by Ray Cluley
Nate stared into the dark neck of his beer bottle in the gloom of the kitchen and thought about the man he’d killed two days ago. Lawrence. Lawrence LeBlanc. Nate used to think the name was funny for a nigger. A man of colour. He didn’t think it was funny no more. The paper conjectured it was a racial attack but it weren’t nothing but an accident. Stupid nigger was walking at night with no light, how was Nate supposed to see him? When he did see him, the man was a sudden face at the windshield, a shape coming at him hard and fast in the dark, and then he rolled away into the night again. His feet kicked up behind him like he’d been yanked on a chain.
Nate tipped the beer to his mouth and grabbed a crumpled pack of smokes from the table. The lighter needed a few tries but he got it to work. He threw it aside with his first puff and settled back into the hard chair. The smoke did little to hide the smell of rank water that sat beneath the house. A pipe had broke, and he’d fixed it, but the damage was already done.
“Why’d you go out so late?” Nate said to his beer.
He’d heard from someone that Lawrence had been looking for gators, and it seemed likely enough. The road was a single track out by the bayou. It was a shitty road with flooded woods either side, trees swollen or sinking dead into the water. It wasn’t a place to park your truck in the middle of the night and go walking, especially when the truck’s blue, and especially when your skin is as black as the night you walk in. Nate came up fast on the nigger’s truck, turning around it with barely a dick’s width to spare, and he’d been looking at it as he passed, wondering at it being there, and then—WHAM!—he had a nigger on his windshield.
Nate tapped ash into a saucepan at the centre of the table. It was crusty with some long ago meal and filled now with twisted cigarette butts.
The nigger had twitched something fierce. Nate got out, checked his truck, and the man was casting shadows in the headlights from where he was propped against a twisted cypress. His eyes were open, one rolled white, and his legs were kicking. His head was flat on top, caved in at the crown, and Nate thought he was probably brain damaged. He knew a woman once who had a kid that was retarded and it weren’t no fun for anyone. He grabbed the shovel from his truck and used it till the man was still.
“Should have dragged you to the water,” Nate said. He was staring at all the dead cigarette ends he measured his life by. He chased another swallow of beer with smoke, exhaling it with, “Should have let the damn gators finish you. Walkin in the middle of the night with a wife and kid home. Hunting for some damn mojo to solve all your problems. Fuck.”
He threw his beer and it exploded against the wall in a shower of glass and froth.
Nate sighed. He stubbed his cigarette out on the table and dropped it into the pot. He ran his hands through hair that was longer at the back than on top and greasy with sweat.
“Jesus Christ, who am I even talking to?”
He clasped his hands behind his head and bowed to the table, resting on his elbows. He thought about calling Molly, wondered what she’d say after all this time. He figured a talk with her could go one of two ways. She’d either listen to him and then ask what it was he wanted and he wouldn’t know, or she’d remind him that Louisiana was made up of all the shit and sediment that got washed down river and tell him he weren’t no different. So he thought about driving back to Bo’s and talking to him about it. But Bo weren’t the kind you told things to. Shit, he’d sort of tried when he said about seeing them in the store, but that line of talk went nowhere. “You ever fuck a nigger?” Bo had said. Yeah, Nate thought, I gone fucked a whole family of them.
When she’d come into the store that day Nate thought she’d come for him. She held herself straight, and though she was head to toe in black she made it look good. Serene. She wasn’t there for him, though, and she ignored everyone else looking at her, too. She went right to the counter where Lemmy was tallying up groceries.
“I’m right sorry for your loss,” Nate told her as she moved by. He’d wanted to say more but didn’t know how. She gave him a curt nod. The boy, though. The boy gave him something different. That sonofabitch stared right into him. Couldn’t be no more than sixteen but he met eyes with Nate and stared his apology dead. Nate couldn’t breathe with that look on him, felt like he was drowning in the hot air of the store, and then someone else muttered condolences and the moment broke. It weren’t a scene, not really, but it might have been if the boy hadn’t quit staring. Nate had felt something underneath it, a mosquito drone buzzing under the quiet, the kind of noise you didn’t really hear but knew was there.
Nate stood in line, waiting to pay for his beer, and the widow asked about her tab. Old man Lemmy wrote it down on a piece of paper on account of how quiet the store was. Whatever he wrote, she only gave that curt nod again and said she’d settle it as soon as she was able. Said she might sell the place, and her boy looked around as if daring anyone to say how difficult that would be.
The kitchen lit up with the sudden sweep of headlights outside and was dark again just as quickly as whoever it was turned around. Nate waited to hear them drive away again, but the engine only idled.
“You’re too late, Bo,” he said, getting up. He’d talked it through in his head enough already. He didn’t want to say none of it out loud, not now. He’d have another beer or two with him, if that’s what he was offering, but that was all. A man weren’t a man unless he had a secret to take to the grave.
S
The truck next to his in the drive was blue. It had turned around to leave but hadn’t yet. The engine was grumbling quietly. The tailgate was down and the flatbed was empty but Nate couldn’t see anybody through the window of the cab. It wasn’t Bo’s truck. It was the one Nate had seen on the single track through the bayou. It was the nigger’s truck. Lawrence’s truck.
Nate pushed the screen door open but went no further than the threshold. “What you want?” He held the door open with one hand, patted at the wall beside him for the porch light. It was quiet out there. Even the frogs had stopped their reeping. There was only the engine of the truck, Lawrence’s truck, and nevermind that Lawrence was dead.
But a man hunting gators would take his boy, wouldn’t he? Of course he would.
“You’re Lawrence’s boy, ain’t you?” Nate called into the dark. “What you want?”
He found the switch and flipped it but there was no light. He looked up to see if the bulb had been broken but it was still there. Maybe it had been loosened.
Nate’s rifle was still racked in the truck.
“Look, I’m real sorry about what happened to your daddy, but you got no right being here.”
He was damned if he was going to let some kid spook him. He stepped out onto the porch, let the door slap shut behind him, and heard the boards creak in their familiar way underfoot. Then he heard something else. A shuffle. He looked to his right and saw nothing. But when he looked down he saw the long dark shape of an alligator on his porch.
“That’s about right.”
He went for his truck as the gator attacked. It didn’t do no more than clip him, but it hit his shin hard and he fell down the steps and sprawled on the ground. He pulled up handfuls of grass getting to his feet, managed a few steps more, then tangled his feet in an old coil of hosepipe and fell again. He struck his chin hard and stunned himself some. So he rolled onto his back, ready to kick.
Nate saw the weeds part at his feet, saw the side-winding shape of the alligator, and then the sky flared. The lightning kept itself within the clouds, but the sudden bright pulse and flicker of it revealed the gator in a quick sequence of images. It lunged, its mouth open, and sank its teeth into Nate’s thigh. Then the two of them were thrashing in the grass and thundering dark. Nate grabbed its head, trying to stop it from twisting and tearing chunks from his leg. His other leg kicked in uncontrollable spasms. He rolled when the animal rolled, prehistoric mus
cle tumbling under him and over him, the alligator trying to drown him on dry land because it was instinct, habit, and you couldn’t change things that were part of yourself.
They knocked the oil drum over. Nate swept his arm through the trash. He found a burnt broken length of guitar neck and stabbed at the animal’s scaled head but the wood split and crumbled in his hand with the first hit. The gator released him, only to strike higher, clamping down on Nate’s hands. Nate roared. He kicked at its belly. He pushed up at the tapered end of its snout, pushed down, felt the teeth moving in his palms but pushed anyway, trying to prise the jaws open. It released him only by tearing meat from the bone, wrenching a chunk of flesh away with some of Nate’s fingers. It snapped its head back and gulped them down. Nate screamed his agony to the sky.
He was answered by another rumble of thunder, deep and heavy. The gator came in again. Nate pushed at its head with ruined hands. He raked limp fingers over the horny scutes and ridges of its body as it settled its weight onto him again. He tried to find something he could grip enough to turn it away from him. He found a leg that was scrambling as frantically as he was as the animal tried to claw a path up his flesh. He wrenched at this, yelling with the pain it caused him, but a hard twist and suddenly it was off of him. Nate felt something break away in his grip and clutched it in his fist. The thrashing of the animal’s heavy tail hit him once, twice, and then it was passing him.
Nate lay panting when he knew he should be rolling, getting up, running. He just couldn’t. He held his weak fist up to the light to see a leather cord. Dangling from it was a coin, wet with his blood. He recognized it. It was a dead man’s dime. Throwing it aside, he twisted onto his stomach with the same motion and tried to push himself up from the ground. He couldn’t. He lay in weeds awash with red from the truck’s rear lights, staring at the blood on his hands.
The clouds pulsed and thunder grumbled. It sounded to Nate like the throaty sound of an alligator, and it felt like something coming from himself, something that wouldn’t be still until it was broken. Or maybe it was just the engine noise of the truck pulling away as Nate bled into the ground.
He dragged himself across a circle blackened from ancient oil drum fires and red with rust and found within it the bloody coin he had torn from the gator’s body. It lay heads up to the sky.
Nate turned himself over to do the same as a full red moon came out from the clouds.
“What are you looking at?”
Its only answer was to slip away again behind black clouds.
“Sorry,” Nate said. It didn’t matter none, but he said it anyway. “I’m sorry.”
Something came at him hard and fast in the dark.
It would never let go.
Where the Salmon Run
The Kamchatka track is rough, throwing them up, slamming them down, and Sergei turns to Ana to ask, “Did you miss this?” Pines and firs pass the windows in green blurs that fill the truck with a fresh wet scent.
Ana smiles. “Yes.”
Kamchatka does not have good roads. Less than two hundred miles of them, in fact, in an area bigger than many American states. Access is easier via helicopter, but Ana is thankful that Sergei collected her in his Land Rover. It’s shaking as if it might fall to pieces (and considering how it is held together with wire and rust that’s a good possibility) but still she’s thankful; the way it pitches her about is a physical reminder that Kamchatka remains a wild place. She tries to tell Sergei some of this but a particularly violent bump has her teeth clacking together so she abandons the sentence and holds on, one hand on the dashboard and the other on her stomach. He won’t understand anyway. He’s never known anywhere but here.
Thrusting from the eastern edge of Russia, Kamchatka enters the cold Pacific Ocean at an angle as if to shy away from America. To Ana, Kamchatka’s shape is its network of rivers and the way the land rises and falls under her feet (or a vehicle’s wheels) but the in-flight magazine had reduced it to an outline of block colour. She remembers its more rugged coastlines, its vast lakes, mountains that are snow-topped even in summer. She remembers its frequent rain, the lack of permafrost, the good natural drainage, its separation from the mainland rivers, everything that makes it ideal for the salmon. There are some, even now, who think Kamchatka so perfect for salmon that it must have been designed by the great god Khantai himself. Even the magazine map, which showed nothing of this, outlined Kamchatka in such a way that it looked like a salmon, at least to Ana; the south-west of the peninsula is its head, fattening into a plump body spined with mountains and jagged at the edges where the sea has battered it before tapering into a tail forever fastened to Russia no matter how it might long to swim away. Perhaps Ana saw a salmon because she feels like one herself, coming home.
Sergei glances at her and smiles. He hasn’t changed much over the years. His hair is still tightly cropped, still a curly mat of brown, but there’s some grey in his stubble now and he has a few more crinkles around his eyes when he smiles.
“What?” he asks.
“Is that the same jumper?”
Sergei laughs and Ana laughs with him, knowing his answer. Of course it’s the same jumper. Yuliya made it for him and he wears it more than any other. Loops of wool have been tugged out of shape, the sleeves are tatty and frayed, and in one place it has been repaired, sewn together with wool brighter than the rest, but Ana recognizes it because of the way he has to wear the neck rolled, an unintentional design that he insists to Yuliya keeps him warm.
“How is she?”
“Good. Big and round and healthy.”
“She’s pregnant?”
Sergei laughs, looking away from the road to share it with her. “We have two children now, but no more,” he says. “She tells me the extra weight keeps her warm.”
As the road bounces them up and down, shakes them left and right, Sergei tells Ana about his children. Irena, two, and little Sergei, nearly catching up. Ana notes the way he says everything through a smile and sees how he’s gained those new wrinkles at the corners of his eyes.
She rubs her stomach, thinking of how happiness shapes the body. How it wears lines into the skin gradually, like a river. Scars, on the other hand, are quick to leave their mark.
For a few minutes the only noise is the loud growl of the engine, the tink! and ping! of loose stones thrown up against the vehicle as it speeds too fast over a poor track.
“He’s not with anyone,” Sergei says eventually.
“Who?”
She tries to smile. Sergei does a better job.
“He had someone, but not any more. She went back to Petropavlovsk.”
“Navy?”
“Engineer.”
Ana has no right to ask, but she does. “What was she like?”
Sergei slows the truck a little so he can prolong eye contact. “She wasn’t you.”
S
Kamchatka is a wild place of eagles, wolves, and bears, but for Ana it was always about the fish. Oncorhynchus. Specifically, salmon. They have a tough life, salmon, especially those from the Malki hatchery. Released as fry, small enough to hold in the palm of your hand, they have to traverse more than a hundred miles of river to reach the sea. From the narrow channel of the Bystraya, through the Central Range, they descend into the largest river in western Kamchatka—the Bolshaya—and into the Sea of Okhotsk, all the while avoiding predators. Before entering the sea they smolt, transforming themselves in order to survive salt water, and once they have adjusted they leave the estuary to grow large and strong in the ocean. Then they repeat the entire dangerous journey in reverse. Guided by magnetic senses and polarized light and smell, they head back to where their journey began, ascending the rivers to spawn and then die. Birth and death. Death and birth. These are Ana’s thoughts as Sergei guides them through the boreal greenery of Kamchatka, the wild place that calls to her
heart.
“This isn’t the way,” Ana says.
“Ahhh. You remember.”
“Of course.”
“We are going to the Kol.”
The Kol River, like the Bolshaya, also drains to the west, but there are no hatcheries and far fewer roads, especially alongside the rivers. It’s part of the Kol-Kekhta Regional Salmon Reserve, an excellent habitat home to six species of salmon: chinook, sockeye, chum, coho, masu, pink; they all come back to the Kol.
“There are so many fish here,” Sergei says, “you can barely see the water.”
“They’re protected.”
Sergei merely glances at her, but she thinks she sees something of his smile again.
The natural challenges salmon have to face makes their lives difficult enough, but there are other factors to consider too in a post-Soviet Russia. Over-fishing is one of them. There are quotas, of course, but there’s also a great deal of corruption that allows companies to ignore them. It’s so common it even has its own term, perelov, salmon shipped off to China, Japan, and South Korea in greater quantities than is legal. And of course, there is all the poaching.
Aleksandr had told her he was a fisherman. He hadn’t really lied. Ana had been hiking one of the Bystraya tributaries and found him standing up to his waist in the water, waders pulled high, straps crossing his broad chest. His jumper was sodden as if he had taken a fall, but the woollen cap he wore was still dry. With rubber gloves up to his elbows, he was scooping fish straight from the water with his hands and tossing them to the bank where several others glistened.