Follow the Sun. Edward J. Delaney
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heaved. He clung to the side as the boat steered itself, East-Southeast into the darkening sky, toward the Great South Channel.
The older of the new guys, João, started in on it.
“I hope you’re ready to work as hard as we are,” he said. “I need the money. I don’t need a skipper who can’t pull his load.”
“I’ll pull my load,” Quinn had barked over the grind of the diesel.
“I got kids to feed,” he said. “If you can’t do the work, give me and the boy equal bigger shares.”
“Is that what this is, then?” Quinn said, more sharply. “Negotiating shares a half-day out of port? Because you don’t do that.”
“You look like shit.”
“I’m just getting prepped,” Quinn said.
“I didn’t know I was signing on to a jackpot,” João said.
“You’ll do just fine,” Quinn said over his shoulder.
Quinn had done his farewell mainline the night before the trip. He was sleeping on the boat in those days; the spent needle went off the back as they cast off, held since morning for this bit of concealed ceremony, something approximating baptismal waters. And he had been ebullient the first few hours, both riding the dregs of the last of the smack, yet too easily allowing himself the sense of celebration of being off it. The new guy had been all smiles, sensing fun. Quinn asked, “Why did you want to work on lobster boats?”
“Beats sitting at home listening to the bitch run her mouth,” the new guy said, grinning.
As Quinn came down, it all came down. After he’d wrung himself out for hours with the vomiting, they began to bait and set the pots. He was instantly without strength. It was now twelve hours since the last rush, and the cravings came in on schedule, as precise as a train into a station. Quinn was overcome with the need. João and the kid were going hard, and Quinn’s own legs were cramping in a way he’d never known. He was suffering, but João was unrelenting.
“I’m not doing all the work,” he shouted, and bitterly. “I’m starting to think maybe I was had.”
The work, once out there, was always rote, mindless and mechanical. At the open stern the traps slid off one by one, roped into a long train. The job was like working on the edge of a tall building with no rail. Skill meant marking the edges nearly subconsciously, the industrious dance made leaden by withdrawal. He snuck to the cabin and snorted some more cocaine, filling the ache with the wrong medicine.
By late afternoon, this wasn’t turning out to be a good run. Better than half the pots were coming up empty, and a lot of throw-backs, and the cold rain in sheets. Quinn was in full agony, knowing that turning now, toward land and a fix and insolvency, was pure futility. He had the kid “notching the eggers”— the law said that any fertile female, egg-laden on the underside, be knife-cut with a V to denote its status, before being thrown back. The kid was only getting the hang of it, slowing it all.
“Waste of my damned time,” João was saying from the stern.
“I didn’t guarantee the bugs would jump right into the traps,” Quinn said, “and you ought to know it.”
Soon enough, the younger one had faded completely. Stamina was earned over time. Sixteen hours in and he began to wobble, not used to the sleepless stretches the work demanded.
“Go under and crash for an hour,” Quinn said. “I’ll come and get you.”
In the middle of the night, the big lights made the deck like a tiny arena of their failing. Quinn and João kept on with the work, no longer speaking, backs to one another. Somewhere in there, Quinn began to rally, letting the work try to be the cure, letting it be the anesthetic. He kept on, pulling and sorting, getting from one moment to another. Then he turned and saw that João was gone.
He didn’t have any idea of how long it had been. He stood, looking. Past the open stern was only the wake fading into the darkness behind the trundling boat. No one was there. He went below and found the kid sleeping hard, and shook him. The kid startled, scanning as if he had no idea.
“Where’s the other guy?” Quinn said.
“Who?”
He went back up top and looked fore and aft. The guy was just gone, and the boat was only so big. Quinn looked at his watch. It was past four in the morning, with the first hint of light at the horizon. Out beyond the boat, the waters rolled dark and relentless.
He got on the radio in the wheelhouse, and quickly had the Coast Guard. He already knew it was going to be a search for a body, and likely a useless one. They weren’t wearing life jackets, as they hindered the work. Off the radio, he unfolded the paperwork on the chart table, and looked at the handwriting. Botelho was the guy’s last name. He hadn’t remembered that. The Coast Guard radio man said there was a boat not far away, and coming at him full throttle.
Under the bunk were the bags of cocaine. His bank; his assurance of unbroken chemical relief. He was frantic with what to do with it. The prospects of a double withdrawal were just too daunting. He was expecting the Coast Guard ship to be coming up on him imminently, somewhere in the rising dawn. Quinn opened the first bag, went in with his finger, and snorted hard. He was thinking at that moment to just hide them away. There would be no pretense for a vessel search. He immediately knew he was fooling himself, of course. But he needed the powder that badly.
He tends to find himself back out there a lot, the engines cut and the wind gusting and the rains coming down. The young guy, afraid to let go of the rail and crying to go home. It was only when that white Coast Guard ship was in sight with the gray light of a shrouded rising sun that he panicked fully. Abruptly, he went underneath, pulled out the bags, and began to dump them on the lee side, hoping no one was on him with their binoculars. Which, of course, they were.
And, as always, he brings his head up now, surprised to find himself not back on that boat’s deck but in the ongoing present.
When Botelho disappeared from the deck of Quinn’s boat, it had changed Quinn’s life in ways that were probably for the better, but felt much worse. Prison time allowed him to fight through withdrawal, a state-funded version of a rehab getaway. Had he instead come back from that run with an intact crew and a hold full of bugs, he’d have surely succumbed to the needle by nightfall: maybe, finally, too much. There was always going to be that time.
In the county jail in those next days, they could have begun to wean him with methadone and let him sweat through the days in an infirmary bed, had he ever asked. But he told no one. He still stubbornly held that this was a personal battle. By the time he went to court with his plea bargain signed, he had the strange thought he might live to forty after all.
“Guilty,” he’d said, almost stepping on the judge’s words in the rush to get it out.
Federal prison bit wasn’t so bad, either; he was surrounded pretty much by guys like he worked with every day in the lobster business. He went to a medium-security facility in upstate New York. Ray Brook. It was mainly just uneventful for him. The first few nights, at “orientation,” he’d been in a cell three down from a guy coming off something; the guy kept screaming into the night that he needed his fix. Then, one night, the noise stopped. At chow, someone said, “He hanged himself.” Someone else said, “Bullshit, he got taken to rehab.” Either way, things got quiet then. There were occasional fights, but nobody came near him. The work had made him too big to mess with. He didn’t make conversation, didn’t take exceptions, felt no need to pose or preen, and quietly counted down the weeks. Some guys, they were still trying to prove something, or maybe disprove something. Quinn took it only as a quiet recusal from many things.
He goes back to that at moments like this, lying sober on his small bed in the middle of the night. Quinn has awakened again after sleeping through the day and then the evening; it’s closing time for the bars as he awakens from his stretch, and he has nothing to do. Below his window he can hear the hoots of the drunks coming out to the street; he misses