Джек Кейди - The Jonah Watch

“No one aboard,” Wilson said. “Our cap put over the small boat and our guys ran it down.”

The lobsterman, locking his helm in the bleak waters that splashed against the dark islands that surrounded his trade, setting his speed like a hum to underline his solitude, had been pulling traps. The slowly moving boat closed on the marker buoy. The lobsterman plucked the line from the water and took a turn on a cleat. The low speed of the boat broke the trap loose from the bottom. The technique saved some hauling, and it was common practice; but this time the man missed the cleat, doubtless had a turn of line over his hand, and the trap dragged him overboard. The boat, still under way, left him struggling in icy water, in combat with his high boots; a struggle that was small in that wet vastness that closed, empty and complete, over the final solitude.

“We had such an eerie feeling,” Wilson said, “but the worst of it came later.”

News of “the worst of it” spread to Adrian like the chill of ice fog rolling toward and over an anchored vessel. News of “the worst of it” traveled to the Base, thence across the million-dollar bridge to the bars of Portland, along the piers and into the trawlers, the lobster boats, and, subsequently, south through the fishing fleet. It became a sea story. There was no conversation so light, so ridiculous or so gay that could not be stilled by mention of the lobster boat Hester C .

Lamp’s leonine head was filled with auguries. He told stories of the Bermuda Triangle. He talked to the hobbling Indian Conally, asking after ancient spirit tales that might help him form a complete theory.

“Maybe some of the old people know,” Conally said doggedly. “I never paid no attention to that stuff.”

“’Tis coming on to winter.”

Dane, who had seen a thousand frightened seamen, was unimpressed. He blustered and threatened.

Howard reluctantly admitted that he felt the gray chill. Glass sarcasmed at himself for a sudden urge to speak Yiddish.

Brace, both then and earlier, was occupied with other matters, matters so personal and intense that no sea story could penetrate his unhappiness.

With stiff green hair and stiff dungarees, Brace cleaned paint for three days in the sun. At night he was allowed to remove his clothes and sleep in a paint-stained bunk. Dane was scrupulous. Not a fleck of paint escaped him. On a dozen occasions Brace swore that he was finished, and Dane found more paint between the grill of the ladder, on the underside of a rail, spotted beneath the mats on the bridge, or tracked to other parts of the ship on the clothes or shoes of seamen. At the end of three days even Dane was content. Brace, unable to accomplish a personal cleanup, begged Amon for help, and Amon shaved Brace’s head.

“There are such tales on the Grand Banks,” chief engineman Snow mentioned with little interest to second engineman Fallon. “Come, lad, when we plot the bilge piping, the job is complete.”

“The lobster boat was nearly out of fuel,” Abner ’s yeoman Wilson told Howard. “Been wallowing along for two or three days. His lobsters was dead but not stinkin’.”

Abner had streamed grapples and gone through the necessary hours and motions of a hopeless box search. The ice in the trawler Ezekiel ’s hold was melting.

“We rigged a short tow aft of Ezekiel ,” Wilson told Howard. “Put a seaman aboard. All the kid had to do was lock down that helm and keep watch.”

Abner , according to yeoman Wilson, settled into a straight double tow toward nightfall. A double tow was not common, but it was something Abner had done a dozen-twenty-times before. The deck force was short one watchstander because of the man on Hester C . Still, enginemen and firemen were running two on, four off. An eight- to ten-knot breeze rose. The tows rode well and Abner maintained speed.

“We were just changing watch for the mid,” Wilson said. “That kid on the lobster boat got the engine started somehow. He dropped the tow and came kiting around Ezekiel ’s stern like he had a pocketful of pus. Ran the boat alongside, eyes bulging like a cod, and yelling that the boat was haunted. We lost an hour rerigging the tow.”

“And that’s when the Clara caught fire?”

“No,” Wilson shook his head in wonderment. “The Clara didn’t catch fire until they were relieving the four-to-eight. I was aboard that bumboat at the time.

“It was just nothing, at first,” Wilson said after a moment spent thinking. “We rode for nearly an hour, me, and this seaman with his teeth chattering and pretending like he was brave. The dead lobsters were sloshing around in the well. We couldn’t run the engine because of the low fuel. It was just real quiet, and the running lights were dirty and dim and things were all shadowy.” Wilson looked at Howard, knowing that Howard had already heard the story, thinking, perhaps, that Howard would say that the story was only crazy.

“This hand came up over the transom,” Wilson said. “It just hung there for maybe thirty seconds, just pale and graspy, and then it slipped away. I ran aft and there wasn’t nothing. No splash. That kid seaman started to cry. Ten minutes later the hand came back again. I ran forward and started leaning on the whistle to signal for a stop.” Wilson looked ashamed, and then indignant. “We were only trying to help,” he said. “Trying to get the boat back in so at least his old lady could sell it. That guy was dead. He didn’t have any right to do that. He didn’t have any right at all.”

At each nightfall the gray chill seemed to move like the whisking touch of a spirit hand across Adrian . As standing lights flared against the slowly encroaching dusk that layered with the cold and colder-growing diminishment of a waning summer, men chatted beside the galley, or walked the decks, or laundered, played cards, laughed and told stories. Commercial radios on the messdeck and in the crew’s compartment were turned higher. The compartments were filled with the voices of young women, touted as “hot chicks” by a local disc jockey who praised songs of love and its unavoidable sadness. The gray chill, experienced at outwaiting eons of illusions, dwelt like an ice-covered boulder planted at the foot of the gangway.

At 2200 hours, dead center in the eight-to-twelve watch, the stories faltered, the flaring and somehow suddenly beautiful incandescent lights went out, and the red nightlights were switched on. They signaled the approach of grayness. Watch-standers on the bridge and in the engine room turned the incandescent lights up in those spaces, rolled pencils across the faces of log sheets, listened suspiciously to normal sounds; but through the rest of the ship the red lights threw pale shadows that grew increasingly grotesque.

“Nobody’ s talking,” Mother Lamp confided seriously to Howard. “It’s like the boys are pretending t’isn’t there.”

“Maybe it’s behind your shoulder, cook.”

“You’ve got a smart mouth,” Lamp said, “but you’re not smart about this. This has the same feel of something that happened once in Hong Kong.”

“There aren’t enough Chinese in Hong Kong to match the number of times I’ve heard about Hong Kong.”

“You haven’t heard this.” Lamp seemed attentive to an inner voice, a communication rising from some heretofore great void, the cold of which only he had suspected. He shook his red-blond-haired head, looked at Howard like a mother doing her best to dote on an idiot child. Then his face changed. He was nearly timid, certainly sad. “I know you don’t like me much. It’s okay. Nobody hired you to.”