Amy George was a bar girl from Norfolk County. She’d been working up and down the coast well on seven years when she met Ben Summers one evening at the Crow Bar. Ben’d flown down from Florida because he’d heard they were looking for swordfishermen.
Ben come in the Crow with his duffle bag over his shoulder. “I’m here for the Bonny ‘n Clyde,” he says like he’s all set to go. “Well,” says Irene, who is not without her deadpan, “you better put away your Thompson and park yourself here. Billy’s still waiting on a swordfisherman. What are you drinking?”
That was the way it was at the Crow Bar. They’d buy you a drink and keep buying you a drink till you all were drunker than drunk. They all got sore heads that night. And Amy never got to speak to Ben. “If I did,” she says, “I don’t remember.”
The Bonny ‘n Clyde went out to the Grand Banks to haul in some big fish before the other longliners pitched in. It came back a month or so later with enough swordfish to get their owner Dwayne Johnson all hot and sweaty under the collar. Dwayne gave the crew all bonuses, which in Ben’s case meant another grand on top of the three he took. There was a big party that night. The swordfishermen kept buying the beers, and they might just as well have not gone to bed and carried on drinking through the next day. Except they had to bring out the fish from the hold, which is just about a ball breaking back breaking thing do when you got a hangover along with a hardon in your greased-up fish pants.
Amy and Ben were sick for each other. Amy couldn’t get enough of Ben, and Ben couldn’t get enough of Amy. Ben wanted Amy all the time, and Amy wanted Ben all the time etc.
Days Ben’d be gone, and she’d wait up for him, ‘specially when they got to the four-week mark. You knew they were due in, and you’d start pacing. You’d see one of the other longliners like the Moonshine or the Geraldine and you’d ask them. “Anyone seen the Bonny ‘n Clyde?” – Maybe they had, about two weeks back. Somewhere out over the Grand Banks. Or down at the Point. Sometimes she’d go up to the Eastern Point by Brace Rock. Look out to sea till everything got misty and you couldn’t see anything because of the fog, or just for the damn depressing way the sea and sky seem to blend into each other. And you’d be thinking the longliner won’t come. They are in a storm, what you call a beam sea where you got about a zero chance of survival. Amy’s thoughts would get pretty black. She’d start seeing ghosts – faint outlines. “I’d trick myself with the light. But the Bonny ‘n Clyde never came, so I’d go back to the bar to help out Irene.”
Amy used get real antsy waiting, she’d want a drink, and she’d d start up with a buddy. “Irene didn’t mind, she knew what I was going through. It had been the same with Ron. The waiting nearly killed me each time. Each time I’d be churning away, thinking when are they coming back? Will they ever?”
The truth was, Amy could not stop thinking about Ben. He was already a ghost. She’d see him everywhere in town. At the bar. At the supermarket. Down on the waterfront. She’d get in the pick-up and she’d have his old sweatshirt on the seat, or one of his CDs. And she’d put on his Aerosmith or his Axel Rose. “Then I start thinking about how much I wanted his dick inside me. I mean, sometimes it got so bad I started fingering myself as I was driving over to see Stacey’s kid. That’s how crazy I was. Stacey’s kid had mental problems! And there I was thinking about Ben, thinking about the way he ran his fingers down my spine and pressed his thumbs in my dimples. It was always enough to get me off.”
Ben was a handsome guy; Irene said, so did the other girls. He had lovely green eyes that made his smile extra special. And like a lot of those swordfishermen, he was strong in the hands and tight in the belly where most guys have spare tyres. Yes, aesthetically, you could say he was a turn on, Ben Summers. Otherwise he was like any fuckwit round here. He liked drinking. Hell, he did. When he come off the boat, he’d come down to the bar and start on it. But Amy wasn’t complaining. “We all did it. Drank ourselves silly, drank ourselves till we couldn’t stand up or sit down. And you could hardly swing or duck a punch.”
Sometimes they got into fights. But when Amy gave him the black eye, it was an accident. “I mean, hell, I didn’t mean it. How could I mean it? – He was about to go off on a trip and we were just horsing around in the room above of the bar. And Ben said, “Go on! Slap me!” “Why do you want me to slap you?” “I don’t know,” he said. “Just want to feel what it feels like when you hit me.” “Why,” I said, “does that make you a masochist?” “I am no masochist!” he says. “Just hit me.” So, I did. I slapped him on the face. “Hell, that’s not a slap,” he said. “You gotta hit me!” So I did, I slugged him. He said, “Hey, that hurt!” and he hit me back. It sounds worse than it was, but we was laughing as we were doing it. Then he chased me onto the bed and grabbed me and he tried to pin me down. “Fuck you!” I said, as I was trying to wriggle free. He got me pinned there, like I was in a tackle – or struggling like a fish in a net but I wasn’t having it. I pushed him off, and as I did, I caught his eye, right with the funny bone. Hit him with my elbow. “Fuckin’ hell!” he said. “That hurt!” But he was laughing, and soon we were at it again like rabbits. Which just shows you, sometimes when you get drunk, it isn’t all bad. You can have fun and not get pissed at each other.
“Ben was always pulling pranks – horsing around like that. He bought the trombone in a junk shop. He couldn’t fuckin’ play it, but he liked to pretend he could. Once he come up behind me as I’m getting changed into my jeans and blows it at my fanny. I said to Ben, you prick! I would’ve slugged him. He scared the shit out of me, but I didn’t. I just grabbed him and gripped him till he started pulling off his jeans.
“But he wasn’t just like that with me. He was like it with everyone. I remember there was a Mako shark, and the Mako was still alive. They’d put it in the freezer. And this newbie, his name was Wade Dooley. We used to call him Drooley because he had such a sad-looking face. He comes to pull the Mako out of the freezer and it jumps up at him. Everyone shat themselves. He jumped like you know the Mako was about to rip his arm off. But from what Ben said the Mako was already half-dead when he hit it with the old Vatican priest, it made Ben ache. Ache with laughter, the sickness of it. No damn Mako needs the last rights.
“Swordfishermen could get really wild like that. Ben was no exception. But there was a reason for it. You see there was danger in that work. Those swordfish were dangerous mothers. They were not only dangerous till you cut their swords, but the whole business of laying out the line was dangerous. You see you put these hooks, they call ‘em snoods, on the line with a bit of bait, a squid or sardine. You got a thousand of these hooks you’re hauling. And then you gotta haul them back in with a swordfish on it. Guys get their arm hooked, or flipped over board. One guy we knew, Hardy Staines took a hook in his cheek. Everyone says he comes back looking like Freddy Kruger.
“Fishermen they say are full of bull, outrageous lies and tall stories. But a swordfisherman don’t lie when he’s talking about the seventy-foot waves and the wind moaning through the outrigging cables, and the skipper is struggling with steering least they get turned around and sit leeward with another big one about to crash into them. You get rolled over like that and you never get right again.
“Ben didn’t want to tempt fate. But like most swordfishermen he had a strong sense of fate and superstition. Every swordfisherman knows it. There’s that one wave – the rogue wave coming to get him. They smash in the potholes and turn the boat over. You can see yourself drowning there. The water coming into the cabin. And maybe they are trying to make out from the companionway. Hell, are you going to jump over the side into a raging sea with sixty, seventy-foot waves? You haven’t got a cat in hell’s chance of surviving.
“I’m telling that was the weirdest dream. I never dream about being on a longliner, but there I am on the Bonny ‘n Clyde with Billy, Ben and the boys when the sixty-foot waves are coming. And we’re all laughing about it, like we really are gangsters of the high seas, just like in the film with Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway. I see Ben next to me, and he’s looking at me with the strangest eyes. I say to him, do you want to make love, honey? – And I hold him to me and press his body against mine and show him where he can put his hands. We make love there, and I can’t hear anything of it. Not the wind howling and moaning, or the waves crashing on the whale-deck.
“And in the morning, you are not going to believe this, when I wake up properly, the bed is all wet. Then they come and told me the Bonny ‘n Clyde isn’t coming back. They lost contact. One thing for sure, when I get out of here, I don’t want to live anywhere near the sea.”
Amy George never made her parole date. According to The Nantucket Inquirer and Mirror, she went crazy at the sound of a trombone and drowned in her own shower water.