To Billy Joe, who received an exemption owing to a bum leg, the war was someone else’s problem in another country, far removed from his own life. When the draft board came knocking, some of the boys went off to fight and die in Vietnam others hopped buses to dodge the draft in Canada. There weren’t any civil rights marches or antiwar rallies in a town like Seadrift. His folks and several siblings had recently moved there his brother Doc ran a fish house in town, buying the daily catch of shrimp, crabs, and oysters.įewer than a thousand people lived in town, which was sealed off from just about everything. After getting caught up in a gun deal gone bad with some mobsters in Galveston involving a dozen Lugers with Nazi insignia, he fled with his family to Alaska to work as a dive boat captain for divers repairing oil pipelines.īy the mid-1970s, though, things had cooled down enough for the Aplins to return to Texas, with enough savings for a down payment on their first home, a small redbrick two-story on the outskirts of Seadrift, a speck of a fishing town halfway down the Texas Gulf Coast to Mexico. He soon indulged in an affair that nearly destroyed his marriage. As best as he could tell, nothing in the natural world produced mutated crabs or zombie fish. The next morning, he made his final bank payment on a wrecked boat and was knocked back down to crabbing and oystering. In that moment, it was hard not to be embittered by how small his life seemed in comparison. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin lived near the Manned Spacecraft Center, in El Lago, right next to the Galveston Bay shrimping towns of Kemah and Seabrook, where Billy Joe frequently docked. Beth, then four, ironed the waterlogged cash while her dad sulked in the living room, watching the Apollo 11 moon landing. A fellow shrimper by the name of John Collins came to their rescue on a salvage boat, winching up the wreckage and Judy’s purse. Billy Joe dove down to search for it, again and again, but came up empty-handed. Judy remembered her purse and started screaming. The moment before it capsized, Billy Joe and Judy dove into the gulf, treading water as the boat began its descent into darkness. Whatever had seized their nets caused Judy’s Pride to circle her tether and quickly take on water.
The bays were filled with debris, boulders, oil pipeline, shipwrecks-the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department once dumped hundreds of junked cars to build artificial reefs for game fish, switching to concrete pipes only after the tide swept the cars away. Almost as soon as their ninety-by-thirty-foot nets drifted to the bottom of the bay, the trawler lurched and began listing Judy’s Pride was snagged upon something on the floor of the bay. After dropping Beth off with a relative, Billy Joe and Judy went dragging for shrimp in high spirits: in her purse was a wad of cash-the final bank payment before they owned Judy’s Pride outright. They bought their first trawler, which he named Judy’s Pride, and for a brief spell, the future seemed brighter.īut one fateful morning in July 1969, his luck began to curdle.
By the late 1960s, though, after a few good seasons, he had finally saved enough to graduate to shrimping. Rising fuel prices ate into his slim margins-plenty of days he only earned enough to cover gas. A hurricane could scatter the catch or disappear a boat. Superstitious fishermen thought it was bad luck to bring a woman on a boat, but by 1975, Billy Joe had endured such a streak of bum luck that he couldn’t afford not to bring his family out with him: they were his deckhands.īilly Joe knew they needed something more stable, but his ambitions had a habit of getting snagged and torn up along the unforgiving coastline. and Cheryl Ann, only five and four, huddled close to their mom. His ten-year-old daughter, Beth, was already perched on her culling stool, ready to sort the catch. His wife, Judy, lit a cigarette and took a long drag in the Texas heat. Their skiff drifted calmly at the mouth of the Guadalupe River in San Antonio Bay, their favorite spot to lay traps.
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Above him, a big dome of sky, humid and swarming with gulls impatient for a crack at his catch. His palms were callused from the thousands of times he’d hauled in these ropes, hand over hand as the trap emerged, water streaming out its chicken-wire sides until its quarry of blue crabs came into view, stunned by sunlight and sea breeze. As he pulled it toward his skiff, the rope gathered in soggy coils by his white rubber boots.īilly Joe was a bear of a man, six feet with broad shoulders, strong nose, square jaw, and jet-black hair. Five years before a pair of bullets tore through his gut and heart, Billy Joe Aplin reached over the silt-smeared water of the tidal flats with a boat hook to snare a small buoy bobbing near the grassy shoreline.
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