The Alaskan Laundry (35 page)

She went inside and lay on the bench, sucking the blood from her finger where the nail had torn. The galley was quiet save for the sound of water dripping from her sock onto the floor. She heard the pop of the mechanical winch, the boys resuming their work, and pushed herself back to standing. In the gear closet she found a set of boots, duct-taped and too big. “Boys, on second thought, let's set 'em aboard,” Bruce said. “Seems like this string might be bad luck.”

When she went on deck, the crew was ganging up on pots and pushing them by hand, not waiting for the crane. No one said anything to her, so she just stood there, nursing her finger until the work was finished.

“Try not to kill us in our sleep,” King Bruce said, nodding toward his seat behind the screens. The cushion was still warm with his heat. “Rudy will be up to spell you in two hours. You good? Your back all right from that spill?”

“I'm fine,” Tara said.

“I got the shallow water alarm set. Watch alarm, too. When it starts blinking, just hit the button before it beeps and wakes the whole boat up. Your finger good?”

“I'm fine,” she repeated.

She stuck three squares of ginger gum into her mouth and began the two hours of monkish silence, eyes making rounds between the bright green lines of the radar screen, the grainy fathometer, and the GPS. Every ten minutes she reached over to stop the red blinking light, worried about the alarm. After an hour she mixed instant coffee and hot chocolate to power her through the second half of the watch.

She reached to reset the watch alarm, heard steps, and turned, expecting to see Rudy. “You hanging in there?” It was Jethro coming up the stairs.

“Fine.”

“Finger okay?”

She held up the bandage. She felt relaxed and queenly in King Bruce's cushy chair.

“What about the seasickness?”

She told him her cocktail. “Use the Rugby instead of the Bonine,” he said. “Won't make you half as drowsy.”

He pushed his hair behind his ears, stood over the chair. King Bruce snored in his berth behind them, on the other side of the door. Outside the water shifted in the lights. It had been two years since she had touched another person, at least in that way. She waited.

But he didn't move. After a couple minutes Rudy came to spell her.

Alone in her bunk, she thought of what she might have done. Imagined hands on her ribs, leaning up to kiss him. But soon it was Connor who came to mind, his birch oil smell, and his slow movements. She slipped her hand into her underwear, but her finger throbbed, and her body was tired. Annoyed, she sat up, patting the bunk for her book.

Dudes jerking off all around her, and she didn't even have the energy to try.

The next day the crew worked in a dry fury. Tara kept waiting to hear King Bruce on the radio, comparing notes, plugging his fishing partners for intel on their quarry. But aside from the occasional twitter from Minnow, there was only silence from up top.

Their eighth night on the water. As they ran between pots she found Jethro in the galley, standing over a frying pan of sputtering sausages. He wore a doleful expression that matched his beard, which had grown in soft and sparse.

A pot of rice steamed, covering the cabinet face with drops of moisture. Cooking shifts on the boat had disintegrated—people made food at all hours, sometimes sharing, sometimes not.

She tore apart two hamburger buns and set them on a baking sheet, cracked a yolk into a bowl of burger meat, sifted in bread crumbs, then turned the knob on the oven.

Jethro smiled. He ripped off a section of paper towel, laid it over a plate, and forked out the sausages.

“So where'd your dad get those tats?” she asked.

“Jail.”

“Ah.”

“You want one of these?” he asked, holding up an oily sausage.

“Sure. You want a burger?”

“Sure.”

“What about the red and green flames on his head?”

“Jail too. Victorville, California. 'Cept the dumbass mixed up the colors, so now he's got green for port and red for starboard.”

“And ‘Trust no bitch'?”

“That came right after he caught my mom in bed with a charter fisherman.”

“And that's how he ended up in jail.”

“You got it.”

Hale came in off the deck, water dripping from his bibs. The hydraulics on the crane had been having issues. “Yoke up, lovebirds. This stretch's supposed to be crawling with bugs—other boats have been killing it out here.”

In just a few seconds the galley was a-flurry with the sound of zippers and the snap of buttons, clicks as yellow life vests were fastened. Tara scarfed down the sausage, set the burger meat in the refrigerator, and turned off the oven.

“She's blowing a gale out there. Buckle up,” Hale warned. “If we don't get anything on this pull, we're fucked.”

Rain appeared like tracers in the glare of the metal halide bulbs. On the horizon she could see a few lights, like stars, blinking in and out of view, as other boats pulled pots. Jethro climbed atop the stack. Balanced between the steel bars he affixed bridles, making sure each was ready to fish. Rudy took his position with the grappling hook, and Coon-Ass let out a whoop as he tossed it, snagging the line suspended between the two buoys. Tara stood by with bait as Hale fit the polyester crab line into the winch. It popped and crackled as it fed through the block.

The whole crew was silent, leaning over the cap rail to see if the pot had any color in it. If it did, it suggested that the rest of their line would be good. And if it didn't, all that work setting the pots was wasted.

The whine of the hydraulic power block, the shudder of the boat as the pot knocked against the gunwales, slamming into the rack. Inside were just a few small, confused crabs. On the next pot the bait jar was askew, the door tied shut in a sloppy knot, line tangled. A few undersized crabs mopped the air with their spiny legs.

“Well, boys, looks like we've been robbed,” King Bruce said over the deck speakers.

A pall came over the crew, lifted only by Rudy's half-English, serious-sounding vows of old-world vengeance. “Tara, get food going,” King Bruce said over the speaker.

She was in the cabin chopping onions, dabbing her eyes with a paper towel, when she smelled King Bruce's sweaty chestnut scent behind her. A few red hairs fell into the onions as he stroked his goatee. She didn't look up.

“Seein' now it was a mistake takin' you on.” She stirred the onions. “Just not right havin' a girl on a crabber. Bad luck. I got a son who can't seem to focus on shit since you come aboard. Yer probably in love with him, too. Look at you now, you're all worked up.”

She looked at him. “Bruce, I'm chopping onions.”

“That'd be King Bruce to you,” he said softly. He looked down at her chest and her heart quickened. “Just watch yourself.”

As she stood there in front of the sink she imagined going up those stairs, into King Bruce's semen- and sweat-scented bunk, and suffocating him with a pillow. Standing aloft in the rain on the bridge beneath the sodium crab lights, proclaiming to Hale and the rest of the boat that from now on, she was captain.

Outside the boys kept working, resetting the pots. In the early morning Hale told her to get two hours of sleep. Clad in long underwear and fleece pants, a synthetic turtleneck zipped to her chin, she stared up at the steel-beamed ceiling. She could hear King Bruce snore just above her in ragged, phlegmy snuffles. She thought of Connor, his smell and his voice and his calmness, how he said he was hopeful. The words were a blanket she pulled over her head to shut out the world.

With only five days left in the opening, the boat seemed to be running less like a well-oiled machine than a spaceship about to disintegrate—the shouting and cursing, the wheeze of hydraulics and the shudder of the bulwarks as Hale slammed another pot into the launcher. The rasp of crab line against the blocking, the pot crashing down seconds later, a few crabs thrown against the webbing. King Bruce began coming down from the castle, lurching around, pointing and spitting, streaks of tobacco in his goatee. A matte of orange stubble had grown over his flames.

He ordered her to deep clean the galley. As she got on her hands and knees, breathing in the chemical scent of the cleaners, the squall of nausea returned. She went out on deck. An opaque, bluish dawn bloomed over the soft sea. A yellow crab line uncoiled as Rudy threw a buoy. The boys hardly paid attention as she heaved over the side, vomit slapping the surface.

That night before bed, their eleventh on the water, she stared back at herself in the mirror. Her eyes were sunken, and the edges of her lips downturned. The tip of the toothbrush poked between them like a thermometer. She checked her curls for gray hairs.

Back in her bunk she turned off the light and squeezed her eyes shut.

“
Aqetak. Aqetak. Aqetak. Aqetak. Aqetak.
”

WITH THREE DAYS LEFT
, they switched fishing spots. It was a blowy day, whitecaps on the tips of the waves. The string had been soaking for twelve hours—this was their final shot.

“One string can make the difference,” Jethro said. “One good haul.”

Even King Bruce came down on deck as their first pot came up from the depths. Silence all around. And then a bloom between the bars, crab claws bulging against the nylon.

“Yippee ki yay, motherfucker!” Hale yelped. Crabs convulsed as the cage slammed into the launcher. The boys whooped and slapped hands and grabbed their crotches. A crunch of shells as Coon-Ass released the trapdoor and dumped a writhing pile onto the sorting table.

“We're in 'em, boys!” King Bruce yipped over the loudspeaker. “We can still plug it. Work, you motherfuckers!”

Tara did her best to keep her balance in the heaving boat as she reached into a tangle of red backs and white undersides. Pointed legs clinked and clattered against the sides of the chute, the male crabs landing with a far-off slap into the salt water below. Rudy held out an orange-gloved hand and yelled, “Bait!” She sent over a jar of chopped-up herring.

“Send her back down, then,” King Bruce said over the deck speakers. “Don't wanna be running in this shit. Cod instead of herring. You wanna be walking off this boat with ten thousand or twenty, boys? Let's find another gear.”

Coon-Ass hurled a twenty-five-fathom shot of line on top of the pot, baited with codfish.

“Clear! Twenty, Cap!”

“Handful more pots like that and we'll be golden,” King Bruce announced.

They brought up another pot, this one even more packed. The hold was halfway to full, Bruce announced. The euphoria of catching—large and legal crab pulled from the depths, all spiked legs and that glorious white underbelly—made the seasickness, Hale's ribbing, all of it, shrink away.

They set down their last trap on the string, and King Bruce swung back to start picking pots along the rocks. Coon-Ass and Jethro coiled shots of line and organized gear. One of the larger eight-by pots stood in her way, by the castle. She looked around for Hale, to ask him to fire up the crane, but he was busy with a pair of pliers, on top of a stack, working on the hinges of a trapdoor.

She'd seen the boys push these bigger pots, usually ganging up on them. Hale could do one by himself—like Jethro said, he had some sort of superstrength, which she had felt when he saved her from going overboard. But never Jethro or Coon-Ass. Or King Bruce, for that matter. Despite his puffed knuckles, she hadn't really seen him do shit over the trip, other than touching a couple stanchions with his grinder.

Curious, she wrapped her gloved hands on the horizontal support bar running across the pot and leaned her weight against the metal, trying to get a sense of the heft. Her pulse quickened. She waited for a shout, one of the guys laughing at the absurd idea of her pushing this box of steel across the deck. But they were all either inside or occupied.

She readjusted her position and bent forward again, letting the cold bar rest against the back of her neck, nestling her shoulders against the pot. She thought of Gypo in his corner.
Jab, Tara, stick and move.
“C'mon, motherfucker,” she whispered. She felt the roll of the sea beneath her, hinged at the legs, then pumped her thighs, timed her push with the waves, threw her hips forward, straightened her back, and heaved. Blood rushed to her head.

When she opened her eyes she looked up to see three men on the foredeck, looking down at her, disbelief on their faces. She had moved the pot to the bow.

Hale spit over the side, shaking his head. “Sweet lord above. They ruined a hell of a man when they cut the balls off you.”

ON THE SECOND-TO-LAST DAY
they idled into a secluded bay, anchored up alongside a few other boats. King Bruce announced that they could sleep in until sunup while the pots soaked. They had found a honey hole, crawling with crabs, and he intended to get the most out of it.

In the early morning Tara took her coffee outside. A silver tincture lay over the bay. Rectangular buildings of the cannery were situated on the eastern shore beside a runway. A few single-prop planes were lined up at one end. On the other side of the bay, along the mud flats, she watched a bear scrounge among tidal grasses. Her muscles felt tired and quiet. It was comforting to know, as she stood in this mysterious outpost, that the pots were making money.

When she went back into the house Jethro said they were calling for a storm out of the southwest, which would blow them off Dutch Harbor. King Bruce wanted another couple thousand pounds before heading in, to top off the hold. But after almost two weeks the crew was ready for home.

“All right, we'll pick 'em up then blow this Popsicle stand,” Bruce said over the speakers.

A cheer went up on deck as he pulled the hook and pointed them east.