Safe from the Sea by Peter Geye Page A

diesel. That’s when Jan got jittery.
    “I wasn’t ever a spook, but something in the back of my mind got a little itchy when they told us to replace the fuel line. I rememberthinking it was strange that the higher-ups okayed a repair like that so late in the season. I mean, their priority was always bottom-line tonnage.” He paused, scratching the back of his head. “I chalked it up to the engine being new and the brass just not knowing how reckless they could be. But I was still uneasy about it.
    “Twenty-two hours we sat there while a contractor put the new line in. We gave the crew fourteen hours’ leave and watched them all hump into Two Harbors.”
    “I bet they did their best to hump once they got there, too.” Olaf smiled. “They usually did.”
    “In Two Harbors, though?”
    “You’d be surprised.” Olaf smiled again, shook his head, and then turned more serious. “Some of those boys lived up there. Bjorn did. He had a baby girl and a sweet little wife. I’ll tell you what, he was off that goddamn boat in five minutes.
    “The boys who didn’t live there got pissed in the bars up on Willow Street. I’d venture to guess that more than one or two of those fellas had a pretty good time that night.” Olaf smiled again, as if to admit that despite his age, the memories of those little Great Lake ports, the run-down pubs that filled them, and the sailor-loving girls who knew the ship schedules like their multiplication tables hadn’t escaped him even now.
    “The next morning, when they came back aboard, it was like watching a zombie parade. I remember the days before I met your mother, before I became an officer, too, and the shit we used to get ourselves into.” He smiled again. “Those boys knew how to dig it up. They were all red-eyed and pale, sweating in spite of the weather. Goddamn.
    “The boys who lived up there, though, they all looked happy as clams. Walking lightly, you know,” he said and winked. “But not Bjorn.I didn’t know him well, but he looked like two different people at once. You could see he was happy—must have been thinking of his little girl and wife—but he also looked resentful as hell, probably about shipping out again. He was one of those guys who got tricked into his life on the boats. He was just dumb enough not to be able to do something else and just smart enough to hate what he did. There were a lot of guys like that on the Lakes.”
    Noah scanned his memory for the men he knew from his father’s trade. Having had it put so simply, he could recognize the split in many of them. Some of the men, like Luke, stood out. They were single-minded types, gruff and bigger than life. But the majority of the men he remembered—men from his childhood cruises on the boats with his father and from his time slumming down in Canal Park with his high school buddies—were just ordinary guys.
    “I’ll bet you put them right to work,” Noah said.
    “Of course. We had to get the deck cleared and only had a short window of time to do it.”
    “Because of the weather?”
    “One front had already passed—the one that left a foot and a half of snow on our deck—and another one was coming, a nor’easter. We knew the seas would be rough and that it’d be cold as hell, so we wanted to get loaded and in front of the weather. It was no fun to be out there latching the hatches when it got below zero.”
    “Didn’t the forecast warrant sitting tight for a few hours?” Noah asked.
    “We could see it coming, we could feel it, too, but we never would’ve backed down on the basis of the weather reports we were getting.”
    “Were they wrong?”
    “Not wrong,” Olaf said. “When the wind turned around and theflurries started out of the northeast, we all got that sinking feeling. When the lake started crashing over the breakwater and the harbor water got choppy, we knew it was going to be a mean day, but it would’ve taken more than we saw to keep us in port.
    “Anyway, we