Six More Stories
from Clyde's Shaggy Dog Stories. You were warned.
<< Back to the first six, and how to tell one

If you've come this far you are either one of my grandchildren or a very patient person, and either way I thank you. These six are the ones the Friday table asks for when they want to suffer. Pour yourself another cup.

7. The Movie Actor

A two-cup story · Groans at the table: 6 of 8

In the fifties some of the Hollywood people liked to come down to San Diego and go out fishing, and every so often, between trips, if the money was right, a tuna skipper would take a party out for a day. Howard, the same skipper who left Alfred on the dock, took out a movie actor in the summer of 1953. I won't tell you his name. His family is still living, and he wasn't so famous anyway. Mostly he played the sheriff's brother in cowboy pictures, the one who rides into town in the first reel and doesn't ride out.

He came aboard in dark glasses and a white hat, set up a canvas chair on the right-hand side of the boat, sat down in it, and waited to be recognized.

Nobody recognized him. The cook asked him if he was the new engineer. We found a little school of albacore and started fishing, and he didn't fish. He sat. He sighed. Once he said, to nobody, "In Hollywood, I'm somebody." He moved his chair a few inches so the sun would hit him better, in case anybody looked. Nobody looked. By three in the afternoon he hadn't moved from that chair on the right side of the boat, which on a boat, for the young people, is called the starboard side.

Howard kept a logbook every day of his life, wind and weather and position and fish, in very small handwriting. That night, after the actor had gone ashore and driven back to Los Angeles, I looked at what Howard had written for the day. It said:

Wind NW 10 kts. Seas calm. Albacore 2 tons.
Passenger: star, bored.

Elizabeth says this is the only one of my stories that works better written down. I'm choosing to take that as a compliment.

8. The Soup That Wouldn't Quit

A three-cup story · Groans at the table: 8 of 8, and the priest at the next table

Every summer at the festa of the Holy Ghost our people serve sopas to everybody who comes, free, the way it's been done in the islands for hundreds of years. Beef cooked for hours with spices, poured over bread and cabbage, with a sprig of mint on top. The men cook it the night before in big kettles in the kitchen behind the hall, and somebody has to stay up all night to watch the kettles. In 1961 that was Wayne, the engineer, because he could stay awake longer than anybody on the Point.

At midnight Wayne looked in the big kettle and it was half empty. The committee had been tasting it all evening, and they are thorough men. At two o'clock he looked again, and the kettle was full to the top. At three a couple of the fellows came back to taste it some more, and it went down again. At four, full again. Wayne hadn't left the kitchen except to step outside for some air.

Wayne went and woke up the priest. The priest came over in his bathrobe, looked into the kettle, looked at Wayne, and said a prayer. By five the old ladies had heard, and they came down in their black dresses and stood around the kettle and whispered. By breakfast it was all over Point Loma: the kettle that fills itself. People came to look. Somebody's grandmother brought a candle and set it on the stove, and Wayne moved it, because it was a stove.

Then came the procession, and the crowning, and the dinner. Everybody ate. It was the best sopas anybody could remember. Men had thirds. And the kettle stayed full all afternoon, no matter how many bowls came out of it.

Late in the day my cousin Seymour came out of the kitchen with his face as red as a boiled crab, and he went straight to the priest, in front of everybody, and confessed. The first batch had been his job, and he had salted it twice by mistake, and it was so salty you could have floated an egg in it. He was so ashamed he couldn't tell anybody. So all night long, every time Wayne stepped out for air, Seymour had been sneaking in the back door with pots of sopas his mother was making in her own kitchen up the hill, and pouring them in to thin the salt out. Up and down that hill all night in the dark with a pot in each hand.

The whole hall was quiet. And the priest put his hand on Seymour's shoulder, and he said, "My son, I'm relieved. I was afraid it was something supernatural."

And Seymour said, "No, Father. Just sopa-natural."

Seymour's mother lived to be ninety-eight and never once let him forget that she made the best sopas in the history of the festa, and nobody could ever say so out loud.

9. The Fly Fisherman

A two-cup story · Groans at the table: 5 of 8

In 1966 a gentleman from back east, a friend of our skipper's brother-in-law, wanted very badly to see a tuna trip. He arranged to ride down with us to the fishing grounds off Mexico and fly home from there. He came aboard with a long skinny rod in a leather case and a little wooden box full of trout flies, every one tied by hand, feathers and fur, beautiful things. He told us he was a fly fisherman, and he said it the way another man would say he was a bishop.

We told him, very politely, "Mister, these are tuna. Forty pounds, eighty pounds. Your rod will snap like a breadstick." He said, "I only fly fish."

So every day he stood at the rail with his skinny rod, waving that line back and forth over his head in big loops, and laying his little fly down on the ocean as gentle as a kiss. And every day nothing happened. We filled the wells around him. He caught nothing. He never complained, and the crew started to feel sorry for him. Frank, the cook, even started saving him the best piece of fish at supper.

One night down south, in the warm water, we were working late under the deck lights, and the flying fish came. If you've never been to sea in the tropics, at night the flying fish see the lights and come right up out of the water and sail across the deck, and land at your feet, and hit you in the back of the head. That night it rained flying fish. Dozens of them. And one of them came sailing out of the dark and hit our gentleman square in the chest, and he caught it, without thinking, in both hands.

He stood there holding it. It was flapping. He looked at us. He said, "What do I do?"

And Frank put down his knife and said, "Mister, congratulations. That's fly fishing."

Frank says this isn't a pun, it's just the truth, and he is the only one at the table who's allowed to say so because he was there. He is eighty-eight and he still has the best timing on the Point.

10. The Man in the White Suit

A one-cup story · Groans at the table: 7 of 8

The clippers carried their fish in wells, big tanks below deck full of sea water with salt added and chilled down so cold the tuna froze solid. The brine, we called it.

One morning in 1950 a fellow came down from the cannery office to look the boat over. He wore a white suit, white shoes, a straw hat with a ribbon around it and a red carnation in his buttonhole. A real dandy. He wanted to see the wells. The skipper said, "Be careful, sir." We had a well open and we were just filling it from the hose with fresh sea water, not chilled yet, thank God. The fellow leaned over the hatch to see how deep it was, and he leaned a little more, and in he went. Hat, carnation, white shoes and all.

We pulled him out by the collar. He stood on the deck with the sea water running out of his sleeves and his shoes going squish and the carnation sitting on top of his head. The skipper, very worried, said, "Are you all right, sir?"

And the man straightened his tie, put his hat back on over the carnation, and said, "Never better, Captain. Everything is brine and dandy."

Elizabeth gave this one a 7 instead of an 8 because she says a man from the cannery office would never have been that good a sport.

11. The Boy on the Dock

A two-cup story · Groans at the table: 8 of 8

During the war there was a little boy named Jay who lived on the docks, more or less. His mother worked long shifts at the cannery and his father was in the Navy, and Jay took care of himself from breakfast to supper, and he chose to do it on the waterfront. He was about ten. He knew every boat on the Point by the sound of her engine. He knew every knot. He'd untangle a line for a nickel and coil it better than the man who tangled it. He'd mend a net for a sandwich. The women of the Point fed him so often he had three lunches some days and never said no to any of them.

With so many of the men gone to the war, by the time Jay was twelve he was doing a man's work on those docks. And one day a lady from uptown came down with a friend to buy fish right off a boat, in a fancy hat and gloves, and she saw Jay sitting on a piling with a net in his lap, barefoot, salt in his hair, and she said to her friend, "Oh, look at that poor little street urchin."

Now, Alex the net mender was sitting right there. Alex never said a word to anybody if he could help it. But he put down his needle, and he looked up at that lady from under his cap, and he said, "Lady, that boy has never been on a street in his life. He's a sea urchin."

Jay grew up to be one of the best skippers on the Point. He sits at our table every Friday, and he groaned the loudest, and then he said Alex's line along with me, because he's heard it about four hundred times.

12. My First Day

A one-cup story · Groans at the table: 6 of 8

This one is about me. In the spring of 1938 I was eighteen years old, green as a lime, on my very first day on a tuna boat. We were loading at the dock: ice, groceries, coffee, rope, gear, bait coming aboard, everybody running. The skipper was an old Madeiran with a voice like a foghorn, and I was scared to death of him.

Right in the middle of all that, the skipper sees his wife coming down the dock with the lunch he forgot at home, and he wants everybody out of her way, and he hollers at the top of his lungs, "HOLD EVERYTHING!"

Now I knew one thing about boats. I knew the hold was the big room under the deck where the fish go. So I started putting everything in the hold. The sack of potatoes. The coffee. A coil of rope. The cook's big pot. A wooden chair. The skipper's coat off the hook. A bucket. A smaller bucket. I was working like a madman.

When he turned around, the whole deck was bare, and I was standing there by the hatch, sweating, very proud of myself. He looked at the empty deck. He looked at me. He said, "Where is everything?"

And I said, "In the hold, Skipper. Like you said."

He kept me on anyway, and I stayed forty years on the boats. Elizabeth says this one isn't a pun, it's an excuse. Maybe so. But it's how I know I'm the one who ought to be telling the stories.

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Last updated Friday, September 24, 1999