by David Vann
On my break from rinsing out tubs, I talked of breeds and life spans with an old man who had stopped to watch, of place and home while the man waited for the time he could return. Trouble there, he hinted, but I didn’t ask questions. There were oil stains on the man’s vest and hands, his thick nails yellow-brown. His baseball cap was of the Alaska State Bird—the Mosquito—and his eyes were marbled red.
Though we hadn’t been introduced, I knew who this man was; I had been in Ketchikan three weeks now and looking for a way to meet him, because his wife was the receptionist my father had slept with, a kind of turning point, I thought, in all our lives. Her name was Gloria Sills, though she had married him and taken his name, and his Bill Douglas. I was planning to invite them both to dinner, to talk with her and maybe tell her who I was.
“Timber, I worked in originally,” Bill was saying. “Not a good business anymore.” He was the kind of coherent drunk who told everything to anyone. Bill hadn’t officially told me even his name, but he’d told me he was looking for a job, that he’d been doing odd jobs since he retired but the garage he’d picked up work at for the last eight years had closed down. Amway hadn’t brought in the diamond rings as promised. Instead, because of overinvestment in products he couldn’t sell and time lost from other work, he’d had to sell his house and lived now with his wife in a trailer. He had no Cadillac, nor even a pickup truck. He did have an old Chevy Monza, rusted out, that needed a few parts. His wife had become more bitter than he had thought possible.
“She’s a wonder, all right,” he said, chuckling. “I didn’t know she had it in her.”
I smiled with him. Absurdity is all that makes grief bearable.
“So how many you let out each year?” Bill asked. And he pointed to the nearest pool of fingerlings.
“Fifty to sixty thousand,” I told him, “and we take in most years about two hundred and fifty, maybe three hundred. But I just got on here. This is my first season.” The returning salmon were in concrete pools closer to the river, where they came up the shallows, their dark backs exposed above pebbles and ripples, the small humpies and reds mixed in with the great kings over three times their size. Leaving snake tracks in the water, they slipped through a narrow chute to leap over four low concrete walls against the current—simulated waterfalls—until they had so packed the slim borders of the final pool that many fell back out and had to leap again. They were solid and earnest, single-minded, pure muscle decaying yet elegant in its movement.
“Bill Douglas is the name,” Bill said. He put out his hand and we shook.
“Roy Fenn. My dad, Jim Fenn, used to live in town here. He was a dentist. Did you know him at all?”
“When was this?”
“Until ’72, I think.”
“Sounds familiar, maybe,” Bill said. “He might have been down in the county building on Third Street, with Doc Iverson and some other dentist. Sound right?”
“That was him. My grandfather caught a big halibut once—two hundred and fifty or sixty pounds. There was a picture of the three of us on the front page of the paper, three generations standing next to one very large fish.”
Bill chuckled.
“Does that sound familiar at all?” I asked.
“Could be,” Bill said, wiping the corners of his mouth with his handkerchief. “Could be.”
“Well,” I said. I was unsatisfied. I felt displaced by the fact that no one really remembered us in this small town.
“Mind if I take a closer look?” Bill asked.
“No, go ahead.”
We walked over to the nearest pool and watched king salmon fingerlings leap into the two-foot stream of a hose. Even at two and three inches, they looked exactly as they would full-grown, perfect miniature replicas, and I couldn’t help but see these great fish leaping forty, fifty feet in the air at a speed that defied normal gravity. Their falls were not suspended but vanished in a wink. In pairs and threes or singly, tiny slivers of light. When I had come late and turned the flashlight on their silvery-blue sides and eyes, even then they were leaping.
Bill dipped his hand in and the fingerlings caved one side of their ring to avoid him. “Hard to believe those are kings,” he said.
His hand removed, the circle re-formed. “I came here when I was twenty-two. That was in 1946. I arrived on the ferry in a red Ford pickup. Even the hubcaps were painted red.” Bill shook his head. “I was pretty interesting then. I wore cowboy boots.”
“Maybe that’s what I need,” I said. “Cowboy boots and red hubcaps, and then I’ll be all set.”
Bill wiped his hand on his jeans. “They came with some other things, too, unfortunately. You’d have to be a drunk and have no money and marry a woman you met here, mostly because you were scared.”
“Scared?” I asked.
“Yep.” Bill zipped his jacket and walked around the pool, bent to look at the pump and hose, then the leaping. “Ever find any of these on the wrong side?”
“’Fraid not,” I said, and smiled, though I had already been asked that question a few times now. I wanted more about his wife, too. “Would you like to come for dinner sometime, you and your wife?” I asked him.
“What’s that?”
“Sorry. That sounded kind of sudden, I guess. I need to get back to work here, but I was thinking I’d invite you and your wife over for dinner, if you’d like.”
“That’s a nice offer,” Bill said. “I’ll give you my phone number, and you can talk to the wife.”
My father was an insomniac. He once told me about an experiment in which thousands of mosquitoes in a large tank were exposed to flashes of bright light at odd hours. For many of the mosquitoes, one bad night knocked them off-kilter for the rest of their short lives. Perhaps they seemed less focused in the way they buzzed along the tank’s glass walls afterward, wobbled a little or hung at odd angles, and certainly they no longer slept normally, though who ever thought of mosquitoes sleeping? My father told this story as if it explained him. One bad night, or perhaps he was claiming to be a visionary. Or perhaps he simply felt a bit odd. The only real solution, of course, was that he thought this little tale funny, as he did all the other little tales. Everything my father had left me vanished. I glanced at the remains and they shifted the light until opacity became translucence and I could see only a diffusion of the unparticular ground beyond, the clutter that promised but gave nothing.
I sometimes walked up the hill to visit the house I had lived in as a child. Up on a slope set between two mountains, the small house that once had been bordered on two sides by forest was now dwarfed by a dozen two-and three-story dark wooden houses with stained glass and gazebos. The view of the channel and ranges beyond was blocked by lower-cost developments. The house had not been painted in the twenty-five years since I had left, nor the fence repaired. The green my father and mother and I had applied had decayed to show pink beneath and, beneath that, white and, finally, bare wood. The roof showed tar paper, the metal screen door and mailbox at the street both stood at angles, though each distinct, the pavement of the driveway had become its own map of small islands, and the fence hung bare where it hung at all. The current residents remembered my family and invited me in, but there were no memories here, only the foreign stains of smoke, pets, food, and children, cans and clothing strewn everywhere across the floor. The cherry tree in back, which I remembered as very tall, since I had climbed, hidden in, and fallen from it, stood maybe ten or twelve feet, narrow and unimpressive. The tall fence came to my waist. Memories are infinitely richer than their origins, I discovered; to travel back can only estrange one even from memory itself. And because memory is often all that a life or a self is built on, returning home can take away exactly that.
On the phone with Gloria, I didn’t use my last name. I wondered whether she knew, but there were no indications either way. The conversation was cordial and short and told me nothing, really, except that she sounded like she was from Boston, not the loud Bostonian dialect but the cla
ssier kind, upper-crust, not that this meant anything in particular. I wondered for the hundredth time why I was doing all this, why I was here in Ketchikan. After the initial return and rush of belonging, I had felt only out of place. The divorce and my father’s suicide seemed to exist in another world.
I looked all around my house that night, feeling a little crazy, I think, studied the wood and even the cracks in the linoleum. Part of the mountainside had been dug away to accommodate. Rock had been blasted. The wood was old and had perhaps never been fully dry, but I was convinced it would remain forever. The stains on the walls, too, the fierce green linoleum, the teapot with its inward formations of minerals white, red, and other, as well as the windows that warped what was looked at—all of these would resist wearing away, would remain for as long as the house could be called a house, and longer.
Late night, I wandered. At the gates of the hatchery, I spun the lock, slipped inside. I took hundreds of fingerlings by net, dumped handfuls in my pockets, walked along cliffs above the roadway, bare rock cut in grooves, and held out the fish one by one in an open palm. The miniature salmon leaped each of their own accord, a tail flash into the night, glint of silver, sixty feet of twisting, and an inaudible slap to the pavement below. Waiting, then. For water, for some new rule, new possibility, that could make pavement not pavement, air not air, a fall not a fall.
I made each fish do this, waited patiently for each to send itself, all the time muttering obscenities: “Walk the plank, matey. Time to sleep with the fish.”
I watched the last one vanish, listened for the tiny slap, heard nothing. The mist was orange from streetlight. The air cold. I took off my coat, my shirt, folded them and placed them on a stump. I removed my shoes, pants, underwear, watch, and put my shoes back on. I double-knotted them. I would run through the forest until I was exhausted and could sleep; perhaps even as I ripped through ferns and over the rotting logs invisible now beneath the false second rain-forest floor I would have some kind of vision. So I set off running. But before long, I only felt tired and stopped and turned around and walked slowly back. I had no faith in that kind of thing anymore, I realized. It had worked in high school, a few times even in college, but it seemed ineffectual now. So I put my clothes back on, descended past rubble and wire, concrete, brush, and stood over the wide-flung fingerlings to twist each delicately under my heel.
At work the next day, my boss, a young biologist whose eyes were not quite in alignment, so that I could never be sure whether or not I had been seen, asked me to write a letter to the Ketchikan Daily News and to post flyers asking for information leading to arrest. I suggested a reward of dinner for two at the Fisherman’s Grotto, but my boss didn’t think that was funny.
“I don’t think you understand,” he said, scratching at one of his sideburns. “If this asshole keeps this up, and we don’t catch him, you and me are out a job.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’m your man. I’m the one. I’ll have the letter and flyers ready by the end of the day.”
So I wrote a short press release, included the fact that the theft had probably occurred at night, asked for vigilance, suggested the ever-expanding threat crimes like this posed to us all, and delivered the release to the newspaper. I made flyers with a close-up photo of fingerlings schooling, a shot with rings like a peacock’s fan, difficult to recognize but startling in its way. Under this, I printed, in bold letters, missing, and beneath this the details of the crime and numbers to call. I wrote that they had been netted at night and taken away for unknown purposes. I asked, “Is your neighborhood known to you?”
Bill and Gloria arrived in the Monza and I swung my rickety door wide. I had made everything inside as cozy as possible, despite the fact that Gloria was the woman my father had cheated with. I had baked sweet potatoes and lit candles, tuned the radio to the softer of the two available stations, beer-battered fresh halibut. I was determined to have a good time and to make Bill and Gloria have a good time, too.
Gloria was taller than Bill. Younger, also—early fifties, perhaps. Her hair was still mostly blond. “Hello,” she said. “It’s nice to meet you.”
I muttered something inane, then moved on to what I really wanted to know. “You’re not from here originally, are you? You’re from the East Coast, right, somewhere in New En gland?”
“Boston,” she said.
“Boston,” I repeated. “Well,” I said, “I have food. And would you like something to drink?”
“Howdy,” Bill said, and shook my hand. He was more awkward around his wife.
“A beer?” I asked.
“Sure.”
I could not believe this was the receptionist my father had slept with. I had always imagined her with a wide smile in red lipstick, a brassy, obnoxious voice, and no brain. This was a child’s conception, of course, built from the feel of my mother’s attacks on my father more than their content, but still it had persisted. Even the conversation over the phone had somehow dispelled nothing. I was embarrassed.
“It’s getting colder out there,” Bill said from the couch. “It’ll be an early one this year, looks like.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I heard them talking about that on the radio. That and the decline in tourism this year seem to be about all I’ve heard about.”
“That’s true, you know,” Gloria said. “And agencies everywhere are suffering. At the library we’ve had to trim our hours and staff and reduce or even eliminate many of our services. You can’t call us with reference questions anymore, for instance. And there will be more cuts next year.”
“You work at the library?” I asked, a doubly pointless question since I already knew the answer from trying to track her down when I first arrived in Ketchikan.
“Yes,” she said.
“In Lake County, California, where my grandmother still lives,” I said, to cover myself, “they don’t even have a public library now. Not a single branch in the whole county. They’ve all closed down. And a few of the elementary schools, too.”
I joined Gloria and Bill in the tiny living/dining room off the kitchen. The table was along one wall of this room, the couch along the other. I sat in a chair with its back touching the table.
“I don’t know,” Bill said. “It doesn’t seem to me we need to give everyone a handout. I know that view will be unpopular with my wife, but I just have to say, if someone’s going to make it in this country, they’re going to make it, that’s all.”
Gloria scooted closer to her husband on the couch and took his hand in hers. “I’d prefer not to talk about Amway tonight, honey, if we could. I want to hear what Roy’s up to.”
“Oh,” I said. It was hard to hear her voice. “That’s fine. I haven’t been doing much of anything.” I didn’t know what to do about Bill’s conversational minefield. And I knew I would have to say something stupid now to try to smooth things over. “My uncle used to sell Amway,” I said.
“It’s not such a bad organization, really,” Bill said.
“Yeah,” I said. “I used to listen to the tapes when I’d go goose hunting with him up to Modoc. My uncle and this friend of his named Big Al. They kept the windows up and shouted a lot—my uncle was from Nebraska—and every once in a while, Big Al would turn to me and hold out his finger and…you know, I probably shouldn’t continue with this. I’m sorry.”
“No, no,” Gloria said.
“I think it should wait till another time,” I said.
“That’s all right,” Bill said.
I looked down at the linoleum. “Well,” I said, “why don’t we go to the table. I’ll bring over the halibut and sweet potatoes.”
“Sweet potatoes?” Gloria asked. “That sounds lovely.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I got them at the store.”
I hated sounding like an idiot. But I was shaking now for some reason, and I couldn’t think well. I took the tray of halibut out of the oven, where I’d been keeping it warm, used tongs to transfer the pieces onto a plate, and served up the
sweet potatoes. I’d put miniature marshmallows on them, not because I thought that was a classy touch, because it isn’t, but because I had felt so warm and happy earlier, a rare and simple feeling I was trying to prolong, and this was how my mother had fixed them when I was a child. Now they looked a bit odd.
“Sorry about the marshmallows,” I said as I brought over the plates. “I was suffering from nostalgia earlier today.”
“I like marshmallows,” Bill said.
“Our own oven has seen them as recently as last week,” Gloria said. “Though we did pull the blinds to be sure no one else saw.”
I laughed. “That’s pretty good,” I said, but I felt sick. None of this was working out right. Gloria was not disturbed at all. I was the only one. Then this thought made me wonder whether I had been looking for some kind of revenge. “So what brought you out to Alaska, Gloria?” I asked.
The radio was playing Miles Davis, a rare moment in Ketchikan. Nothing was solid or reliable. I felt that maybe I was somewhere else.
“This halibut is delicious, Roy,” Gloria said.
“Yeah, it’s really great,” said Bill.