The next day I decided to work. Money was money and I hadn’t done much “volunteer” work yet. “ Volunteer” because it was optional whether we worked or not. At first when anyone talked about the volunteer list, I was afraid that they were talking about working for the sake of working and that didn’t interest me at all.
I’d snuck out of Malcolm’s apartment a little before 5:00 a.m. and made it down to the cabin, crawling back in bed for a couple of hours. To my great relief, no Ted from the Charger.
I had a piece of toast at the cabin, grabbed a coffee at the cafeteria, but didn’t stay to chat with anyone. I wasn’t feeling so much anti-social, but just not ready to argue, debate, or defend my position. Unfortunately, I had no idea how this volunteer crap worked. So I’d have to ask.
I clocked in and then loitered out front with other workers, waiting to be assigned some task.
“Hey,” Tim said to me, “you actually going to do volunteer work?”
I raised my eyebrows, “You actually going to speak to me?”
He looked away and gave a twisted smile. “Yeah, guess so.”
“Good,” I said, “I wasn’t enjoying how things had changed between us.” Tim didn’t respond, but just nodded.
Thelma and Scary Bill approached, clip boards in hand. Malcolm was walking behind them, eyes on me, a warm smile, and not a single person in the crowd picked up on it.
Thelma started in, “Tim, Enrico, Clark, David, John, and yes, the other John, and Mike…go get your freezer suits on and get those tunnels cleaned out.” This announcement was met with a group groan.
“Petra, you and Jaimie can—“
“No way, Thelma, “ Creepy Bill said forcefully, “You don’t get to just start taking every worker you want and leaving me with nothing. I’ve got work that needs to be done in the Crab Plant. “
Thelma turned to Bill, her hands on her hips. “Bill, halibut is before crab.”
“Yes, Thelma,” Creepy Bill said with strong sarcasm, “But the Crab Plant needs a lot of work done to it before Crab season opens. The engineers stored stuff in there all winter and it’s totally wrecked. I need workers, too.”
“So what did you do all during Black Cod, Bill? I never noticed you in here helping us but you still managed to collect a paycheck, so what did you do?”
Malcolm walked past, gave me a small wink, and only I noticed. Of course, Thelma and Bill were beginning to make quite an entertaining spectacle of themselves.
“Don’t give me shit,” Bill’s voice was cold and threatening, “don’t even try it. Now I’m going to take Petra, Jaimie, Loki, and Clark.”
“I already called Clark.”
“Uncall him. I’m taking him.”
“It’s nice to be loved,” Clark chirped in, a pleased, evil smile on his face.
“Shut up,” Thelma told him. “Fine, take Clark then. See how much work you get out of him when he’s in the bathroom all day.”
“Hey, I take exception to that,” Clark protested.
“Sure, go ahead,” Thelma said rather unpleasantly and stalked off.
Bill watched her leave, hands on his hips, and a smile on his lips that never reached his eyes.
“Come on, you guys, get to the Crab Plant.”
So we ambled along. Then we loitered in the alley way inside the Crab Plant, just outside the cafeteria door. This was about as much of the Crab Plant as I’d ever seen. I’d poked my head inside the door of the actual processing room once, but couldn’t see anything, because as Creepy had said, the engineers had stored crap in there all winter.
“Ok, you girls wait here for a moment while I get Clark and Loki started.” The two guys followed Bill into the processing room.
“Come on, let’s go into the dry room,” Jaimie said.
“That’s too far away, “ I said, “he said to wait here.”
“Not the Fish House dry room, stupid, the Crab Plant dry room. It’s behind that door that you’re standing right in front of.”
“Well, how was I supposed to know that?” Crap. Jaimie had me on edge and feeling defensive already and it was only five minutes into an eight hour day.
“Come on.” So we walked into the tiny, smelly room and were hit by a blast of hot air.
“Holy! Talk about hot! Why isn’t the Fish House dry room this hot?”
“Too big, too cold,” Jaimie replied. “Crab is warm to process. We’ll just wear t-shirts when we work crab.”
“Really? Truly? I can live with that. Don’t know if I can live with Bill, but I can live with being warm.”
“You’re not going to have any choice but to live with Bill. All the new hires end up in the Crab Plant because of the wage difference. Once you get up the scale, you make less and less if you work here, so the workers with seniority insist on the Fish House.”
“Why do they get less money over here?”
“Some stupid compromise during the last contract negotiations.”
“Oh.”
“Girls!”
I opened the dry room door to find Creepy looking around, hands on his hips, looking as though he were afraid we may have ditched him.
I gave him a smile. “Yes? You called?”
Oh, big revolting grin. Note to myself: don’t say anything that Creepy may interpret as flirting. I hid a shudder.
“This way, ladies.” Bill led the way up the staircase. I was curious, never having been up here before, but honestly, not much to see. More stacks of crap, most of it unmade boxes, also known as pallets of fiber.
“Over here,” Bill led the way, meandering past cascading piles of fiber. “Start over here in this corner and get as far as you can today, moving that direction.” He pointed to the way we had just come.
“Get started doing what?” I asked, baffled.
“Get all this fiber sorted out by size and re-stacked. Then if there’s time, I want you to start making 50-pound boxes and stacking them over here by the shoot. I want to be totally ready when the crab hits.”
I probably still looked stupid and blank, looking with curiosity at the hole in the floor through which I could see a small portion of the processing room. Bill looked at me and shook his head. Then he looked at Jaimie and she was nodding as though she had it all under control, so Bill seemed reassured.
“Don’t screw off just because you’re up here by yourselves. I’ll be checking on you and I’d better see some progress. Got it?”
I nodded without confidence and Bill shook his head in disgust again and ambled off.
“God, where to start?” I asked Jaimie as I perused the chaos.
“I say over here,” Jaimie said as she lay down on a big pile of fiber.
I stared in silence for a moment, waiting for her to say she was just joking. But she didn’t move except to make herself more comfortable.
“Jaimie, Bill will blow a gasket if he comes up here and finds that we’re sleeping and doing nothing.”
“Petra,” Jaimie said with her usual impatient sarcasm, “Bill isn’t going to show up for hours. Bill just went home to snort a whole bunch of coke up his head and listen to music. Plus a couple of boats pulled in this morning and he will be entertaining coke clients for at least a couple of hours.”
I stared at her. I kept staring at her. Finally Jaimie lifted her eyebrows, willing me to say something.
All I came up with is, “Are you serious?”
Jaimie sighed. “How old are you? Did you come here straight from a convent? I mean, can you really be that dense?”
“I’m not sure if that was intended as a rhetorical question or not, but I’ll answer anyway. Yes, I am apparently that dense. How does he get away with it?”
“The V.P.S.O. is a childhood friend who does coke. A lot of fishermen buy from him. He sells pot, too, but right now he’s sitting on a bunch of coke. Jeff either doesn’t know or is turning a blind eye because he doesn’t want to piss off any of the fleet by canning their dealer, but he did make Bill move out of company housing.”
“Ok. Next question. How do you know all this?”
“What? Do you think I’m so unpopular that no one will tell me anything or invite me anywhere?”
“Whoa! No offense intended. I’m merely curious.”
“I was visiting some of the fishermen I grew up around the other night and they wanted to score some and I just tagged along, hoping to get some beer.”
I made a face at the mention of beer, my least favorite beverage. “So what happened? Did you see anything?”
“Would you come sit down so I don’t have to look up so far?” Jaimie was the rudest, most impatient little thing, but I obliged and stretched out on the fiber and we turned and faced one another—a Cold Storage daytime slumber party in the making.
“I saw everything. They snorted a bunch of lines and offered me a couple, too. No one questioned it.”
“Bill was right there?”
“Bill was right there,” she confirmed.
“Weird,” I said, not knowing what else I could possibly say.
Jaimie agreed. “It was weird. I kept expecting him to tell me to get lost or to tell the guys I was with that it wasn’t cool and to come back later along, but no, he just laid out some lines, everyone snorted, listened to some music, and did some more lines. He must have a shitload of that stuff.”
I was quiet for a few moments. “How do you know that’s what he’s doing right now?”
“Oh, there’s no doubt. He is high as a kite and was starting to jones. He’ll be there awhile. Remember Thelma’s snotty comment to him? The coke is why he didn’t work at all during Black Cod. He was too busy dealing and using. Plus he thinks he’s really something now that he’s a foreman. My dad says he won’t last long, though.”
“Huh.” Too much to ponder.
“So I say, let’s take a nap, and then we’ll get up and bust some of this stuff out before lunch and no one will be the wiser.”
“Ok.” I agreed. I wasn’t sure if I could actually sleep, but to my surprise, I drifted off to be plagued by very strange dreams.
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