The Doxy

The Doxy

Change of light – Jake and Buster - Sea lions– A parley – “Blue Boots”/The Gene S .- “Those tender boat assholes” - In Nakat Bay – A moment of silence

I was awake in my bunk, and I could feel my legs sweating against my foam mattress. Thunder reverberated through the mountains. I listened to the rain fall softly on the deck. I waited. Brian would be in to get me up soon. My knees ached at the thought of crawling on deck, and there was still a welt on my cheek from where a jellyfish tentacle had stung me the day before. We hadn’t been to town in five weeks.

The bunk in the forecastle was humid and warm, heavy with the scent of unwashed clothes and a six-pack of glass bottled beer that had broken open on our last jog back from town. I though about how the bottles had smashed into the toolbox after we’d ploughed through a stretch of ten-foot waves. I’d been driving the boat at the time, and there was a terrible feeling when we reached the top of a crest- that long moment where time seemed to pause- before the bottom fell out of the world, and we went crashing into the next trough.

There were six inches between my forehead and Brian’s bunk above mine, and I stared at the swirls in the wood. A filtered shaft of moonlight lit the forecastle, and I drifted in and out of sleep. In a dream there was a woman, warm and naked lying against me, all the sexless days disappearing as I concentrated on rivulets of sweat that ran across the contours of her shoulders and back.

But when I woke back up, I had the image of Dave in my mind. His fat and oily neck and the folds of pasty white skin. The salt stained ball cap covering his sparse white hair, and the way he waddled on deck because his midsection was so bloated. He’d been in my dreams ever since his heart attack. Ever since the joke had started that I’d killed him by asking him to climb the stack for my new rain gear. He’d died early in the season, before he had taught any of his crew members how to drive the boat. And after he’d died (midway between a steam from the fishing grounds to Ketchikan), the crew had floated for miles, captainless, and in a panic, dropping anchor too far from the shore so that it never hit bottom, and instead drug behind them like a bum leg. We’d listened to it all play out over the radio like it was a program broadcasted to entertain us, instead of an actual thing that happened.

I sighed and reached for my socks and pants at my feet and rolled out of the bunk. My throat was dry, and I felt like a beer. I hadn’t had a drink since I had gotten on the boat. All the work and all the boredom and all the death, and I hadn’t had a drink. It was a long time and a helluva thing. I thought about that for a while.

The analog clock on the wall of the wheelhouse read 4 AM. It was time for the change of light set. Brian hadn’t been to sleep that night, hadn’t properly been to sleep in days it seemed, and I’d only gone to bed two hours before. I wondered what kind of mood he’d be in. I brushed my teeth and was putting on deodorant when the VHF crackled to life.

“Attention all mariners. Stand by for important message from U.S. Coast Guard, Ketchikan, Alaska.” I walked up to the radio and turned the volume up a few notches.

I watched Brian’s outline on deck. He was bent over the stern and studying the end of our net.

“Attention all mariners, be on lookout for fishing vessel, The Doxy, thirty-two foot white and blue gillnetter out of Gig Harbor, Washington. Last seen Wednesday night fishing two point five miles southeast of Tree Point, Alaska near the Nakat Bay jackline. Repeat, the Doxy is a thirty-two foot white and blue gillnetter last seen fishing southeast of Tree Point, Alaska. Please report any information on missing vessel to Coast Guard channel eighteen. Over.”

I stared at the radio trying to comprehend the meaning. The message started to cycle over.

When I got on deck, Brian was already at work. The gibbous moon was fading but still high over the ridge of Canadian Rockies. The sky was star sprent and tendrils of fog drifted over the evergreen trees and enveloped the lighthouse. The water lapped against the hull, and the hydraulics lines on the drum pulsed like arteries carrying their fluids through rubber hoses.

I put on my rain gear and walked to the starboard side of the drum. I tried to think how I’d say it, and then decided to just say it fast and natural. “Jake and Buster are missing.” I couldn’t think of Jake’s face, but I imagined his dog, a golden retriever named Buster, wagging his tail and running back and forth across deck. They usually fished a couple of sets over from us, and I would watch him through the binoculars. The dog was always on deck, even when Jake wasn’t. A good lookout and ever faithful.

“Huh?” Brian didn’t look up from the net. He picked clumps of seaweed and small sticks from it, and I helped.

“The Doxy’s gone missing.”

“Says who?”

“Coast Guard. I just heard it on the VHF.”

The sky was purple and blue in the east. It felt like day was coming so much later than just a few weeks ago, and it made me feel both sad and excited to think of going home. The days of the $5000 catches were gone, but we were still making good money.

“He probably just cut out early with the closing today.”

I looked at Brian and didn’t think he believed what he’d said. The fishing on the outside was closed for a few days, and most guys went inland to work an open fishery on the weekends. You had to be lazy or in need of repair to not spend the weekend grinding inland. Everyone knew Jake was dumb, but he wasn’t lazy. His frenetic worship of the Lord was proof enough of that.

“I like the guy, but he doesn’t have a fucking clue what he’s doing. He’s corked the shit out of a Randy a few times, and he got us early season. Maybe he just gave up on Nakat for the weekend. A guy’s gotta have some guts and the right teaching to make any money there.”

“That’s where he went missing,” I said.

Brian didn’t say anything, and I could tell he was worried and thinking it over.

The net came slowly over the stern, and finally, the seaweed cleared and there were a few fish. They were no longer the vibrant silver of early summer but rotting and black and eggless. With jagged misshapen teeth, and chunks of missing flesh where sea lions had been gnawing at them, they were like mutant versions of their early summer selves. The net was full of surprises by this time in the season.

Brian grunted and paused from picking. “Jesus, Mike. They look about as good as I feel. Fucking sea lions.” He grinned, and his teeth shown in the dim light.

There was a fish every few fathoms for the first hundred, and the boat bobbed in the three-foot rollers as I yawned and blinked sleep from my eyes. The rain was just a drizzle now, and I started daydreaming of the first cup of coffee, jogging on the gear with the sun warming my face, the clouds receding back into the mountains until they cleared the sparkling inland fjords and disappeared back into Canada. But in my mind, I kept going back to Buster running the deck of The Doxy, and those mossy granite cliffs of Nakat Bay. They’d be hard to climb if a guy fell in, I thought.

I picked the net in a mechanic fashion, but before long the fish were coming over the rail in large clumps, and I jabbed my fish picker into the net trying to keep up with Brian. These fish were lively and small, mostly pink salmon, with spots on their tails and dumb vacant looks in their eyes. They were only thirty-five cents a pound, half the price of chums, and I was starting to hate them for being so cheap and plentiful. Sometimes I wanted to break apart their gill arches with my hand, step on them and watch them burst open. Punish them for making me work just as hard as three weeks ago but for half the money.

The net was slick with jellyfish slime, and their bulbous, membranous bodies came up with the fish and then broke apart in the meshes of the net and plopped on the deck like blobs of pink and purple snot.

Brian yelled out like he’d been burned by a hot iron and slammed the drum to a stop.

“Motherfucker. Motherfucking fucker.” There was slime across all across his cheek and nose, and he shook his head from side to side. I could already imagine the welt on his face. They had a way of lingering. I’d been jellyfish stung across the eye so bad earlier in the season that I went blind for a day, and continued to have blurriness and tearing for two more.

Brian cursed again, but then started the drum back up. He looked angry and in pain but said nothing else. There’s only so much time to feel sorry for yourself, or anyone else. That was something Brian was always saying to me.

We picked the fish from the net, but many were too small to get caught in the large meshes. They fell out and hit the deck hard, popping off like bleeding firecrackers at our feet and splashing the jellyfish slime onto our pant legs before spasming out their last few moments of life in bloody half arcs all across the deck. A few other fish were like chunks of ice, large silvers and sockeyes, already in rigor mortis and heavy enough that they could break a toe if they hit just right. The fish piled up and blocked the scuppers and turned the deck murky and russet colored, and pretty soon we were ankle deep in them.

“Goddamn,” Brian said. “There’s a metric fuck ton of em’ this morning.” His mood had already turned away from the news of The Doxy. Despite the pain, it was obvious the set would turn in good money. “Mike, you better go throw a few down before they start falling over the sides.” The boat rocked hard starboard and a few dozen fish smashed into the rail.

“Alright, Cap, I gotcha.”

I left the net and pulled the hatch covers off the holds. I rearranged the brailer bags, and then threw dozens of fish in the port hold to even out the boat’s weight. I worked on my hands and knees, and each time I tossed one of the stiff fish into the hold, it echoed against the fiberglass sides like a stone down a well. My back ached, and my palms cramped from grabbing fish by their thick tails.

I put the hatches back on and returned to helping Brian.

“How many did you put down?” he said.

“About a hundred.”

Brian stopped picking from the net and surveyed the rest of the deck. There must have been another hundred fish and ten more in the couple fathoms of net between the drum and the stern. There was blood everywhere, even a little glistening in his sandy blond beard.

“At this rate, they just might sink us. It’s turning into a theatre of fucking war, man.” He smiled wide like a little kid, that smile that said the fishing was still good. How did he always end up in such a good mood, I thought. Maybe it was because he was the youngest captain in the fleet. Maybe it just felt that good to have his own boat, to be making money on his own terms. One thing I’d come to learn: fishing was about money more than anything, and when we were making it, the rest of the world had a way of folding back into itself.

I smiled too and decided to play along. “Should I employ counter-insurgency measures, sir?”

“Naw, not unless the little bastards get up past the top of the scuppers again.”

In another hour, we’d finished picking the last hundred fathoms. There must have been four hundred fish in the set. I couldn’t remember a set all season that had lasted longer or had had more fish. I worked at throwing the fish down the holds and cleaning the deck and started whistling to myself. Brian had played the “Best of Michael Jackson” on the boat stereo the night before, and I had “Billie Jean” stuck in my head. Pretty soon he joined in and was singing the lyrics. He took a break from setting back the net in the water and started moon walking in his blood encrusted deck boots, and I laughed. On our boat, we passed days with an I Pod mix and old copies of the New Yorker Brian’s girlfriend mailed us. I thought of sitting in old Randy’s galley at the net float, gas station porno strewn on the dining table and a tape of Conway Twitty on a boom box. Things could have been much worse.

By the time Brian set the net back, the early morning fog and rain had cleared, and it was turning into a bright and warm day. Maybe only seventy or so degrees in the sun, but hot enough that the inside of my rain gear was already sticky and sour with the scent of fish guts and blood. I peeled off my rain jacket and pants and went inside.

I made a pot of coffee, and then poured a cup. The taste was rich and bitter and streamed down my throat. I felt that jolt of energy fighting back against the waves of tiredness, and it made me think of caffeine after a hangover. The way it had of cutting through the fog and making everything better, if temporarily.

Brian sprayed the back deck and then changed from his rain gear. I walked to the open cabin door to ask if he wanted a cup, but then suddenly he came rushing at me and pushed me aside into the kitchen counter. He hopped into the forecastle and returned with his rifle. Brian put the boat in gear, and the diesel engine roared to life. The engine strained as he rammed it through the gears, up to what must have been ten thousand RPMS for a short sprint along our net. We crashed through the water, and I could feel my stomach slam into my throat. I bounced high as we hit each wave, and then I hit my head on the low ceiling, shattering a bare light bulb all over the galley floor. I cursed and rubbed my head. Brian looked back at me, and I stared at him. He ignored me and went back to firing out the port side window for a minute or so, and then put the boat in neutral and climbed out the window.

“Get me more ammo,” he shouted. “Worry about the light bulb later. We’ve got a couple of sea lions in the net.”

I went down into the forecastle and fumbled through the toolbox for more bullets, all the while muttering to myself.

“Every fucking time. Every fucking time, he does this. Sea lions, and he acts like their fucking killer sharks.” I talked to myself for a while to work down from the anger. “All that gas and time just to save a few fish from getting eaten.”

The door of the head flew up as we hit another wave, and I noticed there were bullet casings in the toilet. I scanned the floor (an area of about two feet by three which doubled as a miniature shower) and saw five or six more shell casings. They were coming in from the small port side window, where I could see Brian lay prone, with his rifle over his shoulder. He’d stopped firing, and I walked back into the cabin and put the bullets on the captain’s seat.

I stared at the shattered glass on the floor. Fuck it, I thought. He can clean it up when he gets back in.

Brian stood on the port side of the bow and scanned the net for the offending sea lions. I hadn’t seen them. I could rarely seen them, but Brian had a hawkish sense for these things. I watched him as he leaned in the window for the extra ammo and reloaded. He walked back to the bow and stood.

There was a short burst on one our other radios. “Mike, you got me on here.” The voice sounded old, a little slurred and deliberate like someone who carried too much weight in the neck, and I could tell it was Randy on The Kimberly.

I reached for the radio. “Yeah, Randy. I got you.” I watched Brian pacing the bow through the window, still searching the net.

“You hear this deal about Jake on The Doxy?”

“Yeah, we just got the transmission during our change of light. You wanna talk to Brian, you’ll have to wait. He’s massacring some sea lions.”

Randy chuckled. “Yeah, I seen that. The fishing’s slow over here, and I been watching through my binoculars. Looks like you guys had a helluva first set there before them sea lions come around. You must have caught everything before they could get down to me.”

“We caught a couple,” I said.

“Right, a couple. You guys fishing Nakat after the closure today?”

“Yeah, affirmative there, Randy. Brian thought we’d fish up by the jackline.”

“Shit,” he said, “up there with the big boys. Tell Brian I want to come around and parley. I’m gonna leave the gear here and give it a good soak.”

“Right, Randy. I’ll tell him. See you in a few. Over.”

“Hey, uh wait.”

“Yeah.”

“A few of us are gonna meet on The Gene S. tonight over by Cape Fox. Have a drink and say a prayer for Jake if you guys wanna anchor up.”

“Alright, I’ll let Brian know. Over.”

About fifty feet away, The Kimberly bobbed stern to stern with us. Randy stood on the back deck and ran the boat from the second throttle he had next to his drum. It was not the safest way to parley, but guys did it all the time. I walked on deck and stood next to Brian who still had his rifle in hand.

“Ahoy there, boys. I hear you’re having some sea lion trouble.” Randy was shouting to be heard above the idling engines, but it was the kind of clear day that when we sat on the gear with the engine off I could hear a boat coming from miles away. When, with the right kind of ears, I could hear the eery chatter of deckhands practically a quarter mile from us.

“I think I scared them off,” Brian said.

“Yeah, just remember to be careful firing off the bow like that. I was doing that one time and damn near killed myself.”

“What happened?” Brian put the boat in reverse and backed a little closer to The Kimberly in the shifting seas.

“I was shooting at this little shit fucking seal that was swimming around my gear. Somewhere up near Juneau in the 80s. I had this brand new scoped rifle I brought up with me that season. I was popping shots off my hip, but then got down on my belly and lined one up through the scope. Only problem was that the scope had gotten off in the ride up that year, and so when I fired a shot it went about three inches lower than I meant. The bullet hit my anchor chain, ricocheted back, and nailed me smack dab in the middle of my forehead.” Randy chuckled his big man’s laugh like it was funny instead of horrific.

“I was stunned. I was pretty sure I’d killed myself. But then I walked back inside the cabin and saw the bullet had lodged between my skin and skull. I took out a pocket knife and pried the bullet out, and then drove myself back to town for stitches.”

Brian and I stared at each other. Randy was no doubt a tough old guy, a former crabber in the Bering Sea and off the coast of Oregon, but he had a bunch of these near death stories. Stories where he climbed a mountainside after his truck crashed over the guardrail, or cut himself out of bite lines while forty foot waves crashed down on him, and it was hard to know how much stock to put in them.

“No Coast Guard?” Brian said.

“Ah, shit, they don’t come out unless you’re missing an arm, or turn up drowned.”

“Or, you have a heart attack,” I said.

Brian and Randy turned to me.

“Yeah, or you up and die like poor old Dave.” Randy took off his long-billed cap and wiped his big red forehead with the back of his hand. “What do you guys think of this whole Doxy thing?”

“I don’t know,” Brian said. “He better turn up soon, or one of us will have to talk to that big loud wife of his.”

Randy laughed. “Maybe he just went back to town because he felt bad for missing church during our opening last Sunday.”

Brian smiled. “God damn, he’s not a bad guy, though. Corked the shit out of us during change of light a few weeks ago, and I ran his ass up and down on the radio for it. Then, when I saw him in Ketchikan later that week, he gave me a McDonalds gift certificate for $20 and a hand written apology on the inside of a book. Guess he felt that bad about it.”

“What was the book?” Randy said.

“You Can’t Be An Atheist Because God Doesn’t Believe in Them.” Brian said

We all laughed. It was just the sort of book you could imagine Jake giving someone.

“Sonuvabitch means well. Just needs to cut out that God shit and figure out the fishing.” Randy spit out into the water. “Alright guys, meet you tonight over on the Gene S.?”

“Yeah, we’ll be there,” Brian said. “We’ll probably knock off early, maybe around sunset.”

We steamed to the off load point in the little bay inside Cape Fox. It was just after noon, and we were south of the lighthouse and around the bend from Nakat Bay.

Brian had regretted the sea lion ordeal, and let me drive the boat as he swept the glass from the cabin floor. He took the wheel when finished, and in a few minutes we could see The Gene S., bright and red and black and shining in the sunlight. There was a skull and crossbones painted on the bow like it was some sort of modern day pirate boat, but really, it was just an old steel crabber out of Seattle that doubled as a tender boat for gillnetters in the summer. It must have been a little over a hundred feet long, and when we pulled alongside, starboard to port, it cast a huge shadow over us that made me feel like we’d be crushed by it.

It was still clear, and a couple of eagles sat perched on the tops of evergreens. The wind was blowing steadily, and I watched the trees sway hard. The replacement captain of the Gene S. was a young guy named Gabe, and he greeted us by tossing over a line. I tied it to our stern raiol, and then caught the next line from one of their deckhands.

“How goes Blue Boots?” their deckhand, Paul, shouted at me.

I’d shown up to Alaska with cheap, blue deck boots that went to mid-calf and looked like they were made for a child at play on the beach, and so I’d spent the first week of the season as “Blue Boots,” a bad nickname for someone trying to earn his spot. My captain, the deckhands on the other boats, the tender guys, and especially Dave, the obese and sour former captain of the Gene S., had called me it. It hadn’t taken long before I got tired of the nickname, and I so I’d put in an order with the processing plant for new boots and rain gear at the end of my first week fishing.

On a Saturday near the end of June, the gear had arrived. When we’d met the boat, Dave had been the only one on deck at the time, and the gear was in a box along with our groceries on the top of a double stack of ten-foot by twelve-foot plastic tubs. He’d cursed me, and then waddled over and climbed the stack to get my gear. I remembered him gasping for breath after he handed me the box, and me pulling back after sweat from his hands dripped on to mine. He died in his bunk on the way back to town two hours later.

“You know, I haven’t had those boots for over a month,” I said to Paul and tied the other line to the bow.

“Yeah, not since you killed Dave.” He smiled a toothy grin, and the veins on his forearms were huge and wrapped in barbwire tattoos.

I looked at him. “At least I wasn’t the dipshit who dropped anchor two miles from shore.” He stared at me but didn’t say anything else.

The seas were rocking hard in the little bay, and the raised deck of the Gene S., some six feet above ours, threatened to pull our rails loose from where they were bolted in to the deck. The wood made a terrible moaning sound with each little wave like it would splinter apart at any moment.

Brian was hooking a brailer bag to the metal hook on the end of the hyrdraulic crane and yelled at Paul, “Hey, loosen up the ties on your end before you pull my goddamn rails off.”

“You guys will be fine, everyone else has,” Paul said, and went about sorting fish from a tub.

Gabe ran the hydraulic crane and lifted the brailer bag from the hold. He was still new to working the cranes, and it was a slow process. Brian became more tense with each moment, and one of our rails, the one even with the back of the wheelhouse, was straining at its base, while the molding looked like it was coming away from the deck.

Each bag was nearly a thousand pounds, and it was a spectacle to watch one swing in the air forty feet over the deck, knowing that if it fell on me it would crush me, and I would become nothing more than a hideous splotch of splintered bone, guts, and blood. I thought about what it would be like to die that way, and watched as the miasmic juices drained to the bottom of the bag and spilled out in vile arcs across both decks.

“Paul, I’m not fucking around. Loosen the fucking ties,” Brian yelled again. As a rule, Brian hated the deckhands on tender boats because he thought them lazy and slow. He felt they cost him money by being inept.

Gabe hollered across deck at Paul. “Hey do what the captain asks, alright, Paul?” Gabe turned back to us. The last of our bags was offloaded, and now we waited for the check. “You guys hear that Norm on The Dog Catcher says they found The Doxy crashed up into the rocks. A couple miles east. No one on board.”

Brian nodded at Gabe and then stared at Paul as he slowly fumbled with one of the lines. “Coast Guard show up yet?”

Gabe was writing out our check on a clipboard. “They’re sending out a cutter, but it might be a couple hours. Who knows, as bad as shape as that boat of his was in, Jake might of just crashed the thing to collect on it.”

At that moment, part of the molding from the middle rail splintered and a screw broke loose.

Brian screamed at Paul. “God damn, you fucking idiot!” He ran to the bow line to untie us before that rail gave way as well and yelled at me to untie us from the stern.

When we were free, Brian jogged back in to the wheelhouse and steamed away from the Gene S. as fast as our boat would go.

Gabe called our boat on the radio. “Hey, what about your check there, Cap?”

Brian was still furious. “Keep the fucking thing until tonight, and tell your fucking deckhand to get his fucking head out of his ass.” Brian slammed the receiver on the wheel and turned the radio off.

There was another full day of fishing, and all the effort that entailed, beating back behind us and erased and forgotten by the day’s warm ocean breeze and the forever of the Alaskan blue sky, but I felt no grace in the afternoon. The sense of accomplishment I usually felt after delivery was muted by the mystery of the crashed boat, and the sour taste of delivery.

We spent the early afternoon fishing the jackline at the mouth of Nakat Bay. The current ran hard, and it flooded on every set. We had to pick every thirty minutes because the net would be swept a half-mile inland in that time. It was difficult work for two to keep up with, and I thought about the struggle someone like Jake would have working a set by himself. Most one-man crews fished farther inland where the waters were calm and the fish less plentiful.

Between sets I didn’t bother to change from my rain gear, but instead stayed on deck and studied the face of the rocks that walled off and channeled the fjord. There were clumps of trees with gnarly gray roots that grew out of the granite, clinging to it like they were fearful of being washed away at any moment.

Brian came on deck from the cabin and stood next to me. We both just stared out at the cliffs. An eagle glided down from one of the trees and floated across the shimmering blue surface of the water.

“I never did believe that birds were the souls of dead fisherman,” he said. “I’m just not the superstitious type.”

“You think he crashed it on purpose?” I asked Brian.

“Guys leave boats out here all the time for one reason or another. He wouldn’t be the first. It would explain why he took his dog with him.”

“But you don’t figure that’s what happened?”
“I have a hard time believing it.”

“Me too,” I said.

“Fuck it,” he said. “Let’s go back up in the bay. I need a nap before we meet back up with those tender boat assholes.”

I drove the boat out about an eighth of a mile from the net, pointed it straight at the middle, and then set it to autopilot. The bay was calm, and the net had been in the water for over an hour. Brian had been asleep most of that time. At that distance, I had about a minute to get on deck and piss before we ran over it over. It was a game I played sometimes when Brian napped, and I was bored. I needed any kind of distraction that afternoon.

I could see every boat in the one mile by five mile stretch of the waterway as I pissed over the side of the boat. I held myself and looked at the fishscales on the hairs of my knuckles and saw them glitter in the light. It seemed like as the summer went on there were fishscales everywhere. In the bunks, on our boots, in the food. Under our fingernails and in our ear canals.

The boat was practically on top of the net now, and I zipped myself up and jogged back to the cabin. I took the wheel and turned it slightly towards the net so the prop wouldn’t get caught. I straightened it out and nodded to myself. Pretty close this time.

I continued jogging the boat along the gear and took the binoculars from behind the radar screen on the dash. Randy had the next set over from us, and he was combing the last fifty fathoms of his net. I could see each fish he picked: chum, chum, pink, chum, and the rest a mess of seaweed. When he was done, he set to work cleaning a few of his fish. Randy was unstable on deck. He didn’t have a tray to cut the fish on, and he worked on his hands and knees. I wondered how many years of fishing he had left in him. When he finished cleaning his fish, he went back inside and started the old wooden boat. I looked at the name on the boat and studied the scripted, careful lettering: Kimberly. It was Randy’s wife’s name. Someone loved that brutal, surly man, and he loved them back. Had anyone thought to call Jake’s wife, I thought.

I drove the boat back and forth along our net in low gear until the middle bunched and both ends hooked in on themselves and caught tree branches and seaweed. It was long past the time we should have picked it. Around the middle of the net there was a weird, glinting mass, and I looked through the binoculars again. It was oddly proportioned and unlike anything I’d seen in the net. I stared at it for a good ten seconds, and then I realized it was a loaf of bread.

I shouted down to Brian in the forecastle. “Hey, Cap, wake up. You gotta check this out.”

“Ah, uh huh, Mike. Is it about time to pick up?”

Brian climbed the stairs from the forecastle and yawned and scratched his stomach. He stared out the port window at the net. “Wow, it really turned into a shit heap.”

“Check out the middle,” I said and handed him the binoculars.

He peered through them. “Whole wheat or potato?”

“White?” I said.

“Yeah, no one gives a fuck about white,” he said and laughed.

Brian put his boots on slowly, and then we switched places, and he drove us to the north end of the net. I went on deck and reached over the side with the gaffe hook. I picked up the net by the buoy bag up and attached it to the drum.

There were a few fish in the net, but mostly it was just junk. The process was slow and my mind drifted. I broke apart sticks in the net, and then slid them free from the meshes and tossed them overboard. We got to the loaf of bread, and I picked it out with the hooked end of my fish picker. I turned to throw it in our trash in the cabin when Brian spotted a dark, weird mass in the net about ten fathoms out. I could see it was encased in stems of olive brown seaweed, and it was wrapped in the green meshes many times over. When it was halfway up the back of the boat, the hydraulics on the drum whirred in protest, and we leaned over and pulled it over the stern. It was heavy, and my back burned with the weight. It took us twenty minutes to get it fully unentangled, and the whole time we knew it was a dead dog. The tail came free first, and it was stiff like it was made of a heavy gauge of wire. A couple of half eaten fish fell out as we unwrapped the layers. When we got to the head, the left eye was open and staring out at us, but there was a hole in the head where the other eye should have been. There was fur and flesh torn out from around the right eye socket. Something had been at eating at it, and a raggedy mess of blood vessels was the only thing left in the gaping hole in its head. We both just stared at it. That place where an eye should have been. I felt angry and sick and bile rose in the back of my throat. I wanted something to clear the taste and wondered if the tender boat had a bottle of whiskey.

“Good fucking God,” Brian said. “Let’s put in on the middle hold.”

I grabbed the front legs, and Brian grabbed the back. They were stiff and solid like the silvers and sockeyes we’d pulled up in the first set of the day. It was Jake’s dog. There was no doubt. After we sat it on the hatch, I kicked it hard in the ribs, as if I thought it might suddenly hop up and be okay. I felt bad about doing it.

“We’ll finish picking the neck. Then, get the shovels from the lazarette.”

I nodded. I couldn’t say anything.

At dusk, we anchored up and rowed our skiff out to a break in the rocks where the muddy shore led up to the woods. We carried the dog back into the trees a ways, breathing hard and cursing the entire way because Buster was so big and water logged. A swarm of no-see-ums followed us like a cloud, and we sat Buster in the tall grass as we dug a hole five or six feet deep in the soft dirt. The flies bit me on the face, on the arms, and I slapped at them. They landed around the dog’s exposed eye socket and sucked on the blood vessels until the area was just a buzzing baseball sized mass. I burned with anger and stopped digging to beat at the dog’s face with my fist, trying to clear away the flies. Brian stared at me and said nothing, and when I stopped pounding away at the dog’s head, there were just at many flies as before.

When we were finished, Brian rose from the dirt, panting, and pouring sweat. “Let’s pray Jake is still out there,” he said.

And I nodded. Brian reached out his hand, and I held it while we shared a moment of silence. But in my mind I thought of a man falling off his boat at the crest of a tall, frothing wave and then struggling to climb up the mossy cliffs around him. I thought of the panic that would set in when the water filled his nose, his vision blurred, and his mind turned dark. And I thought about a dog jumping over board, swimming out to help his friend, and then going under.

I thought I’d see if The Gene S. had any liquor, and if they did, I thought I’d drink my fill.