The Alaskan Laundry (32 page)

“I didn't see you put down those quarters,” Hale shouted. Then, “You calling me a fucking liar?”

Tara recognized the troller from the docks, an attractive young man who had married a Norwegian woman. They had recently had a daughter, and the man was chatting with Petree about how to deaden the noise from the boat's engine and make a baby-changing station in the fo'c'sle. He always wore the same small animal skull of some creature tied with leather twine around his neck. He had probably come down here tonight for a bit of peace and a pool game, Tara thought.

“Hey!” Hale shouted. “Don't walk away from me. The fuck you think you are?”

She could see the skull rise and fall against the man's chest. She knew enough about fighting to see he didn't want to be involved, even though he had a good six inches on Hale.

Cassie yelled from behind the bar and grabbed the bat from beneath the popcorn maker. “I'll whale the tar out of all y'all if you don't quit it!”

Coon-Ass, standing behind Cassie, knocked a glass from the bar. It shattered over the linoleum. He followed this with a low, woodsy howl. Hale hit the young troller in the temple. The man stumbled, swinging wildly. Hale charged, grabbing the man's hips, driving him into the wall and rabbit-jabbing his stomach. Frames fell to the ground, the glass shattering. Cassie held the bat over them, continuing to swear. Hale was on the man's back, with a seat-belt hold around the troller's neck.

Shaking his head, King Bruce slid out of the booth. “You shoulda been part of this,” he said, shaking a finger at Jethro. He stepped in front of Cassie, keeping one hand on the barrel of the bat while he hauled Hale up by his hood.

“Let go, for godsakes. Nuff!” he growled.

The troller was bleeding from his forehead. King Bruce held out an arm and helped the man to his feet. Someone handed him a napkin.

“You all right, hoss?” King Bruce asked.

“I'm callin' the police on y'all,” Cassie said, going back behind the bar and slamming the rotary phone down. “Fuckin' crazy-ass crabbing fucks.”

King Bruce fanned five hundred-dollar bills on the counter. Cassie's chest heaved. “For your troubles,” he told her.

She flashed another five fingers. He sighed, peeled them off, and turned to Hale and Coon-Ass.

“That'll be coming off the top of your deck shares, you can be sure about that.”

Cassie took the money, opened her cash register with a ding of the bell, and poured out five tequila shots.

“You boys drink these down, and then heigh-the-fucking-ho on outta my bar.”

Rudy, Coon-Ass, and Hale whooped their way back along Pletnikoff, pounding on truck doors and peeing in the street. Jethro walked with his hands shoved into his pockets, looking down at the wet pavement, while King Bruce tacked back and forth between the sidewalk on one side and the humming processors on the other, his cheek lit white by his cell phone.

“You don't want to do this,” Jethro said to her. “Trust me.”

It sounded like a challenge, but not one that interested her. She just wanted the check at the end of the trip.

“Is your dad a good captain?”

Jethro bowed his head, thinking. “He knows where to drop 'em, for sure. We make money.”

She thought about this as they crossed the parking lot. “I got a boat I want to buy.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah—that one parked aft of the
Reiver.
”

“The old wood thing?”

“It's a World War II tugboat.”

When they reached the harbor Hale hoisted an unlocked bicycle out of the rack and rode it down the ramp, roaring as it slid out from under him. Coon-Ass convulsed into laughter as Hale tumbled onto the planks. Rudy clapped. The fall looked bad enough to break a bone, but Hale seemed to be constructed of some superhuman substance, just blasting through the world without a care. She made a note to herself to keep calm around him. People like Hale drove her nuts.

Back at the boat, the boys climbed the ladder. She followed Hale, bleeding from an elbow, into the main house. The galley bench, which made a horseshoe around the table, was torn up, with plugs of yellow foam punching out from the holes. The boys scattered to their various bunks. Jethro put coffee on.

“Here's our food for when you cook,” he said, opening a cupboard. Hot sauce and boxes of Aunt Jemima and cans of corn and beef stew and powdered milk were arranged on the shelves. Bags of mini candy bars stacked on the bottom.

“You're gonna be crashing down here,” he said, walking behind the galley to a bunk. “Only single rack. Pop thought it was proper, seeing as how you're the girl.” He pushed open a louvered door, revealing a toilet in a corner. “Head.”

She threw her duffel on the bunk. The boat trembled as the engines fired. King Bruce's slurred voice came over the speaker.

“Cut 'er da fuck loose, boys. We're gettin' the fuck outta this fuckin' fuckhole.”

“He's operating this boat?” Tara asked. “He can hardly see straight.”

“Aw, he's been driving boats drunk since he was twelve,” Jethro said.

Tara went back out on deck, watching as the boys undid the lines. It wasn't too late, she thought—she could still leap. Hale yelled up at her from the docks. “Your hands cold?” Cursing to herself, she pulled them out of her pockets. “Catch.” He tossed the bitter end toward her, but it hit the hull and flopped into the water.

“I said ‘catch.'”

She hauled the wet hawser line onto deck and looped it.
Patience,
she told herself.
You will not react with anger. Just let it slide.

With a grumble and belch of black smoke the
Reiver
pushed away from the dock. Swim, she thought, she could still swim. But then they were gathering speed. Tara pinched her mother's medallion between her fingers as the tugboat tied to the corner grew small, bobbing in their wake.
I'm doing this for you. Wait for me.

TIME DRAGGED
, one day after the other, as they ran north toward the crab grounds. The plan was to make it to Unalaska, work on the boat for a few days, then crab twenty-four/seven for the opener. She chopped onions and carrots and made stews with crushed tomatoes and peppers. She waited to be asked to do a night wheel watch, thrilled by the idea of guiding this 106-foot steel boat through the black. Although she knew it would mean sitting there staring at screens and staying awake. But it never happened.

When the boys weren't on watch they took food into their bunks, emerging later with egg yolk or bread crumbs caked in their beards. A stench of seawater and moisturizer leaked into the galley. Bits of burnt bacon were stuck in their teeth, the enamel stained yellow from coffee and cigarettes—she wondered if they ever brushed. She felt like a ghost on the boat. Except for Jethro, they continued their campaign of ignoring her, limiting communication to nods or one-syllable responses.

Jethro spent his days curled at the far end of the galley booth, hood up, the tips of his long, oily seal-colored hair framing his jaw, and devoured books she still hadn't read but had seen in the woods among the Alaskan Travelers:
The Alchemist
,
The Prophet
,
Ishmael
,
Celestine Prophecies
. When he wasn't reading he wrote letters to his “hippie chick,” as Hale called her, back in college at Santa Cruz.

Hale asked Jethro to start prepping the cages. Tara watched out the porthole as he leapt from pot to pot, coiling line in twists, moving in a fury that she didn't recognize from the calm reader. She wondered what he'd be like as a lover—tender and gentle, or the madman on the pots, looping line between his elbow and hand.

At night, after wiping down the galley, she lay in her bunk, steel bulkheads sweating above her, dripping onto her sleeping bag. She recalled first arriving in Alaska, sure the island would free her, allow her to rediscover some happiness taken by her mother's death, by what happened at Avalon. This wasn't the case—she knew this now. If anything she felt cordoned off, wrapped in yellow emergency tape. Waiting. To get the tug, perhaps, which had become, in her mind, the way forward.

She reached out and wiped a drop from the bulkhead, closed her eyes. Thinking of that warm spot on Keta's brow when he woke up. His blond eyelashes.

Just get through these next few weeks. The final sprint, and then she'd be there.

After five days of travel, under a dome of cloudless blue sky, they idled past the narrow spit protecting the womb of Dutch Harbor from the Bering Sea. In the distance she saw the steam-obscured rectangles of a processor in Unalaska, and, farther on, teardrop shapes of the steeples on the Russian church, similar to the one in Port Anna.

King Bruce angled them into the harbor. The sun, at her back in the south, reflected hard off the flat water. The
Northwestern
,
Aleutian Sable
,
Cape Caution
, the fleet of crab boats tied up in the harbor made the seiners back in Port Anna look like small dogs.

“We're headed to the Elbow Room,” Hale said to her, pulling his hat brim over his eyebrows. “Second-most-dangerous bar in the world, right behind some goddamn place in Rhodesia. Ten bucks Jethro's gonna mail a pile of love letters off to his hippie chick back in San Francisco, ain't that right, Romeo?”

“Santa Cruz, asshole.”

They piled into a pickup, rented by King Bruce for the season, and parked in town. Tara decided to wander.

“Okay, lone wolf,” Hale said. “Meet us back at the rig in an hour.”

There was the tang of pre-battle excitement in town—she could taste it, that hysterical current running through the men before the opening. Scrums of deckhands outside the Elbow Room, a bar the size of a doublewide trailer, stared out from under their soiled caps as she passed. One catcalled. It was warm, almost sixty, but she pulled up the hood of her sweatshirt.

Alaska was not a place for a lone wolf—she knew this by now. Once you got kicked out of the pack, like Betteryear, or Irish, or even Keta, it was almost impossible to get back in. You grew a particular type of bitterness—she could see it in Keta, how he disliked Fritz. Or just complained how things used to be, like Irish.

Quiet, detached, maybe a little scared—in her view, this was how the boys on the
Reiver
regarded her. They were feral. She needed to become louder, cruder, more aggressive.

She crossed the bridge back toward the harbor. A greenish- purple front of clouds, underside reflecting the gray of the ocean, moved toward town. She had never been in a place with no trees—there were just these wind-scraped, bald mountains, snow blanketing the peaks.

On the boat she spooned cans of beef stew into a pot and spread frozen tater tots on a cookie sheet, salting them and sliding the tray into the oven.

“Soon enough we're gonna run outta the ready-made stuff,” King Bruce said as he passed through the galley, popping a tot in his mouth and wiping ketchup from his whiskers. “Hope you know a bit more than how to open a can.”

“Your boys prefer the canned stuff,” she said.

“My boys?” He shook his head, took another handful of tater tots. “This is your crew, sweetheart. We're gonna be keeping each other alive out there on the big waters. Where are those boys, anyways?”

“At the Elbow Room. I walked back.”

He looked at her for a moment, as if considering something, then went up the stairs. “Call me when that stew's warm,” he shouted behind him.

The following morning, the stars still out, she heard Hale in the galley and smelled bacon. She pulled on fleece pants and found him by the stove, spooning grease over egg yolks.

“Wakey-wakey, Snow White. Hope you like swine.”

“Jesus, dude. The sun's not even up, and you're already busting balls.”

“Whose balls would those be?” he asked innocently. “Here.”

With a spatula he worked a couple eggs loose, and passed a steaming plate to her. The other deckhands came out, poured coffee, and helped themselves to food. “Grab your plate,” Jethro said to her. “I'll give you a crash course in crabbing.”

She poured more coffee and followed him out on deck. It was just after eight, and the sky was lightening to a raw white. Jethro gripped a steel bar on a pot, a square cage webbed in nylon netting, taller than Tara. “Seven-bys,” he said. “Each cage weighs about seven hundred and fifty pounds.”

Inside the trap yellow line connected a set of three pot buoys: one pink rubber, the other green rubber, and the third made of Styrofoam, sprayed-painted emergency orange.

“That's our sea lion buoy, in case the little bastards puncture the other two. So how it works is our pot goes here”—he patted a pockmarked sheet of steel—“called the lift, rack, or the pot launcher. We swing the pot up into the lift, bait it with herring or codfish or whatever, and shut the door. One of us, usually Hale, hits the hydros, and splash, down she goes. Five hundred feet or so to the bottom. Throw out a shot of coiled line over the side, which connects the bridle on the pot to these two buoys, which float on the surface. Unless . . .” He looked at her, waiting.

“Unless a sea lion eats them, in which case just the sea lion buoy will remain,” she finished.

“I could tell you were smart,” he said.

It reminded her of being at the processor, having to learn how to make boxes with Trunk. Except this time people expected her to fuck up.

“So the pots soak for how long?” she asked.

“Day or two, then we swing back around, find the buoy, toss a grappling hook to catch the line, strung between the pink and yellow buoys, and bring her on up. This is where it gets tough, especially when it's blowing. You've got pots swinging around and we're all trying to rack 'em and get 'em in the lift. So that's done, then we tilt up the cage and open the trap and out come the crabs onto the table, and then we start sorting, which will be one of your jobs. We keep only legals, which means males over the size limit. Females go back down. Keepers get thrown into a lined chute leading to the live hold, filled with salt water. Goal is pretty simple—plug the hold. Got it?”