there was the agony of not knowing, as well. Missing dory crews could turn up at any time, and so there was never a point at which the families knew for sure they could grieve and get on with their lives. “We saw a father go morning and evening to the hill-top which overlooked the ocean,” recorded the Provincetown Advocate after a terrible gale in 1841. “And there seating himself, would watch for hours, scanning the distant horizon … for some speck on which to build a hope.”
And they prayed. They walked up Prospect Street to the top of a steep rise called Portagee Hill and stood beneath the twin bell towers of Our Lady of Good Voyage church. The bell towers are one of the highest points in Gloucester and can be seen for miles by incoming ships. Between the towers is a sculpture of the Virgin Mary, who gazes down with love and concern at a bundle in her arms. This is the Virgin who has been charged with the safety of the local fishermen. The bundle in her arms is not the infant Jesus; it’s a Gloucester schooner.
AFTER Mary Anne leaves the Green Tavern, Chris and Bobby finish up their drinks and then tell Bugsy that they’re going out for a while. They step out of the barroom darkness into the soft grey light of Gloucester in the rain and walk across the street to Bill’s. Bobby orders a couple of Budweisers while Chris fishes a dime out of her pocket and calls her friend Thea from a pay-phone. She and Thea used to be neighbors in a housing project, and Chris thinks she might be able to borrow Theas apartment for a while to give Bobby a proper goodbye. She wants to be alone with him for a while, and she wants to help Bugsy out if she can. It’s possible Thea might be interested in him—he’s leaving in a few hours for the Grand Banks, but you never know.
Thea says come by any time, and Chris hangs up and goes back to the bar. Bobby’s hangover has alchemized into a huge empty hunger, and they finish off their beers and leave a buck on the bartop and head back outside. They drive across town to a lunch place called Sammy J’s and order two more beers and fishcakes and beans. Fishcakes are Bobby’s favorite food and he probably won’t see them again until he’s back on shore. The last thing fishermen want to eat at sea is more fish. They eat fast and pick up Bugsy and then drive over to Ethel’s. Chris has had a falling out with Ethel’s boyfriend, and Chris is going to move out everything she has stored there. It’s still raining a little, everything seems dark and oppressive, and they carry boxes of her belongings down one flight of stairs and pack it into the Volvo. They fill the car with lamps and clothes and house plants and then squeeze themselves in and drive across town to the projects on Arthur Street.
Thea doesn’t go for Bugsy, as it turns out, she’s already got a boyfriend. The four of them sit around talking and drinking beer for a while, and then the men have a terrible realization: They’ve forgotten the hotdogs. Murph, who is charged with buying food for the trip, won’t get hotdogs on his own, so if they want any they’ll have to get them on their own. They drive to Cape Ann Market and Bobby and Bugsy run into the store and come back a few minutes later with fifty dollars’ worth of hotdogs. It’s midafternoon now; it’s getting close. Chris drives them back down Rogers Street, past Walgreen’s and Americold and Gorton’s, and turns down into the gravel lot behind Rose’s Marine. Bobby and Bugsy get out with their hotdogs and jump from the pier to the deck of the Andrea Gail.
Watching the men move around the boat Chris thinks: this winter Bobby’ll be down in Bradenton, next summer he’ll be back up here but gone a month at a time, and that’s just how it is; Bobby’s a swordfisherman and owes a lot of money. At least they have a plan, though. Bobby signed a statement directing Bob Brown to give his settlement check from the last trip to Chris, and she’s going to use the money—almost $3,000—to pay off some of his debts and get an apartment in Lanesville, on the north shore of Cape Ann. Maybe living out there, they’ll spend a little less time at the Nest. And she’s got two jobs lined up, one at the Old Farm Inn in Rockport, and another taking care of the retarded son of a friend. They’ll get by. Bobby might be away a lot, but they’ll get by.
Suddenly there are shouts coming from the boat: Bugsy and Bobby are standing toe to toe on the wharf in the rain, wrenching a jug of bleach back and forth. Fists are coming up and the bleach is going first one way, then another, and at any moment it looks like one of them’s going to roundhouse the other. It doesn’t happen; Bobby finally turns away, spitting swears, and goes back to work. Out of the corner of her eye Chris sees another fisherman named Sully angling across the gravel lot toward her car. He walks up and leans in the window.
I just got a site on the boat, he says, I’m replacin’ some guy who backed out. He looks over at Bobby and Bugsy. Can you believe this shit? Thirty days together and it’s startin’ already?
THE Andrea Gail, in the language, is a raked-stem, hard-chined western-rig swordfisherman. That means her bow has a lot of angle to it, she has a nearly-square cross-section, and her pilothouse is up front rather than in the stern, atop an elevated deck called the whaleback. She’s 72 feet long, has a hull of continuously-welded steel plate, and was built in Panama City, Florida, in 1978. She has a 365-horsepower,turbo-charged diesel engine, which is capable of speeds up to twelve knots. There are seven type-one life preservers on board, six Imperial survival suits, a 406-megahertz Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon (EPIRB), a 121.5-megahertz EPIRB, and a Givens auto-inflating life raft. There are forty miles of 700-pound test monofilament line on her, thousands of hooks, and room for five tons of baitfish. An ice machine that can make three tons of ice a day sits on her whaleback deck, and state-of-the-art electronics fill her pilothouse: radar, loran, single-sideband, VHF, weather track satellite receiver. There’s a washer/dryer on board, and the galley has fake wood veneer and a four-burner stove.
The Andrea Gail is one of the biggest moneymakers in Gloucester harbor, and Billy Tyne and Bugsy Moran have driven all the way from Florida to grab sites onboard. The only other sword boat in the harbor that might be able to out fish her is the Hannah Boden, skippered by a Colby College graduate named Linda Green law. Not only is Green law one of the only women in the business, she’s one of the best captains, period, on the entire East Coast. Year after year, trip after trip, she makes more money than almost anyone else. Both the Andrea Gail and the Hannah Boden are owned by Bob Brown, and they can take so much fish from the ocean that Ethel’s son Ricky has been known to call in from Hawaii to find out if either one is in port. When the Hannah Boden unloads her catch in Gloucester, swordfish prices plummet halfway across the world.
So far, though, Billy’s second trip on the Andrea Gail is off to a bad start. The boys have been drinking hard all week and everyone’s in a foul mood. No one wants to go back out. For the past several days almost every attempt to work on the boat has degenerated either into a fight or an occasion to walk across the street to the bar. Now it’s September 20th, late in the season to be heading out, and Tyne can barely round up a full crew. Alfred Pierre—an immense, kind Jamaican from New York City—is holed up with his girl-friend in one of the upstairs rooms at the Nest. One minute he says he’s going, the next minute he’s not—it’s been like that all day long. Bobby’s somewhere across town with a black eye and a hangover. Bugsy’s in an ugly mood because he hasn’t met a woman. Murph is complaining about money and misses his kid, and—the last straw—a new crew member walked off this morning without any explanation at all.
The guy’s name was Adam Randall, and he was supposed to replace Doug Kosco, who’d crewed on the previous trip. Randall had driven up from East Bridgewater, Massachusetts, with his father-in-law that morning to take the job; he pulled into the dirt parking lot behind Rose’s and got out to look the boat over. Randall was a lithe, intensely handsome 30-year-old man with a shag of blond rock-star hair and cold blue eyes. He was a welder, an engineer, a scuba diver, and had fished his whole life. He knew an unsafe boat when he saw one—he called them “slabs”—and the Andrea Gail was anything but. She looked like she could take an aircraft carrier broadside. Moreover, he knew most of her crew, and his girlfriend had practically told him not to bother coming home if he didn’t take the job. He hadn’t worked in three months. He walked back across the lot, told his father-in-law that he had a funny feeling,
