The Alaskan Laundry (23 page)

“Good. It'll be straightforward, go up the circuit, pick up our load, c'mon back and drop it off. May to September. You have time to run down to the post office before we head out. Tell them to forward your mail to the processor. Welcome aboard.”

When Tara returned to the boat, Jackie introduced her to Miles, the engineer, a quiet, thick-bodied senior in Port Anna High School who wore faded Carhartt overalls. “Miles is the town wrestling star,” Jackie announced. “A whiz with the engine, with a nasty sweet tooth.”

They loaded up, threw the lines, and pushed north along the channel past the tug. After a brief look, she went down to begin moving into her bunk for the summer.

AS THEY RAN
she found that she enjoyed spending time in the wheelhouse with Teague. She liked his drawl and his stories, particularly when they involved landmarks along their path—how this boat ran aground in this bay here, how the Tlingits once maintained a fish camp there.

On the second day of the trip she watched their progress on the computer screen as Teague made the gradual turn from Chatham Strait into Peril Strait. Tree-covered mountains rose, jagged, along the coastline. Teague said that all the land to her left was protected wilderness.

“Thank god,” she said.

“Bullshit. It was God who gave us these resources. Now here we are sitting on our hands instead of fulfilling our duty of cutting those trees down.”

She recalled Fritz's
CUT KILL DIG DRILL
bumper sticker. The men up here were funny. They seemed to pride themselves not only on surviving Alaska, but on conquering it. She thought of Connor backstage with his headset, a clipboard in one hand, making a note. He'd be good at working, she decided. But he didn't have the swashbuckling nature of the men here. The built-in power of dudes like Miles.

They anchored in a drizzle at the back of a bay. “On the beach over there is where a picnicking family discovered a local hunter cached by a brown bear,” Teague told her. “Kids found him folded in half like a doll. Stuffed at the base of a tree, a little after-hibernation snack.”

She peered into the woods, and thought of telling him about the time she had been charged up on Crow Hill, how Keta had stood in front, protecting her, when Teague picked up the VHF to make an announcement that the
Adriatic
was buying.

Like distant stars, the mast lights appeared on the horizon. Teague made a list of trollers ready to unload.

“You met Irish yet?” he asked. She shook her head. “He'll be our first. Cranky old-timer. Eighty-three, and he still works alone. Can't wait to be at the front of the line.”

Tara went down the stairs and pulled on her bibs and gloves in time to drop fenders off the side. As the troller eased in, she looped line over the cleat. Irish paced the deck, chewing his blistered lips. He had a shock of white hair, a weathered face, and thick-lensed glasses. Behind her she heard the snap of Jackie's elastic wristers, and watched as her skipper hopped down onto the smaller boat and lifted the hold cover. She cursed.

“C'mon, Irish. Coho should face the same direction, otherwise their scales come off. Jesus, what a fucking mess.”

The man lifted a hand in the air but didn't speak.

“What are you waiting for?” Jackie snapped at Tara. “Fish aren't getting any deader.”

She lowered herself into the hold. Silver scales floated like confetti. She dug the blood-slimed straps of the brailer bag out from the pile of fish, hooked the straps to the steel eye. Jackie gave a twirl of her finger. “Up!” The hydraulics groaned, the elastic spreaders made a bang as they sprang loose from the side hooks, and the bag rose.

“Gimme that tag,” Jackie said to Tara, stepping back onto the
Adriatic.

“What?”

“The tag! The tag line!” Jackie reached over and grabbed the rope tied off to the bottom of the bag, threw her weight away from the
Northern Star
, heaving the brailer bag over a tote. With a gaff hook in one hand she went back into the hold, came up with a fish, and set it on the V-groove of Irish's tray. She opened the belly flaps, frowned, reached for the Vicky knife duct-taped to her suspender.

“This is some sloppy horseshit, Irish,” she said, scraping with the knife and flinging purple goop to the side. “Blood in the central artery and in the armpits. Swim bladder remnants. And this?” she held up a fan of ruby-red gill rakers. “Are you shitting me, Irish? You didn't even clean out the head!”

The old man continued to look out toward some invisible spot in the distance as Jackie used the honed edge of a spoon to squeeze out the remaining threads of blood from the sides of the fish.

“I'll tell you what, Irish. I wouldn't be caught dead handling a fish like this. And I
goddamn well
don't have time to do your work alongside mine. You've gone through your ice, your fish are belly-burned, and they've lost their scales. These are all gonna get number-twoed, you're not gonna be able to afford your gas. Am I making sense to you, old man?”

Tara stood there, feeling embarrassed for the skipper, who took a pack of cigarettes from his wool vest and shook one loose. If Jackie had yelled at Urbano like this, it would have been a much different story.

“I'll ask again: Am I gettin' through, Irish? I'm not fucking getting through, am I? Waste of my fucking time. We'll buy your shitty fish, but they're all number-twoed, good for cat food. If you don't like it, sell 'em elsewhere.”

The rest of the day was more of the same—Jackie bitching out skippers, sniping at Tara, giving a quick nod of the head when the catch was acceptable. It was dark when Tara hosed down the deck, water running pink through the scuppers. She used the hand-powered pallet jack to rearrange totes to make more room for the next day's fish. Links on the chain clacked as Teague pulled the hook and the engines fired.

“Go grab a few while we run up the line,” Jackie told her. Zipped into her sleeping bag, staring up at the ceiling inches from her nose, her muscles felt long and tired.

She understood now why Newt had grown so frantic before a trip on the
Adriatic.
Jackie functioned in a perpetual state of frustration. At the same time it made Tara proud to see this small woman take on the world.

THE NEXT MORNING
, after finishing her chores around the boat, Tara poured a mug of coffee and joined Teague in the wheelhouse. They worked their way up Lisianski Strait, spruce and hemlock thick along the water's edge, cliff sides slick with rainwater. To the north she could see the front end of a glacier between the tree-covered mountains. Teague told her how fishermen had drowned in a storm here a few years back after alerting the Coast Guard that the boat was going down in Lisianski Inlet instead of Lisianski Strait.

“Trust me. One day, when you get a boat of your own, you'll find yourself in the shit. Something will go wrong, something you couldn't have imagined, and you'll have to make the right decision.”

“Hope not,” she said.

“Hope doesn't have a damn thing to do with it. That's just the game we play out here.”

They approached a silty green line separating glacier water from the blue ocean. “Watch this pod,” Teague told her, pointing out the window at the porpoises playing in the wake of the boat. When they reached the lighter water the critters broke off, turning around back toward the deep blue. “Buckos don't like all the sediment,” Teague said. “Least that's what I think. No one really has a clue.”

A buoy rang mournfully in the swell. With the binoculars Tara watched sea lions piled at its base, their wire-thick whiskers twitching as they jockeyed for position. Teague mulled over the tide table, stroking his goatee, trying to decide whether to shoot South Inian Pass, a tidal bottleneck about half a mile wide and three miles long connecting Cross Sound with Icy Strait. “Hold on to that greasy hat of yours—this is a nasty-ass bite of water.”

The scow's twin screws churned against the ebb. They passed whirlpools and oily boils of water. He pointed to odd shapes on the depth-finder screen.

“Sunken boats,” he said. “They all want to go home, to the ocean floor. From dust to dust, and all that.”

She looked toward the distant mountains, snowcapped and craggy, thinking about the
Chief
, with its broad shoulders and horseshoe stern, slipping beneath the ocean. It wasn't possible. Teague broke the silence to identify the Fairweather Range, chipped teeth of mountains outlined against the horizon, the summit of Mount Fairweather more than fourteen thousand feet from the water's surface. Maybe one day, she thought, she'd power the tug through this pass. Already she could hear the bang of the engine, six cylinders pounding in line, charging against the moon's gravity.

They anchored off the ash-colored beaches of Homeshore and went on Channel Sixteen. Trollers appeared, poles lifting in jerks as they came closer, great birds folding their wings. “You think you can get these folks unloaded?” Teague said. “Jackie's down in the engine room with Miles.”

She snapped on her bibs, pulled her hair back in a high ponytail, slipped on her hat and safety glasses, then went on deck to catch trollers' lines and pull them snug over the cleats. Teague worked the levers while Tara hopped down and grabbed the hook out of the air.

“Lower!”

Down it came. She pushed the straps past the catch, twirled a finger to the sky, then up went the bag, its bungees snapping free from the stainless hooks. Teague watched, steel coffee mug in one hand, as she followed the bag, leaping back to the tender.

“You stay out from under that load, hear?” he yelled down. She released the fish into the tote and began sorting. When the skipper came out from the wheelhouse, his permit card in hand, Teague joked. “You gonna have my deckhand do all your work, or what?”

The skipper snorted and dropped back down to his boat. “Hook attached to a lead took off the tip of my deckhand's thumb. I guess we gotta head on back to town.”

“Damn. You still got the thumb?”

“Soakin' in milk there in the hold.”

“Milk?” Teague shouted.

“Yeah, milk.”

“That's teeth, buddy. You soak broken teeth in milk. A thumb is flesh. Wrap it in a steak.”

“Fuck that. I ain't wasting a steak on that lazy sonofabitch.”

“Just slice off a piece then, duct tape the thumb into it.”

“Well, it's coming off his rib eye. Dumb shit. Yeah, I'm talking to you in there!” he yelled into an open sash window. “He's gonna have to catch a rockfish if he's hungry. His goddamn fault for losin' the thumb in the first place. Cost me a whole goddamn trip, now I'm supposed to give up a steak.”

They unloaded the last of the trollers, pulled anchor, bucked the tide across Icy Strait to Hoonah to take on ice, then ran with it down Chatham Strait. Through Sergius Narrows at slack tide, then back to Port Anna to unload at the processor, untying early the following morning to do it all over again.

FRITZ HAD BEEN RIGHT
. Unlike most Alaskans, she hadn't been raised with work—an understanding of how engines ran, how houses fit together, how food arrived on the table. Knead, cut, roll, brush, punch, crumble, soften—this was what her parents had taught her. So different from the gearwork of life, the origin of things: squeezing milk from a cow on an Illinois dairy farm, flaking hay from the bed of a pickup on a Wyoming ranch. Learning how to rip flitches in an Oregon woodshop.

In her first month on the
Adriatic
she had watched Miles, after taking one look at a bolt, reach for the proper socket head, metric instead of inches. Her muscles lacked this knowledge, how many twists were needed to remove that bolt. She didn't know to smear nickel on the threads before tightening it back up. And each time she thought she had mastered a skill—tying a bowline, learning how to feather an orbital sander, working the pallet jack—she was confronted with yet another mystery of the mechanical world that laid bare her ignorance.

On the other hand, she could make cannoli. She recalled the time her father taught her. “Your mother is correct,” he began by saying. “Cold hands make the best pastry. Except with cannoli. To do that, your hands must be warm. Here. Towel off.”

He turned the thermostat on the fryer to 350 degrees, then carefully laid squares of dough into the oil, keeping them plunged with the flat of the tongs until they turned pecan brown. “Always wait until the last minute to fill, otherwise the shells will lose their crunch.”

She learned the correct amount of pressure to squeeze the custard of mascarpone, chocolate chips, and a few drops of amaretto into the cooled shells. When she overfilled he remained patient, waiting by her side until each cannoli was lined up neatly on the wax paper, then followed behind, watching as she slipped the metal tray into the display case.

It made no difference if it was frying shells or working through this bag of fish to make sure no chums were mixed in with kings. Attention to detail and speed, these were the main ingredients. Maneuver the totes with the pallet jack and signal Teague so that when the tote came down its feet fit into the one beneath it. Do it well, do it quickly, and already be thinking about the next job.

It made her cringe to remember her first weeks on Archangel Island, daydreaming in the warehouse while Fritz lay under the tank, waiting for his shim. Worse were those memories of being sprawled on the couch as Connor worked, or dragging her feet through her chores at the bakery.

Miles didn't speak much, except when either diesel engines or wrestling became the topic. She enjoyed sitting with him on the stern deck, protected from the wind by the house, two of them leaning back in plastic lawn chairs, boots propped up on the gunwales, watching the wash from the props. He introduced her to the thin, uneven Backwoods cigars, which they smoked while Jackie's pressure cooker clattered in the galley. When she told him about the tug, he walked her through the basics of a direct-reversible engine, how there was no transmission or clutch, and the cylinders reversed order when the boat had to move backwards.