Pot Forty-One
On my first season crabbing out of Dutch Harbor, pot forty-one came up with Lonnie Pruett’s wedding ring caught in the mesh, and Lonnie was standing at the rail beside me, wearing it.
I should explain about the pots, for people who’ve never done this. A crab pot is a steel frame about seven feet square, wrapped in nylon web, maybe seven hundred pounds empty. You bait it, you drop it on a line with a buoy, it sits on the bottom for a day or so, and then you come back and haul it up with the hydraulic block, swing it onto the rail, and dump whatever’s inside onto the sorting table. Mostly that’s crab. Sometimes it’s a halibut, an octopus, a ball of starfish, a lot of mud. Once that season it was a television set, which nobody could explain.
The Kestrel Bay ran a string of sixty-two pots. I was the greenhorn, nineteen years old, hired because my cousin knew the engineer. The captain was a gray, square man named Arne Holvik who called everyone “you” and expected you to work out which one he meant. There were five of us on deck: Lonnie, Teddy Okafor, a quiet older man everyone called Auggie, the engineer Vic when he wasn’t below, and me.
Forty-one came up on a gray afternoon in the second week. Lonnie and I were on the rail. We dumped it, and in among the crab was a gold band wound in a tangle of web, the knot pulled tight around it the way a fishing line will tighten around a hook. I picked it out because it was shiny. Inside it was engraved L & D 6-14-03.
Lonnie looked at it in my palm. He looked at his own left hand, which had a glove on it. He pulled the glove off with his teeth and there was his ring, gold, on his finger.
“Huh,” he said.
He took the one out of my hand and held them side by side. They were the same. Not similar. The same scratch on the outside, a long diagonal one he said he got from a car door in Anchorage. He took his own off and read the inside. L & D 6-14-03.
Teddy came over. Auggie came over. Somebody said it was a joke and nobody believed it, because nobody on the boat had been near that pot since we set it the day before, and nobody had a spare gold ring with Lonnie’s engraving, and the joke would have been too stupid and too expensive.
“Sell it,” said Teddy. “Two of them, you’re rich.”
Lonnie laughed. He put his own ring back on and put the other one in his breast pocket and zipped it. Then Holvik leaned out of the wheelhouse window and yelled at us to stop standing around, and we did.
That night in the galley Auggie said, “Toss it.”
He hadn’t said anything all evening. He was sitting at the end of the table with his coffee. Auggie was about sixty and had fished the Bering since the seventies, and he was the kind of man who would sooner fall overboard than give an opinion, so it got quiet.
“Toss what,” Lonnie said.
“The one from the pot. Throw it back.”
“It’s gold, Aug.”
“Throw it back. And watch your hands. Tomorrow and the day after.”
Lonnie said sure, okay, and didn’t, and Auggie didn’t say anything else.
Two days later, in eighteen-foot seas, Lonnie got his left hand caught between the pot and the rail as it swung in. It was the kind of thing that happens on crab boats, it’s why they pay what they pay. He didn’t lose the hand. He lost the ring finger to the second knuckle. Vic and I held him down on the galley table while Holvik talked to a doctor on the satellite phone, and I remember looking for the ring and it wasn’t on what was left of the hand. It was somewhere in the sea.
We ran him into Dutch. He flew to Anchorage. He was fine, mostly. Before he left, in the clinic, high on something, he gave me the ring out of his breast pocket and said, “This is the one that’s left, I guess,” and laughed, and then he stopped laughing.
I’ve thought a lot since about how to say this so it sounds like what it was and not a ghost story. The best I can do is this: the sea was giving things back before we lost them.
It was not every pot. It was not even most of the string. It was forty-one, every time, and only forty-one, and never anything big. After Lonnie, it was a cheap black watch with a cracked face, still running, set to the correct time. Teddy recognized it before I did, because he was wearing it. We were in a good stretch of weather. He laughed and then he made himself not laugh and he took the watch from the pot and walked to the other side of the deck and threw it as hard as he could into the water. Then he took off the one on his wrist and threw that, too.
“Now there’s nothing to lose,” he said.
Nothing happened to Teddy’s wrist. A week later he got a satellite text that his father had died in Lagos, and he’d been planning to call him on the Sunday, at a time he had set an alarm for on that watch.
I don’t know if that was the same thing. Teddy thought so. He stopped talking to anybody about it.
After that the crew started wanting to skip forty-one. Not openly. Vic said the buoy line was frayed and needed to come out of the string. Holvik looked at him for a long time and said, “Haul it.” And we did, because he was the captain and the crab in forty-one were as good as the crab anywhere else, and because it’s a strange thing to tell a man who’s fished for forty years that you’d like to stop pulling one particular pot out of the sea because you think it knows something.
Forty-one gave us back, in the next three weeks: a lighter of Vic’s, a photograph of Auggie’s grandson that he kept in his bunk, folded in the same three places, and a single dark curl of hair tied with a rubber band that nobody claimed. We passed that one around the deck in silence. Nobody’s hair on that boat was that color.
Vic lost his lighter overboard on the next haul. That’s all that happened; it slipped out of his pocket. He was relieved. Auggie’s grandson was fine, as far as anyone knows. Auggie lost the photo in a bunkroom flood after a hatch seal failed, the whole bunk soaked through, everything ruined. He stood and looked at the gray wet pulp of it and nodded slowly, like a man paying a bill.
The curl of hair I kept. I don’t know why. I put it with Lonnie’s ring in a sandwich bag inside my sea bag.
On the last night before we ran for town, Auggie came on deck while I was on watch. It was very cold and the sea was low and black and the sky was doing the thing it does up there, going green at the edges. He stood by me and lit a cigarette, which he wasn’t supposed to do.
“My first boat had one,” he said. “Different number. Same deal.”
“What happened to it?”
“Skipper cut it loose. We lost the string that winter anyway. Ice.” He smoked. “He said he couldn’t stand knowing. I could. I still can, mostly. But it gets to be about the small stuff, you see? It never tells you anything big. It just wants you to know it’s got your stuff. Before you know.”
“Why?”
He looked at me like I’d asked why water is wet. “It’s the sea, kid,” he said. “It’s keeping track.”
I went home after the season and did not go back. I’m forty-four now and I teach welding at a community college in Washington. I’m telling this because Auggie died last month, at eighty-one, in a care home in Bellingham, and Lonnie called to tell me, and we talked for an hour about everything except the Kestrel Bay. At the end he said, “You still have the ring?”
I said I did.
“Throw it in the water,” he said. “Do it for me.”
I drove to the waterfront the next morning to do it. It was raining. I got out my old sea bag from the garage, which I hadn’t opened in twenty years, and found the sandwich bag with the ring, and the curl of hair.
The hair isn’t dark anymore. It’s mostly gray, the way my daughter’s would be in about forty years. She has my mother’s curls. I didn’t know that when I was nineteen. I didn’t know I’d have a daughter.
I didn’t throw them in. I’m not sure what happens if you give something back before it’s lost. I’m not sure if that’s how it works. I’ve put the bag in a fire safe in my closet, and I check on it sometimes, and I check on her more than she’d like, and I don’t know which of those things is the one that matters.