He pried open the container. The room filled with the rich, sweet scent of tobacco as he fashioned a plug with his fingers.
“I believe that,” she said slowly.
“And look at us now. Almost a year later, you tying bowlines with your eyes closed. Whacking fish dead, tossing ’em one after the other into my crab pots.” He stood and topped off his coffee mug. “How ’bout you gimme one more day in that warehouse, making it nice and neat. That work?”
She nodded. “That works.”
“I’m rooting for you, Tara. Like I said before, buying an old wood boat’s about the dumbest thing you can do. But I’ve seen kids like you before. Once you got the itch, there’s no turning back.”
On impulse she hugged him. He patted her gently on the back.
“Thanks for your hard work. Don’t be a stranger at Thanksgiving.”
28
TRUNK TWISTED TO LOOK AT THE CLOCK. “You’re early,” he muttered. “A good twenty goddamn minutes early.”
He assigned her to a locker, then set a rubber apron, hairnet, and a pair of orange gloves in her hands. “You here to make money or just the bare minimum? I don’t care either way, I’d just like to know, ’cause I got a couple different tracks for folks. Your buddy Newt, for example, he wants to—”
“I’m saving to buy a boat.”
“Oh yeah? Which boat’s that?”
“An old tug down in the harbor.”
His eyes grew wide. “The Pacific Chief?”
“Yeah.”
“You shoulda said you were crazy before I hired you.”
He introduced her to Bailey, a guy from Boston with the wedge-shaped head of a pit bull who wore a ragged Red Sox hat and had Southie with a four-leaf clover tattooed between his thumb and index finger.
“Show her the ropes,” Trunk said, retreating to his office.
“C’mon,” Bailey said. As she followed she recalled the tattoos on his wrist—he was the one who had almost run her over with the forklift back when she first arrived.
“Where’s Newt?” she asked.
“Re-Re? Not sure. So this is the frozen side, this big wheel here you use to sort fish and make boxes. That machine over there is the glazer—it coats fish in a film of sugar water.” It looked to her like a huge pasta maker. He took note of her expression. “Just don’t touch it, about all you need to know.”
They walked to the other side of the building, silver scales on the concrete floor reflecting back the overhead fluorescents. A line of workers, most of them Asian, in aprons and hairnets, slid schools of fish along the stainless-steel trays, knives and spoons flashing as they pulled out guts. “This is the fresh side, where the fish come once they’re offloaded.”
“You know if Newt’s working today?” she asked.
He turned to her. “I already said I don’t fuckin’ know.”
“You just said you didn’t know where he was.”
“Jesus Christ—you a lawyer or something?”
They crossed back onto the frozen side, where he pushed through plastic flaps. The temperature dropped. Shelves were stacked with rectangular boxes, frozen white fish piled in wire cages. Bailey’s breath came in puffs.
“Get orders there in the wall-box, set up a pallet, fill it up with whatever—black cod, king, coho, halibut. Bang it out quick.” She crossed her arms, already shivering. He focused on her chest. “Trunk likes to put you in here early. See how you do with the cold. We call it the brig.”
Newt better have a good excuse, she thought as she followed Bailey back out. Convincing her to take this job, then disappearing, leaving her to deal with this prick, who led her now into the flash freezer. A network of copper pipes along the low ceiling. Whole salmon were laid out on trays. He picked one up. “Check for gouges and nicks, any damage. Fish gotta be mint before they go in the box. You see something, slip one of these red rubber bands on the tail and they get number-twoed. Clear?”
He looked off to the side. He could stare at her chest no problem, but not into her eyes.
“Crystal.”
“So you’re Re-Re’s buddy?”
“Who?”
“Re-Re. Little man. The one you keep annoying me about.”
“Yeah.”
“Heard he got a job on the water, on the Adriatic.”
It was a good excuse. A very good excuse.
“Where you sleeping?” Bailey asked.
“I just moved into the Bunkhouse. I thought you said you didn’t know where he was?”
He shook his head. “Fuckin’ incredible. Bang it out,” he repeated, and walked away.
That night she lay awake beneath the scratchy wool covers, hearing the snores of men through the walls, breathing in the chlorine smell of the floors. Her mother’s photo of Aci Trezza was set up on the windowsill. The payphone down the hall rang. And rang. And rang.
There was no way it was him, and she grew annoyed at herself for even thinking it might be. Their lives weren’t converging (and who ever said she wanted them to?). It wasn’t like there was a market for postcolonialism, or whatever he was studying, on the Rock. Or for bricklaying, for that matter. She couldn’t see him living on a tugboat. His dry letters were proof. He was becoming a New Yorker. Their time apart revealed how fundamentally different they were from each other. Better to know now.
The phone stopped ringing. She turned on her side, shut her eyes, and tried to sleep.
29
JUST AS BAILEY PREDICTED, Trunk stuck her in cold storage, sorting through boxes and stacking pallets for shipments to be loaded into refrigerated tractor-trailers. Her clothes weren’t warm enough. After work she went to the Pink Cheetah, the local secondhand shop, and picked up a red wool halibut coat and a torn watchman’s cap.
Her second day at the processor, August sixteenth, boats began to drop off fish. Trunk switched her to the docks. They lifted bags from the holds of trollers, dumped salmon onto the steel sorting table, where workers checked the bellies to make sure the fish were properly cleaned, and separated king from the coho, chum, and occasional sockeye.
“Kings got black lips, dots on the tail. And smell ’em. They smell strong, not like the others,” Bailey muttered at her.
After just half an hour she had let three cohos, a sockeye, and two chums past. Bailey came out. “You’re useless. Back into the brig you go.”
Blood tingled in her cheeks as she pulled box after box from the shelf and stacked them on a pallet. After an hour the tips of her curls, poking out from her cap, were frozen. When she bent to check a label and match it to an order form, a stab of pain shot down her neck and bloomed over her back. To get the blood flowing she hopped on the balls of her feet, imagining rope slapping the concrete beneath them. She windmilled her arms, then shadowboxed, pretending she was Rocky going up against the cow carcass. The compressors hummed. Powder-white halibut, piled in metal cages in the corner of the freezer, looked impassively back at her.
She was eight or nine—young enough to be screaming and wreaking havoc in the kitchen, dodging around the mixing bowls—when her father had locked her in the freezer.
It started with her mother trying to roll dough as Tara careened around the bakery floor. Serena finally slammed a rolling pin against the edge of the table. “Cazzo!” she yelled. Urbano flew down the back stairs, seized Tara by the wrist, and dragged her into the walk-in freezer, crowded with silver bowls of dough covered in plastic wrap. Whimpering in the darkness, among the bricks of butter, not sure what she had done, she just stood there, and grew sure her mother didn’t know where she was, and her father had forgotten about her. It was terrifying. After what seemed like hours, the door opened, light and warmth as she clutched Serena’s thighs.
And then, years later, in eleventh grade—which she thought of as the year when she first understood that leaning over the tub of water ice at John’s was a way to get guys to pay attention to her—she found herself crying into Little Vic’s chest as they stood in the back freezer, cylinder
s of water ice stacked around them. She told him about that night in Avalon, about the club, cocaine, the guy with his braided necklace.
“Holy shit,” Little Vic said. “Your pops would kill the kid.”
“Which is why you don’t tell anyone. You hear me?”
“Your mom told you not to say?”
Tara thought back to it. “Yeah. She did.”
“All right,” Little Vic said. “I won’t.”
30
AFTER HER THIRD DAY OF WORK at the processor, the lower left side of her back hurt so bad, she couldn’t fall asleep. The droopy springs at the Bunkhouse didn’t help. She woke in the middle of the night with a pain extending along her hamstring to her heel. She wasn’t meant for this work. Maybe Acuzio had been right all those years ago, and her mother wrong. This was a man’s world.
Salmon came in heavy. She struggled in the freezer to keep up, shadowboxing every fifteen minutes. At lunch Trunk told her to take an hour instead of the usual thirty minutes. “You look like shit,” he remarked.
She walked from the processor to the Muskeg. In her booth she gripped the mug in both hands, glorying in the heat moving up her wrists. When the seat shifted she jumped.
“Geezum. Didn’t mean to scare you.” It was Fran, Fritz’s wife. She wrapped a tea string around a spooned bag, squeezed drops over a mug, set it on the table. “You look like a ghost,” the woman said.
“I’m fine.”
Fran’s paper-blue eyes focused on Tara. “I was thinking—Fritz said you moved to the Funkhouse?”
When Tara smiled it felt like her skin was cracking. “I think they soak the halls in chlorine each afternoon. It makes me nauseous.”
Fran’s neck folded as she considered this, tapping a finger on her lip.
“There’s this couple near our place on the water, musicians. They’ve got a cabin kind of like ours, built over the rocks, which they’re selling. This summer they adopted a dog—I call him Buddha, because he’s totally Zen, like he just skipped being human in the wheel of things and went straight to enlightenment.” Fran smiled. “If you wanted to stay there and look after him, it might work out for everyone, long as they don’t sell the place. He’s a sweet older guy, shepherd-malamute mix. It’s a cute little—”
Tara grabbed her arm and pulled the woman toward her. “Keta. I met him. Yes. Please. When?”
Fran set down her mug, smiling sadly across the table. “They’ve put you through the ringer. Come over this eve.”
“They might not let me off until late.”
“Don’t worry about showering after work. I’m used to it.”
Just after ten Tara limped into the mudroom of the cabin with Fran, dropped her duffel on the clay tiles, and removed her boots. The house was compact and neatly arranged. The wine-red cabinets in the kitchen had rounded edges; the floorboards were tight-grained and honey-stained. (These were things she knew Connor would notice. He’d like it here.)
“Nice, right?” Fran said, holding a wool wrap around her shoulders with one hand as she flipped lights. “The owners, they’re into old wooden boats, and this is about as close as you can get without actually living on one. Built by a shipwright, so everything’s snug.”
“Is that the couple talking to Laney about the Chief?” Tara asked.
Fran looked back at her. “They’d have to be even crazier than I thought they were to go through with that,” she said.
As she slipped off her boots, Tara examined a photo of the couple—smooth-skinned, playing cellos in the rainforest. Beautiful people: her blond and tanned, a mane of hair spilling from his felt hat.
“Fritz said they’re selling this place?” Tara asked.
“That’s right. They travel around the state each summer teaching and giving cello performances. Nice people. Just not entirely, well, realistic.”
She heard a sound from the other room and turned to see the white-muzzled dog tap-tapping toward her.
“You remember me?” Tara said. “From all that time back? You kept my legs warm in the truck.”
The dog’s ears, rimmed in black, pointed forward. He seemed to be appraising her with his brown eyes. He leaned his weight against her shins, craning his head up as Tara tugged her fingers through his fur.
“Some wino fisherman abandoned him on the docks,” Fran said. “This couple took him on, then one of them got a gig playing Carnegie Hall or something. Poor kid.”
His shoulders softened as she pet him. “Looks like you’ll get along just fine,” Fran said. “Here. I’ll show you about his pills.”
Around midnight, after a walk along the beach, Tara set food in front of Keta. The dog peered back at her. “Go get it!” Tara said. He didn’t move. “Eat!” Nothing. “Fuck it. Don’t eat,” she said, going toward the bathroom. “See if I care.”
When she returned from brushing her teeth Keta was still sitting there, watching her over his shoulder. Drool from his cheeks pooled on the tile. She was tired, and had no patience for this. Breathing in deeply, she gave the dog a final, enthusiastic “Okay!”
He loped over to the bowl and began crunching kibble between his teeth.
“Weirdo.”
He shot her a quick, seemingly hurt glance and returned to his food.
After dinner he joined her in the living room, where she filled the wood stove with crumpled newspaper, a package of fire-starter bricks, and a few branches of yellow cedar from the kindling box. When she dropped in a match, smoke kicked back into the room. The dog wheezed, shook his head, sneezed.
“What? You want to try? I never said I knew what the hell I was doing.”
She opened the door, adjusted the knobs until the fire evened out and began to feed into the chimney. The spiced, peppery scent of yellow cedar filled the room. When she shut the door, the flames shot up. So much better than the Bunkhouse, she thought, taking a pillow from the couch and stretching out by the stove, wanting to accumulate as much warmth in her sore body as she could before returning to the brig the following day. The muscles in her leg relaxed, and the heat loosened the knots in her lower back.
Keta crawled across the rug toward her, poking with his pink nose, nestling his snout beneath her jawbone. “Oh, I see. Now you’re ready to snuggle.” She adjusted, trying to read her book, something about a man homesteading and running a trapline in Alaska’s interior. Keta’s chest rose and fell, his breath moist on her neck. The potbelly wood stove let off waves of heat.
“Christ almighty, that’s disgusting,” Tara said when the dog released an airy fart. She waved the pages of the book in front of her nose, shoving his hips with a socked foot. “You’re a nasty, gassy, pill-popping creature, aren’t you? No wonder they left you behind.”
Ears flattened against his skull, the dog skulked to the other side of the room. With a huff he leapt onto the couch and curled up, watching her. When he blinked the two dark orbs of his eyes disappeared. “Jesus,” she said. “Hey. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”
She dropped to her stomach, crawled across the room, and patted the rug in front of her. “C’mon. Please.”
Hesitantly, he put his two paws onto the rug, then his hips, white tail nub shaking as he settled in front of her. She pulled his frame closer, resting her cheek against his shoulders, listening to the steady beat of his heart. With her hand she cupped one of his paws, rubbed the rough pads with the tips of her fingers.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”
31
THE NEXT MORNING, when she woke up at five thirty by the wood stove, Keta had his chin on her stomach. When she rose, he yawned, watching her. She knelt in front of him and dragged out his eye boogers, like her mother had done for her when she was a child. “You must clean away dreams,” Serena liked to say.
After letting him out to pee, she sank his pills into a spoon of peanut butter, told him to sit, and tried to get him to eat. When he refused she grew frustrated, held his mouth open, and shoved the pills to the back of his tongu
e. He coughed, shaking his head, trying to clear his throat.
“I’m sorry, buddy. I gotta go.”
He stood in the mudroom, watching. After closing the door she stopped, opened it again. He was still there, unmoved.
“Go lie down! I’ll be back soon.”
She made it to the processor by six thirty, took her bibs and hairnet from her locker, buttoned up her jacket, and pushed through the plastic flaps into the frozen world of the brig. When she bent to slide out the first box, pain oozed down the back of her neck, unfurled over her shoulders. It felt like punishment, except this time for bigger things. For leaving Connor. Her father. Philadelphia. “Jesus Christ,” she muttered to herself. “This is fucking unreal.”
When she stood up straight a bolt shot down her left leg, worse than the day before. Her cheeks were numb, and she couldn’t feel her toes. She wasn’t even fifteen minutes into the morning. She thought of Keta back at the house, still sitting in the hall, wondering if she was ever coming back. Her joints ached. Her arms didn’t want to bend at the elbow.
A lift pushed through the flaps. She hobbled out of the way as Bailey worked the forks under the pallet. “Staying warm?” he yelled, then honked twice and gunned the vehicle. Fucker.
Maybe people who made it in Alaska were just built of tougher stuff. Some Nordic ancestry better suited to the cold and wet and scream of machinery. Philly hadn’t prepared her for this. Although Gypo told her she had grit. She had fought Golden Gloves. She just needed to calm down and put aside the cold. Pretend she was covered with Keta’s thick fur.
At break her ears, despite being covered in fleece, throbbed. Her feet felt like concrete blocks. She filled a Styrofoam cup with steaming coffee and stood by the humming machine to absorb what scant warmth she could.
It was hopeless. She had never taken a knee in the ring, but another six hours in that freezer wasn’t physically possible. She just wanted to be back by the fire with the dog.
The Alaskan Laundry Page 10