman underway seventy miles offshore and vaguely headed in the direction of Georges.

“It was wallowing along, making maybe one knot,” said Wilson. “We’d been towing Ezekiel for an hour. The old man had just settled on the towing speed.”

In the afternoon sun, but with rolling mist up to Abner ’s stern, the small lobsterman was like a remote, black and gray pinprick of solitude struggling toward the mist. Among those hermits who deal in lobster, those men who seek remoteness and silence as well as a catch, this lobsterman seemed hard-headedly intent on insisting that one could not have enough of a good thing. The boat rose and fell easily in a light swell. As cutter Abner approached, some quirk of monkish defiance seemed to turn the lobsterman across Abner ’s path. As the vessels closed, a collision course developed. Abner took off speed. The lobster boat moved as purposely across Abner ’s bow as might a small animal pursue its excursions across the face of a mountain and under a formation of clouds.