All Text, Music, and Illustrations, including Paintings, Photographs, and 3D models, Copyright © 2022 by Jim Robbins.
Pelican Patrol
THE DECKHAND
He held up a bait-fish, the size of smelt,
showing how to hook the fish behind the skull
so the target would jerk around, attracting
larger fish. "They don’t feel nothin’,"
he sneered. I grabbed one from the bait pool
and carefully slid the hook behind the skull
as the victim squirmed in my hand. The fish released
a faint, shrill scream as the barb entered
its brain. As I tossed my line into the sea,
the deckhand announced, "I figured that two here
on this trip wouldn’t last." Then he chortled
that he'd been wrong about one, the other
curled up half-dead on a cot in the cabin.
“Know what? Never been wrong before!”
he grinned as he squinted at me. My Dad
ignored him. Suddenly a greenhorn reeled
in a shark, and the deckhand shot it twice
in the head, but it kept flopping around,
so he heaved it over the side. A guy who kept
drinking beer and barfing over the railing
hooked a seagull, and the deckhand smirked
as the bird hovered behind the ship like a kite. Then
the deckhand saw me stare at a scar on his forehead.
"See this? I leaned over to pat a little girl
on the head, and she pulled out a gun
and shot me, but I’m as hard-headed
as a shark. When I woke up, I asked
what happened to her, and my buddy
told me they shot her in the head. Why did they
do that? She was only five years old!
She was a killer, he said. She’d do the same
to the next soldier. You know what
was worse? Some yippie rushed up to me
and spit on my face in the airport after
I made it home. They say the war’s
almost over, but I say it’ll be over the day
fish stop feasting on each other."
He pulled open a burlap bag, where
a lingcod gorged on a red snapper.
Then he winked and howled with laughter.
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