Ghost nets
The factors that raise a submerged body include the temperature of the water, movement of the current, and decomposition. A body will usually dwell in the depths of the sea, face down, buttocks up, arms and legs dangling as gas is formed and the skin becomes macerated with water. At Easter or summer time it may take three days to resurface, by then floating belly up. Eyes salt water blue, exhaling frothy mucous air and water as it is grabbed aboard with an uncanny mimicry of life-speech. ‘Here I am.’ In winter it might stay down longer as decomposition is slower. After two weeks the outer layer of skin is whitened, thickened and loosened. In three weeks the nails will peel away, allowing the skin to slip off entirely, to be a companion treading water nearby before heading off, lightly curling gracefully away, like a Manta Ray going to feed.
The drowned are hard to spot. The level and quality of light upon water presents hiding places when the sun is lower in the morning or evening sky, but less so at noon. It takes experience to spot a body, once the main search and rescue (a service only for the living) has been abandoned. In sea-lore tales of the resurrection of the dead take place at noon. The hands of the clock at prayer for the souls of sailors. The stillness of the painted sea in Galilee. The will of the water to let go.
It was 11 am when Gatehouse shifted his wise old bulk from the bar room on to the Boston Harbor quayside to smoke his last cigar, his fine straw coloured hair whipped sharply by the breeze, and his pale white face with its delicate spiders web of red veins blanched in the strong sun. Although he had been drinking evenly for two hours, he prepared briskly, competently, his hand dipping into his pockets for his clipper and lighter. Then, standing and waiting, he screwed up his eyes and smoked and imagined the divers as they watched the sea, looking for his lost crewmates.
The divers would be standing in their white utility boat wearing their orange lifejackets. Candles in a cake. With the full sun aflame directly above them, and a deceiving breeze in their faces that might suggest that it was a cool day, not a burning day, and with the crisp, hard, edges of the wharves, piers and tall and dark glass commercial blocks behind them, the two man dive-team would be scanning for the bodies of fishermen John Boothby and Surinda Dhillon, missing now for three days.
Perhaps the first man might look at his watch again.
‘Noon in an hour,' he might say.
The second might pull on a cigarette and exhale, satisfied, and encourage the dog that they had brought along for its ability to scent a risen corpse – a million times stronger than a man’s. Then the three of them might settle again to silent watching.
Gatehouse turned his thoughts to Cullyer, the skipper-owner of the fishing trawler Hand to the Moon, who had stayed back inside the Wharf-side bar and – uncharacteristically, Gatehouse thought, – wallowed both in personal responsibility for the fate of his men, and in the tarnishing of his business by these very public events.
Though Gatehouse had reached his mid sixties and his days of heavy work were gone, he still had agility and bulk. He was six four with long and strong arms. When he grabbed a rope or stayed a self-closing door against the movement of the rocking boat, it would hold. Pulleys, cranes, chains, chores, charts, radios, berths, and uncertain men – all fell to his control at sea. On land he lived in a small Boston apartment filled with stevedore memorabilia – an interest stemming from his father’s job on the docks, shifting imported china in to trucks, and where as a young boy he would detain the merchant seaman about stories of their voyage and have to be shaken for the work to get done – and filled too with books that Gatehouse read for understanding and pattern. He arranged them on shelves labelled ‘at sea’ or ‘on land’ with the corresponding dates, using them to remember. On rare occasions he wrote out small journals if a journey contained a memorable pattern of events. On land he was a fidget. At sea he was calm, connected to the great swell and mutuality of life on a boat held aloft by ‘the great sweet mother, the sea.’ He lived alone having lost a wife some years before – the crew could not remember why or how this had occurred. Had she died, or left him? He was ambiguous about it. ‘What difference does it make when either way she is lost?’
By noon Gatehouse was a little tight. He had withdrawn a little into himself but tried to sooth Cullyer and to calm his mood with evenly delivered logic, with absolution speeches, broken by pauses or consideration and by drinking.
‘Look, if the sea has taken them then it has,’ Gatehouse said. ‘There were small odds of beating the storm. Quick, violent, and over. That’s weather. They had to be out in a small boat dragging hand nets. That’s Squid. Bostonians like their specialities. You did what you did. We had a pocket-book full of expectations from restaurants that we know they are fickle and fierce. We are here to make money. If we do not go out they will go to someone else who does. That’s trade.’ It was a comradely act. Inside Gatehouse, disbelieving himself, burned.
Al Cullyer had arrived from New York in 2001 after the destruction of the Twin Towers, selling all his stock acquired as deputy CEO of the third largest gambling corporation of the Eastern States, and buying the fishing business with the aim of moving from corporate city life and of connecting back to nine glorious buddy-filled months spent after his college graduation on fishing boats off the Isles of Scotland in the United Kingdom. He had spent the previous twenty years raising a family, making money in asset management and currency markets, and building self-assurance. Then in quick succession his marriage had imploded and the falling towers razed his adjacent office to the ground. Al took that opportunity; he developed elaborate business models for the redevelopment of the Boston fishing industry, purchased the Hand to the Moon, its fishing rights and customer book, obtained Gatehouse, and had absolute self-belief in his ability to transfer his success into anything.
The Hand to the Moon had been already fully crewed. Cullyer let them all go except Gatehouse, twenty years his senior, self evidently experienced at handling the craft, crew and the business.
‘There’s sureness in you,’ Cullyer had told him, ‘I’d like you to mentor me.’
Cullyer installed himself as the Captain.
Five years on Cullyer was poor and drank modestly but continually during his waking hours. Back in NYC, his lawyers failed against the settlement demands from his ex-wife and two sons. Notwithstanding the money handed over, the teenage boys had developed a habit of ignoring their father.
All this Cullyer had presented to Gatehouse, during a night-time talks, whilst the gear slowly pulled in the nets.
‘They’ll come around when they have families of their own. What do you they know? They snap their fingers; I pull the one arm bandit, out pop the coins.’
When his humour was drained completely and where there was a source of alcohol nearby, Al Cullyer has never dithered with his pain. Now, in the Harbor bar, waiting for news of his men, Cullyer told Gatehouse that what he had learned from working with fishermen was that, like them, when all was lost, he believed in drowning.
‘If I can't go down with my ship, I'll go down without it,’ Cullyer told the rest of the bar, loudly.
Gatehouse watched the distressed face of his friend, and by his look raised a question that Cullyer at last began to answer.
‘I am not laid low by an honest defeat from the sea,’ he said, ‘that’s her business. Two days ago, in that storm I thought, “Look at it! Look at the beautiful sea. There is no stopping her; she has all the cards, all the power, and a friend for the weather. Leave her be then, until she calms down.” We are powerless Gatehouse,’ he said softly.
Gatehouse was nodding, blinking at him. Is he talking bullshit, even here, now?
‘I have buried employees,’ Cullyer continued, ‘back in the New York City. Men with heart attacks. Women with cancer in the breasts and wombs. Young men crushed in building accidents. I am not intimidated by the death of men. They knew the risks.’
Cullyer paused, reflecting a moment.
‘What was Surinda? A Muslim?’
‘He’s Indian,’ Gatehouse told him gently, ‘a Hindu.’
‘His wife did not have the spot,’ Cullyer said, jabbing his forehead, ‘how do they bury?’
‘Burning, I think.’
‘Have to dry him first then.’
Cullyer drained his beer and stared ahead at his reflection in the mirror opposite.
‘I feel foe-less, that’s all,’ he said, in a little while.
Gatehouse watched Cullyer stand up from the bar stool and walk across to look through the windows at the Pier and Wharves being turned into apartments.
Two nights before, when the Harbor Police and Massachusetts Port Authority detained them as they landed at Fish Pier, Cullyer had been silent; allowing Gatehouse to do the talking about their run out, the conditions, what catch they had in the hold, what they were after, and why they had sent the two men out with hand nets. Though the weather was poor, it was a moonlit night. The men were netting Loligo Squid as they gathered together by the light of the moon. Cullyer’s only comment, was a forceful summary. The situation represented a sudden and elemental change and the boat did not have time to cover enough distance to respond. A squall line and surge wiped the two men away.
Through the windows Gatehouse could see the single Harbor Police Unit car on the quay. Last evening, it had taken the two wives home, after they had come again to be near the watch for their husbands. Ellie Boothby, in sunglasses, was held by her friends as she walked around. She had gone to pieces. Sujata Dhillon, however, seemed calm and settled. She had brought her ten-year-old son with her to run errands. To Gatehouse she seemed young, untried and yet the boy showed that the had lived life. Surinda had not talked about her much, though Gatehouse had often glanced at the picture her kept of her in his bunk aboard. As in the picture, in person, she was buxom, smiling, and almost apologetic. The sight of her had raised Gatehouse’s spirits for reasons that he did not fully allow himself to admit, given the circumstances. She was bluntly realistic too and that, alarmingly, excited Gatehouse.
‘I have lost him. I cannot sense him anymore. Poor bastard. He is somewhere else. The weight of him is missing,’ Sujata had said.
Cullyer had been dumbfounded at this. So he ignored it and the other similar statements that Sujata made. Instead Cullyer dealt them his usual vigour and confidence, organising where they should watch from, checking arrangements for their accommodation, that they had made provision for themselves and families, that the Harbor police were aware of all of their needs. In short everything practical but no personal details about what had happened. Nothing about their last evening alive. Cullyer gave them hope – false hope, he knew, they knew - and Gatehouse then felt revulsion for his skipper.
Now, mellowed a little by their early afternoon drinking, Gatehouse looked at Cullyer as he stood watching the quay. He could feel his helplessness. For himself he now felt shame and anger building. He had read the storm and should not have allowed the men out. Cullyer was his usual self, deferring to him, rising above the detail of the debate. The restaurants that would only take hand-caught squid. The squid needed to be netted with no damage or stress that would impair their taste at the table. That required a small rear launch to hand catch and then to deposit the caught squid in dragnets fixed by line to the Hand to the Moon herself. Then there was the dark black-blue sky and the question of whether the poor weather was moving away from them and dissipating. The Shipping forecast had said that it was. Gatehouse, regretful that his lips had stayed dumb, closed his eyes, in his drunken state, and pictured the two fishermen sitting on the still ocean bed together in company. Their eyes open. Boothby, the bigger man, would have lasted longest.
The ocean winked at the searching boat but the dive team did not notice. They had been distracted, because it was, naturally, a hard job distinguishing between the differing colours of the swells, following the interests of every swooping bird, whilst maintaining their own relationship. Neither of them had been on the dive team long. They had sat down together. A question of diligence and chance. The sea rolled round the body of John Boothby, surfacing him and winked again. The dog barked. One of the men caught the movement and raised his glasses to his face.
‘There,’ he told his colleague.
They stood up, steadily, together, and readied to their business. They pulled on their white plastic over robes, and put on their gloves. One of them laid out the body bag in the central portion of the boat. They would radio only when they could conform the find. They had the steeliness needed for this task. They had tools to minimise the amount of contact with the body but whatever those arrangements, bringing aboard a rotten corpse is unpleasant. They were silent as they moved the boat towards the body. As they neared it, the colleague finally replied.
‘I wonder which it is,’ he said
‘And where is the other,’ his companion responded.
The body of Surinda Dhillon was never found. Two months later his death, and an inquest finding of accidental cause, was declared and Gatehouse received an invitation to a Hindu death ritual to be hosted by Sujata Dhillon, Surinda’s family and friends. It struck Gatehouse that he knew none of these people and he first reaction was to shy away.
Cullyer did not attend.
He had not attended Boothby’s funeral.
In the week following the surfacing of Boothby’s body Al Cullyer put the fishing business up for sale. “It had been a mistake to leave the city,” he’d said to Gatehouse. Within a further week he was gone.
Gatehouse had offered to keep in touch. Cullyer warmly shook his hand and somehow Gatehouse knew that there would be silence from then on. Gatehouse was laid off. He read his books. For the first time in years he started to write small accounts of his times at sea, beginning with the events surrounding the deaths of Boothy and Surinda Dhillon. Every day his walk took him to the harbour fish pier to see if the Hand to the Moon was in service. He asked amongst the boatyards, fishing companies and wholesalers. Everyone clasped his shoulders. No one gave him a job. In his apartment, browsing amongst his collections, Gatehouse caught sight of himself in a small decorated brass beaded mirror that he had taken from Surinda’s bunk at his last leaving of the boat. An old man, ashore.
Sujata Dhillon hugged Gatehouse warmly and ran her hand gently across his back and led him in. They had decorated the small garden with fruit offerings and placed small woven grass crows around the small pool of water, symbolic of a river. Sujata had put rice balls in to feed it. At the centre of the garden, on a small raised fire they cremated the grass replica bones of Surinda Dhillon and wished his spirit on through the ancestral ghosts to heaven.
Gatehouse listened as Surinda’s family described their understanding of the meaning of his upbringing and his dreams.
It was a cool evening with a light breeze coming in from the coast that gently pushed the grey smoke around the mourners. Sujata was dressed in a white sari and tan coloured head cloth covering her hair to portray a traditional widow.
Gently and modestly, tapping the arm of Gatehouse, she asked him if he would speak. Gatehouse could not prevent showing his pleasure at her company.
‘There is little to be complicated about in thinking of Surinda the fisherman. He worked together with us for his share these past five years, and he had a good stomach and good instinct. He worked hard day and at night. He told stories. He sang. He did not seem to me to be unfulfilled. In the early days, as he was learning his trade, he cost us a few meshes and nets. Ghost nets we call them. They float, adrift, on their own. Sometimes one will catch on to a boat’s hull or become entangled in its live nets. A reminder.
Gatehouse paused and realised he felt confused and tried to get himself back on track. He looked at Sujata’s face. She was watching him, he felt, with an open, smiling expression, willing him on. A few people shuffled. There was something he wanted to say about connection, about mutuality. He was struck by how close the mourners were standing to him. A plane droned away, towards New York.
‘Surinda is gone like those nets. He will always be amongst the white squids, before the moonlight, his hands in the water poised.’
Gatehouse thought for a moment, then, realising that he lacked further belief, stopped altogether.
James A Bullion - September 2007
No comments:
Post a Comment