Widowmaker

The second spring with the Widowmaker, a friend from patrol boat days suddenly showed up on the dock. I was wheeling my cooler full of two days’ supplies down the ramp toward the boat, for my first overnight trip of the season, and saw some guy pacing up and down the planks, smoking a cigarette, peering at my boat as if he might be considering making an offer on her. He had a stunning Oriental lady with him, waiting off to the side from him, leaning against a dock piling, watching him at his study of the boat. He had only one arm.

I nodded at her as I went past, and she replied by lowering her eyes. I had to say, “Pardon me,” to get around the fellow, and even then didn’t recognize him. But by his smirk I knew I was supposed to, so searched my memory and dredged him up. When I got him recalled I can’t say I was glad to see him, but pretended I was and tried to believe it myself.

“Trullinger!” I said. “What the hell you doing here?” I tried to shake all the hands he had left, and he tried to hug me, but all we got out of the awkward operation was almost burned by his cigarette.

He threw it in the water, said, “Dave, I’m doing great, and so are you. I can see it.” He shook my hand.

Trullinger had been trouble on the boats, so he got shipped from one to another, never stuck on one, and was on mine for a very short time. I’d hardly got to know him before he shipped out for good. He was the kind of guy who always smoked, rarely got stoned, never got caught. He managed to keep himself just a bit hazed up most of the time, able to do what he was ordered to do, but usually a few beats slow at getting it done. That’s what cost him that arm, and except for luck, might have cost me that or a lot more.

We were out at night, a team of two boats, cruising a bank of the Mekong, looking for whatever we could find, but mostly, because of all the noise we made motoring along, trying to get somebody to shoot at us so we could shoot back at them. Because they couldn’t see us well, they had to fire at the sound of us. Most times they missed, and we could see their muzzle flashes, so we didn’t. It was usually a good formula for fighting our part of the war.

That black night Trullinger was sitting up on the foredeck, supposedly on watch, but surreptitiously smoking, with his reefer concealed in his hand, stupidly so the butt glowed toward shore to keep the skipper and the rest of the crew from seeing it. He wore a steel pot and flack jacket, and was armed with an M-16. He was exposed out there; the program was for him to fire a burst and bolt back into the cockpit the instant anything started. I didn’t know until I went up to rescue him, and saw that butt still alight and rolling on the deck, that it was he who got it going.

The first thing we saw was the flame and flash of an RPG round that missed, but not by much. Then we received a cloud of small arms fire, which we called and raised. By then Trullinger should have been off the bow and the skipper should have gunned the boat out of there. But Trullinger was just getting to his feet when another RPG round whapped into the bow, burst, took off his arm, left him lying there in the blackness bellowing.

I had to go up and get him, drag him into the cockpit, get a tourniquet on what was left of that arm. He was okay, and we got out of there all right, but the formula had been busted. We were never able to return fire effectively, and it was a minor victory for them, whoever they were and whatever that meant. But Trullinger was missing that useful appendage. There had been a lot of fire, and not all of the blood on me was his.

He was medevaced out, and I was reassigned to the safety of the repair yards. I did not see him again until he showed up there on the dock, gazing at the Widowmaker.

“This is Mai,” he said, holding out his only hand to the girl. It turned out he’d gone to Thailand after the Navy gave up getting him fitted with an artificial arm. “Those things take a lot of work,” he told me a bit short of jokingly, “and it only takes one arm to smoke. My disability pays me well enough; everything costs almost nothing in Thailand.” He nodded at Mai when he said this. “And nobody scolds you for smoking over there.”

Apparently he’d settled upcountry from Bangkok, made some connections, married Mai, in the two years he’d been out of the Navy.

“Then I saw that damned article of yours,” he laughed. “Some rich stoner from California had all his boating magazines sent over, and there you were. He and even Mai said I owed it to you to track you down, thank you for saving my life. Never had time to do that over there, you know.”

Trull and Mai hung around Astoria, lived in a cheap motel, didn’t seem to have a life, hung out on the dock whenever I was in. Mai began to look bored and restless, then even a bit jumpy. But Trull was always mildly lit, and always either exuberant or mellow. He spooked me the first time he asked to go out with me — all those memories of the last time he’d been out on a boat with me came storming back — but it’s hard to turn away a guy who has come to thank you for saving his life. Maybe I was subconsciously trying to give meaning, add value, to the fact that I’d done that. I don’t know. I took him on a day trip just out over the bar, after salmon, when they were in thick. Mai went with; she seemed to relax into the day as it went along.

Trull couldn’t operate a fly rod with one arm, so I set him up for harling: put a swivel and a couple of beads and a tiny two-blade spinner on the nose of an anchovy pattern, had him tow it 30 feet off the stern, in the prop wash. “You get a hit on that you’ll know it,” I told him. “Hold that rod tight.” He didn’t have any belief in the prospect of fish, and he needed to smoke, but luckily the first fish that came made a monstrous boil at the fly before circling to take it violently. Had it not tipped its hand, the rod would have been lost, because Trull was holding it between his knees and smoking. He had sense to throw his joint and grab the rod when he saw that boil. When the fish came back he still had trouble keeping the rod.

Of course he could not bring the fish in; he had no spare hand with which to crank a reel. But he was happy enough to pass the rod off to Mai after the first long run. She hadn’t done anything like that before, and got a hell of a kick out of playing that salmon. She was murderous; there was no way it was going back into the ocean after she’d led it thrashing into my net and I’d hoisted it over the rail. She pounced on it. It became groceries.

Early that afternoon, as often happens, a tidal wave of fog blew in suddenly off the ocean and broke over us, turned off the bright sun, shut off the long view. We kept fishing for awhile. Mai had one fish to go for her limit, wanted it badly, was holding onto the rod and peering over the stern, didn’t seem even to notice the fog. But it made Trull nervous. He said, “How do we get back into the river in this shit?”

I took him into the cabin, turned on the radar. The screen revealed the jetties and mouth of the river outlined almost as if on a chart. A few blips that were other boats caught out like us showed up as well. It took awhile to get a Loran reading — there was no GPS back then — and to pinpoint our exact position on the nautical chart. Then we reeled Mai in, unhappy at not catching her last salmon, and I used the radar to motor in to Astoria. By the time we broke out of the fog, three miles up the river, we had a trail of half a dozen small boats following us. They lacked radar, radios, probably even charts, were completely dependent on being able to see to get home, a mistake out where we were. I felt like the Pied Piper.

We went out together a lot that spring and summer, because Trull always asked if they could go whenever I was going without a charter, which was often — that article hadn’t brought much business, only Trull and Mai. I took them mostly because Mai got such a thrill out of it that I had trouble saying no. She fished, and when she’d get something — anything — she cooked up an amazing meal of it. She used an Oriental propane-fired cooker that could be a frying pan, broiler, boiler, seemingly whatever she wanted, and she had more ways to cook fish than there were fish in that ocean, or so it seemed. Trull got interested in running the boat, which I thought was beneficial. It’s always better to have two folks than one aboard who know how to get a boat home. I taught him to get a fix from the Loran, pin us on the chart, use the radar if needed to bring us over the bar. He made comm checks with the Coast Guard, even exchanged fishing reports with other boats. He loved to announce over the airways that we were into a monstrous bite when we weren’t over anything but empty ocean, then scoot out of there as soon as the greedy fishless flock began flying up to crowd in on us.

But he never was able to master the intricate shift, throttle, and rudder maneuvers necessary to get the Widowmaker in or out of her slip at the dock without banging a few other boats.

Once toward the end of summer he asked if he and Mai, for romantic reasons, could go out for an overnight trip by themselves. I vetoed that. “How the hell you going to get away from the dock?” I asked him.

He had no answer to that.