The Perfect Storm
by Sebastian Junger
List Price: $14.00
Pages: 240
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 006101351X
Publisher: HarperCollins
GLOUCESTER, MASS., 1991
The Antiquary,
Chapter 11
A soft fall rain slips down
through the trees and the smell of ocean is so strong that it can almost
be licked off the air. Trucks rumble along Rogers Street and men in t-shirts
stained with fishblood shout to each other from the decks of boats. Beneath
them the ocean swells up against the black pilings and sucks back down
to the barnacles. Beer cans and old pieces of styrofoam rise and fall
and pools of spilled diesel fuel undulate like huge iridescent jellyfish.
The boats rock and creak against their ropes and seagulls complain and
hunker down and complain some more. Across Rogers Street and around the
back of the Crow's Nest, through the door and up the cement stairs, down
the carpeted hallway and into one of the doors on the left, stretched
out on a double bed in room number twenty-seven with a sheet pulled over
him, Bobby Shatford lies asleep.
He's got one black eye. There
are beer cans and food wrappers scattered around the room and a duffel
bag on the floor with t-shirts and flannel shirts and blue jeans spilling
out. Lying asleep next to him is his girlfriend, Christina Cotter. She's
an attractive woman in her early forties with rust-blond hair and a strong,
narrow face. There's a TV in the room and a low chest of drawers with
a mirror on top of it and a chair of the sort they have in high-school
cafeterias. The plastic cushion cover has cigarette burns in it. The window
looks out on Rogers Street where trucks ease themselves into fish-plant
bays.
It's still raining. Across
the street is Rose Marine, where fishing boats fuel up, and across a small
leg of water is the State Fish Pier, where they unload their catch. The
State Pier is essentially a huge parking lot on pilings, and on the far
side, across another leg of water, is a boatyard and a small park where
mothers bring their children to play. Looking over the park on the corner
of Haskell Street is an elegant brick house built by the famous Boston
architect, Charles Bulfinch. It originally stood on the corner of Washington
and Summer Streets in Boston, but in 1850 it was jacked up, rolled onto
a barge, and transported to Gloucester. That is where Bobby's mother,
Ethel, raised four sons and two daughters. For the past fourteen years
she has been a daytime bartender at the Crow's Nest. Ethel's grandfather
was a fisherman and both her daughters dated fishermen and all four of
the sons fished at one point or another. Most of them still do.
The Crow's Nest windows face
east into the coming day over a street used at dawn by reefer trucks.
Guests don't tend to sleep late. Around eight o'clock in the morning,
Bobby Shatford struggles awake. He has flax-brown hair, hollow cheeks,
and a sinewy build that has seen a lot of work. In a few hours he's due
on a swordfishing boat named the Andrea Gail, which is headed on a one-month
trip to the Grand Banks. He could return with $5,000 in his pocket or
he could not return at all. Outside, the rain drips on. Chris groans,
opens her eyes, and squints up at him. One of Bobby's eyes is the color
of an overripe plum.
Did I do that?
Yeah.
Jesus.
She considers his eye for a
moment. How did I reach that high?
They smoke a cigarette and
then pull on their clothes and grope their way downstairs. A metal fire
door opens onto a back alley, they push it open and walk around to the
Rogers Street entrance. The Crow's Nest is a block-long faux-Tudor construction
across from the J. B. Wright Fish Company and Rose Marine. The plate-glass
window in front is said to be the biggest barroom window in town. That's
quite a distinction in a town where barroom windows are made small so
that patrons don't get thrown through them. There's an old pool table,
a pay phone by the door, and a horseshoe-shaped bar. Budweiser costs a
dollar seventy-five, but as often as not there's a fisherman just in from
a trip who's buying for the whole house. Money flows through a fisherman
like water through a fishing net; one regular ran up a $4,000 tab in a
week.
Bobby and Chris walk in and
look around. Ethel's behind the bar, and a couple of the town's earlier
risers are already gripping bottles of beer. A shipmate of Bobby's named
Bugsy Moran is seated at the bar, a little dazed. Rough night, huh? Bobby
says. Bugsy grunts. His real name is Michael. He's got wild long hair
and a crazy reputation and everyone in town loves him. Chris invites him
to join them for breakfast and Bugsy slides off his stool and follows
them out the door into the light rain. They climb into Chris's twenty-year-old
Volvo and drive down to the White Hen Pantry and shuffle in, eyes bloodshot,
heads throbbing. They buy sandwiches and cheap sunglasses and then they
make their way out into the unrelenting greyness of the day. Chris drives
them back to the Nest and they pick up thirty-year-old Dale Murphy, another
crew member from the Andrea Gail, and head out of town.
Dale's nickname is Murph, he's
a big grizzly bear of a guy from Bradenton Beach, Florida. He has shaggy
black hair, a thin beard, and angled, almost Mongolian eyes; he gets a
lot of looks around town. He has a three-year-old baby, also named Dale,
whom he openly adores.
Excerpted from The Perfect Storm © Copyright 2008 by Sebastian Junger. Reprinted with permission by HarperCollins. All rights reserved.
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