Chapter Text
SEA-HOARDINGS
My heart is open again and sea flows in,
It shall fill with a summer of mists and winds and clouds and waves breaking,
Of gull-wings over the green tide, of the surf's drenching din
ACT I
Sea salt spray chaps John’s lips. Flecking and settling and drying to a salty crust that forces him to lick it away, pushing the salt grains into the open splits. Worsening the problem and the sting, only to repeat the process all over again a few moments later. His bag strap digs into a shoulder, pulling his weight sideways and turning his posture lopsided, the strain to correct it making his spine ache pleasantly.
Like a good, long stretch.
The docks beneath his boots are weathered, sunbleached, covered in dried sheets of barnacles and spray from the ocean– the sides are splintery in places where boats have bashed up against them in the rough seas, even with the protection afforded by the harbor. He’s accompanied by a few gulls, hopeful for scraps he doesn’t have, but the awkward screech of their calls is part of the music. He’s right where he wants to be, chapped lips and chill wind picking at any place his jacket doesn’t cover, ruffling the curls off his forehead until he knows it will be bright red, too. Dutch Harbour is a far cry from Wisconsin, but the winds off the water aren’t too different from those off Lake Michigan.
The skyline, on the other hand, is jarring. And the lack of car exhaust or buildings more than two or three stories tall. And the stars he had seen last night, camped out on the floor of the hostel, head tilted towards the window when the giddy nerves had left him too wired to sleep– they are more than he ever could have imagined he would see.
Three days ago, he’d been in a classroom, taking notes on tax law, hopping parties with friends, and kissing his girlfriend on the cheek with the sneaking suspicion he wasn’t going to come home to a girlfriend altogether. He was thinking maybe he wouldn’t go back to college at all.
It had been a whim, one of the reckless, split-second decisions that John’s friends laughed off and his mother reviled him for. An ad in the newspaper, hidden and tucked away; would John like to risk his life for a couple weeks for a couple grand– if all went well? Would he like to weather dangerous waters and hazardous working conditions on a boat with a crew of other men he would only know for a handful of days?
High risk, high reward.
The plane ticket had drained nearly all of his savings, the gear– thermal clothes, gloves, rubber-soled boots, a good, warm jacket, a couple of sweaters knitted by his mother, and a duffel bag to carry it all– stole the rest.
The strap still digs into John’s shoulder.
He’s got directions scribbled on a piece of paper. Just a scrap of a napkin, really, coffee-stained and crumpled, from the local one-room diner. They tell him which dock to go down, which turn to take, what boat he’s looking for.
Alice.
There’s a handful of boats being prepped, the sharp tang of diesel filling the air alongside the smell of salt and fish guts as cranes lift thousand-pound crab pots onto their decks. Crew scramble over them like ants, scuttling around precarious metal traps to secure them down as the boats sway with the tide, gulls scattering around bright orange, bib-clad bodies. It’s an organized sort of chaos, no rhyme or reason to it except for the part where everybody knows exactly where they need to be. John feels something scrawny and small around them that’s got less to do with the lack of meat on his bones and more to do with the lack of experience under his belt.
“”Scuse me,” he says, catching the elbow of a bearded, tattooed deckhand. Broad in a way John is still wondering if he’ll ever be, twenty now and still lean. A cigarette dangles from the man’s chapped lips when he turns to raise a brow at John. “You know where I can find the crew of the Alice?”
“Three boats down. The gray one– you their new greenie?”
“Last one they’ll ever need.”
The deckhand snorts, scuffing at the dock. “Give it a few days of no rest, and we’ll see what tune you’re singing, kid.”
His words are derisive, but his tone nice enough, and John grins, then glances at the pack of cigarettes, battered and crumpled, tucked into the deckhand's fishing bib.
“Hey, buy the rest of the pack off you?”
A raised eyebrow, and a pause for thought. Then: “Twenty bucks.”
“Deal.” John nearly drops his bag digging around a pocket for a crumpled twenty, smoothing it flat against his thigh. The cigarettes trade hands, as does the money, and John waves his goodbye to the far more friendly fisherman and shuffles his way further down the docks. Around more assembled pots waiting to be loaded, and crew shouting, and even a cat, lazing about in the sunshine but more than willing to purr for a few scratches under the chin.
The cigarettes fill the empty spot left by the twenty, John whistling along cheerfully to the edge. A handful of sea-rough men linger there, discussing the previous season, their expectations for the coming one. Talking about the sort of money John’s never fathomed he’d see in his lifetime. A thousand dollars alone for a few days seems egregious, and that’s with the fixed rate he’s guaranteed as a newbie. The men in front of him can make five times that easily.
He interrupts again, stepping close enough to be noticed hovering, and offers his hand to each one of them. “Alice, right? John Egan.”
“New kid,” one of the deckhands grunts, with a tight squeeze that John matches. “You sure you’re in the right place?”
“Stronger than I look,” John says, adjusting the damned strap of his duffel again. “Here to make the same money you are.”
“Captain doesn’t suffer idiots, or an attitude, kid.”
“Ah, well, good thing I’m all personality and brains.”
The deckhand, a middle-aged man who introduces himself as Smokey, glances at one of his companions, who sucks his teeth and spits brown tobacco onto the dock. “Let him learn, Smoke. Nobody here’s gonna be on your side unless you work just as hard, Greenie.”
“I know how to work hard.”
“College kid?”
John waves a hand, blasé. “For now.”
“Shit,” Smokey drawls, “almost makes you miss being twenty. Too much fuckin’ confidence, and a dick that still works. Your dick work, Greenie?”
“My friends call me Bucky,” John says. “Worked well enough last time I asked my girl.”
“The hell kind of name is Bucky?”
“My name.” John shoulders his bag, feeling the dock rock beneath his feet, rock his stomach. He looks up at the curved ribcage of a ship behind the shoulders of the two deckhands. “This is it, right?”
“Her,” Smokey’s companion corrects. “Ships are always women, you treat ‘em with the same respect you treat your girl.”
“Or your mother,” Smokey corrects.
Alice is a tired ship, with a gray belly that might have been blue once, judging by the paint chips left behind here and there. Rust gathers around the rivets holding her together, a bright splash of orange that seems almost obscene in the wintry monochrome of Unalaska. At eighty feet or so, she isn’t the largest ship in port, but still far from insubstantial; the buoys hang from her railings nearly as large as John is. Orange, dripping seawater, and stubborn brown algae, John has the childish urge to reach out and push at one like he might a wayward balloon. But the gap between boat and dock is too wide, the water too dark, the likelihood of getting crushed up between the two massive objects a hair-raising way to die. Her name is painted on her side in gold and white lettering, faded and sun-bleached and sanded away by salt-rough waves. The image of it is more in the shape around the lack of paint, rather than the letters themselves. There are a few men milling around on deck, and a crane hauling crab pots on board– John can hear the heavy clang of them hitting the deck like a car crash.
“Go get your kit stowed, Greenie,” Smokey says, scraping the dregs from a tin of tobacco and tucking the brown leaves into his lip. “Cap’ll want to hold a prayer and a speech before we cast off. You called your mama?”
“Before I headed down to the docks.”
“You tell her you love her?”
John feels his ears heat. “‘Course.”
Smokey grunts again, glancing at his companion. “Make sure you meant it, kid. May be the last thing she ever hears from you.”
The words seem aimed to scare John, cow him back into place with the prospect of any of the mishaps that might take him early from this world on a crab boat. An icy slip overboard, a sudden rogue wave, the boat springing a leak or capsizing and taking her entire crew with her down into the depths. Without the bright orange survival suit to help keep John warm, he’d last a minute or two; with them, only hours. The contract he’d signed had laid it all out in cold, clinical terms. Maybe John is a lunatic. A little more than just bored with the life he’d found himself settling for; a girlfriend he was pretty sure was cheating on him, college classes that had him tearing his hair out with disinterest. A future that seemed as unappealing as it did vanilla-flavored. He should be scared by the danger. His stomach instead clenches with something like anticipation.
“Bill’s gotta call his Mama,” Smokey adds. “Get your shit stowed and then go help them haul those pots. You got gloves?”
John nods, digging through a pocket until he pulls out the fingerless mittens his mother had knitted for him. Bill scoffs.
“Those are good for the under layer, but those pots will tear your palms up in half a second and give you tetanus for the trouble. Here–” Smokey tugs out his own pair of work-beaten latex-soled gloves. “I’ll need ‘em back by the end of the day, but use ‘em for now.”
John takes them, trying to hide his grin, tugging the heavy fabric over his fingers. A little big, built for a man’s hands rather than the teenage gangliness John is still stubbornly trying to grow out of, but they’ll stay on. John knows better than to turn down the gift, though a part of him wants to insist he can handle it. His mother had made him promise to be brave, not stupid. John hadn’t the heart to explain that he was pretty sure he didn’t know how to do one without the other.
“The hell is in your ear?” Bill asks.
The cold bite of the gold earring is something John had gotten used to quickly, the Alaskan air freezing the metal in seconds, making his ear burn where it went through. He shakes his head, letting the hair and the ring flip together and gives Bill a grin. “You like it?”
Bill’s face reads like a man who very much does not like it. “That what they’re letting boys do down in the lower forty-eight now? Put sparkly shit in their lobes?”
“Well, hey, it ain’t sparkly. And it’s only the one.”
John gets a glare, another scoff. Smokey snorts and claps his companion on the back, cuffs John around the earring. “Both of you get your heels moving, Cap’ll be pissed if he looks out the window and sees us dragging ass.”
A quick salute has Smokey’s lips twitching, Bill scowling even harder. John’s confident he’ll win them over by the end of the trip as he walks a little further down the deck to where a ramp has been slung over the railing to allow a precarious climb aboard. Several seconds have him dangling over the open water, feeling the boat and dock shift and somehow keep the ramp mostly steady between them. The water looks dark, without any hint of fish like he sometimes saw back in Manitowoc. He’s sure they’re there, lurking and waiting for some green sailor to take a plunge. The water looks cold. It would only get colder. John shudders a disgusting little thrill, letting the weight of his bag keep him steady on the ladder until he tumbles onto the deck with more confidence than grace.
Onboard is more chaotic, men shouting and stomping back and forth, marching around John like he’s just another part of the boat. The gulls have followed, sitting on railings and hovering over the crab pots and hopping curiously to the door below deck until one of the deckhands unloading boxes of bait into a freezer aims a kick without any effort their way. It’s enough to send them scuttling a few feet away, wings and beaks flapping indignantly but not scared away. It feels like a long-practiced game, though John thinks the gulls might be the only ones having fun in the arrangement, scooping up chunks of fish-filled ice that managed to fall and taking off with their triumphant prizes.
He shuffles past the dance of man and bird, through the open steel door, and is immediately faced with a set of steps that test his balance, even with the mild rolling of the ship in the calm harbor waves. He manages to make it to the bottom in one piece, and allows himself a single grin, shouldering his bag into a better position as he finds himself in a galley that looks about the same as it must have twenty, thirty years ago. All wood and pale plastic, everything bolted down and railings welded to all the counters and the stove to keep things from flying off during rough seas. All the cabinets have child locks on them, likely for a similar reason, unless the captain has suspiciously little trust and faith in the smarts of his sailors.
There’s a few men milling about here, similarly grizzled and skeptical. Another man named Smoky, this time without the ‘e’, and a quiet Inuk man named Shelley. The youngest deckhand at the table is a guy in his thirties. With a little bit of grizzle to him and a cigar clenched between his teeth that’s choking up the room with smoke, he introduced himself as Chick Harding. They’re playing cards, and the first two pay John no mind after shaking his hand. But Chick gives him a second nod, a quiet get at it, when John lingers curiously, and John salutes him back with a wink. He slips down a narrow hall, having to turn nearly sideways to get all the bulk of his belongings through. Heads into a room filled with a handful of narrow bunks until he gets to an unoccupied one that he can toss his bag onto.
Door open, unconcerned with who might be passing by, the whole ship buzzing with activity, he strips down to his underwear and a worn Nokturnal Mortum shirt he’d rolled out of bed in. Back turned to the hall, he tugs on a pair of thermal pants, jeans over, and then a sweater his mother made on top of that, the shoulders a little baggy like she expects he’s going to grow two, three sizes over the course of a week. He decides to leave the jacket for now, and the coveralls, emulating what he’d observed on deck so far; men in hoodies and jeans and sweaters instead of the full kit.
John tops it all off with a knit cap smashed over his curls, and heads back up on deck.
It takes a moment to slot himself into the flow, observing until one of the deckhands barks at him to jump in. Ends up helping the cranes guide the crab pots down, putting his hands where he’s told, his feet where he’s instructed, the cold gray sea below where he clambered over the pots enough of an encouragement to do exactly as he’s told. Every once in a while, one of the deckhands grabs him by a baggy sweater shoulder and hauls him to a safer, more stable spot. He takes it in good spirit, tries to listen to their shouted, irritated advice. It’s hard, heavy work, and he’s sweating only a few minutes in, hat relocated to a back pocket, sleeves pushed to his elbows and muscles awoken in wild confusion at what’s being asked of them.
Baseball had been what carried him to college. It had paid for his classes and his meals, and got him out of the house in high school. It’s been a long, long time since his body has felt so clumsy and out of shape.
By the time the pots are loaded– all hundred and six of them– he’s panting and drenched around the arms. Barely even registers the clap on the back that Bill gives him, the gesture equal parts approving and mocking.
Good job– things are just getting started, rook.
Someone passes him a flask and, without hesitation, John upends it, expecting water and finding throat-scalding liquor instead. None of the cheap cinnamon fireball he’s used to drinking, this is the real deal stuff, and John nearly gags before taking it down.
It gets him a laugh and another pat on his back for the trouble when he hands the flask back and swipes a hand across his tingling lips.
“We’ll make a man out of you yet,” Bill grunts, taking his own sip from the flask with far less complaint.
“Hell, maybe I’ll even have hair on my chest by the end of it,” John rasps, shocked by the way his voice has gone rocky from the burn. It makes him sound older.
Bill guffaws and claps John again on one aching shoulder.
<º)))><
Lee Cleven, Captain of the Alice, is the sort of man who feels shouting means what he has to say is important.
He’s a severe man, handsomeness a decade in the past, giving way now to thinning hair and burst-capillary cheeks. Blue eyes that appear shockingly pale against his sun-tanned face and a voice that echoes over the water like the horn of a ship. He stands on the deck, men assembled around him like schoolboys with hands folded behind his back in a lackluster imitation of parade rest– John’s father would scoff to see such a poor display. A smack with a belt to the thigh, the upper arm, tucking everything up tight, posture perfect, John nearly goes to demonstrate for him how it’s done before he decides the joke might not go over well.
“Listen up!” Lee bellows, all gravel and honey. He sounds like Sam Elliott. “We’ll be casting off within the hour, soon as Fish and Game give us the green flag, so whoever has something they forgot– a wife to call or a mother to write– you can forget about it. It’s go time, fellas–”
John tunes him out, hands folded behind his back, eyes fixed somewhere over Cleven’s shoulder. It’s an easy, practiced move, John is well-versed in what to do when some man thinks raising his voice means it makes him in charge.
Lee Cleven is bitter, but he doesn’t get hot like J.C. Sr.
The other man in the center of the circle is as much one as John is, really. Tall, slight, with the same gold hair and blue eyes as his companion but with a much softer, sweeter face. Too sweet for the hard work, John thinks, though his brow is set as seriously as any other man in the circle. He looks John’s age, or even a little younger, all baby-fat cheeks like a youth camp flyer and hair that ruffles around his face in the breeze. It’s long, like the boyband magazines that John’s sister plasters up on her walls. His lips are a bit too big for his face, wind-chapped and peeling– John can see the red line of a split, wiping away when the boy sucks it inside his mouth and red again when he releases it. John’s own lips are dry from the cold, the salt in the air thick enough he could lick it off. He imagines the split must sting, though the boy gives no indication of discomfort. He catches John’s eye, or catches John watching, and John can’t help but slot him a small smirk, Lee Cleven still on his tirade.
After a moment, the boy smirks back, brows lifting with a faint eye roll.
“Something funny, Greenie?”
John snaps his eyes forward to Captain Cleven, and shrugs one shoulder with all the easy nonchalance he saved for his coaches and professors hounding him about his grades. “Just excited to be here, Sir. And the name’s Bucky.”
Lee’s face twists sideways. There’s a cross around his neck, glittering faint and gold between the suntanned lines where his skin creases. John wonders if he’s the hypocritical sort, or the extreme sort. “We’ll see how excited you are a few days from now, when you’ve been colder for longer than you haven’t slept. You ever sailed before?”
“Just on Lake Michigan, sir.”
“Well, this is no Lake Michigan, kid. This is the Big Leagues.”
John offers another easy grin. “Guess I’m batting for a point eight.”
Lee snorts, unwillingly amused. “Dismissed,” he barks, drill sergeant volume without any of the skill to back it up. “Finish stowing your things, we cast off in twenty minutes.”
There’s a chorus of confirmations, a couple of half-ironic aye-aye’s that John echoes a second behind, and then bodies are moving again with that same ant-hill fervor, John caught up in their wake. He tries to push his way through the activity, make it to the other side where the blond boy is still just barely visible, turned to listen to something the Captain is saying. By the time he gets free, he can see a pair of blond heads vanishing up to the wheelhouse.
After that, he allows himself to be swept up in the buzz. Helping secure the last of the pots, sticking the last of the stinking, frozen blocks of bait into the massive iceboxes secured on board, learning how to tie up and secure the ropes that lash them to the deck. The rumble of the anchor being pulled up is something John feels in his belly, and it makes his knees wobbly with excitement, as does the sudden feeling of weightlessness that comes from the boat now drifting free in the harbor without any ropes or tethers, engines coughing to life. John’s been on boats before, but never one so big as this.
They start slow. With a rumble, a faint churn of water. The wind tugging a little extra meanly where John’s curls spring free from his cap. A faint salt spray that lingers as they push back against the waves trying to convince them to stay safe inside the harbor. Picking up speed. By the time John tracks Smokey down to return the gloves– hands perfectly safe and sound– they’re halfway to the opening of the harbor, a full sprint that is shockingly smooth.
“Just wait,” Smoky– the other one– grunts. “Once we get out on the open sea, we’ll be going over waves twenty, thirty feet high. Bigger. Won’t feel like such an easy glide then.”
“Got you some gloves, kid,” Bill adds, holding out a pair far more battered than the ones John had been lent. They’re scuffed and scraped and sun-faded and smelling more than faintly of fish, but still perfectly intact, warm on the inside when John slips them on. “Don’t forget to use ‘em.”
“Couldn’t do anything about the smell?”
Smoky guffaws, nudging Smokey. They even look similar, tall and graying, though John is pretty sure they hold no relation besides the name. “You’re gonna eat, sleep, and breathe that smell soon, kiddo. Greenhorns get bait duty.”
“Bucky,” John corrects.
“Earn it,” Bill grunts.
“Oh, got no doubt I will.” John grins, shivering slightly as the sea breeze cuts through the middle of the deck, testing to see if she might be able to sweep him off his feet. All four of the men brace, and for the first time John sees the same giddy excitement on their faces that has his stomach feeling queasy. The thrill of the unknown, open ocean, the question about to be answered of whether each man could face the worst of nature and come out on top. The potential payday that faces them. John licks his lips, feeling them smart and crack, salty penny blood mixing with salty sea spray. “What next?”
“Go find a spot at the rail,” Smokey says, voice kind as he claps John on a sore, aching shoulder. “Enjoy it, kid. This is your last bit of leisure before the work starts.”
“Once we hit those pots it’s go time,” Bill adds. “Don’t make us work harder.”
“I can pull my weight, don’t you worry about that, old man,” John says.
“This fuckin kid–” Bill scowls even as his friends laugh. “Get going before we toss you over.”
John salutes them. “Bucky,” he insists again, then makes himself scarce.
Up near the bow of the ship, tucked away from any sort of chore or activity, likely because it’s the prime spot for the worst of the wind and spray, John’s gear is damp almost instantly, his hair blown back from his face as he gets a perfect view of the open ocean through the open maw of the harbor. It’s the perfect spot to feel the waves begin to grow bigger, grow rougher, each rise a longer pause before the fall until John feels like a bug stuck to the forehead of a galloping horse, each audible impact of the boat coming back down to the bottom of a wave a solid whump that makes John shiver.
The water is foamy and gray, a few bits of debris floating here and there on the surface. Probably only sixty, seventy feet deep here, but too cloudy to show any hint of fish or bottom. John can taste them, though.
It hits him now, as the land passes him by and then fades out of sight of his periphery. The reality of what John has gotten himself into. There’s no getting bored, or getting tired, or giving up and going home. This is the most enormous, adult thing he’s ever done; no kiddie rails, no safety net. He’d signed an agreement that the boat isn’t liable if he dies. He’d listed his mother down as the recipient of any wages, if that were to happen. This is a real test. John finally doing something with himself. Or at close to it.
When the blue line of the coast gives way to cold, gray waves, Alice having fallen well and truly off the end of the world now, John fumbles out the crumpled pack of cigarettes. Taps the carton against the railing, fingers stinging from the cold metal. He doesn’t have a lighter and begs one off one of the passing deckhands, who shows him how to light it against the wild wind, face tucked down into the lapels of his jacket.
The cigarettes make him sick. John only takes a puff or two before his lungs seize up and his stomach turns, and he heaves over the railing until he thinks he might pass out and fall in. He takes another few puffs with stinging eyes and running nose, and sends himself into another bout of lung-hacking.
By the time he’s recovered, the cigarette has burnt itself down to ash, and he nearly pitches it over the side before hesitating. Tucks it into his pocket instead, spitting on the flowing ember until it sputters and cools. The wind tugs at his curls, and as he adjusts his hat, John looks up to the looming shadow of the wheelhouse. It’s a reflexive glance, but his eyes catch on a pair of figures. Lee Cleven and his unnamed shadow. A son, or maybe nephew. Looks too similar to be anything but familial. They’re facing each other, half the window reflecting the bright blue sky so John can only make out half the expression on Lee’s face as he jabs a finger into the chest of his companion. The look on his face is angry, contemptuous. John’s pretty sure the boy is his son, with vitriol like that.
Briefly, John considers doing something to break up the one-sided fight, get their attention somehow. He wonders if Lee treats his son like the crew, or the crew’s treatment is modeled after that of his child. John rests his wrists on the railing and grips it tight, remembering the phantom pain of a finger against his own sternum, a cuff around the ear. John tells himself to look away– it isn’t any of his business.
Before he can make the call, Lee cuts his hand across the empty space between him and his son, lips forming one last parting shot before he’s vanishing from view of the window.
John watches his son stand there for a moment, shoulders square and breathing in a sharp, slow manner. He swipes an arm across his face and then turns, revealing a tense frown, set jaw, and red cheeks. His expression is miserable, his posture hunched as he folds his arms into a pillow for his chin, nose pressed right up against the glass to stare out toward the sea.
His shoulders heave in a sigh.
When he breathes out, glass fogging, it’s followed by a faint smile.
John doesn’t mean to intrude on the moment, but he can’t find it in himself to look away, afford the other boy his privacy. It’s voyeuristic, maybe, but John finds a thrill in watching without being watched, no mask for him to parse through. The smile on the boy’s face is the same one John has been battling all day, infecting his own face now as he finds himself grinning, too. Watching as Lee’s son looks out over the ocean with giddy anticipation, hand rubbing across his face again and expression clearing into something bright, anticipatory.
He wants it, too. And for a moment, it feels like they’re sharing something. Some sort of kinship.
Giddy, and wild, stomach still tense and cramping from vomiting, John taps out another cigarette and looks out into the cold mountain range of waves in front of them. Deep, alien, the last real wild place in the world. He can’t help it, can’t fight the pressure in his sternum. He decides he’s going to grow a mustache, thick and full, before the end of the voyage.
John tilts his head back and howls to the wind. Giving his hello to the sea.
There’s movement in his periphery, and when John looks up again he finds that he’s been noticed. John grins.
He raises two fingers to his temple in salute.