Widowmaker

In August the albacore came on close to shore. Close, for those small tuna on the Oregon coast, is anything under 100 miles, well out of reach for me. The Widowmaker was no car; she got about five miles to the gallon, and had a 40-gallon tank. That would just do it, out and back, but without an ounce extra to find the fish, or to weather a storm. A boat at sea is like a plane in the air: you calculate what you need, then double it. I couldn’t afford to do it, but Trull was wild to go.

“I’ll fill the tank,” he surprised me by saying. I hadn’t noticed he had a bunch of extra money.

“That’s only half the problem,” I told him. “We’ve got to go out with the tank full, and we’ve got to have the same in cans for spare.”

“How about a barrel?”

That one-armed asshole Trullinger bought a 55-gallon drum of high-grade gas, had it delivered to a cannery, paid the cannery boss to load it into a fish box, winch it gently down to the Widowmaker’s deck. I stood the barrel upright in front of the engine box, braced it against it, drilled holes in the floorboards, screwed eyed lug bolts into the deck, lashed that barrel so tight it wouldn’t come out if the boat rolled. If we needed it, we’d transfer it to the tank with a siphon hose.

It was a three-day trip: one to run out and find the fish; one to fish; one to gallop back on what turned out to be a placid sea.

The first day we left sight of land behind, crossed the abrupt line between green water and blue about 30 miles out, then ran steady for five more hours before we slowed down, set up a lookout on the cabin roof, started watching for birds. The sun was squatting on the horizon when we spotted a wheeling flock of seagulls, but we failed to get onto any fish before they went down, disappeared, the birds wandered away.

It was such a fine night that I bunked on the roof, gave Trull and Mai the single bunk in the cabin. I slept with earplugs in, to keep myself from going crazy — there is nothing like sex assisted by the sea — but all I heard were the muffled sounds of an argument.

The second day we were into fish about half the time. We started by jigging up herring, which we chopped up and tossed back out for chum. We kept our flies out and down on heavy heads, and watched for birds, but failed to see any. After a couple of hours we’d still seen no sign of fish, but one of the rods, in its holder, was suddenly bucking almost to breaking, with its tip pulled all the way to the tops of the waves that slapped gently against the Widowmaker’s side.

Trull couldn’t do a thing against that fish, or any of the many that followed. He couldn’t even fight the rod out of its holder against the weight and strength of them. Mai was too light, not strong enough to turn them from their long, brutal dives. I’d play a fish out, hand her the rod, take the gaff. We only caught the small ones. Anything over 10 or 12 pounds flopped off, broke off, or simply wore us out so we’d break it off to end it and get on with another. We were after numbers.

Mai attacked the tuna when they came flapping aboard. She’d cut their gills to bleed them, let them flop out their lives on the deck, then clean them. She sliced a fillet off one, pared it into thin strips, dipped the strips in soy sauce and wasabi, ate a few, offered one to me. I tried it, stopped fishing for awhile to eat more. Trull wouldn’t touch it. “Not until it’s cooked,” he said, and tried to get Mai to quit catching fish, fire up that propane pan, cook some for him. She refused to do it.

Mai ended up tight-jeaned and T-shirted, wet and bloody, long-haired and laughing. Trull was pissed at her, but maybe less because she wouldn’t stop fishing and cook for him than angry because with his absent arm he’d not been able to share much in the frenzied fishing.

A couple of fellows approached me at the dock while I cleaned up the boat the day after the tuna trip. The Widowmaker was a mess, and it took most of the day, but the tuna I’d arranged to have canned would last half of winter. These guys had read my article, and at first I thought they were prospective clients, interested in a similar trip out after tuna. I told them no; taking friends out was one thing, I’d never take charters out that far. Weather could easily come up. “Look at the name of my boat,” I told them, “and I don’t think you’ll want to go out with me.” It turned out they didn’t.

When their questions turned from tuna to Trullinger, I squinted a bit more closely at them. They were nearly twins, in their late 30s or early 40s, articulate, suspicious, dressed in new jeans and chamois shirts right out of the L. L. Bean catalog, trying to look rustic but failing. I could read the rest of their suits from the dress shoes on their feet. These were cops of some sort, even to the eye of a guy who had had very little interaction with law enforcement.

I answered as exactly as I could every question they asked about Trullinger and Mai, and realized as I did how very little I knew about either of them. It must have seemed to whoever these guys were, as it seemed even to me, that I was trying to hold something back. But I was not. When they went away, they left me with a million questions of my own.

We’d already planned another tuna trip for the following week. That spare barrel of gas had not been opened. I wanted to get enough tuna canned for the second half of winter. The unpredictable albacore were in, but could as abruptly be out.

The weather had frisked up by the time we left the dock, ran down the river, crossed the bar on the ebb tide — you don’t cross the Columbia River entrance in a small boat on the flood if you can avoid it. The outrushing tide and incoming waves collide, buck each other up. The waves turn sharp, sometimes knife-edged, and confused, so you can’t predict where one will suddenly rise up. That’s when boats drive onto jetties. We went out on the ebb, but it was still a bit rough. Once over the bar, the long run out to the tuna grounds wasn’t bad. The swells were high but lengthened out, so the Widowmaker climbed up and ran down them smoothly. With a little speed taken off, we had a fine ride.

Trull fiddled between the Loran and the chart the whole way out, making sure we were going to get back onto the tuna right where we’d left them the last time, though I told him it wasn’t all that important; they might be anywhere out there, we’d need to find them all over again. By the time we’d reached the precise same place, a little into the night because of the slower run out, I’d told him about the two visitors, and asked him all my questions.

All I got was the same single answer, that the Navy was always sending snoops around to check on him, make sure he hadn’t taken a job, which would be stupid, because it would cut into his disability an amount equal to whatever he earned. “Why earn anything?” he laughed.

That didn’t sound right to me. I didn’t believe him.

I’d waited too late.

When the boat loomed out of the darkness and into view at the tops of the swells, a few hundred yards away but closing on us slowly, I knew exactly what I was into.