T. Boyle - T.C. Boyle Stories II - Volume II

The boat lurched and Hunter grabbed the rail to steady himself. “Go ahead,” he said, “do him first, I don’t care. Really. I don’t.”

The spider man looked away, muttering curses, as she bent to retie his rig. “What about bait,” he said. “This clown”—he jerked a thumb at Hunter—“fucked up my bait. I need bait. Fresh bait.”

She could have told him to fetch it himself — she was there to help and smile and show off her physique in the hope and expectation of tips, sure, but she was nobody’s slave and any five-year-old could bait a hook — and yet she just gave him a look, padded over to the bait well and came back with a live anchovy cradled in one hand. But he was off now and there was no bringing him back, his harsh cracked voice running through its variations — she was wasting his time, and the whole thing, the whole fucking boat, was a conspiracy and he wanted a refund and he was damned fucking well going to get it too and they could all kiss his ass if they thought he was going to put up with this kind of cheat and fraud because that’s what it was, screwing over the customer, eight bucks for a goddamned burger that tasted like warmed-over shit — and when finally she’d threaded the anchovy on his hook he said, loud enough for everybody to hear, “Hey, thanks for nothing. But I guess you’re peddling your little ass for tips, right, so here you go”—and before she could react he stabbed a rolled-up bill into the gap between her breasts.

It wasn’t a happy moment. Because Julie wasn’t frail and wilting, wasn’t like Ilta, whose sweet suffering face stared out of the vacancy of the head every time one of the sportsmen pulled back the door in an attempt to go in and relieve himself. She was lean and muscular, knots in her calves and upper arms, her shoulders pulled tight. In a single motion she dug out the bill and threw it in his face without even looking at it, and then she slapped him, and this was no ordinary slap, but an openhanded blow that sent him back against the rail.

For a split second it looked as if he was going to go for her and Hunter braced himself because there was no way he was going to let this asshole attack a woman in front of him, even if he had to take a beating for it, and he would, he would take a beating for Julie. Gladly. But the spider man, a froth of spittle caught in the corners of his mouth, just glared at her. “All right!” he shouted. “All right, fuck it,” and he swung round, whirled the rented pole over his head like a lariat and flung it out into the chop, where gravity took it down just as if it had never existed.

—

Later, after the captain had come down personally from his perch to restrain the spider man and the command went up to haul in and the engines revved and the boat began hammering the waves on the way back to the dock, Hunter took a seat in the cabin to get out of the wind and for the first time since the night before he felt a kind of equilibrium settle over him. Mark and Damian were at the counter, leaning back on their elbows and sipping beer out of their plastic cups. Ilta was stretched out on a bench in the far corner, her face to the wall, a blanket pulled up over her shoulders. The others milled round in a happy mob, eating sandwiches, ordering up cocktails, reliving their exploits and speculating on who was going to win the pool, because apparently it wasn’t over yet. In announcing the problem that had arisen with one of the passengers, the captain had promised to make up the lost time with a little inshore fishing — an hour or so, for halibut — once they’d deposited the unhappy sportsman back at the dock. An hour more. Hunter would have preferred an hour less, but he found himself drifting up to the counter to order a gin and tonic — as a calmative, strictly as a calmative — and then taking it outside, in the breeze, to where Julie stood over a pitted slab of wood at the rear of the boat, filleting the day’s catch.

Behind her, a whole squadron of gulls, interspersed with half a dozen pelicans, cried havoc over the scraps. She looked tired. Gooseflesh stippled her shoulders and upper arms. Her makeup was fading. She dipped mechanically to the burlap sacks to extract the fish, slamming them down one after another before gutting them with an expert flick of her knife, half of them alive still and feebly working their tails. Next she ran the blade against the grain to remove the scales, a whole hurricane of translucent discs suddenly animated and dancing on the breeze as if by some feat of prestidigitation, and then she teased out the fillets and shook them into plastic bags, dumping the refuse overboard with a clean sweep of the knife. A few sportsmen stood around watching her. The engines whined at full throttle, the wake unraveling from the stern as if from an infinite spool, the birds vanishing in the froth. Hunter steadied himself against the rail and lifted the plastic cup to his lips, his fingers stinking of baitfish, wishing he had a dripping sack of plunder to hand her, but he didn’t. Or not yet anyway. “You look like you’ve done that a time or two before,” he said.

She looked up with a smile. “Yeah,” she said. “One or two.” Up close, he saw that her torso glittered with the thin wafers of the scales, scales everywhere, caught in the ends of her hair, fastened between her breasts, on her calves and the place where her thighs came together.

“Could I get you a drink?” he asked, and when she didn’t answer, he added, “I’m having a gin and tonic. You like gin?”

The knife moved as if it had a life of its own. The fish gave in, lost their heads, ribs and tails, while the fillets, white and yielding, disappeared into ice chests, all ready for freezer or pan. And here was Damian’s bag, #12, laid out before her like an offering. He could hear Damian crowing even now because Damian had hooked a lingcod that was bigger by a pound and a half than his nearest competitor’s catch and he hadn’t been shy about letting everybody know it—“I’m going to win that pool, you wait and see,” he’d said before sidling up to the bar with Mark, “and I’m going to tip Julie a hundred and ask her to have a drink with us later, for your sake, your sake only, buddy, believe me.” The thought of it made him feel queasy all over again. “Sure,” Julie said. “I like gin, who doesn’t? But I can’t drink while I’m on duty — it’s against regulations. And plus, the captain—”

“Yeah,” he said, “the captain.”

The boat slammed down hard and jerked back up so that he had to brace himself, but the knife never paused. After a moment he said, “Well, what about afterwards then, after we’re back in, I mean? Would you like to have a drink then? Or dinner? After you get cleaned up and all?”

“That might be nice,” she allowed. “But we’ve still got a whole lot of fishing to do. So let’s not get premature here—”

He leaned back and let the gin wet his lips. He could see the way things would unfold — he was going to fish like the greatest fisherman on earth, like Lucky Jim himself, and he was going to catch a fish twice the size of Damian’s. A hundred dollars? He’d tip her the whole thing, all three hundred, and she’d hold on to his arm while the spider man stalked off to haunt some other ship and Anacapa faded away in the mist and Damian went back home to sleep on the couch. That was the scenario, that was what was going to happen, he was sure of it. Of course, on the other hand, she must have had a dozen propositions a day, a girl as pretty as that, doing what she did for a living, and besides what would he do with all that fish? Was there room for it in the freezer even? Or would it just sit on a shelf in the refrigerator, turning color, till he dropped it in the trash?

“Right?” she said. “Agreed?”