“To our lost friend.”
“To Leander. I hope he’s in a better place than this—one with more tolerable temperatures.”
“So anywhere? Including hell?”
“I’m not sure what I believe about the afterlife,” the young man responded thoughtfully, “but I am positive that the fires of Hades are a tropical paradise compared to Alaska.”
The older man laughed at this, temporarily transforming his sorrowful face. “Cheers, kid.”
“Cheers, Captain.” The two men nodded at each other solemnly before clinking their mugs together. The younger one took a long, satisfying swig of the brew before smiling in appreciation. “You know, this club is a lot wilder than I expected. I figure if I’m going to kill myself for money, I might as well spend it on some quality entertainment in the downtime.”
“Kid,” said the grey-haired man, shaking his head disapprovingly, “too much of this kind of ‘entertainment’ will be the precise thing that gets you killed on the job if you’re not careful.”
“I’ve been lucky in my life so far. I don’t intend for that to change. Want to get a seat closer to the stage, Captain?”
“No, thanks, Arnav. You go ahead. My leg’s aching something awful.”
“An excellent excuse to save your dollar bills!” Arnav joked before clapping his friend on the back and heading to the center of the action.
Captain Trevain Murphy leaned back in his chair, mulling over the details of the previous days. He had always been fortunate on the waters; he had always somehow scraped by until the end of the season without a single casualty.
He was a firm believer in not allowing the sea to collect the souls of his men. Although they took their food from the sea’s open mouth, he did not believe it was necessary to offer up human sacrifices for this privilege. He had stayed in business long enough without appeasing any pagan gods—and he was quite certain that the gods did not pay close attention to Alaska anyway. Trevain did not accept that losses were bound to happen as most others did. He held that they were the result of carelessness and inefficiency, and he chose his men cautiously to avoid having either of these blights on his boat.
The conditions of Leander’s demise had been strange. The captain had begun to wonder in the moments before the incident whether the man had been feeling all that well.
“Did you hear a strange noise, Captain?” Leander had asked in his suspicious but respectful manner.
Trevain had briefly paused, as if to listen, to satisfy the man. Perhaps his mind had been too occupied with the remaining tasks on board, but he had heard nothing. “Just the whistling of the wind, Leo. A storm’s not far off, but we’ll be home long before it hits. Why are you so agitated?”
“I just… I swear I saw something in the water earlier.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know.” Leander had been so tense that he twitched when Arnav dropped a coil of rope a few feet away from him. “I am a bit tired and feverish. Might just be coming down with something and seeing things.”
“Just relax—we’ll be back to shore soon. A hot meal and a warm bed will fix you right up, son.” Now, in retrospect, his own words made him cringe.
The weather had been benevolent while the day had unfolded smoothly. There was no way that Trevain could have expected anything unusual on such a humdrum fishing trip. After hauling up the pots and completing all of the most grueling tasks, the crew had begun to bask in their communal sense of accomplishment and good cheer. They had been turning the ship around and preparing to head home when the first mate, Doughlas, had noticed that Leander was missing. None of the men could find him below or above deck, and no one had shouted for a man overboard. Everyone had been puzzled, and Trevain had felt the first pangs of true panic he’d experienced in over thirty years. Leander had just seemed to vanish.
The crew had suggested that the young man they fondly called “Leo” might be taking a nap somewhere. It had been a long trip on the water, and the seasoned seamen were used to working inhuman hours. They had considered that he had been hiding or trying to pull some strange kind of prank. It had only taken a few hours for the Magician’s temperament to progress from mildly amused to generally annoyed and finally to disbelieving and appalled. It was hard to accept that a man was dead when there were no details to process regarding the incident. Nothing to examine, nothing to understand.
The last person to speak with Leander had been Edwin, the Canadian. When asked about the conversation repeatedly by the crew, Edwin lost his cool at having to revisit, dozens of times, that Leander had only told him that he was going to take a leak. The Canadian had cursed incessantly, while wiping tears from his eyes with his sleeves. “I thought it was safe enough for him to go to the fucking washroom on his own. I didn’t think he was in danger of drowning while urinating! Toilet monsters that grab you by the wang and pull you down to a horrifying death-by-piss haven’t exactly been my major concern since preschool.”
Now the men were drowning their woes in women and booze. They loved the occasional sojourn in Soldotna for that purpose, but their woes usually did not require such a substantial sloshing to be adequately submerged.
As Captain Murphy sat in a secluded corner of the strip club, he frowned until his face creased with dozens of dismal trenches. The lines deepened and intersected to create a roadmap leading to nowhere as he inwardly labored to find the path to understanding how he had lost a man. He had always prided himself on being able to bring men home to their wives and children at the end of the season. Leander had been young, and had no children depending on him—but he had a girlfriend that he had spoken of often, one whom he had hoped to marry. He also had loving parents. There had been an established place for him in the world which had now collapsed.
No obvious, detrimental mistake had been made and no miscalculations could be identified. There was no one to punish or blame. Trevain could not yell at the men to reinforce or avoid a certain action in the future to prevent this from occurring again. There was nothing to correct, there was no lesson to be learned. Nothing had really gone wrong. It had been a random, quiet, shadowlike loss.
Had Leander just decided to dive off the side of the boat when no one was looking, just for the hell of it? Had he plunged himself into the cold depths to see how far he could swim down into the sea before he sucked in a breath of saltwater? These were the types of scenarios that floated through the captain’s mind as he tried to imagine what had happened to the deckhand. The situation seemed that crazy. Trevain couldn’t shake the feeling that something had changed. There had been some kind of major change in the seas since he was a boy, and he no longer knew the waters as well as he always felt he had.
The ocean was not usually quiet and mercenary-like in her brutality. There had always been plenty of fanfare to announce her burgeoning rage. The sky would use its whole canvas to display a bloodbath of remarkable colors in unmistakable warning. Trevain had always interpreted the message correctly: “She is ravenous. Do not go out to fish today. She will rape you.” It had very little to do with the weather—of course bad weather presented a technical danger. Trevain was more concerned with some quality he could not quite describe, but could intuitively feel and gauge—bad energy, perhaps.
Oftentimes the crew would call him silly and superstitious. Trevain would patiently point out other signs of trouble as he sternly forbade the men to sail. Large, dark birds like falcons and eagles would leave their secret roosts and venture out, flying in erratic and confused patterns over the shoreline as if trying to discern the source of an unknown crisis. There might be a certain mournful sound in the wind or a certain morbid chill in the air. It was as if everything on the planet was privy to some knowledge that escaped Trevain. Everything was pulsating with the excitement of some indefinite impending carnage. Trevain felt that being human automatically precluded him from being on nature’s mailing list for memos about this sort of thing, but he would not allow that disadvantage to cripple him.
“We have all lost touch with nature,” Trevain would lecture threateningly, pointing at his only Inuit crew member, “yes, even you Ujarak.” The accused man would shrug his innocence and chomp down on his cigar nervously as the captain continued his tirade. “If your greed for a few dollars is greater than your inclination to live, then by all means, go out and fish! Be my guest, take the boat.” Trevain would turn around and march away from the docks, with a parting wave and a mocking challenge, “Go out and fish!”
Of course, no one did.
One by one, the crew would lose their motivation for the intended trip. Without a tenacious leader to rally them, they would disband within minutes and trickle off into homes, bars, and hotel rooms. Sure enough, by the time they gathered again they would have heard of at least one accident or casualty on another fishing boat. They would return to work with the high morale that came from knowing they had escaped the ultimate misfortune. They would hastily remove their hats when speaking of the lost or injured man, and have their faith in their captain renewed to the greatest magnitude.
For decades, although men had come and gone from his crew, that was the way things had worked. Until Leander. Until a few days ago when Captain Murphy had been unable to inform his crew of impending danger. He had not noticed any distress in the birds, the sky, or the winds. His usual indicators had failed him. It was as if even they had been unaware of the ocean’s ire.
Maybe Leo was just mentally unstable, the captain thought to himself. I could have overlooked something when I hired him—maybe he was hallucinating, and he saw or heard something which caused him to jump overboard and dive to his death when we were all occupied. Maybe it was just a singular event. Something out of my control.
As he tried to mentally reassure himself, he leaned back and drank deeply of his cold beer. He did not feel very reassured. Smiling wryly, he imagined that he suddenly understood what it was like to be a veteran master of some now obsolete technology: that which he had been most intimate with had gone and innovated itself on him. Yes, he was fairly certain there had been some kind of eerie change in the seas he had come to know so well, and he was pretty sure that it did not have anything to do with global warming.
