The Closer (3 page)

Our house is just five hundred yards away. I walk home through the tropical darkness, sad and hurt.

I think,
Why does my father have to be so harsh? Why can’t he understand what it’s like to be a kid and how much it meant to me to be at Carnival? Why does he want to hurt me all the time?

I know it’s a parent’s job to instill discipline and teach kids right from wrong. But is this how it has to be done? I don’t know. I am
confused. Maybe it’s in the genes. My father’s brother—my uncle Miguel—lives next door to us. He is very tough on his kids, too. He works on the boat with my father. I am very close to him and his family, and one time I decide to ask my uncle straight-out.

No way would I ever think to ask my father.

Why are you and my father so rough on your children? Do you want us to live in fear of you?

My uncle thinks about it for a few moments. I can tell he wants to answer the question the right way. He seems more reachable to me than my father.

I know that we are tough guys, your father and I. But if you think we are tough, you should’ve seen how our father was with us, he says. This is not an excuse, but this is all we know, because it is how we were raised. We left home as soon as we could—to get away from it. He doesn’t give me many details, but I know they lived inland, in a farming area, and they practically had to flee, things were so bad.

I think about my father as a kid, being afraid of his own father, going out on his own when he wasn’t much more than a boy. It is hard to imagine him as small and vulnerable, but listening to my uncle helps. I never doubt that my father is trying to help me find my way in life by hitting me. I don’t doubt that he loves me, even though those are not words that he says when I am a child. It’s just so… so… hard all the time. I walk away from my uncle Miguel feeling compassion for my father, feeling love for my father. I know how much he cares, how much he is trying to teach us what we need to be a success in life. Even so, I know one thing.

When I have children, I will discipline them and I will teach them, but if I do nothing else, I am going to do it in every other way than through outright fear. And I will pray that, with their own children, they are even better parents than me.

Y
OU ARE NOT SUPPOSED
to fish near the Panama Canal. There is way too much traffic on the seas there, and the other boats don’t slow down. When your boat is the size of my father’s—90 feet in length and 120 tons in weight, with nets that stretch out a thousand feet—it’s not easy to get it out of the way if you have to.

But the way my father looks at it, you do what you have to do. As a fishing boat captain, he has a mantra I’ve been hearing my whole life:

The nets don’t make money on the boat. They only make money in the water.

I am eighteen years old, the youngest of the nine crew members, working on my father’s boat full-time. It’s a hulking steel vessel named
Lisa,
with a banged-up hull and a rusty patchwork of dents and dark paint. It has seen better days, lots of them. I am not on board because I want to be. I am on board to make my fifty dollars a week so I can go to mechanic’s school. I have already decided that the fisherman’s life is not for me. I don’t like being out at sea all week, or the monstrous hours or monotony, and that’s not even getting into the risks involved.

Did you know that fishing is the second most dangerous occupation out there, behind logging? a friend tells me. That it’s thirty-six times more dangerous than the average job?

I did not know that, I reply. But I am not surprised. Then I tell
him about the family friend who had his arm ripped right off his body when it got caught between two boats.

There is another reason I am not keen on being a fisherman. I hate being away from Clara. Six days a week out at sea, and one day a week with Clara? Can we reverse the ratio?

Right now I don’t have a choice, though. I need money and this is how I can earn it. Our nets are in the water, in the Gulf of Panama, and we are not having a good day of it. For hours we’ve been in one of our regular sardine hot spots, called La Maestra, but we haven’t caught anything and are heading back to our base island. We are about twenty minutes away, not far from the Canal, when the fish-finding sonar lights up.

If the sonar is orange, it means you’ve come across a lot of fish. If the sonar is red, it means you have hit the fish lottery. The sonar is red. They are everywhere. We go all day with no action, and suddenly we’re right on top of the mother of all sardine schools. Even though we’re near the Canal, my father figures that at this hour—it’s after 11:00 p.m.—the boat traffic won’t be a problem. You only make thirty-five dollars for every one hundred tons of fish, so you don’t want any swimming away.

Drop the net. Let’s go. The fish are waiting, my father hollers.

We cast the net out in a huge circle, the idea being to surround the fish with it, and then quickly close it up with two massive ropes that get pulled in by hydraulic winches on either side.

It takes a bit of time, but we have a huge haul, maybe eighty or ninety tons of sardines, the net just about bursting, our boat sitting so low it’s practically submerged in the water. We have so many fish, in fact, that my father radios for another couple of boats to come so we can transfer our haul to them and go back out and catch more. The other boats show up, and we unload the sardines and go back to the hot spot. It is now close to 4:00 a.m. It’s not normal to fish at such an hour, but we are not stopping now.

Not when the sonar is flaming red.

My father circles the spot again and we drop the net. He has a hard time maneuvering the boat in the strong current, but we get where we need to be. There is one guy in the back and one in the front working the ropes—huge hunks of interwoven line that do the heavy lifting, bringing the bounty up to the boat. The ropes are guided by a pulley system, and at the top of the pulleys there are flaps that lock into place so the ropes won’t fly out of control once the winch starts reeling them in. When the ropes start coming, they move at a blinding clip, like cars on the Daytona straightaway.

We are working in complete darkness, the sun still two hours from coming up. Our deck lights are not on because lights would alert the fish to our presence and then they would swim away. We are about to close the net and fire up the hydraulic winches and bring the fish up. I am near the middle of the boat, about six feet from my uncle Miguel. It’s a bit tricky working in the dark, but we’re all so familiar with what needs to be done that it isn’t usually a problem.

Except that one of the pulley flaps is not secure. In the daytime somebody definitely would’ve noticed. In the darkness nobody does.

The ropes have to close the net in tandem, one after another, and when I notice that one rope is too far ahead, I tell the crew member on the second rope to let go of his rope. He lets go, but because the flap is not secure, when the winch starts reeling it in, the rope takes off, coming at us like a braided bazooka, ripping out of the water and onto the deck. It happens in an instant. There is no time to get out of the way. The rope blasts into my uncle at chest level, knocking a 240-pound man across the ship as if he were a palm frond. My uncle crashes face-first into the metal edge dividing a large salt-water-filled bin in the middle of the boat. The
rope lashes into me a microsecond later, also hitting me in the chest, and I go flying even farther, but I don’t hit the metal edge, just the divider itself.

I get a tooth knocked out and get scraped and bruised but otherwise come out unscathed. It has nothing to do with athletic ability or anything I do to minimize the damage; by the grace of God, I simply land in a relatively safe place.

My uncle is not so fortunate. His face is split open, blood gushing everywhere. He is badly hurt. He is screaming in pain. It is the most horrific thing I’ve ever seen.

Stop! Help! Miguel is hurt! somebody yells.

Call for help! Quick! He’s hurt bad!

Everybody on board is screaming. My father, who is at the helm in the cabin upstairs, races down to find his brother looking as if he’d taken a machete to the face. I keep replaying the nightmarish sequence of events. An unfastened flap, an out-of-control rope, and seconds later, an uncle I love—the man who gently explained to me why my father is so strict and quick with the belt—seems about to die before my eyes. I wish I could do something. I wish I could do anything. My father radios the Coast Guard, our first responders, and they arrive within minutes and take my uncle to the nearest hospital. The sun is coming up now. I can’t get the brutal images out of my head.

My uncle is a diabetic, and that massively complicates his recovery. He seems better on some days, and on others slips back again. He fights for his life for a month. He does not win that fight. The funeral and burial are held right in Puerto Caimito. People show up by the hundreds.

Miguel has gone home to be with the Lord, the priest says. We grieve for this loss, but we have to remember that the Lord has prepared a room for him and he has gone to a better place. There are
nine prayerful days of mourning. It is the first time I remember seeing my father cry.

We are back out on the boat a few days later, because the nets only make money in the water. We return for the final day of mourning. The perils of the job are nothing we can change. This is just what we do, day after day, week after week.

Close to a year after my uncle died, we are supposed to be off on a Friday, only my father doesn’t know it because he never gets the message from the company that owns the boat. We spend the first part of the day repairing the nets and then set out in the direction of Contadora Island, in the Pacific Ocean, heading toward Colombia. The nets fill quickly and we start back toward our base island to unload our haul. We have not gotten far when the belt on our water pump stops working. We try a backup belt that we have, but it doesn’t fit properly. The pump is still not working.

This is not good.

The pump is what gets the water out of the boat. You do not stay afloat for long if your pump is not functioning.

We’re carrying about a hundred tons of sardines and we’re sitting low and taking on water. Without the pump, we immediately begin taking on a lot more water. We are about two thousand feet off an island called Pacheca, which is next to Contadora. We are starting to sink.

There is no time to deliberate. My father has an immediate decision to make—a decision no captain ever wants to make.

We’re going to bring the boat into Pacheca, right onto the sand, my father says. There isn’t time to get to Contadora.

He heads directly for the island and we are about halfway there, maybe a thousand feet away, when the belt mysteriously starts working again. Nobody knows why, and nobody is launching an
investigation. Water begins to get pumped out and the boat rises in the water. My father is relieved, and you can see it on his face; he knows all about the risks involved with trying to pilot such a big boat onto shore. We could hit a rock or a coral reef, and the hull would get shredded like cheese in a grater. We’d take on too much sandy water, and the engine would be gummed up for the rest of time.

We are two hours from our base, and with the pump back in commission, my father says we’re going back to Contadora. The wind is picking up and the swells in the ocean are getting bigger, but he is confident it will be no problem.

We need to get back and unload the fish, he says. As long as the belt is good and the pump is good, it will be fine.

My father has been fishing these waters for years, and has keen instincts about what’s safe and what isn’t. Those instincts have served him well, but that doesn’t mean they are always right. He reverses field and pulls away from Pacheca. We don’t get more than fifteen hundred feet before the pump stops again.

It is almost 9:00 p.m. now. The water in the boat starts rising, of course. The wind keeps getting stronger, and soon the swells are eight or ten feet, crashing over the sides of the boat. The conditions are worsening by the second. The boat is taking on water at a terrifying rate.

Now there is no decision to make, because there is only one alternative.

We’re heading back to Pacheca, my father shouts. He turns the boat around. The shoreline has literally become our only port in the storm.

It is not going to be an easy or fast trip, not with the water on board and the seas so heavy.

Let’s just get to safety, get to shore, no matter how slow going it is.
I know this is what my father must be thinking.

And then the engine knocks off.

It doesn’t sputter or wheeze. It just dies. The engine is in the front of the boat and probably just got drowned by all the water.

Now what do we do? I ask my father.

We get down there and try to crank-start it, he says. He seems remarkably poised, given the circumstances.

We clamber down the metal steps into the hull, through the wet and darkness, and I grip a thick metal handle and start cranking and cranking on a device that pumps air to generate power to jump-start the engine.

Nothing.

I crank some more. The engine is still not responding.

Our ninety-foot boat is bobbing in the water like a cork now. It is sinking fast. There is no more time for cranking. We scramble up and out to the main deck, almost waist-high in water.

Everybody onto the lifeboat, my father hollers.

The lifeboat is made of iron, deep-hulled and fifteen feet long. We fight the wind and walls of water and finally wrestle the lifeboat into the sea, and all nine of us get in. It is supposed to be equipped with life jackets, but it isn’t. My father starts the engine and steers us slowly away from
Lisa,
waves crashing and cresting, tossing the lifeboat as if it were a bathtub toy.

Behind us, I see my father’s boat—and our family’s livelihood—keel over on its side and then turn upside down. In minutes it disappears completely.

Pacheca is off in the distance, maybe eight hundred feet away. It might as well be on the other side of the earth. I am on the right side of the lifeboat. It is sitting so low with all of us in it that now it starts to take on water, too.

I look out toward the lights of Pacheca. I wonder if I am going to have to swim for my life. I wonder how many of us—or if any of
us—will make it. The swells are one thing. The sharks are another. We have fished these waters many times. Hammerheads, reef sharks, tiger sharks: We have seen all kinds.

There are sharks everywhere.

The best hope for us is to get to shore via the back side of the island, where there is some protection from the wind and the seas figure to be much less rough. That is exactly where my father tries to take us. It is slow going. Up and down the swells we go. The big boat is already gone. Is this one going down, too?

I can’t stop staring at the churning sea. It looks so angry. I don’t scare easily on the water, but I am scared. We are getting a little closer to the back of the island, but it still seems hopelessly far away. The wind and water continue to pound us. Nobody on the boat is saying a word. I am so racked with fear I can barely breathe.

I can’t believe I might die because of a faulty water pump.

I knew I wanted no part of being a fisherman, and this is exactly why. I think about my uncle, and what the fishing life has cost our family. I think about my mother and brothers and sister. Most of all, I think about Clara. She is my best friend, the person I want to spend my life with, even though I’ve never told her that. The thought that I might never see her again is almost too much to bear.

A wave of water soaks me as I hang on to the side of the boat. Do I want to drown to death, or get eaten by a shark? Nineteen years of age, and these are my options.

Somehow my father keeps the lifeboat creeping forward, plowing and dipping through the waves. I try to steer my mind away from the options. He is actually making progress somehow, even in a glorified dinghy that is far from the ideal vessel in such harsh elements. Maybe he will get us to the calmer water, after all. Maybe we aren’t going down.

Is it five minutes later? Ten minutes? I don’t know. I just know
we are much closer now, probably three hundred feet from land. The wind is subsiding and the surf seems to be in retreat. We pick up a little more speed. We are heading toward a sandy beach.