by Leigh Newman
Fish-drunk and screaming, I inch the flopping salmon onto the beach, then run for our trusty wooden club. Only now do I see what I’ve hauled in. The fish is unmistakable—the swollen back, the hooked mouth, the mottled gangrene-colored skin. I’ve caught a humpy, the lowest species of salmon in the salmon family, a fish mocked statewide for its swamp-creature looks and lack of intelligence. Worse, my humpy is soft, lumpish, at the end of its natural life span.
I look up at Dad, waiting for him to laugh.
He rocks on his heels. “Now,” he says. “That’s a beauty!”
“But—”
“A keeper!” he says. “Throw her in the take-home pile.” To prove his point, he steadies the fish for me, holding it firmly against the gravel. Slowly, I raise the club. The fish looks up at me with glittering, green, very alive eyes. Its gills heave. Its fins twitch. I shut my own eyes as I bring down the club hard, over and over—bits of blood and skin splashing up onto my cheeks, the skull creaking, giving way to mush. Still I don’t stop, as if I’m listening for Dad to thunder at me, That’s enough.
But he doesn’t. Above us, seagulls wail, swooping down for scraps.
Hour after hour, for the rest of the day, we bring in humpy after humpy. Our tempo turns swift, methodical. We bash them on the head, bleed them by the throat, throw them in the waterlogged storage compartment in the floats. The more we catch, the more we have to catch, as if, in our minds, the next unnecessary salmon will justify the previous. Neither of us talks as the pile grows, the pebbles at our feet turning flecked with blood.
If Mom was here, we would have made a fire to keep her warm while she read her novel on a log. If Mom was here, she would have told us to knock it off—not because we’d caught enough fish, but because we were all too tired and hungry and it was time for a big hot plate of spaghetti.
The moon rises. The mosquitoes swarm. The sun lowers in the white sky. Still, we stay and stay, catching and clubbing and bagging, not going home as if we don’t ever have to go home, until it is too dark and dangerous to stay any later, and we have to take off.
“Great job today!” my dad says, over the headset, as we fly over Fire Island. “You’re a champ fisherman, you know that?”
“I think my last one was eight pounds!” I say. “Maybe.”
“Sure it was. A state record, I bet. We’ll have to look it up.”
I smile. It isn’t a real lie that we’re telling each other. It’s a fairy-tale lie, a fish-tale lie, the kind Great Old Alaskans tell each other about the five-hundred-pound halibut that once leapt into their rowboat and sank it before leaping back out and swimming off. Besides, I might really be a champ fisherman. One day. If I practice my casts and keep my rod tip up and live in Alaska for forever, just like Dad.
CHAPTER 2
Can’t Lives on Won’t Street
Back across the inlet, on the deck of the house, Dad and I have plenty of visceral truths to confront. In the form of: mealy, mushy, gray-tinged, barbecued humpy. A fine steam rises off the fish, smelling the way it will soon taste in our mouths—like a river-bank, after a school of dead fish washes up in the mud. We shake on salt, a lot of salt. We gulp our Frescas. We stare down at our plates. Then we look up at the sky, as though a rare trumpeter swan has just flown by.
Our new house is built on Campbell Lake, a man-made body of water that allows my father to land our plane in the backyard, a big luxury for people living on the edge of a carless, roadless wilderness. Except for the occasional, distant honks of traffic, it’s hard to tell that we live in a city, or that a few miles north, the downtown is filled with oil-company towers and high-rise tourist hotels.
Campbell is a protected natural preserve. Behind the houses on the opposite shore, the foothills of the mammoth Chugach Mountains rise up, sheathed in fireweed purples and alder greens. Salmon roll across the surface of the water. Geese and ducks glide by, their babies paddling madly to keep up. As late as it is, almost midnight, our neighbors are mowing lawns and fussing with the tie-downs on their planes, trying to use every minute of light they have before the days shorten and darken for winter.
“Well,” says Dad. But his voice wobbles.
“I’m starving!” I say, holding up my fork. “I’m double-starving.”
“Me too.”
And we dive in, eating the way we always do, tornadoing through our overfilled plates, rubbing our entire faces off with paper towels, horrifying my mother—if she’d been here—by spitting the thin, transparent bones directly onto the ground. In this case, there’s an advantage to our wolverine etiquette. We eat too quickly to taste.
“Humpy’s not so bad,” I say.
“Tastes like wild hickory nuts,” says Dad.
This is some kind of grown-up joke, I know. It comes from a Grape-Nuts ad from before I was born. But my dad doesn’t have any grown-ups to joke with anymore. When he laughs, I laugh, too.
By July, we aren’t living full-time in the bush. We can’t. Dad has to work. He’s an orthopedic surgeon; people in the hospital need him to fix their backs and hips. But it’s not as if we live in our house, either. The rooms remain empty, save for a few decorative white throw pillows that Dad has tossed around the living room as if to evoke a couch. In the morning, he goes to the office and I go to a terrifying, loud place in the nearby woods full of kids and kickballs and crusty jars of paste, also known as day camp. As soon as it turns 3 P.M., we hop in the 185 and fly away as fast as we can get the plane loaded.
Ashamed of our humpy massacre—or perhaps too tempted to repeat it—we move from Beluga to an isolated stream we call the Secret Spot. As pristine as Alaska is (especially in the 1980s), fishing rivers are known. Even on what seems like a completely deserted stretch of bank, you’ll find evidence of outdoorsmen past—a lure on a branch, a heap of blackened firewood.
At the Secret Spot, though, there is zero sign of humanity. Not even a loose tangle of line in the water. The stream looks almost tropical, overgrown with lush, jewel-green alders and small, wet patches of darker green moss. The water is slow and deep, the silence total, except for the occasional riffle or plash of jumping fish, all of which belong to a more respectable species of salmon: bright, meaty silvers.
We catch these salmon, however, with the same grim, ruthless determination, filling up thirty-gallon garbage bags that we cache in the shallows or the plane floats. At night, we pitch a tent, fry up tiny fresh rainbows on the propane stove, and play games of gin by the lantern.
One morning, I wake up just as the sun is rising. I have to go to the bathroom, a complicated process when it comes to girlhood and jeans and long underwear and regular underwear and unzipping half asleep. I undo the door to the tent and crawl out. And there—only a few feet ahead—sits a black bear. She’s playing with an alder branch, rubbing her head against the trunk of the tree, making a woof-woof-woof sound. My father’s arms reach out from the door of the tent and yank me back in, flat on my back. He puts his finger to his lips. Then he hauls his rifle out from underneath his sleeping bag.
He points the barrel at the door. I lie very still. No bear. No bear.
Woof-woof-woof. The crackle of branches.
Time slows, then sludges as we wait for the bear to charge the tent and Dad to shoot it. Or for Dad to miss and for the bear to maul us. Or for the bear to skip us and scavenge for our salmon and wreck the plane, stranding us in a spot so secret that nobody back in civilization knows about it. Or for the bear to do what we hope it will do, which is what bears mostly do—go away.
We wait and wait, more woof-woof-woof. Dad keeps his gun trained on the door. I curl beside him, watching the shadows of the leaves through the fabric, growing sluggish in the hot damp tent, knowing I should stay awake, but surrendering, finally, to an almost lazy feeling of safety—Dad is here, Dad will protect us. I fall asleep on his shoulder, never hearing when, hours later, the bear finally wanders off in the alders.
Soon enough Dad and I are forced to buy one piece of furniture—a fr
eezer. We are a salmon machine by now, hauling in catches of reds, pinks, silvers, kings, whatever kind of salmon is running, plus anything else in our path: pike, trout, graylings. All the while never asking ourselves why we have to keep catching fish, long after we need any, long after two people could possibly eat them in any kind of reasonable time frame. And we have to eat them.
We are good, moral Alaskans, who use what they kill, fins to gills.
Every once in a while, though, the magnitude of our slaughter strikes us—or maybe just me. We never fished like this before Mom and I left Alaska. Somehow, on a flight back into town, I get it in my head that if Mom were still here, we would be able to eat all this fish. The problem is not that we are killing too many, but that we don’t have enough people in our family to eat them. I don’t say this to Dad, though. I don’t want him to cry again.
Besides, when you are fishing and clubbing and gutting and filleting, there is no time to think about mother or families or people that are gone. Fishing is a lot of work. My job is to haul the garbage bags out of the floats and gut our most recent twelve or fifteen—we’re careful not to count actual numbers—fish down at the dock. Unfortunately, I have never been that wild about gutting, save for the fact that the activity comes with a knife, specifically a thirteen-piece Swiss Army Knife that my father presented to me one night of this same summer, along with a braided rope lanyard.
“The lanyard will keep your knife from sinking to the bottom of the river,” he said. “If and when your knife slips out of your hands. If and when you remember to tie your lanyard to the belt loops of your pants.”
This afternoon, I check my knot on my belt loop. Then recheck it. Off Dad goes, up the hill to start filleting in the garage.
“Get a move on!” he says, no need to even turn around.
I kneel down in the mud, stick the blade into a fish’s egg hole, and bring it straight up the belly and around the gill cover, sawing down around the head. The next step is snapping and yanking off the head, then peeling away its dangling heart and intestines and stomach. Then I scrape off the kidney—a layer of blackish gunk along the spine—with my fingernail.
The first fish or two are fun. After that, gutting is no different from mowing the lawn or doing the dishes: egg hole, belly, head, guts, kidney, egg hole, belly, head, guts, kidney, eggholebellyheadgutskidney. A process that gets, at first, faster and faster, then slower and slower. A process that begins to stall mid-process, when I wander over to the fence to watch the neighbor’s mentally challenged black Lab, Wacker, try to gulp down flying bumblebees in the backyard.
Eventually, pretending I’m done, I head up to the garage and hang onto Dad as he industriously fillets fish after fish, wrapping each one in plastic, labeling it with masking tape, and shoving it—with a great deal of effort—into our overstuffed freezer.
Dad takes one look at me, puts down his knife, and says, “Let’s get the rest of that catch up here.”
I smile. I slump, as if to say Look at me, your cute, towheaded, helpless daughter. As an extra flourish, I add, “But I can’t finish them all. There’s too many.”
Even as I say these words, I wonder why I bother. I know what my father is going to say. He knows what he is going to say. Finally, he goes ahead and says it. “Can’t lives on won’t street, Leifer. Check your home address.”
No matter what happens, I know better than to bring up my mother. By August, though, stray objects remind me of her—a plate with little blue cornflowers I find hidden under the sink, the smell of my just-washed pillowcase, forgotten opera records in a milk crate in the crawl space. I’m careful to call her at night, after Dad has fallen asleep.
“Do you miss me?” she mumbles, never mentioning it’s three in the morning her time.
“Every day,” I say, even though I don’t miss her. She’s my mother. I love her. I love her long delicate fingers and her slender gold necklaces and the shush-sound of her silk work blouse when she bends over me to say good night. But every time I shut my eyes, I can’t really see her face. All over Anchorage, thin jagged cracks cut through the sidewalks and streets, left by the Great Alaskan Earthquake that leveled the city in the 1960s. It’s as if she and Baltimore and our lives there have fallen into one of those cracks, way down into the deep dark melted center of the earth.
A few times, I ask to go see our old house, the one Dad sold right before my mother and I left. The house is way across Anchorage, in our old neighborhood by the mountains. I try to invent reasons to stop by: Maybe we can go pick the raspberries that we planted in the backyard, maybe we forgot my bike in the garage.
“I sold the Schwinn, Leifer,” Dad says. “It was way too little for you. We’ll get you a new bike. With a banana seat.”
I bring up Baby, my husky puppy that Dad said had run away while I was gone. Dad’s own dog, Chrissy, is a hunting Lab. Maybe Chrissy could sniff Baby out from the bushes, I suggest, if we went back to our old house. Maybe if we drove up and down our old streets and called Baby’s name, she would come.
My father gets a far, irritated look in his eye. I vaguely understand what it means: Baby peed in the house. Baby chewed up a fly rod. Baby got taken out to the woods and sent off to that great invisible dog cabin in the sky. I run up to my room. There is no bed to hide under. I hide in the closet.
“That’s enough, now,” Dad says, somewhere in the muffled distance. “Cut that out. We’ve had enough theatrics for one summer.”
I hold the door handle shut from the inside.
“You didn’t even like that dog,” says Dad. “It stank. It crapped in the house.”
He is right. Baby did stink. And she did poop in the house, one time in my bed on my pillow while I was sleeping. I never walked or fed or bathed her the way I’d promised. I never even played with her very much. But I want her back all of a sudden. I want her and I want her old outdoor kennel, which was next to our old garage, which was next to our old laundry room, which was next to our old family room with the leather couch and the rocking chair and the cabinet TV and the thick, dusty carpet that you could draw pictures in with your fingernail: flower, tree, bird, stick-house, stick-me.
Dad’s boots thud across the room. “I’m going to count to three. Either you come out or I’m going to rip down the goddamn door.”
I wipe the crying off my face. I crawl out of the closet.
“Get in the plane. Now. Hop to.”
Off we go to Deep Creek. The silvers are running there, fast and thick. We catch a planeful. We catch a mountain of fish.
Just opposite our house on Campbell Lake lives Lou Gallagher, Dad’s surgery-practice partner and best friend. Lou is new to the neighborhood, too. He has purchased himself a split-level house with a leather-walled, fully stocked bar downstairs and, in the entrance, a waterfall fountain made from giant clamshells terraced into a grotto of petrified coral and cement.
For the past ten years, a seemingly endless supply of money has flowed into Anchorage from the oil companies and contractors that are building the Arctic pipeline. This, Dad says, combined with the fundamental Alaskan love of individualism, has led to some lavish, one-of-a-kind décor choices.
Personally, I love the clamshell fountain. I harbor certain classified plans about peeing in the upper tiers and watching the golden waterfall tumble down over the embedded starfish and faux pearls. Lou, however, is not at all enthralled. He’s decided to tear the rancher down to build a bigger, more tasteful home. He invites us to a demolition celebration barbecue, right on the rubble of the old foundation.
By the time we arrive, the yard is thick with cigar smoke and random black Labs. Watermelons lie piled up by the coolers. Whole salmon, wrapped into tinfoil logs, sizzle on the grill. Lou, a tall, dark, and charismatic version of my blond, smaller, quieter father, waves us over with one giant lobster-claw pot holder. When Dad stands back, rocking on his heels, Lou bear-hugs him. When Dad says we have to be home early, Lou says Dad has to wear a ruffled apron that says KISS THE COOK, pl
us finish up grilling the salmon, plus finish up drinking Lou’s beer, plus put on the goddamn lobster pot holders that his lovely wife bought him for Christmas. Then Dad can go home and be a party pooper. You bet.
To my surprise, Dad neither thunders back at him nor tells him to redirect his misguided energies. He blushes, the way I would. Then ties on the apron. Lou sticks a few beers in the front ruffled pocket, plus an unlit Roman candle.
Over on the half-built deck, Great Alaskan Moms are sipping jug Chablis and nibbling on canapés made from Triscuits and spread-able port wine cheese. They wear silk blouses and teetering heels and gold hoops straight from the disco-dancing photos in magazines at the supermarket. The poetry of their outfits is lost on their husbands, all of whom have gussied themselves up in JCPenney and hip boots, as usual.
I sit in the mud by a broken patio chair. My job is to listen and worship and not, under any circumstances, be noticed. I can do this until the end of time. Gesturing with his hands, then his spatula, then a raw moose sausage, Lou explains how to land a plane on a moving glacier. Rudolph Deer (his real name) enacts his escape from a bull moose that charged him down his own street.
Beer flows. The grill sizzles. Stories curl and wind around us. Dad joins in, finally, pausing at just the right moment and stroking his mustache for effect, as if he just can’t seem to remember how he fought off that grizzly with a butterfly net, a canned ham, and a broken paddle.
“I used a can of Cutter once,” says Four-Finger Dick. “A blast of bug spray, straight to the bear’s face. Gave me that thirty extra seconds.”
A high-pitched scream cuts through the laughter. All ten male heads swing around, evaluating the landscape of the lake for a possible drowning or discharged firearm. Down on the beach, ten girls freeze in instant, identical states of paralysis.