The Alaskan Laundry (11 page)

“No shit.”

He nodded slowly, tapping the end of his pen against the newspaper. “You know all that stuff Fran said at Thanksgiving, about the Tlingits getting a raw deal—don't get Betteryear started. Man's got a temper.”

She thought about him in the coffee shop. “He seems pretty chilled out.”

“Trust me, he's not.”

After a couple more minutes of listening to the VHF, Fritz heaved himself to standing, adjusted his suspender straps, and took his coat from the hook. “Gonna go change out bait on the traps.”

“Roger.”

Alone, she sat on the stool, listening to the thrum of water from the tote room and the back-and-forth on the radio. The smell of silicone was making her woozy.

Her thoughts returned to standing with Laney in the wheelhouse of the tug. It made no sense, the idea of working so hard for a boat. She could find something less expensive, a double-wide trailer by the water. Then again, falling asleep in that hammock, having that piece of history, making it her home . . .

Sighing, she went into the yard to begin feeding the fish.

The next morning when she arrived at work, Fritz shooed her. “Take the flatbed—just drive out Papermill Road toward the church until you see parked cars. Here, use these.” He handed her a pair of binoculars.

“Where am I going?”

“To the opener. Go! Just get out there before you miss the wolves.”

She drove past Maksoutoff Bay, up the hill, past the Lincoln Log church and Salmonberry Cove, and back down to the water. And there they were, the seiners, forty or so tacking back and forth in the ocean. With the binoculars she made out names:
Storm Chaser
,
Perseverance
,
Leading Lady
,
Defiant
. Pointed snouts, gunwales just above the waterline, sodium halide mast lights as bright as near planets. Skippers in wraparound sunglasses leaned out of wheelhouse windows, smoking cigars, steel coffee mugs in hand. Crews dressed in bright orange and green raingear stood poised on decks. A horde of floatplanes buzzed overhead, on the lookout for balls of herring, Fritz had told her, the pilots reporting back on scrambled channels to the seiners.

People had set up picnics on patches of grass and on the roofs of houses across the road, sharing jars of smoked salmon and pickled herring. A VHF radio from a car broadcasted the district commissioner counting down from ten.

“Nine, eight, seven . . .”

“Let the dogs out!” someone yelled.

“Five, four, three, two . . . Open season!”

A roar echoed off the mountainsides as clouds of black smoke rose over the water. Rooster tails spewed from jet-powered skiffs dragging folds of black net from the boat decks, making a wall of mesh. Herring flashed like coins as the mesh drew tight, fish pocking the surface. She watched a deckhand punch the web, working to free a caught log, cursing loud enough for her to hear. Just off the rocks two boats barreled toward each other, neither conceding position, the larger one veering off at the last second. There was the screech of steel ripping, followed by a flurry of expletives over the handheld radio. The larger boat began to sink. Two other seiners gathered up their nets, positioned themselves on either side, squeezing the sinking boat between them, keeping it afloat. Like coaches at a football game, an arm on either shoulder, they nursed the injured vessel off the field, back toward the harbor.

Thirty minutes later the fishery closed. She took the rest of the afternoon to hike up Crow Hill.

The forest had turned chartreuse with spring, shoots of new growth spearing the soil. A few bears had been reported around town, groggy after hibernation, digging through garbage, one snatching a Labrador from its chain. Not wanting to take chances, she sang Prince's “Kiss,” trilling the falsetto. A bottle of bear spray jostled at her hip, its plastic safety removed.

A couple thousand feet above the sea she reached the lookout and watched as the fleet made its slow return to town. Newt was down there somewhere, working in that steam-shrouded processor. He'd probably go through the night.

As she walked back down, she couldn't escape the feeling that she was just beginning to scratch the surface of life on the Rock.
Give it to me. I'm ready.

IN MAY
, two months after the herring opening, Fritz called Newt back from the processor. Pink salmon had started to appear in the slough at the hatchery.

“Here we go again,” Newt said, snapping on his bibs and duct-taping a hole on his Xtratufs. “Giddyup.”

A few times she tried to drum up the courage to call her father back. To apologize, perhaps, for hanging up on him. Or to say that she was fine, and they'd speak sometime in the future. But she didn't want to. If anyone needed to apologize, it was him. In the meantime, she had work to do.

Her job was to corral the dark schools of fish up against the aluminum weir and scoop as many as she could. The spawning males, some a couple feet long, had overdeveloped snouts and jaws. Their teeth snagged on the waders she had patched so carefully, ripping new holes, letting cold water seep into her long underwear. Her legs were soaked.

“This fucking sucks,” Tara yelled up to Newt. “I'm wet as shit.”

“C'mon up here then. We'll switch.”

Outside the killing shack, Newt showed her how to seize the male fish by the meat of their tails and fling them into the chute, while females were dropped on a stainless-steel tray. “You're not tapping them awake, you're knockin 'em dead,” he said, gripping a female just behind the head and setting the skull on the cinderblock. “Downright mean to be hesitant.” He raised an alder stick wrapped in heavy-gauge copper.
BANG.
The tray shook, the salmon quivered, the yellow eye dimmed as the body went slack. “There you have it. Dead as an iced catfish.”

It was miserable work. She preferred being inside the killing shack, using a finger-razor to slice open the females' stomachs, dumping their skeins of orange eggs into a five-gallon bucket, sealing the bucket by pounding on the lid with a rubber mallet.

Throughout the day they switched off. Fritz had hired a couple students from the college who reminded Tara of how she had been her first weeks—trudging around, unsnapping their bibs at the end of the day while Newt and Tara loaded buckets onto the flatbed. Lazy.

Things grew more exciting whenever Fritz came down to the slough, a doughnut or coffee in his hand, and yelled, “It's baby-making time!” Newt showed Tara how to select seven virile males with prominent humps and long jaws. One by one she rubbed the spot just above the anus, releasing a stream of milky white liquid over the eggs of twenty-seven females. Newt patted her on the back.

“Keep it up, you'll be chief salmon jacker in no time. Just a little lower, give it a good pinch.” She pushed him out of the way. But he was right: she did have the touch. She shook the bucket until the eggs were covered in a film of milt, then tossed the writhing male salmon into the chute. “Spawn and die,” Newt chanted, two fingers held above his head like a rock star. “Spawn and motherfuckin' die!”

As summer wore on she refined her moves, knocking fish a centimeter behind the eye, flinging spent males over her shoulder, one after the other, into the chute. Fritz watched from the doorway of the shack. “If I don't look out, some fisherman's gonna steal you away and make a worker out of you.”

He gave them Sundays off. At the Muskeg, mandolins, banjos, guitars, and fiddles emerged from beat-up cases pasted with stickers. A bright-eyed older woman pulled out an accordion, and soon they were all playing, the fiddle so mournful, it made the roots of her hair hurt. She realized she was counting again, trying to recall when Connor had sent her that short letter. Just before Christmas. A card would be good, she decided. Brief and informal. In the bookstore she selected one with an old cabin rotting into the woods.

June 17, 1998

Hey, Connor,

I just wanted to drop a note to let you know I'm still alive up here. Putting away money with that tug I told you about in mind. It has a messed-up engine or something. The woman who owns it is an odd duck. Maybe I'll just end up with a little fishing boat.

She considered what she had written, unsure why she was going on like this.

Are you back in Philly for the summer, maybe up on the scaffold again? I'm working at the hatchery, killing fish. The work's not so bad once you get into a groove.

I hope you're enjoying your separate path.

She hesitated over the signing, then scribbled,
Yours, Tara.
She put the card in the postbox and walked back to her apartment in the rain.

SHE GOT HIS LETTER
on the Friday before July Fourth. She set it in front of her at the Muskeg, after getting a slice of pie and a coffee, but she couldn't bring herself to open it. Then she placed it on her bedside table, waking in the middle of the night to rest it in her palm, trying to glean its contents. The envelope felt warm to the touch.

Saturday, Coast Guard helicopters thundered over Main Street. Newt snagged Mary Janes tossed from the backs of fire trucks, and made faces at the Civil Air Patrol kids waving from the boat trailer.

“I'll be right back,” she told him. “Don't move.”

She weaved through the crowd, then walked up the concrete steps to Castle Hill, the spot where Alaska had been transferred from Russia to the United States. She sat on a stone wall overlooking the water. A rope tinged against a flagpole. Her hands trembled as she slit open the envelope. If anyone had the right to be angry, she thought, it was her. He shouldn't be able to put her on edge like this.

She looked over the roofs of town, then down at the letter. From across the water she heard the steady beat of rotors as the helicopters returned to the base.

27 June 1998

Dear T,

Thanks for the card. Pretty and sad this moss-covered cabin being swallowed back into the woods.

It's good to know you're alive out there. I was beginning to doubt it. The boat sounds lovely. Failing means you're playing right? Good for you keeping on. There's an old schooner on the Delaware. They're looking for volunteers to work on her. I was thinking about doing it this summer if I can find the time. Sounds like you have a similar project ahead of you if you get that tug. Yeah I'm putting some hours with the crew bricking. Helping my mom out where I can.

On another note I've also been taking improv classes. Trying to loosen up. The idea is to put yourself in someone else's world. And to never say no. I'm bad Tara. I mean really bad. Like my brain just doesn't react so quickly.

It's good (I think) that we're living our own lives now. Although I will say in all honesty when I try and spin my life forward I bang my head against you. You are experiencing something powerful on that Rock of yours that has nothing to do with me. And I have my own world. My father (surprisingly) is all of a sudden trying to broaden his role in my life. Impromptu visits to New York. My mother can't stand to be in the same room with him—you know all this.

But you you're falling in love with a place—and perhaps a boat—instead of a person. Either way Alaska seems to soften you. I think this is a good thing.

That's all for now.

C

She folded the letter, then went down the hill to find Newt. He wanted to go out to the docks to watch the fireworks. As they walked, Connor's words turned over in her head. He had responded so quickly. It took her off-guard.

His father was a weird dude who dressed in French cuffs and pressed shirts and kept a neatly trimmed beard. He worked with banks in France, or something like that. When she thought about it, she realized Connor never really talked about the man. Then again, she hadn't been great at asking questions.

They reached the end of the docks. When she strode up the gangplank of the tugboat, looming in front of them, Newt stayed behind, uncharacteristically bashful. “Does Laney know you're here? She's not my biggest fan.”

She knocked on the padlocked door, then cupped her hand to the glass. Chairs were arranged around the galley table, plates stacked in the dish rack. “She won't mind,” Tara said. Her words, spoken into the glass, echoed.

“Hey, check this out.”

She turned to see the top of Newt's balding head disappear down the hatch into the engine room.

Below, his penlight flashed over an unplugged chest freezer, chunks of rigid insulation, a workbench cluttered with mason jars filled with rusting screws. “Laney said to stop by, but I don't think she meant for us to sneak on,” Tara said.

“Scared money don't win, T.”

“Look who's all gung-ho now.”

She followed as he ducked beneath a bulkhead. The beam reflected off the engine block. Newt ran his palm over the cast-iron, gasping. “Geezum crow—thing's the size of a goddamn school bus! You could take a bath in these cylinders. Look here,” he said, running his fingernail along a crack. “Probably hasn't run since Moses split the seas.”

“Six years,” Tara said, tracing her hands along a copper pipe leading to a cylinder. “That's what Laney said.”

“Hell of a lot of elbow grease into this old girl to get her running.”

They climbed into the living space. Her eyes followed the white beam as it worked over the cookstove. A fine coating of dust covered the burner plates, the pots hanging overhead.