بخش 19

We crossed a bridge over the Siuslaw. There was just enough mist in the air that I could lick out my tongue to the wind and taste the ocean before we could see it. Everyone knew we were getting close and didn’t speak all the way to the docks.

The captain who was supposed to take us out had a bald gray metal head set in a black turtleneck like a gun turret on a U-boat; the cold cigar sticking from his mouth swept over us. He stood beside McMurphy on the wooden pier and looked out to sea as he talked. Behind him and up a bunch of steps, six or eight men in windbreakers were sitting on a bench along the front of the bait shop. The captain talked loudly, half to the loafers on his one side and half to McMurphy on the other side, firing his copper-jacket voice someplace in between.

“Don’t care. Told you specifically in the letter. You don’t have a signed waiver clearing me with proper authorities, I don’t go out.” The round head swiveled in the turret of his sweater, beading down that cigar at the lot of us. “Look there. Bunch like that at sea, could go to diving overboard like rats. Relatives could sue me for everything I own. I can’t risk it.”

McMurphy explained how the other girl was supposed to get all those papers up in Portland. One of the guys leaning against the bait shop called, “What other girl? Couldn’t Blondie there handle the lot of you?” McMurphy didn’t pay the guy any mind and went on arguing with the captain, but you could see how it bothered the girl. Those men against the shop kept leering at her and leaning close together to whisper things. All our crew, even the doctor, saw this and got to feeling ashamed that we didn’t do something. We weren’t the cocky bunch that was back at the service station.

McMurphy stopped arguing when he saw he wasn’t getting any place with the captain, and turned around a couple of times, running his hand through his hair.

“Which boat have we got rented?”

“That’s it there. The Lark. Not a man sets foot on her till I have a signed waiver clearing me. Not a man.”

“I don’t intend to rent a boat so we can sit all day and watch it bob up and down at the dock,” McMurphy said. “Don’t you have a phone up there in your bait shack? Let’s go get this cleared up.”

They thumped up the steps onto the level with the bait shop and went inside, leaving us clustered up by ourselves, with that bunch of loafers up there watching us and making comments and sniggering and goosing one another in the ribs. The wind was blowing the boats at their moorings, nuzzling them up against the wet rubber tires along the dock so they made a sound like they were laughing at us. The water was giggling under the boards, and the sign hanging over the door to the bait shack that read “SEAMAN’S SERVICE—CAPT BLOCK, PROP” was squeaking and scratching as the wind rocked it on rusty hooks. The mussels that clung to the pilings, four feet out of water marking the tide line, whistled and clicked in the sun.

The wind had turned cold and mean, and Billy Bibbit took off his green coat and gave it to the girl, and she put it on over her thin little T-shirt. One of the loafers kept calling down, “Hey you, Blondie, you like fruitcake kids like that?” The man’s lips were kidney-colored and he was purple under his eyes where the wind’d mashed the veins to the surface. “Hey you, Blondie,” he called over and over in a high, tired voice, “hey you, Blondie… hey you, Blondie… hey you, Blondie…”

We bunched up closer together against the wind.

“Tell me, Blondie, what’ve they got you committed for?”

“Ahr, she ain’t committed, Perce, she’s part of the cure!”

“Is that right, Blondie? You hired as part of the cure? Hey you, Blondie.”

She lifted her head and gave us a look that asked where was that hard-boiled bunch she’d seen and why weren’t they saying something to defend her? Nobody would answer the look. All our hard-boiled strength had just walked up those steps with his arm around the shoulders of that bald-headed captain.

She pulled the collar of the jacket high around her neck and hugged her elbows and strolled as far away from us down the dock as she could go. Nobody went after her. Billy Bibbit shivered in the cold and bit his lip. The guys at the bait shack whispered something else and whooped out laughing again.

“Ask ‘er, Perce—go on.”

“Hey, Blondie, did you get ‘em to sign a waiver clearing you with proper authorities? Relatives could sue, they tell me, if one of the boys fell in and drown while he was on board. Did you ever think of that? Maybe you’d better stay here with us, Blondie.”

“Yeah, Blondie; my relatives wouldn’t sue. I promise. Stay here with us fellows, Blondie.”

I imagined I could feel my feet getting wet as the dock sank with shame into the bay. We weren’t fit to be out here with people. I wished McMurphy would come back out and cuss these guys good and then drive us back where we belonged.

The man with the kidney lips folded his knife and stood up and brushed the whittle shavings out of his lap. He started walking toward the steps. “C’mon now, Blondie, what you want to mess with these bozos for?”

She turned and looked at him from the end of the dock, then back at us, and you could tell she was thinking his proposition over when the door of the bait shop opened and McMurphy came shoving out past the bunch of them, down the steps.

“Pile in, crew, it’s all set! Gassed and ready and there’s bait and beer on board.”

He slapped Billy on the rear and did a little hornpipe and commenced slinging ropes from their snubs.

“Ol’ Cap’n Block’s still on the phone, but we’ll be pulling off as quick as he comes out. George, let’s see if you can get that motor warmed up. Scanlon, you and Harding untie that rope there. Candy! What you doing off down there? Let’s get with it, honey, we’re shoving off.”

We swarmed into the boat, glad for anything that would take us away from those guys standing in a row at the bait shop. Billy took the girl by the hand and helped her on board. George hummed over the dashboard up on the bridge, pointing out buttons for McMurphy to twist or push.

“Yeah, these pukers, puke boats, we call them,” he said to McMurphy, “they joost as easy like driving the ottomobile.”

The doctor hesitated before climbing aboard and looked toward the shop where all the loafers stood milling toward the steps.

“Don’t you think, Randle, we’d better wait… until the captain—”

McMurphy caught him by the lapels and lifted him clear of the dock into the boat like he was a small boy. “Yeah, Doc,” he said, “wait till the captain what?” He commenced to laugh like he was drunk, talking in an excited, nervous way. “Wait till the captain comes out and tells us that the phone number I gave him is a flophouse up in Portland? You bet. Here, George, damn your eyes; take hold of this thing and get us out of here! Sefelt! Get that rope loose and get on. George, come on.”

The motor chugged and died, chugged again like it was clearing its throat, then roared full on.

“Hoowee! There she goes. Pour the coal to ‘er, George, and all hands stand by to repel boarders!”

A white gorge of smoke and water roared from the back of the boat, and the door of the bait shop crashed open and the captain’s head came booming out and down the steps like it was not only dragging his body behind it but the bodies of the eight other guys as well. They came thundering down the dock and stopped right at the boil of foam washing over their feet as George swung the big boat out and away from the docks and we had the sea to ourselves.

A sudden turn of the boat had thrown Candy to her knees, and Billy was helping her up and trying to apologize for the way he’d acted on the dock at the same time. McMurphy came down from the bridge and asked if the two of them would like to be alone so they could talk over old times, and Candy looked at Billy and all he could do was shake his head and stutter. McMurphy said in that case that he and Candy’d better go below and check for leaks and the rest of us could make do for a while. He stood at the door down to the cabin and saluted and winked and appointed George captain and Harding second in command and said, “Carry on, mates,” and followed the girl out of sight into the cabin.

The wind lay down and the sun got higher, chrome-plating the east side of the deep green swells. George aimed the boat straight out to sea, full throttle, putting the docks and that bait shop farther and farther behind us. When we passed the last point of the jetty and the last black rock, I could feel a great calmness creep over me, a calmness that increased the farther we left land behind us.

The guys had talked excitedly for a few minutes about our piracy of the boat, but now they were quiet. The cabin door opened once long enough for a hand to shove out a case of beer, and Billy opened us each one with an opener he found in the tackle box, and passed them around. We drank and watched the land sinking in our wake.

A mile or so out George cut the speed to what he called a trolling idle, put four guys to the four poles in the back of the boat, and the rest of us sprawled in the sun on top of the cabin or up on the bow and took off our shirts and watched the guys trying to rig their poles. Harding said the rule was a guy got to hold a pole till he got one strike, then he had to change off with a man who hadn’t had a chance. George stood at the wheel, squinting out through the salt-caked windshield, and hollered instructions back how to fix up the reels and lines and how to tie a herring into the herring harness and how far back to fish and how deep:

“And take that number four pole and you put you twelve ounces on him on a rope with a breakaway rig—I show you how in joost a minute—and we go after that big fella down on the bottom with that pole, by golly!”

Martini ran to the edge and leaned over the side and stared down into the water in the direction of his line. “Oh. Oh, my God,” he said, but whatever he saw was too deep down for the rest of us.

There were other sports boats trolling up and down the coast, but George didn’t make any attempt to join them; he kept pushing steadily straight on out past them, toward the open sea. “You bet,” he said. “We go out with the commercial boats, where the real fish is.”

The swells slid by, deep emerald on one side, chrome on the other. The only noise was the engine sputtering and humming, off and on, as the swells dipped the exhaust in and out of the water, and the funny, lost cry of the raggedy little black birds swimming around asking one another directions. Everything else was quiet. Some of the guys slept, and the others watched the water. We’d been trolling close to an hour when the tip of Sefelt’s pole arched and dived into the water.

“George! Jesus, George, give us a hand!”

George wouldn’t have a thing to do with the pole; he grinned and told Sefelt to ease up on the star drag, keep the tip pointed up, up, and work hell outa that fella!

“But what if I have a seizure?” Sefelt hollered.

“Why, we’ll simply put hook and line on you and use you for a lure,” Harding said. “Now work that fella, as the captain ordered, and quit worrying about a seizure.”

Thirty yards back of the boat the fish broke into the sun in a shower of silver scales, and Sefelt’s eyes popped and be got so excited watching the fish he let the end of his pole go down, and the line snapped into the boat like a rubber band.

“Up, I told you! You let him get a straight pull, don’t you see? Keep that tip up… up! You had you one big silver there, by golly.”

Sefelt’s jaw was white and shaking when he finally gave up the pole to Fredrickson. “Okay—but if you get a fish with a hook in his mouth, that’s my godblessed fish!”

I was as excited as the rest. I hadn’t planned on fishing, but after seeing that steel power a salmon has at the end of a line I got off the cabin top and put on my shirt to wait my turn at a pole.

Scanlon got up a pool for the biggest fish and another for the first fish landed, four bits from everybody that wanted in it, and he’d no more’n got his money in his pocket than Billy drug in some awful thing that looked like a ten-pound toad with spines on it like a porcupine.

“That’s no fish,” Scanlon said. “You can’t win on that.”

“It isn’t a b-b-bird.”

“That there, he’s a ling cod,” George told us. “He’s one good eating fish you get all his warts off.”

“See there. He is too a fish. P-p-pay up.”

Billy gave me his pole and took his money and went to sit up close to the cabin where McMurphy and the girl were, looking at the closed door forlornly. “I wu-wu-wu-wish we had enough poles to go around,” he said, leaning back against the side of the cabin.

I sat down and held the pole and watched the line swoop out into the wake. I smelt the air and felt the four cans of beer I’d drunk shorting out dozens of control leads down inside me: all around, the chrome sides of the swells flickered and flashed in the sun.

George sang out for us to look up ahead, that here come just what we been looking for. I leaned around to look, but all I saw was a big drifting log and those black seagulls circling and diving around the log, like black leaves caught up in a dust devil. George speeded up some, heading into the place where the birds circled, and the speed of the boat dragged my line until I couldn’t see how you’d be able to tell if you did get a bite.

“Those fellas, those cormorants, they go after a school of candle fishes,” George told us as he drove. “Little white fishes the size of your finger. You dry them and they burn joost like a candle. They are food fish, chum fish. And you bet where there’s a big school of them candle fish you find the silver salmon feeding.”

He drove into the birds, missing the floating log, and suddenly all around me the smooth slopes of chrome were shattered by diving birds and churning minnows, and the sleek silver-blue torpedo backs of the salmon slicing through it all. I saw one of the backs check its direction and turn and set course for a spot thirty yards behind the end of my pole, where my herring would be. I braced, my heart ringing, and then felt a jolt up both arms as if somebody’d hit the pole with a ball bat, and my line went burning off the reel from under my thumb, red as blood. “Use the star drag!” George yelled at me, but what I knew about star drags you could put in your eye so I just mashed harder with my thumb until the line turned back to yellow, then slowed and stopped. I looked around, and there were all three of the other poles whipping around just like mine, and the rest of the guys scrambling down off the cabin at the excitement and doing everything in their power to get underfoot.

“Up! Up! Keep the tip up!” George was yelling.

“McMurphy! Get out here and look at this.”

“Godbless you, Fred, you got my blessed fish!”

“McMurphy, we need some help!”

I heard McMurphy laughing and saw him out of the corner of my eye, just standing at the cabin door, not even making a move to do anything, and I was too busy cranking at my fish to ask him for help. Everyone was shouting at him to do something, but he wasn’t moving. Even the doctor, who had the deep pole, was asking McMurphy for assistance. And McMurphy was just laughing. Harding finally saw McMurphy wasn’t going to do anything, so he got the gaff and jerked my fish into the boat with a clean, graceful motion like he’s been boating fish all his life. He’s big as my leg, I thought, big as a fence post! I thought, He’s bigger’n any fish we ever got at the falls. He’s springing all over the bottom of the boat like a rainbow gone wild! Smearing blood and scattering scales like little silver dimes, and I’m scared he’s gonna flop overboard. McMurphy won’t make a move to help. Scanlon grabs the fish and wrestles it down to keep it from flopping over the side. The girl comes running up from below, yelling it’s her turn, dang it, grabs my pole, and jerks the hook into me three times while I’m trying to tie on a herring for her.

“Chief, I’ll be damned if I ever saw anything so slow! Ugh, your thumb’s bleeding. Did that monster bite you? Somebody fix the Chief’s thumb—hurry!”

“Here we go into them again,” George yells, and I drop the line off the back of the boat and see the flash of the herring vanish in the dark blue-gray charge of a salmon and the line go sizzling down into the water. The girl wraps both arms around the pole and grits her teeth. “Oh no you don’t, dang you! Oh no…!”

She’s on her feet, got the butt of the pole scissored in her crotch and both arms wrapped below the reel and the reel crank knocking against her as the line spins out: “Oh no you don’t!” She’s still got on Billy’s green jacket, but that reel’s whipped it. She’s and everybody on board sees the T-shirt she had on is gone—everybody gawking, trying to play his own fish, dodge mine slamming around the boat bottom, with the crank of that reel fluttering her breast at such a speed the nipple’s just red blur!

Billy jumps to help. All he can think to do is reach around from behind and help her squeeze the pole tighter in between her breasts until the reel’s finally stopped by nothing more than the pressure of her flesh. By this time she’s flexed so taut and her breasts look so firm I think she and Billy could both turn loose with their hands and arms and she’d still keep hold of that pole.

This scramble of action holds for a space, a second there on the sea—the men yammering and struggling and cussing and trying to tend their poles while watching the girl; the bleeding, crashing battle between Scanlon and my fish at everybody’s feet; the lines all tangled and shooting every which way with the doctor’s glasses-on-a-string tangled and dangling from one line ten feet off the back of the boat, fish striking at the flash of the lens, and the girl cussing for all she’s worth and looking now at her bare breasts, one white and one smarting red—and George takes his eye off where he’s going and runs the boat into that log and kills the engine.

While McMurphy laughs. Rocking farther and farther backward against the cabin top, spreading his laugh out across the water—laughing at the girl, at the guys, at George, at me sucking my bleeding thumb, at the captain back at the pier and the bicycle rider and the service-station guys and the five thousand houses and the Big Nurse and all of it. Because he knows you have to laugh at the things that hurt you just to keep yourself in balance, just to keep the world from running you plumb crazy. He knows there’s a painful side; he knows my thumb smarts and his girl friend has a bruised breast and the doctor is losing his glasses, but he won’t let the pain blot out the humor no more’n he’ll let the humor blot out the pain.

I notice Harding is collapsed beside McMurphy and is laughing too. And Scanlon from the bottom of the boat. At their own selves as well as at the rest of us. And the girl, with her eyes still smarting as she looks from her white breast to her red one, she starts laughing. And Sefelt and the doctor, and all.

It started slow and pumped itself full, swelling the men bigger and bigger. I watched, part of them, laughing with them—and somehow not with them. I was off the boat, blown up off the water and skating the wind with those black birds, high above myself, and I could look down and see myself and the rest of the guys, see the boat rocking there in the middle of those diving birds, see McMurphy surrounded by his dozen people, and watch them, us, swinging a laughter that rang out on the water in ever-widening circles, farther and farther, until it crashed up on beaches all over the coast, on beaches all over all coasts, in wave after wave after wave.

The doctor had hooked something off the bottom on the deep pole, and everybody else on board except George had caught and landed a fish by the time he lifted it up to where we could even see it—just a whitish shape appearing, then diving for the bottom in spite of everything the doctor tried to do to hold it. As soon as he’d get it up near the top again, lifting and reeling at it with tight, stubborn little grunts and refusing any help the guys might offer, it would see the light and down it would go.

George didn’t bother starting the boat again, but came down to show us how to clean the fish over the side and rip the gills out so the meat would stay sweeter. McMurphy tied a chunk of meat to each end of a four-foot string, tossed it in the air, and sent two squawking birds wheeling off, “Till death do them part.”

The whole back of the boat and most of the people in it were dappled with red and silver. Some of us took our shirts off and dipped them over the side and tried to clean them. We fiddled around this way, fishing a little, drinking the other case of beer, and feeding the birds till afternoon, while the boat rolled lazily around the swells and the doctor worked with his monster from the deep. A wind came up and broke the sea into green and silver chunks, like a field of glass and chrome, and the boat began to rock and pitch about more. George told the doctor he’d have to land his fish or cut it loose because there was a bad sky coming down on us. The doctor didn’t answer. He just heaved harder on the pole, bent forward and reeled the slack, and heaved again.

Billy and the girl had climbed around to the bow and were talking and looking down in the water. Billy hollered that he saw something, and we all rushed to that side, and a shape broad and white was becoming solid some ten or fifteen feet down. It was strange watching it rise, first just a light coloring, then a white form like fog under water, becoming solid, alive…

“Jesus God,” Scanlon cried, “that’s the doc’s fish!”

It was on the side opposite the doctor, but we could see by the direction of his line that it led to the shape under the water.

“We’ll never get it in the boat,” Sefelt said. “And the wind’s getting stronger.”

“He’s a big flounder,” George said. “Sometimes they weigh two, three hundred. You got to lift them in with the winch.”

“We’ll have to cut him loose, Doc,” Sefelt said and put his arm across the doctor’s shoulders. The doctor didn’t say anything; he had sweated clear through his suit between his shoulders, and his eyes were bright red from going so long without glasses. He kept heaving until the fish appeared on his side of the boat. We watched it near the surface for a few minutes longer, then started getting the rope and gaff ready.

Even with the gaff in it, it took another hour to drag the fish into the back of the boat. We had to hook him with all three other poles, and McMurphy leaned down and got a hand in his gills, and with a heave he slid in, transparent white and flat, and flopped down to the bottom of the boat with the doctor.

“That was something.” The doctor panted from the floor, not enough strength left to push the huge fish off him. “That was… certainly something.”

The boat pitched and cracked all the way back to shore, with McMurphy telling grim tales about shipwrecks and sharks. The waves got bigger as we got closer to shore, and from the crests clots of white foam blew swirling up in the wind to join the gulls. The swells at the mouth of the jetty were combing higher than the boat, and George had us all put on life jackets. I noticed all the other sports boats were in.

We were three jackets short, and there was a fuss as to who’d be the three that braved that bar without jackets. It finally turned out to be Billy Bibbit and Harding and George, who wouldn’t wear one anyway on account of the dirt. Everybody was kind of surprised that Billy had volunteered, took his life jacket off right away when we found we were short, and helped the girl into it, but everybody was even more surprised that McMurphy hadn’t insisted that he be one of the heroes; all during the fuss he’d stood with his back against the cabin, bracing against the pitch of the boat, and watched the guys without saying a word. Just grinning and watching.

We hit the bar and dropped into a canyon of water, the bow of the boat pointing up the hissing crest of the wave going before us, and the rear down in the trough in the shadow of the wave looming behind us, and everybody in the back hanging on the rail and looking from the mountain that chased behind to the streaming black rocks of the jetty forty feet to the left, to George at the wheel. He stood there like a mast. He kept turning his head from the front to the back, gunning the throttle, easing off, gunning again, holding us steady riding the uphill slant of that wave in front. He’d told us before we started the run that if we went over that crest in front, we’d surfboard out of control as soon as the prop and rudder broke water, and if we slowed down to where that wave behind caught up it would break over the stern and dump ten tons of water into the boat. Nobody joked or said anything funny about the way he kept turning his head back and forth like it was mounted up there on a swivel.