Time Bandit by Andy Hillstrand Read Free Book Online Page B

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    But Johnathan was usually the first into Kasilof. And now that Russell had mentioned it, the men looked at one another like boys whose mother had caught them in a lie. Music was blasting from CD players in two parked pickup trucks with open doors. On a fold-out banquet table over by a derelict house trailer someone had laid out in foil pans a dinner of soggy macaroni and cheese and a salad that looked toxic. The food was cold and the booze bottles were a quarter empty.
    “Has anyone heard from him at all today?” Russell asked.
    “Not since last night,” Dino said.
    Russell speed dialed Johnathan’s cell phone number, then switched off his phone, remembering how Johnathan had fried his Razr last night on the fire.
    “Maybe he went to Homer,” Dino said. Along with Russell, Dino was Johnathan’s oldest friend. “You know John….”
    Russell did know him. He knew that he would be the last person to miss another rowdy night in the Kasilof camp. “What was he going to do with his fish in Homer?”
    “Russ, I didn’t think of that.”
    “Did you talk to him today?”
    “I just said not since last night,” Dino said.
    “Me, neither.”
    “You know Johnathan.” Dino waited a minute. “I thought he hit El Dorado and didn’t want us to know. I tried to reach him.”
    “He went out alone, didn’t he?”
    “Yes, he did.”
    Russell knew Johnathan especially well and for the longest time “because of the salmon thing.” They both owned salmon boats, were original members of the Kasilof fishing camp, and loved sockeye for the immediacy of the catch. They deployed the gill net and minutes later knew what they had caught. No waiting. No boredom. Russell and Johnathan shared a common view of the fishing life: Everybody has a good time; easy come easy go; no matter what happens, there will always be another day of fishing. Russell often summed up his view of life by saying, “It would just kill me to leave this planet with a full tank of gas in the truck. You can just as easily get killed making a left hand turn in town as you can drown out on the Bering Sea; you must live today like it’s your last; and the only easy day was yesterday.”
    As a teenager, he hung out with the Hillstrand brothers and was in and out of trouble because of them; the Hillstrand boys were always doing something that was on the edge, and their reputation in Homer in the summers was legendary. Russell was drawn to the sea because of his father, who had served in the Coast Guard in Kodiak, but Russell had to fight to find jobs as a teenager, while the Hillstrand brothers automatically went fishing with their father. The opportunity to work on Time Bandit had arisen a couple of times, but Russell chose other options on bigger and different boats each Bering Sea crab season, until recently, when he hired on with Johnathan and Andy as a crewmate.
    The Kasilof camp brought them together with more leisure time than on the Bering Sea. The camp was all about camaraderie. They never knew when the salmon were going to come in to spawn. The men in the camp were set up to go when the fish arrived offshore. But until that moment, they waited only yards from the shore. And around an oil-drum fire, they talked about how much money they were going to make, about gear, women, and fishing in seasons past. Then suddenly, the fish were running. The men dashed for their boats. They went out and fished, and when they came back at the end of the day, as it was growing dark, they talked about where they had fished and what they had caught. Russell wanted to catch every single fish in the sea. That was his dream. He was so competitive. If he played tiddledywinks, he wanted to win each game.
    If there were a camp hierarchy, Johnathan was the alpha dog. In the eyes of the other men, he was a pirate outlaw and a good fisherman who preferred to be lucky rather than good. He caught what he was fishing for, with the needed mindset to think like a fish. He had an