and wave. There is a lot of "standing around" now that Mad Jack's haul of fish is unloaded. The smiles of the young deck hands have white teeth in them; the smiles of the foremen have some teeth. From a round window across the deck window, a blonde head can be seen popping up anxiously, and then disappears. Mad Jack starts off to the stern toward the captain's quarters and the purser. Before the two of them can get three steps, a finger is beckoning them from a doorway, and the blonde shaggy head half-hiding in the shadows calls out, "Hey, Hallie." "I'll catch you later, Cap, OK?"
Mad Jack ducks through the low doorway designed for a crew scarcely taller than 5' 7" and knocks on the steel door marked "Captain." He is received into the captain's quarters, an office and bunk area of about 100-square feet, with a couple of floppy chairs and skimpy desk littered with stacks of papers all to one side and a short bunk supporting a T-shirted and stockinged captain to the other side. The captain receives Mad Jack with his feet dangling from the bed over a chest of drawers. Thirty years at sea gazes down from
the bunk, thirty not-wholly kind years if the captain's demeanor is any measure. A square and rutted face with a scarred dome over it looks through weathered eyes.
"There's your check on the desk, there, Mad Jack, thanks for bringing in your load. You caught more than most of the other guys lately." "Oh, you know me, Tom, I'm a bloodhound when it comes to fish. It was pretty tricky with all the coral on the bottom along there and all, but my crew is real good and we had some luck." "Didn't get bothered by the whales, huh?" "Nooo, there aren't as many on the south side of the Aleutians, never saw any," he answers a little distractedly. The mention of whales brings back the strange events of the morning. He looks at Tom but only sees the great fins circling past him in the blue-black water.
"Your lucky," Tom continues," a lot of guys have been hit pretty bad lately. More this season than ever before." "No kidding. I've heard of some, but not all that much. Hell, between the whales and the closings of the fishing grounds it getting pretty hard to fish for black cod anymore. It's enough to give a guy a mid-life crisis." The two of them chuckle and Tom lights up a cigarette, perhaps the ten thousandth one if his skin was any witness. He offers Mad Jack a drink and pours two brandys into two sturdy and finely beveled old glasses. "Well, thanks a lot Tom, I always like a man who signs his
