by Deni Béchard
The tires screeched, and the crates hopped from the bed of the truck and seemed to hang briefly, suspended. They landed upright and skidded to the wide delivery door.
We got out, shocked into silence, and inspected the crates.
Heads lifted, everyone in the market stared at us, like deer in a field.
He smiled at me, his grin easy, not followed by scrutiny or anger. I laughed as if we’d done something like this every day of our lives, as if we’d just lurched from the railroad before the train passed.
We did it again three days later, though one of the crates spilled, hundreds of small salmon flashing across the market floor, under counters. For the next hour, we gathered them, customers and nearby vendors occasionally bringing us a fish, offering it to us as if it were a wallet forgotten in a restaurant.
“Are you getting along with him?” my mother asked the next morning when I called. I’d told him I wanted to stay home and write. He’d agreed, though he’d left with a scowl.
“Of course,” I said in an annoyed voice. I talked a little about his life, that he was alone and didn’t appear to have anyone close, even that he liked a girl who worked for him.
“Be careful,” she said. “He might be recording his calls.”
“I doubt it,” I replied, glancing at the gray, loosely kinked phone cord on the dirty rug.
“What school are you going to go to?”
“We’ve looked at a few . . .”
“A few . . . ,” she repeated. “You should enroll soon.”
“I know. I will. Don’t worry. I’ll be fine.”
After our conversation, I wandered through the house. There were details I found strange: a sign on the kitchen wall that read God Bless This Mess, or doilies on the couch’s end tables, a vase of withered flowers in the dining room. It was as if a woman had been living there.
His room had the musty smell of a lair. Heaps of stiff clothes covered the floors of his closets, loosely folded jeans and button-down shirts on top of his dressers, price tags still on them. I counted a dozen pairs of running shoes, the laces and suede white, the soles unscuffed. Each had an orange sale sticker. In the closet, between two casual leather jackets, a Kmart bag on a hanger held seven red shotgun shells.
They felt heavy and cold in my palm. The printing on the casings read Slugs.
I went to the dresser and opened a drawer. It held photographs. A blond infant standing among dandelions. Two boys playing at the edge of a mud puddle. There were no images of children past the age of ten, as if their lives had ended.
In a field, my mother held me, my brother standing next to her. My father must have taken the photo. What had drawn her to him? That he was free and a rebel? I knew from living in the US—the trailer park had taught me this almost overnight—that Americans admired those who weren’t afraid of the law. Maybe she’d had that wildness in her, too—the way she’d run away, rejecting the Vietnam War and her family. She’d wanted a free-spirited life and had probably thought she could find that with him. But she must have seen something other than a criminal. I knew her. If she hadn’t, she wouldn’t have stayed.
I kept searching. A rubber band held a dozen social insurance cards, each with a different name, one of them my brother’s. My father must have named him after one of his aliases. This made sense. He wouldn’t want to live under a name he didn’t like—and naming oneself, starting a new life, might be like naming a child.
I pulled a box from under the bed: every sort of card, Christmas, birthday, get well, all unused, all for children. Another box was filled with fishing equipment, tangled lines and lures, faded cork floaters, three-pronged hooks, a hand scale, a fly-fishing kit, a bag of old backlashed reels.
I found a Valentine’s card I’d made for him in school, concentric multicolored hearts on construction paper, like the echo of affection. I sat in his chair. On the wall were three portraits of us our mother had given him for his birthday, simple charcoal sketches by a mall artist that made us look chubby. I hadn’t found the shotgun in any of the obvious places.
Nothing, not even the trees outside, seemed to move, and then a German shepherd barked behind the house.
Sara sat on the freezer next to me, thigh to thigh, and took my hand and held it in her lap in a childish way. “Does André talk about me?” she asked.
I hesitated. He’d just gone to get something from his truck. I couldn’t figure out their relationship, because she never came by his house and she mostly spoke of her high school friends, though she’d recently dropped out.
“Well, yeah,” I told her, “I guess. I mean, he likes you.”
“Really!” she said, as if she had no idea.
He came back into the market, walking quickly, then slowed, seeing us sitting close.
“You ready?” he called and looked away as if distracted. I got off the freezer.
Soon we were back at Knight and Day, beneath the same dim, green metal lamps. He hadn’t said much other than to order, and sat, rolling the edge of his paper place mat.
“You know,” he told me, “I’m thinking about starting a new family.”
“You’d want that?” I asked. Nothing seemed more miserable to me.
“Why wouldn’t I? There’s Sara. She needs to calm down.”
“But are you two even together?”
“She drives my car. That Cavalier, the maroon one, it’s mine. I shouldn’t have been able to get it, not after the bankruptcy.” He spoke as if having the car were strange, but it was his interest in Sara that bothered me. She was only eighteen.
His eyes stilled, looking into mine. What did he see? I had no idea if I was giving anything away, and I tried to make my face show nothing.
“Listen. I have a job for you. Some Indians are making a delivery tonight, and I want you to take care of it.”
“What do you mean?”
“Business has been hard. It wasn’t easy to start up again. So I buy from the Indians. They can fish as much as they want. And they always have good quality.”
I just nodded, trying to mask my thoughts. I didn’t say that what he was doing was illegal. That would be ridiculous. But this wasn’t the crime I wanted.
“They’re bringing a load of salmon to the place near the ferry. You can stay there for a few days. A girl who works for me lives there. She’ll explain things to you if you need help. There’s a road behind the house and some old freezers in the woods. The Indians have been there before. There’s also a scale. Make sure you use it. Don’t let them use theirs. And make sure you clean the ice off the plate if there’s any. You have to watch that they don’t weigh the salmon with ice in them. Check the cut where they were gutted.”
After a pause, he said, “There should be about two thousand pounds. You can do this?”
“Of course,” I said, not sure that I wanted to. But at least he trusted me and thought I could handle it.
“Just make sure nobody can see from the road. And I want you to do the weighing. You should be the one to read from the scale and write it down. You’ve seen me do it. It’s easy.”
The road descended through rocky pine forest. The green numbers on the dash read 10:17, and the truck’s tires vibrated against the ridged surface of a bridge. I watched a lamppost pass, catching my reflection in the window.
“She’s eighteen,” he said of the girl who worked at the ferry. “You guys should get along.”
The green trailer with a hand-lettered Fish ’n’ Chips sign looked the same as I remembered, next to the misted river, just off the road where cars lined up. A few drivers stretched their legs as the ferry’s lights moved across the dark expanse.
Gravel crunched loosely beneath the tires, and my father parked, though the driveway continued, rutted and muddy, into the forest. Yellow paint peeled from the house like birch bark, and a strand of green and red bulbs hung between a post and the snack bar awning, their color flaking, showing bright specks of light. A girl came to the door. Dark, curly hair framed her face, her skin faintly oli
ve. She wore jeans, and a thin white shirt hung against her breasts.
Little was said beyond introductions, my father the only one speaking, the girl’s eyes darting back to him after each time she glanced at me. Her name was Jasmine, and he told her I’d be sleeping on the couch. She forced a smile, her front teeth separated by a gap like a coin slot.
He and I then walked back along the looping driveway. It was dark beneath the pines but for the pale rectangles of two ancient freezers. He told me to put the salmon in them and handed me a wad of twenties.
“A thousand dollars,” he said. “Don’t give it to them until the end.”
After he’d left, Jasmine and I hardly spoke. She lingered in the kitchen.
“I put some blankets on the couch,” she told me.
“Thanks.”
“Are you okay? Is there anything you need?”
“No, I’m fine.”
“Okay, well, good night,” she said and went upstairs.
The room with the couch had a scantily decorated Christmas tree that leaned in its stand, anchored to the outlet by a string of lights. I lay and stared at the ceiling, trying to feel that this was important, that I was doing something serious and impressive.
After weeks dreaming of the addictive terror of risk and the hard-earned win like a lottery jackpot, here I was. Maybe even when the crime was serious, you were alone in a dingy room, waiting on something you didn’t care about, just for money. I’d wanted the thrill, that and to be with my father. I hadn’t imagined ex-cons like his surly employees, warily meeting my gaze as if waiting for an accusation. People my age seemed hopeful, and I hadn’t really considered life without school. My mother had been obsessed with education when I was little. She and my teachers had encouraged writing and yet did I love novels because I’d loved my father’s stories? He’d never even read one.
I gazed past the threadbare curtains. Drivers sat behind damp windows, exhaust rising in the glow of taillights. Cars and trucks left the landing, tires banging over corrugated metal. Motors started up. Mist lay thick and low, variously tinged and glittering like rain beneath the streetlamp. The light changed at the entrance, the mist now green. The cars crept forward until the line was empty. The mist shone red again, eddying, settling against the dark asphalt.
I had no idea when I should expect the delivery. From the couch, I watched the line build up and load. A cop parked next to the restrooms, to sleep or lie in wait for those who sped along the lonely straightaway that extinguished itself at the river.
The police car was gone by midnight, when a green truck approached the streetlamp, body filler at the wheel wells and door edges. As it turned, its headlights plunged through the front window, into my eyes. It drove past the house, into the woods above the river. A moment later, a small blue pickup followed.
My heart was speeding. With a notepad and pen, I followed the tracks over the brittle ice.
The rain had stopped, and with the cold, the mist had almost lifted. The moon, emerging from scattered clouds, hung over the river. Everything seemed amplified, vivid, washed in adrenaline—the late ferry run, the sound of the heavy engine across the water, the vessel’s square bulk folding back the current, the river dragging its stiff belly against the night.
Four barrel-chested men stood behind the truck, the lid of a wooden crate against its side, a scale on the tailgate. They wore baseball caps, dark hair to their shoulders. Without introducing myself, I told them about the scale near the house, surprised to find myself breathless.
“We have our own. It’s better,” one of them said. He was shorter and burlier than the others, his face lost beneath his visor.
“I’m supposed to use my father’s scale,” I repeated.
They had begun setting up, and as one, they paused and turned and looked at me, four faceless men bulked against the dark.
“We’re using our scale,” the shortest one repeated.
“Okay,” I conceded, then reconsidered. “But he wants me to weigh it.”
“We’re weighing it. You write it down.”
He asked for the money, and I hesitated. My cold fingers had a hard time taking the wad of bills from the front pocket of my jeans. He counted it and put it in his jacket.
The men began loading a small plastic crate. The weights on the scale were set at a hundred, and each time the bar balanced, they dumped the crate into a garbage bag and carried it to the battered, iced-over freezers in the woods. I stood by the scale, making a tick on the paper for each bag. The short man told me which number it was, and I confirmed it.
The truck’s shocks creaked, and my fingers ached as I tried to keep my records legible. The moon melted to a pale splotch low in the clouds, occasional flurries pushed by the wind. When I’d insisted on using the scale, I must have sounded like a boy, repeating my father’s orders. But there was no threat in their responses, simply firmness, as if they were commanding a child. Though I resented this, they spoke to me kindly, telling me what to do, asking me to hand them another garbage bag.
The last of the fish had been weighed out. The short man patted me on the arm and thanked me. The gesture seemed deliberate, as if to reassure. They climbed into their trucks and drove to the road, slowing at the edge of the asphalt before accelerating.
Flurries tumbled down. The ferry’s red and yellow lights moved above the water, slowing at the far shore, the clang of metal reaching me as if from a great distance.
THE CROSSING
I woke early, the skin of my face hot from the night in the cold air. I pulled on my shoes and walked out to the road. Five cars waited, windows pale with condensation. The ferry landing reached into the current like a broken bridge, the far shore appearing briefly beneath mist.
Dead grass and weeds grew from the house’s gutters and shingles. I tried to recall that night years ago. It was late when he came inside, his shirt torn, hands bleeding, the skin around his eyes gouged. The fight was later ruled self-defense, all charges dropped. Had my mother, witnessing his violence, his ability to leave two people unconscious in a matter of seconds, felt trapped or protected?
I heard the steady acceleration of the truck’s engine before I saw him. He braked and turned, his tires digging into the frozen gravel, and drove back into the forest. He was already standing at one of the rust-pitted freezers, the top lifted, when I got there.
“Help me load this,” he said without looking at me. “Then we’ll get something to eat.”
Afterward, at a restaurant on a busy street in Fort Langley, he told me I’d done a good job. “You did what I asked you to, right?”
“Yeah, of course.”
He nodded, silent, as he scrutinized my face.
“Listen, I want you to stay at the ferry for a while.”
“Why? How long?”
“For the holidays. I’m too busy right now, and Jasmine needs help. She’s lonely. You can stick around until after Christmas.”
“What about school?”
He shrugged and smiled unconvincingly. “Why do you need it? I didn’t.”
I’d been friends with dropouts over the years, but I’d never seen myself that way, even when I hated school. Besides, if I stopped going, my mother might do something crazy.
“I have to go back to school,” I said.
He dropped his gaze and sighed. “Listen, a year off wouldn’t hurt. We’d have time to get to know each other. You might not even need to go back. I never had an education.”
I looked away to hide my anger. Cars flashed past on the street. An old man shuffled along in a raincoat, and two girls ran woodenly in high heels to the bus stop.
“Besides,” he told me, “it will feel good for you to be a man. Make some money and get out in the world.”
I still didn’t say anything. He sounded wise and honest, concerned with my best interest without mentioning his own goals. I realized how easy it would be to like what he said, but I didn’t want his life. Though I’d resented having to go to school, it now s
eemed the only escape. He indulged his fidget, moving the paper place mat back and forth with his fingertips.
“You know,” he said, “after I pulled the big job, I thought I’d never have to work again. I never thought I’d be here . . .”
I looked at him but didn’t speak, knowing he’d tell stories now, trying to charm me.
“It was a year after the burglary in Hollywood . . .” He furrowed his brow as if remembering. “I was in a bar in Miami, talking to a girl, and a man came up and slapped her. I didn’t even think about it. I broke his nose with a punch. There was blood everywhere, all over his shirt. The girl started swearing at me, and someone told me she was a whore getting it from her pimp.”
He shook his head, appearing disappointed, as if he might have liked her.
“I left, and as I was starting my car, the pimp ran out. He had a bruiser with him carrying a metal bar. I fired up the engine just as the bruiser put the bar through the ragtop.”
He motioned to the back of his head, behind his ear. “It passed right there and almost hit me. I kicked the door open as he was pulling it out, and the edge of the door hit him. Then I kneed him in the face, threw him down, and kicked him in the neck. The pimp had a knife, and I took the bar from the ragtop and hit him across the knees. That’s when the police arrived.
“The three of us, me and the pimp and the bruiser, we were taken to the station. The cops had come for the pimp, not for me. They asked me to give a statement saying I’d fought in self-defense. They were pretty happy about getting him. This one cop joked with me about boxing and asked how I’d taken down the bruiser.
“I just had to give that statement. I was almost out of there. Me and that cop, we were walking out, talking about the fight, when another cop called from inside. He asked if my green card had been checked. The guy who was with me didn’t seem too worried, but the cop who’d asked said I had an accent. The other guy told me there was no problem. They just needed to see my papers. He was smiling with all his talk about knockouts. I told him my wallet had been stolen.”