"Thanks, Bobby," I said. "That means a lot, coming from you."
We'd never loosened our grip, and we just stood there, holding hands. Down the beach, the rest of the Shatford family was having a cook-out. I was headed there, but Bobby couldn't come. He had to stay away.
When I finally talked to Ricky, it seemed as close as I was going to get to shaking Bobby Shatford's hand. Ricky was a fisherman, he was Bobby's older brother, and he'd wanted to kill me. Those are tough hurdles to clear. One summer night in a Gloucester bar, though, we got to talking, and he told me what it was like to lose his younger brother. To me, Ricky had always been the scary older brother who careened around town looking for trouble; now here he was, telling me about the most painful thing in his life. It wasn't an easy thing to listen to.
"When we were kids we were a real close family," says Ricky. "Me and Bobby and Rusty slept in the same bed together. Bobby worked down at the wharf, Bob Brown built the Miss Penny and Looper was running it and I remember one time we were down at Rosie's doing the last-minute preparations and on the way out I yelled to Bobby on the State Fish Pier, HEY BRO! That trip we hit one of the first storms I ever encountered in my life, it was '83 and we were crazy, it was December on the southeast part of Georges and the water was still warm, the Rush was right next to us and they lost every window they had. We gave them our loran to get back home."
A few years later Ricky went down to Florida to run a shark-fishing boat—"I was a highliner back then," he says, "I was damn pretty good with shark." When Bobby and his wife split up, Ricky invited him down to Florida to fish and got him a job on another boat. At one point the captain didn't show up for a trip, so the owner handed the boat over to Bobby. Ricky and Bobby fished side by side for a while, making a lot of money, and then Bobby ran into his own trouble and wound up back in Gloucester. "I always thought it was safer to go fishing on the Grand Banks for thirty days than stay on land for thirty days," says Ricky. "Bobby and I had some brawls down in Florida, just me against him. We had a club and Bobby and I just destroyed the place—tables, chairs, people."
From Florida Ricky went on to Hawaii. There was a lot of swordfishing in the Pacific, and Ricky was given a state-of-the-art ninety-foot boat and two salaried Filipino crew. In September, 1991, he called up the Crow's Nest and asked to speak to Bobby. Bro, he said, I got this big beautiful boat, why don't you come out and fish with me?
The owner had even offered to pay Bobby's plane ticket. Bobby declined. "He said he was really in love with this chick," says Ricky. "So I said, 'Alright, I love you, bro,' and he said, 'I love you too.' And that was the last thing we said to each other."
A month later Ricky got the news. He was two days out of Hawaii with all his gear in the water, and he called up the High Seas operator to make contact by satellite phone with the boat's owner, who was fishing off Samoa. The operator told Ricky there was "stand-by traffic" for him—a call waiting to be patched through—and then she connected Ricky to his boss. The boss said that Bob Brown had been leaving messages on his assistant's answering machine in California. Uh-oh, Ricky thought, stand-by traffic, a message from Bob Brown . . . something's happened to Bobby.
Sure enough, the stand-by call was from his sister, Mary Anne. Ricky, I love you, she started off, and then she said that Bobby's boat was missing. "I just figured they were gone," says Ricky. "So I went outside and told my crew, I
said, 'My brother's boat is missing and I think we're just gonna haul the line and go in.' I hauled with tears in my eyes, I was bullshit with God for something like that happening. We got in and got drunk and then I just flew home."
At the memorial service Ricky saw people he hadn't seen in twenty years—friends from grade school, old fishing buddies, mothers from the neighborhood. He stayed in Gloucester a couple of weeks and then went right back out to Hawaii, knocking two windows out of the wheelhouse during a storm on the first trip out. All he could think about was how his mother would feel if she lost two sons instead of just one, and he decided to cut down on his risks. He would go to the Grand Banks no later than October, and even October would be subject to Ethel's approval. "You'll have a choice in the matter," he told her. Still, risk was a difficult thing to avoid, and he even found himself seeking it from time to time. After a few more years in Hawaii he moved back to Gloucester with his wife and started fishing with a man whose father had been lost at sea. The two of them, he said, did crazy things on the boat, fishing late in the season through really severe weather.