One at a time, he plunged head and shoulders into the pots, hanging the bait jars inside and tying the doors shut on each afterward with lengths of yellow plastic twine.
Kate filled the last bait jar, tightened the lid down and waited for the deck beneath her feet to heave in the right direction. It did, but this time the swell was too big and she slid fight past the stacked pots and into the pot launcher. It caught her just beneath her breasts, square across the diaphragm, knocking the breath out of her. Kate caught her breath just in time to hold it beneath the wave of spray that swept over the rail and poured ice-cold water inside her collar and down her spine.
Gasping, she shook her head. When her eyes cleared she saw Seth Skinner grinning at her, his teeth a white slash in his bearded face. "Nice day!" he shouted. It was the longest sentence she'd ever heard him speak.
"Couldn't ask for nicer!" she shouted back, and fought her way over to where Andy was baiting. Together they baited the last pot, and Kate began coiling the twenty-five-fathom shots of five-eighth-inch polypropylene line while Andy checked the buoys. Each pot had three, one Styrofoam buoy and two air-filled plastic buoys, all painted a painfully fluorescent orange and each with the boat's name and registration number lettered on it in sloppy but legible black paint. Finishing with the buoys, he set his shoulder to the pot at the end of the row and reached around for the line fastening the pot down.
"No," Kate shouted, "wait for the next swell."
"What?" His usually fresh face was exhausted and uncomprehending.
He bent to shove and she grabbed his arm. "No," she shouted again, "wait. Wait."
The word penetrated, and dumbly, he waited.
The next swell was a big one, the biggest one yet.
When she'd rolled as far as she was going to, the Avilda's portside gunnel was again awash, the water boiling over the railing. She hesitated there for a long, long moment.
Kate knew enough of the old girl's construction to know that they'd loaded enough crab so that the Avilda was carrying sufficient ballast. Kate hoped. Just the same, she strained against the list of the deck, as if by pulling hard enough against the pot she could right the boat by her efforts alone. It was entirely involuntary, a human rebellion against this unnatural tilting of the world, and if she'd been able to took around she would have seen the rest of the crew, their faces screwed into similar fearful grimaces, straining just as hard against the nearest available surface.
The Avilda hesitated a moment longer, and then the swell passed beneath her keel and she heeled over with a rush. "Now!" Kate shouted. "Shove! Hard!"
Together, she and Andy shoved, hard, and the pot screeched across the deck, to be caught by Seth, who in a few deft movements had it attached to the hoist.
He raised it to the pot launcher, Kate fastened off the shots of line and Andy lined up the buoys. Ned craned his neck and caught the nod from the bridge, and shifted the lever that tilted the pot launcher so that the pot slid over the side to crash into the heaving sea and begin its rapid journey to the muddy ocean floor some three hundred feet below. Kate heaved the coil of line after it, Andy the buoys. The process was repeated with the remaining five pots. After thirty-or was it forty? straight hours of practice, the crew was moving well together, more of a team now, working about eight pots per hour. In good weather the really good boat crews worked between fourteen an eighteen pots per hour, but she didn't think this was one of them, and it sure as hell wasn't good weather, so they had done pretty well. She was almost proud of their performance. Just not enough to make a vocation out of it. She stretched, bare y repressing a groan. Her body felt like a hockey puck after a sudden death play-off.
The skipper, a short, broad man with a short, broad face drawn into a perpetual scowl, appeared on the catwalk outside the bridge. He shouted and the deck boss looked up. The skipper made a circling motion with one forefinger.
The deck boss stuck up his thumb in reply and went aft, where he tossed out a short line with nothing on the end of it, letting it dangle down the side of the boat and trail in their wake.
It was the signal they had all been waiting for. On the bridge the skipper took a couple of turns on the wheel, and plunging and rolling as she came crossways of the heavy swell, the Avilda began to come about. Kate began gathering and coiling lines as the others stored the rest of the bait, secured the pots that needed mending, and replaced the hatch cover.
Dinner that night was whatever came to hand first.
Kate, choking a little on the last bite of her peanut butter and grape jelly sandwich, stumbled through the door of her stateroom, feeling her way, eyes already closed in anticipation of hitting her bunk. Her foot tangled in something and she tripped and nearly fell. "What the hell?" Her bloodshot gaze peered around malevolently and encountered something that looked like a tent made out of a bedsheet, draped over three lengths of welding rod tied together in a kind of teepee frame.
Andy's sun-streaked mop of blond hair poked out of a fold of cloth. "It's okay, Kate, it's only me."
She stood where she was, swaying. "What the hell are you doing pitching a tent in the middle of the goddam floor? What's wrong with your bunk?"
He crawled out on all fours and rose to his feet. "It's not a tent, it's a pyramid."
"It"s a what?" she said stupidly.
"A pyramid," he repeated. "I was reinforcing my prana.
"Reinforcing your what?"
"Reinforcing my prana." Andy picked up the top of the tent and it collapsed into a limp cylinder of linen and rods. "It's got the same ratio of structure as the pyramid at Giza."
Kate was very, very tired, or she never would have asked. "What's prana?"
He set the pyramid in a corner and looked at her, very solemn, very earnest. "Prana is the universal life force. All energy derives from it. It brings together East and West, the spiritual and physical. The pyramid concentrates that energy, and I meditate beneath it, thus enhancing my own personal prana." He stretched and yawned. "Long shift. Think I'll turn in." He climbed into the top bunk and burrowed beneath the covers. "Get the light, would you?"
TWO
THE smell of bacon frying brought Kate wide awake the next morning. For a moment she lay listening to the throb of the engines and the rush of the Avilda's hull through the water. It wasn't necessary to hang on to anything to stay in her bunk. Of course. Now that they were no longer picking pots and hanging their asses out over the water, the high seas had abated. Naturally.
Raising up on one elbow, she peered out the porthole.
All there was to see was fog and gray seas slipping rapidly past beneath it. It figured. This was the Aleutians.
If it wasn't foggy, it was windy. If it wasn't windy, it was foggy. After the last week, Kate would take a nice, peaceful, impenetrable fog any day.
The tantalizing smell of bacon eventually proved impossible to resist. Abandoning the contemplation of things meteorological for things hygienic and things culinary, she showered and dressed, tied her still-wet hair back into a single braid and beat feet down to the galley. There she was greeted by the dizzying sight of eggs over easy, bacon fried crisp and a huge mound of buttered toast. It was the first hot meal she'd seen in four days. She piled her plate high and sat down next to Andy.
"Oh, no," he said, looking at her plate, "not you, too."
She reached for a slice of bacon. "I beg your pardon?"
He waited until the bacon was well and truly in her mouth. "Oink, Oink, oink, oink."
"Excuse me?"
"Meat eater," he said, in the portentous tone of one crying "J'accuse!"
She looked down at her plate, and was aware, not necessarily of things coming to a halt around her, but of attention being shifted to the two of them in an almost palpable way. "And proud of it," she agreed cheerfully, and forked up some egg.