Time Bandit by Andy Hillstrand Read Free Book Online Page A

as deckhands as a career or advance themselves to boat captains. Or they can fade away. Time does not work in their favor. After a few years, they think they know better than the captain. They want to make decisions. But they are not the captains. Andy tells them, before they get too big for their britches, “The only job where you can start on top is a ditch digger. You’re the head honcho from the start. Everything else, you have to work your way up, and if you have no desire for improvement, you will stay where you are, with your mouth shut.” Some deckhands remain simple tools who will never get anywhere. Andy and I tell a joke about them: “What is long and hard on a crab fisherman? The second year of third grade.” And we tell another one about the crewman who entered a bar with a ship’s propeller sticking out of his ass. The bartender points this out to him. The crewman says, “Aye. How do you think I got here? It be driving me nuts.”
    These days, I believe we are lucky to find anybody to work on the deck, much less good hands like Shea and Richard and Russell. Look what we ask of them: Work steadily without sleep for seventy-two hours in freezing temperatures with saltwater spray keeping you constantly wet. We expect them to perform tasks that would call for accuracy and economy of movement on land, and out on a heaving deck, they are balancing their bodies when all that another person could do is hold on for dear life. The demands are heavy. An ocean of death lies over the rails. The weather on the Bering Sea needs to be experienced to be believed. Time has no meaning. In day, the sun gives light; in night, sodium lamps, which we call “the Norwegian sun,” light their violent universe. Work and more work means bodies strained by overuse, sore muscles, and shattered spirits. During breaks, the food can taste lousy and must be eaten quickly. The living conditions are basic. What is there to like about crab fishing, except the money?
    And for this misery, Time Bandit ’s five crewmen are paid 30 percent of what the boat earns, less a share for diesel oil, bait, and food. In the opilio season last year, our crewmen grossed $32,000 apiece for the work of a couple weeks. Few jobs pay as much in that short a time, but the men know that after they have suffered through what the Bering Sea throws at them, nothing is free.

The Only Easy Day Was Yesterday
    By the time Russell Newberry had chugged (at eight knots) back to Kasilof cannery dock after a day of sockeye fishing, unloaded his salmon, cleaned the boat and walked through the gloaming to the junkyard fishing camp, he was prepared for a night’s revelry—booze, maybe somebody would bring a woman, jokes, some hot food, and laughter. He was getting into it, warming his hands over the oil-drum fire, lubricating himself with a Bud, with Dino Sutherland and some others like phantoms in the flickering light, when during a lull in conversation he thought to ask, “Has anyone seen Johnathan?”
    “Johnathan? No,” several of the fishing campers replied in unison.
    Russell understood the men’s apparent lack of concern. Johnathan was erratic. Unpredictable behavior was his only consistent feature, if anyone were to ask, though hardly anyone in camp would say so to his face. It was a shared characteristic; hardly anyone could ever predict what the captain of another boat might do. Things happened. The weather changed. An engine blew. Tides gripped a stalled boat, either shoving it toward home or out to sea. A collision with a log easily creased a hull and crippled a boat. As for a captain not responding to radio calls, it happened all the time. Captains who are not catching fish the way other boats were reporting simply did not want to hear about their good fortune and snapped off the radio. Besides, who was to say Johnathan was even planning to return to Kasilof? Russell expected him, but so what? He was a professional fisherman capable of watching his own