Problems with People (15 page)

The day the news arrived, Hutchinson had gone duck hunting and shot his limit by eleven-thirty. While his wife was speaking to the Coast Guard petty officer, Hutchinson was on the road between Vantage and Ellensburg and feeling keenly the pleasure of his existence—three greenheads and a mallard hen in the cooler behind him, his dog asleep with her head on her paws, a thermos of coffee wedged against the dashboard, the heat and the radio on. While he rolled through Rye Pass and into the Ellensburg Valley, his wife read the fax five times. Later, she looked at photo albums, starting with Paul as a baby. She found a lot of photos from hunting expeditions, including one of Paul holding a duck by the neck and smiling, stiffly, for the camera.

While his wife grieved over photos, Hutchinson ate a midday breakfast at the Sportman’s Café in Cle Elum. There were maybe a dozen other males present—smoking, drinking, staring at a screen—and Hutchinson found that the atmosphere of the place undercut the joie de vivre that had been growing in him all morning. He’d taken a booth and, with the sports section propped against a napkin dispenser, eaten two eggs, hash browns, sausage, and sourdough toast spread with jam. Now, six weeks later, it was the last decent meal he could remember eating. He remembered that after it he’d driven through Snoqualmie Pass feeling certain it was a good thing to arrive home early. He would have ample time to get things put away. He would draw, pluck, and roast two of his ducks.

His wife met him at the door with the news, and Hutchinson, not believing it for a moment, hurried into the house to read the death notice from the Coast Guard.

They were eating dinner. There was no such thing as dinner. Hutchinson and his wife had both stopped cooking. She lived on slices of cheese.

“You can say that,” said Hutchinson. “You can accuse me of that. But I don’t have to think it’s fair.”

He leaned against the stove. In one hand he held a spoon, in the other a soup pot. His wife was at the table with a box of corn flakes in front of her. She wasn’t eating, either.

“I’m guilty,” said Hutchinson. “Of course I’m guilty. But I blame you, too, Laura. We blame each other.”

She didn’t look at him. She was very much this sort of woman, and he had always known that. She could be cold—she
went cold when she got angry. “What you say is true,” he said. “But you babied him.”

“Twist and turn,” she replied, and left the kitchen.

He stayed by the stove, insisting to himself that it was equally her fault for—for what exactly? Could he really say that babying a kid just made him press all the harder? He could say that. And hadn’t he warned her? When he heard her coming back down the hall, he turned toward the burners. “I think I want you to leave,” she said. “I can’t stand the sight of you anymore.”

The next week, he gave her to understand over the telephone that he was entitled to see his daughter, who was home for the weekend. Laura told him to come on Saturday. She said that the captain of the
Fearless
had called. He, too, would come on Saturday—Saturday night, for dinner.

The captain of the
Fearless
was standing in the living room with a bourbon and water when Hutchinson showed up. “I’m Bob Pomeroy,” he said. “Your son was a great guy.”

He didn’t look like a fisherman. Wire-rimmed glasses sat cock-eyed on his nose. He blinked often. His lips were cracked.

They sat in the dining room. Hutchinson’s daughter had changed her hairstyle: a pageboy, tinted red. She wore a smock and knickers. Her glasses hung from a chain around her neck. When Bob Pomeroy asked her politely about college, she said she’d recently changed her major from art with a focus on photomedia to art with a focus on visual communication design. Hutchinson hadn’t known about that.

When the food was on the table, Bob Pomeroy shook his
head and pressed his glasses against his nose with a dry, fissured forefinger. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t think I can eat.”

He leaned toward Hutchinson across the table. “I’m in knots,” he said. “I better just lay it all out here. I have to tell you what happened,” he said. “I feel I owe you that.”

The food grew cold. No one touched anything. Bob Pomeroy pushed his plate away, slid a map from the inner pocket of his jacket, unfolded it, and turned it in Hutchinson’s direction. “Some background,” he said, “and context.”

The
Fearless
was a salmon boat, he explained, geared to gillnet or to troll, depending. For the last two seasons he’d fished with his girlfriend. This year they’d run the Inside Passage in mid-April, trolled from the Pedro Grounds to Cape Chirikof through mid-June, then worked the net through the height of the Alaskan summer. Basically, all of that was a bust—three months of headaches. They went through a lot of foul, nasty weather, doubling and even tripling up a lot of lines that chafed through in a week’s time. A good net sank, and they passed too many hours tied up to floats, waiting for better conditions. Then, in mid-July, Bob’s girlfriend left him. She got off the boat at Port Chilkoot, south of Haines, and refused to come back on board. The result was that Bob had to find a new deckhand, which he did by running up to Skagway. In a tourist saloon, he turned up Paul, who was nineteen and a half and weighed 210 pounds—precisely at that juncture in his earthly existence when he was capable of pushing his body hardest. He seemed eager. He and a friend had driven north
from Bellingham in a truck with a mounted camper. The friend had flown home, but Paul was still there, about to start work in a cannery.

The
Fearless
left Skagway with Paul on board, fuel tanks topped off, and quarters stocked. It was a bright, even joyous, brimming July day as they maneuvered past Sullivan Island. While his boat made the run down Lynn Canal, Bob tuned the radar and depth sounder, and because the sun was out on a fair afternoon, and the green water lay sleek and glassy, and because his new deckhand seemed stalwart and reliable, he felt—for the first time since May, really—good about things. In this state of mind, he went outside, made his way forward, and peered up toward the pilothouse window, where Paul—he would not forget this—stood tall at the wheel. Paul nodded at him gravely, as if he’d been piloting the
Fearless
for years, then fixed his gaze once again to the southeast and the promise of the Chatham Strait fishing grounds.

There was a net closure, and for a few days they trolled for silvers. They worked the rip at Point Gardner for a dozen modest fish; they dragged twenty-two fathoms off Admiralty Island for two dozen more. Paul learned to gaff fish behind the gills to avoid damaging the meat. Bob showed him how to work the gurdies and how to unsnap the leaders as they came up with their spoons and how to coil them neatly in the stern. Then came a twenty-four-hour gillnet opening. They fished a tight corner with the Port Protection fleet, the tide running hard, the boats close to one another, the evening westerly tossing
spray across the pilothouses. In the dark, Paul picked his first net clean—sixty-five chums in a stiff night wind beneath the season’s first northern lights. The moon went down, and they fished the beach with the radar, running in tight and dropping the net light, then plowing out again and dropping net off the drum. They drifted through a kelp bed, with Paul tossing fish in the hold and kelp over the gunnels. He was definitely paying off—a good deckhand.

Paul, Bob said, spoke sometimes about high-school football and wrestling. He claimed he could play the guitar, but regretted his lack of seriousness about it. He wasn’t sure about college. He thought he might do something else—he didn’t know what. He confessed to confusion about his future and said that, so far, the worst thing about fishing was no women. He’d really liked women, Bob said.

In August, Paul confronted evil weather. They set the net in a heavy rain, a big wind driving seawater across both decks. A gale came up, the tide ebbed hard, and Bob decided to reel up and slip into a bight in the shoreline. But the high speed in the reel drive quit against the tide with the net still two-thirds in the water. In the storm, with the wind blowing the tops off of waves and the offshore rips boiling over in overfalls and combers, the
Fearless
towed her net beyond Cape Lynch, where the tide swept her out to open water. The clutch quit working inside of fifteen minutes, and Paul and Bob pulled net by hand. They took turns. They worked in their rain gear, with the sea coming from all directions. Darkness fell, and the sea steepened; the
Fearless
cupped deeply into westerly swells, and Bob had to get behind the wheel. Paul pulled net on his
own for four hours. Afterward, when Bob complimented him for sticking it out solo, Paul answered that sticking it out was something his father had trained into him.

Weather prevented them from making the run south, and for three days they waited it out at Twin Coves, holed up and reading novels. Bob brought out his bag of marijuana. Paul recollected, aloud, high-school girls. He explained how he’d stolen, on a regular basis, cases of beer from delivery trucks. He said that after graduating from high school he’d gone into the mountains for two weeks with a guy from football. This was the guy he’d driven to Alaska with—now in California, pouring asphalt.

Paul said he was rethinking everything. Football, for example, and wrestling—he’d never liked either one. Why had he done those things? What was the point? And what would he do now? Where would he live? He wanted to go far away, he said. He wanted to go to South America. He wanted to learn to lay tile, too. He wanted to build a post-and-beam barn. He thought he might ride a bicycle across the country. He showed Bob some genuinely mystifying card tricks. He had an idea for a movie, he said, that would include optical illusions and levitation, and he believed it was possible to make Mars habitable. He was eager to learn how to scuba-dive.

“Now comes the hard part,” Bob said.

They lay at anchor at Twin Coves in sixty-knot winds and twelve-foot seas; the wipers froze solid, and ice formed in the rigging. In a lull, they made the run to Point Horton, but the
radar locked up when they were less than midway, and they had to jog for twelve hours through a snowstorm. Finally, though, they made Ketchikan, where they paired up with the
Wayfarer
—another gillnetter—for the run across Dixon Entrance. The two boats lit south, running for home, but more ill weather blew down from the north, and they had to lay anchor in Customhouse Cove with snow freezing against the pilothouse windows. Once again, the rigging iced up; the radio reported steepening seas and a fifty-five-knot gale. Then, on the third day, the forecast called for clearing, and the skippers agreed to run for it at first light.

At three in the morning, Bob flicked on the radar and stared for a long time at the empty scope while Paul slept in the fo’c’sle. A rough squall passed through Customhouse Cove, and, in his rain gear, reluctantly, Bob went out to let slip more anchor chain. At dawn, they pushed off for Foggy Bay with the
Wayfarer
to port and in radio contact; they cleared Mary Island and plowed into the vast just as the Coast Guard broadcast a gale warning for the length of the northern coast. Bob radioed the
Wayfarer
, but since the seas in front of them were apparently calm, she radioed back to say she would run for Foggy Bay at least. There was time, her skipper said, before the wind came up.

The
Fearless
followed, quartering to stern, but the wind, a northerly, came in at seven-thirty. The water darkened. The tops of the swells blew off all around, so that shreds of foam flew past. The seas grew tall, and the two boats jogged in tandem to put their trolling poles down. The last of the flood came at eight-fifteen, and as the tide turned back against the
wind, the sea rolled even higher. It rolled over both decks of the
Fearless
so deeply that Bob had to send Paul down to clear the bilges while he, at the wheel, negotiated swells, first from the west and then from the south, with the southwest chop and the tide pushing on top. The waves pressed so hard against the windows the glass sagged with their weight. Water poured in over the stern, filled the cockpit, and drained as the boat throttled uphill. Once, to port, Bob caught a glimpse of the
Wayfarer
, a third of her keel visible as she rode the waves. When he turned to look starboard, Paul stood beside him with a strand of vomit hanging from his mouth. “Taking a quick break,” he explained.

Bob had passed storms at the bilges himself, clearing the strainers of wet cardboard and caked oil, wedged in tight alongside the engine, listening to its scream, and breathing the putrid odor of diesel fumes, old salmon, and musty wood. It was not long before a person might have to vomit in that unlit and windowless hellhole. A storm would shake the entire length of the boat, and as you lay on your belly, her hull shuddered under you; you prayed with your face to the ribbing that she wouldn’t go under while you were down there alone beside that slamming engine.

“You better get back down,” Bob said. “I need you pumping bilge.”

Paul went. Darkness came. The seas steepened. Water buried the bow to the cabin; they lost radio contact with the
Wayfarer
, but Bob could see her running lights as she mounted into a nearby wave. He kept the
Fearless
diving deep into troughs and throttled hard up the steepest hills of white water, listening
to the engine change pitch. Then, in the dark, the mast and the radio antenna toppled. There was a crash and a shudder, and the
Fearless
listed to starboard, her mast hanging on by its rigging.

Paul came topside; anyone would have done that. Bob didn’t blame him for abandoning his post. But as soon as Paul slid the pilothouse door open, Bob waved him off and said, “Get back out there! Cut the damn thing loose! Cut that mast loose now!”

Paul went out with a flashlight and a hatchet. It was the last time Bob saw him, alive or dead. He wore his rain gear. He went without a question. There was vomit hanging from his lip.

They were swamped by three big ones in succession. They rode low, and the engine died. The
Fearless
turned broadside and, helpless now, did a half-roll into the ocean. It seemed to Bob both sudden and inevitable; he had just enough time to drag back the pilothouse door and make a grab before the water hit him.