Huddled over lyrics, hoods making shadows over the paper, the islanders resembled monks, save for the shouts and dancing. Fritz stomped around the fire, rain pasting his thinning hair to his skull.
“Tara!” he shouted when he saw her. He held up a potent-smelling purple liquid. “Glogg! Island tradition. Have some.”
Sparks from the flames swirled into the darkness. She finished her cup and Fritz ladled out another. Snowflakes caught in the wool of his sweater, in his beard, which had thickened over the winter. A conga line formed, hands waving in the air. She felt palms on her waist, closed her eyes.
“Hey, girl—I saw you out on the docks tonight.” She turned. It was Laney. “When are you gonna you grow a pair and knock on my door?”
Before she could respond, the woman was off, dancing by the fire with Newt, who skipped in his Xtratuf boots, his yellow teeth shiny in the firelight. When he saw Tara he grabbed her by the wrist and twirled her, letting out a rebel yell that hurt her ears.
Later, after a few more cups of wine, masts and troll poles zigzagged in her vision as she stumbled up the beach to the sidewalk. She lost her balance and crashed into the bushes, struggled to her knees, her breath coming out in puffs. The snow had turned back to rain. Drops knocked against her coat. She let herself fall again, wheezing softly. When she opened her eyes she thought she saw her mother there beside her, just inches away, a heart-shaped face framed by dark curls, as if reflected in the thin glass of an ornament.
“Mama,” she groaned. “Mama, make it stop.”
She squeezed her eyes shut, then turned and looked again. A shiver went through her. She didn’t want her mother to see her like this, caked in snow, drunk, about to vomit. Lost on some island in Alaska. She turned on her back, looked up at the sky, and whispered into the dark, “I just miss you so much.”
20
AFTER NEW YEAR’S she began to grow more efficient at moving from task to task—washing incubation trays, scrubbing concrete floors with bleach, picking sticks and leaves from the fish ladder. Newt had switched over to working at the processor, where the money was better and he had a shot at getting a job on the tender. Occasionally she considered responding to Connor’s letter, but at the end of each day she just wanted sleep.
“Don’t get too comfy in your routine,” Fritz warned. “Things around here are gonna change pretty quick soon as they let out the wolves.”
The wolves, Newt explained, as they met up on a Friday for beers on the breakwater, were the low-riding seine boats that began, toward the end of February, steaming into town from points north and south.
At the beginning of March she took one of her walks out to the harbor to see the tug. Newt was right—the place had been transformed. Seiners were tied up on the transient float, rafted together three and four deep. When she reached the Chief she saw grass growing from the seams of the hull. Mussels and seaweed coated the planks beneath the waterline. Tara chewed the insides of her cheeks.
Laney’s head appeared around the side of an Adirondack chair, red wool shawl wrapped around her shoulders, glass of white wine lifted. “You better scurry on up here before you get snatched by one of those hungry herring boys.”
Tara gripped the knots on the rope railing and pulled herself up the gangplank.
“Help yourself to the grigio in the galley there,” Laney said. “There’s a glass above the sink.”
Slowly, as if drifting back into some favorite dream, she stepped into the house. She stood for a moment in the warmth, letting her eyes adjust, breathing in the diesel and cedar scent. Wood crackled in the cast-iron and porcelain cookstove. On top, a teapot billowed steam. Copper pans hung from the beams, their lids nearby, arranged in descending order of size. Firewood stacked on the other side of the bookshelf along the wall—all of it just as she had imagined.
She found a glass in a varnished oak cabinet, then joined Laney, who wore her same dark eyeliner, wavy hair piled with a chopstick. They clinked glasses and looked out past the breakwater toward the volcano. A sea lion exhaled, surfacing to watch them. The wine was fruity and strong, and immediately made her lightheaded. Waves washed against the wood hull. Tara resisted the urge to pick at weeds beneath her chair.
“So what’s the verdict?” Laney asked.
“On what?”
“The boat, silly.”
Tara paused, thinking of the rusted anchor chain, thick as a fist. Or how the wheelhouse curved, the steel visor protecting the oak sash windows.
“I didn’t really get a chance to look around. But that cookstove in the kitchen’s pretty cool.”
“Don’t let someone hear you say ‘kitchen’ on the docks. Galley is what we call it. You ever get Newt to tell you the story?”
“He told me.”
“Dude hid right up there, behind the windlass,” she said, pointing to the bow. “Just about a year ago to the day.”
Laney rose and grew serious, pacing on deck. She wore heels. What a strange woman.
“So the Rock being what it is, I’m sure you’ve heard Doug and I are filing for divorce. I should tell you that when we hauled the boat out, we sank a hundred thousand into planking beneath the waterline. There’s a couple out of San Francisco, cello musicians with the philharmonic, who’re talking about towing her to the Bay Area, starting a music school or some yuppie crap. I’m flying back there tomorrow.”
Tara bit her tongue. Laney seemed about as yuppie as they came, though lined with a go-to-hell Alaska attitude.
“Here’s the thing. She hasn’t moved since we hauled her out, and that was six years ago. If she doesn’t go a hundred yards under her own power, that harbormaster tows her out to state tidelands and hires an excavator to tear her apart.” The ends of her shawl fluttered in the wind. “Still interested?”
Tara spoke slowly. “My mother grew up in a fishing village in Italy, and she loved boats. So yeah. It just makes sense to me. But I don’t have thirty thousand dollars.”
Laney dismissed this with a wave of the hand. “If it’s in your blood you’ll find a way. Listen, I need to get packing. But quickly, I’ll show you the living quarters.”
They took their wine inside. Laney pointed out the Monarch cookstove, which worked great with lint from the dryer as fire starter. Then the head, with its toilet sized for a kindergartner. Three quarter berths, small rooms with double bunk beds, were situated around the salon. “All heated by wood,” Laney said proudly, nodding toward the ax outside. “Chopped by yours truly.”
As Laney climbed a wooden ladder Tara imagined the woman in her heels, splitting wood. She had always considered her mother tough, but had trouble thinking of her living through a divorce, swinging an ax, retaining her elegance at the end of the docks like Laney.
At the top of the ladder the room opened around a bed. Books, mugs with dried tea bags at the bottom, envelopes torn open, were scattered on a slab of plywood to one side. Tara recognized the pine ceiling from looking through the rusted portholes. A hammock swung gently on the other side of the exhaust stack, which was connected to a smaller wood stove.
“And here—the pièce de résistance.” Laney opened the door onto the wheelhouse, a half-circle of sash windows high over the water. The boat’s shiny wooden wheel was almost as tall as she was. Worn leather straps allowed the far windows on either side to slide up and down.
“The catbird seat up here,” Laney said. “Whaddya think?”
It was magnificent, sitting on the water so far above the other boats. “I love it,” Tara said.
Laney smiled. “Yeah. I knew you would.”
21
“IDES OF MARCH,” Fritz murmured, spitting chew juice into a mug, filling in the crossword folded out on his stomach. “Ain’t that funny. Wonder if they did that on purpose.”
Channel 16 on the VHF chattered in the background. Fritz was waiting for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game to put the seine fleet on two-hour notice. Tara made entries into the logbook, measuring the average size of the f
ry, the water temperature of the tanks. Fritz had forbidden anyone else to make reports, with her cursive so neat and precise.
“So I was out picking my pots the other day,” he said, “and who should come on over in his skiff to pay a visit but your pal Betteryear.”
“Who?”
“Tall old Native dude.”
She hadn’t seen the man since that time in the coffee shop. Months ago. She had been avoiding the library, steering clear of the payphones.
“Oh yeah?”
Fritz leaned back in his chair and spit a stream of tobacco. “Yeah.”
She finished transferring information from her notebook to the log and stretched her arms above her head, making a squeaking sound that caused Fritz to grin. She set neoprene waders out on the workbench to patch them. Fritz adjusted the waist of his oilskin pants.
“You ever hear the story about that old guy?”
She focused on her work, squeezing silicone onto the tip of a Popsicle stick, thinking about her money saved—just over twelve hundred dollars. “I haven’t.”
“July, maybe ten years ago. Guess he was steelhead fishing up north. It got hot in the sun, so he stripped down to his long underwear, no shirt, when all of a sudden a bear comes charging out of the brush. He had his thirty-aught on the gravel bar beside him, Winchester seventy, holds five zingers. Took him four to knock down that bruin, which skidded to a stop ten feet from where he stood.” Fritz spat. “And then, not two seconds later, from farther upstream comes a smaller one sprinting like all bananas through the shallows. Old man had one shot left, so he took his time, hit the bear dead in the brainpan. Ended up under the thing as it bled out. Finished putting on his pants, stropped his knife, and spent the next two days skinning and boning.”
“No shit.”
He nodded slowly, tapping the end of his pen against the newspaper. “You know all that stuff Fran said at Thanksgiving, about the Tlingits getting a raw deal—don’t get Betteryear started. Man’s got a temper.”
She thought about him in the coffee shop. “He seems pretty chilled out.”
“Trust me, he’s not.”
After a couple more minutes of listening to the VHF, Fritz heaved himself to standing, adjusted his suspender straps, and took his coat from the hook. “Gonna go change out bait on the traps.”
“Roger.”
Alone, she sat on the stool, listening to the thrum of water from the tote room and the back-and-forth on the radio. The smell of silicone was making her woozy.
Her thoughts returned to standing with Laney in the wheelhouse of the tug. It made no sense, the idea of working so hard for a boat. She could find something less expensive, a double-wide trailer by the water. Then again, falling asleep in that hammock, having that piece of history, making it her home . . .
Sighing, she went into the yard to begin feeding the fish.
The next morning when she arrived at work, Fritz shooed her. “Take the flatbed—just drive out Papermill Road toward the church until you see parked cars. Here, use these.” He handed her a pair of binoculars.
“Where am I going?”
“To the opener. Go! Just get out there before you miss the wolves.”
She drove past Maksoutoff Bay, up the hill, past the Lincoln Log church and Salmonberry Cove, and back down to the water. And there they were, the seiners, forty or so tacking back and forth in the ocean. With the binoculars she made out names: Storm Chaser, Perseverance, Leading Lady, Defiant. Pointed snouts, gunwales just above the waterline, sodium halide mast lights as bright as near planets. Skippers in wraparound sunglasses leaned out of wheelhouse windows, smoking cigars, steel coffee mugs in hand. Crews dressed in bright orange and green raingear stood poised on decks. A horde of floatplanes buzzed overhead, on the lookout for balls of herring, Fritz had told her, the pilots reporting back on scrambled channels to the seiners.
People had set up picnics on patches of grass and on the roofs of houses across the road, sharing jars of smoked salmon and pickled herring. A VHF radio from a car broadcasted the district commissioner counting down from ten.
“Nine, eight, seven . . .”
“Let the dogs out!” someone yelled.
“Five, four, three, two . . . Open season!”
A roar echoed off the mountainsides as clouds of black smoke rose over the water. Rooster tails spewed from jet-powered skiffs dragging folds of black net from the boat decks, making a wall of mesh. Herring flashed like coins as the mesh drew tight, fish pocking the surface. She watched a deckhand punch the web, working to free a caught log, cursing loud enough for her to hear. Just off the rocks two boats barreled toward each other, neither conceding position, the larger one veering off at the last second. There was the screech of steel ripping, followed by a flurry of expletives over the handheld radio. The larger boat began to sink. Two other seiners gathered up their nets, positioned themselves on either side, squeezing the sinking boat between them, keeping it afloat. Like coaches at a football game, an arm on either shoulder, they nursed the injured vessel off the field, back toward the harbor.
Thirty minutes later the fishery closed. She took the rest of the afternoon to hike up Crow Hill.
The forest had turned chartreuse with spring, shoots of new growth spearing the soil. A few bears had been reported around town, groggy after hibernation, digging through garbage, one snatching a Labrador from its chain. Not wanting to take chances, she sang Prince’s “Kiss,” trilling the falsetto. A bottle of bear spray jostled at her hip, its plastic safety removed.
A couple thousand feet above the sea she reached the lookout and watched as the fleet made its slow return to town. Newt was down there somewhere, working in that steam-shrouded processor. He’d probably go through the night.
As she walked back down, she couldn’t escape the feeling that she was just beginning to scratch the surface of life on the Rock. Give it to me. I’m ready.
22
IN MAY, two months after the herring opening, Fritz called Newt back from the processor. Pink salmon had started to appear in the slough at the hatchery.
“Here we go again,” Newt said, snapping on his bibs and duct-taping a hole on his Xtratufs. “Giddyup.”
A few times she tried to drum up the courage to call her father back. To apologize, perhaps, for hanging up on him. Or to say that she was fine, and they’d speak sometime in the future. But she didn’t want to. If anyone needed to apologize, it was him. In the meantime, she had work to do.
Her job was to corral the dark schools of fish up against the aluminum weir and scoop as many as she could. The spawning males, some a couple feet long, had overdeveloped snouts and jaws. Their teeth snagged on the waders she had patched so carefully, ripping new holes, letting cold water seep into her long underwear. Her legs were soaked.
“This fucking sucks,” Tara yelled up to Newt. “I’m wet as shit.”
“C’mon up here then. We’ll switch.”
Outside the killing shack, Newt showed her how to seize the male fish by the meat of their tails and fling them into the chute, while females were dropped on a stainless-steel tray. “You’re not tapping them awake, you’re knockin ’em dead,” he said, gripping a female just behind the head and setting the skull on the cinderblock. “Downright mean to be hesitant.” He raised an alder stick wrapped in heavy-gauge copper. BANG. The tray shook, the salmon quivered, the yellow eye dimmed as the body went slack. “There you have it. Dead as an iced catfish.”
It was miserable work. She preferred being inside the killing shack, using a finger-razor to slice open the females’ stomachs, dumping their skeins of orange eggs into a five-gallon bucket, sealing the bucket by pounding on the lid with a rubber mallet.
Throughout the day they switched off. Fritz had hired a couple students from the college who reminded Tara of how she had been her first weeks—trudging around, unsnapping their bibs at the end of the day while Newt and Tara loaded buckets onto the flatbed. Lazy.
Things grew more exciting when
ever Fritz came down to the slough, a doughnut or coffee in his hand, and yelled, “It’s baby-making time!” Newt showed Tara how to select seven virile males with prominent humps and long jaws. One by one she rubbed the spot just above the anus, releasing a stream of milky white liquid over the eggs of twenty-seven females. Newt patted her on the back.
“Keep it up, you’ll be chief salmon jacker in no time. Just a little lower, give it a good pinch.” She pushed him out of the way. But he was right: she did have the touch. She shook the bucket until the eggs were covered in a film of milt, then tossed the writhing male salmon into the chute. “Spawn and die,” Newt chanted, two fingers held above his head like a rock star. “Spawn and motherfuckin’ die!”
As summer wore on she refined her moves, knocking fish a centimeter behind the eye, flinging spent males over her shoulder, one after the other, into the chute. Fritz watched from the doorway of the shack. “If I don’t look out, some fisherman’s gonna steal you away and make a worker out of you.”
He gave them Sundays off. At the Muskeg, mandolins, banjos, guitars, and fiddles emerged from beat-up cases pasted with stickers. A bright-eyed older woman pulled out an accordion, and soon they were all playing, the fiddle so mournful, it made the roots of her hair hurt. She realized she was counting again, trying to recall when Connor had sent her that short letter. Just before Christmas. A card would be good, she decided. Brief and informal. In the bookstore she selected one with an old cabin rotting into the woods.
June 17, 1998
Hey, Connor,
I just wanted to drop a note to let you know I’m still alive up here. Putting away money with that tug I told you about in mind. It has a messed-up engine or something. The woman who owns it is an odd duck. Maybe I’ll just end up with a little fishing boat.
She considered what she had written, unsure why she was going on like this.
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