The Last Run by Todd Lewan Page B

gives me the creeps.”
    “We’re fixing her up.”
    “I have to go.”
    “Give hugs to Brennie for me tonight?”
    She opened the car door, got in and started the motor. The headlights came on.
    “Thanks for letting him come today,” Bob Doyle said. “And for bringing Katie. I’ll call you when we reach port.”
    She was gone.
     

ELEVEN
    T hat night when Mike DeCapua returned to the boat Bob Doyle was lying facedown on the bottom bunk and looking at the cabin wall. It was dark and the only sound was the lazy creak of the hull in the high tide.
    “Sleeping?” DeCapua asked him.
    “No.”
    “Want a beer?”
    “I don’t think so. Thanks.”
    DeCapua climbed up in his rack and clicked on the reading lamp.
    “How were the whales?”
    “Fine.”
    “Everything all right?”
    “I’m just feeling a little low.”
    “I asked the skipper tonight when we were leaving.”
    “What did he say?”
    “Tomorrow.” DeCapua lit a cigarette. “You know what I said to him? I said: ‘Why don’t we head out on Saturday? We could leave right after midnight.’ So he asks me why. And I go: ‘It’s bad luck to start a fishing trip on a Friday. Don’t you know that?’”
    “And did he?”
    “He does now.”
    “Then what?”
    “So then he goes: ‘Cut the superstition crap, Mike.’ You believe that? We’ve been corking off in port all week and now he’s worried about one fucking day.”
    “Well,” Bob Doyle said, “he is the skipper.”
    DeCapua smoked his cigarette.
    “So what time are we leaving?” Bob Doyle asked him.
    “Four o’clock.”
    “That’s in six hours,” Bob Doyle said. “Where did he say we were going?”
    “Fairweather Grounds.”
    The Fairweather Grounds were a cluster of shoals out in the open gulf, about 150 miles northwest of Sitka. The grounds were great fishing, but it took at least eighteen hours just to get out to them.
    “What does he want to catch?” Bob Doyle asked.
    “Rockfish.”
    “What’s our limit?”
    “We’re allowed twelve thousand pounds a week, plus another ten percent bycatch,” DeCapua said. “I guess that ain’t bad. But you know why they extend the season out there, don’t you? Because nobody’s nuts enough to fish the grounds in the winter. There’s fish, all right. But it’s hell getting them. Hell. I’ve fished the grounds. I know. In January, the only things that belong on the grounds are things with fins and gills.”
    Bob Doyle lay still, listening to the hull creaking around him.
    “You ever get spooked at sea, Mike?”
    “No.”
    “Lonely?”
    “I been on my own a lot. I figure being alone is the normal course of events. Anything else?”
    “You got the one kid, right?”
    “No. I got three.”
    “Three?”
    DeCapua coughed. “I got two girls from my first marriage. Haven’t seen them for a while.”
    “How long?”
    “Nineteen years.”
    “That must be rough.”
    “You got to know how to be alone,” DeCapua told him. “It’s like knowing how to wipe your ass. No one’s going to show you how to do it.” He puffed on his cigarette and then said, “What scares you?”
    “Oblivion.”
    Mike DeCapua grunted.
    “I don’t know. It’s just that everything always seems to start off good and turn out bad,” Bob Doyle said. “Nothing ever gets any better. And then that’s it. You’re dead. Know what I mean?”
    “No.”
    “There’s nothing that makes you afraid?”
    “Sure there is.”
    “What?”
    “Dying with a hundred-dollar bill in my pocket.”
    “Come on.”
    “No kidding. Scares the shit out of me. Want to hear a bedtime story? All right. My old man worked his whole life for Pratt Whitney, the airplane-parts company, in Hartford.”
    “My older brother worked for Pratt Whitney.”
    “Yeah, well, my old man was a machinist for those fuckers. He went in right out of high school thinking that one day, when he’s good and old, he’ll have a little something for when he retires. And he worked there for forty