On the Western Bride

Photo by YoTuT

I’d been pinheading on a fishing boat called the Western Bride—scrubbing and prepping so I could fish for free— and that winter I’d made deckhand. This was when I was living in a cousin’s apartment on Adams in Huntington Beach, sleeping in the front room on the understanding that I went out and did my business and didn’t bother anybody with my problems.

Technically I was too young to be a deckhand; you had to be eighteen, but Rojas on the boat took care of that. He laid the forms out on the desk, his Dodgers cap smashed on his bald head, and he said, “Guess what?” and made me born a year earlier. He just wrote it in everywhere. It confused me, honestly, how uncomplicated it was, how easy. There’s not just one set of rules out there. That was a thing I had to learn. So the paperwork went through, and I was getting paid, and I even rated a share of the side money, which was like a dream. I’d take home fifty or sixty dollars a night. Once it was ninety-three bucks. I still showed up for school, enough to graduate—maybe, I hoped. But otherwise you could find me down at Newport. It was the one thing I couldn’t get enough of. Being on the water. Coastal fishing in the winter, offshore later in the summer. I loved it so much. It was like a taste in my mouth—the wind, the Pacific—but it went beyond that. I don’t know how to describe it, and I guess that’s what this story is about.

I always got there first. That was my thing. It just looks good, if you ask me. First on the boat. Four-thirty am. Grab a block of frozen squid and toss it into the bait tank. Then another. One, two, and you’ve made a beginning. Get the hose out and wash down the decks. Then sort up bags—gunny sacks with a number for each passenger. I’d make it into a game, do evens first, then odds. Do my lucky numbers, then my unlucky. I was alone; that was the best part. The solitude, being industrious. No mockers and scoffers. A perfect hour. Nothing eerie about it; it’d just be cold, down on the bay. After a while Crack, the cook, would come along; I’d hear him shuffling up the dock. “Magoo,” (not my name), “unlock the galley for me.” He knew the combination; he just didn’t like the dark. He’d tell me to shine my phone around. I’d get the galley open, and he’d tell me to finish making numbers. “And get some rental rods out of the office. And stock the galley for me.” Crack liked giving orders. He needed those little boosts. He needed somebody to kick around. I didn’t mind it. He had a hiding place in a partition above the fridge where he put pilfered food, snacks to smuggle home in his backpack.

Crack would be planted in the galley all day, cooking eggs for breakfast and then, for lunch, hamburgers and sausage sandwiches. Vroman, the captain, would call over the PA: “The grill’s hot, Crack’s cooking downstairs.” And all the passengers would shuffle down for their burgers and their burritos and their Modelos. He would sell you chips or sour watermelon candy. In the afternoon he would sit and massage his feet, taking off his shoes and rubbing his soles against the foot rail. He was way heavy, top percentile. He didn’t move good, handicapped by obesity. I couldn’t even guess his weight. He said three-thirteen, but I thought he was four hundred. He had the girth, the waddle. He had those dirty elbows that big people have, like muddy elephant knees, like his elbows never got soaped in the shower. He made his own socks by cutting the sleeves off long-sleeved T-shirts and...