The Alaskan Laundry (6 page)

Mica flecks in the sidewalk sparkled in the lowering sun as Tara and Newt picked their way along the rocks of the harbor breakwater. At the end was a concrete pad with a steel tower built on top, affixed with red triangles and a blinking red light.

He snapped open a beer and handed it to her. The tide was out, and the buttery, low-angled sun lit up the rocks beyond the beach. “Doesn't get better than this, eh?” he said, leaning against a pillar, touching the bottom of his can to the rim of hers. She breathed deep, holding the moist air in her chest. The sea breeze cleared the musty air of the warehouse from her lungs.

“You're lookin' sadder than a midget with a yo-yo. What's picking at you?”

Before she could hold it back a smile broke over her lips. “There it is,” Newt chided. “The zombie has a sense of humor after all.”

She let the grin stay on her face. “You got me.”

“Share a little secret with you,” he said, lighting a cigarette, then squinting out into the distance, picking a fleck of tobacco from his lips. “I got this true love named Plume. Little headache from Kentucky with honky-tonk eyes. My eventual future goal is to buy a boat for the two of us. Have her move on up here with me.”

When he spoke he jabbed the cigarette at Tara as if she might not believe him, his taut face turning serious. “Let you in on something else. Each one of us here on this island, we got this one little thing holding us back from everything we ever wanted. And it's our job—and it ain't no small thing—to find our channel marker.” He pointed at the red light over his head, working on a slow blink. “Something to aim for. But look at me goin' all Baptist minister on you.”

Now that she was out of Philly, and away from her father, she couldn't think of what might be holding her back—or pushing her forward, for that matter.

“Me, I had my eye on this one boat, an old tug, tied up way out at the end of the docks,” Newt said. “Gal from San Francisco had her. Has her, actually.”

“I know that boat,” she said. “The one with the smokestack and big rusted anchor.”

“That's her. You walked out there?”

“The other day I did. Where's Plume now?” Tara asked.

His brow knit as he pulled on the cigarette. “Eugene, Oregon. Pregnant, turns out.”

“Strategy's not working out so hot, then,” she said.

He shot her a look. “Maybe it is and maybe it ain't. Important thing is, I'm stayin' clean as a broke-dick dog up here with my eye on that big steak in the sky. Because lemme be the one to tell you—all of us in this state are just getting whipped around on one continuous cycle, washed clean of our sins. You wait it out, be patient, work hard, keep your eye on that channel marker, and by my word there's a payoff.” His skin appeared transparent in the last rays of sun. A purple vein zigzagged down his forehead. “If the Newtster aims to get a boat—well then you can set your goddamn watch to that happening.”

She shifted on the concrete, drank her beer. Took the knife from her pocket and ran it beneath a fingernail.

“So what about you, Boxer Girl? What's your secret, your channel marker. What sins you got to wash clean?”

“Nothing as interesting as you.”

“Oh, I highly doubt that.
Highly
doubt that. Ten cents says you left a man crying back in Philly.”

His earnest expression made her want to say more, but she didn't. “How'd you end up here instead of down in Eugene with Plume?”

He took a long sip, and she could see him gathering his thoughts.

“Tell you what. Each man's got his gift, and me, I'm a freak with fish. I swear I can see 'em down there in the reeds, watching the underwater world pass by. I just know how their damp little brains work.” He looked over at her as if to see if she was taking him seriously. “I got gills,” he said, lifting his ratty thermal, revealing ribs that indeed looked like gills, then sitting back against the rock. “Got my start in eastern Kentucky, a tobacco-turned-cattle farm, grew up fishing and swimming and sometimes ice-skating on a pond me and my cousins dug out of the back forty. At eighteen I go to California to become a Navy SEAL. Best swimmers on earth, right? So I'm making circles around these meatheads, instructors never seen a thing like it, then this damn knee of mine blows out. So I did a little course correction and ended up working part-time here, part-time at the processor with an aim to get on a troller, or maybe the
Adriatic
, the tender down there at the processor. Either that or I stumble onto one of those big-time jobs up on the Bering Sea, go fish for crab.”

“Where's that?”

He crushed a can against a rock, pulled open another, took a sip, and wiped his lips with the cuff of his flannel. “Oh, way up north. Dutch Harbor, where all the crazies congregate. Pot at the end of the rainbow, those jobs. But just wait until spring rolls around and herring starts. Opportunity abounds. You just gotta be quicker, work harder than the next guy. Maybe it'll rub off on you and you'll quit looking like a fat boy sitting alone in the school cafeteria.”

It was probably an accurate assessment, she thought, watching the tip of his cigarette glow in the twilight. She resisted the urge to tell the story of her father's outburst by the stairs, pounding his fist into the horsehair plaster, and then what he had said.

Newt tossed his cigarette into the water, picked up his backpack, and stood, ducking his head beneath the triangular steel braces. “Anyways, good to know you're just about as fucked up as the rest of us. C'mon. You got some work ahead of you tomorrow.”

THE FOLLOWING DAY
she attacked the warehouse. Her hair in a ponytail threaded through the back of her Eagles hat, she tested circulation fans on an extension cord, coiled sections of hose, aired out mildewy tarps and refolded them. Grouped PVC pipes into neat piles, forty-fives and nineties, couplings, four- and eight-foot sections, labeled drawers for copper nails, wing nuts, gaskets.

By lunch her back ached from the steady, repetitive bend and rise, and her morning surge of energy was gone. Rain hammered away on the corrugated metal roof. This shitty work, being banished to the shed, was all because she hadn't fetched Fritz his precious shim fast enough. She hadn't spent four days on a ferry to deal with this chaos.

“Damn, you work slower than molasses going uphill in January.” Her head snapped around. It was Newt, peering at her in the dim light. “You dreaming up some time machine in here?” And then he was gone.

To trim her misery she tried to focus on good memories. Driving in Connor's beat-up Mazda truck to Runnymede, New Jersey, a picnic on the hard dirt of a pitcher's mound. Wrapped in blankets on the lifeguard chair at Cape May. That night in Rittenhouse Square when he held her, and she felt, for the first time, her heart grow shy in her chest.

And, further back, her mother sweeping the house, pushing dust from the foyer onto the sidewalk, watering her ceramic pot of basil on the kitchen windowsill. Removing the sofa protectors for guests and zipping the plastic back on when they left. The aroma of marrow bones, gravy bubbling, at 1005 Wolf Street for the Sunday meal. The gold medallion around her neck jostling over the ironing board as Serena pressed a white blouse for Tara's first day of school, putting knife-pleats into her wool jumper, folding bobby socks while Little Vic cut off one of her braids at the dining room table. How furious her mother had been.

In these memories her mother was always in motion: leaning out the second-story window of the bedroom at Christmas with a broom in one hand, using the handle to arrange strings of colored lights into the branches of the maple.
Uno, due, tre!
—Tara's job to push the plug into the socket. Urbano on the stoop, unlit cigar shaking between his lips as he clapped. The lights shedding an amber halo on the pavement below. Early winter morning walks to the bakery, sidewalks coated in frost, Tara shocked from half-sleep as her mother flipped on the fluorescent lights in the kitchen. The ticking sound as the oil in the deep fryer heated, Serena fetching a tray of precut cannoli dough from the walk-in freezer.

She recalled one morning a couple months after her sixth birthday when she and her mother watched on the grainy black-and-white television in the bakery kitchen as flames destroyed sixty-five row homes. Her mother wept as she filled the pastry tube. “What kind of country is it where a city bombs its children and no one does nothing?”

The side door slammed. Tara jumped, fearing Fritz's grumpy wrath.

“The hell kind of show you got running in here?” Newt snatched a section of pegboard from her hands, split it, and tossed the pieces into a burn pile. “Thing's about as warped as a dog's hind leg. C'mon, we got some work ahead of us. I like having you around too much to see Grandpa fire your slow ass.”

He plugged in a table saw near the door, took the pencil from his hat, measured and marked, then handed her a pair of safety glasses. “Now just feed it nice and gentle, flat, slow and low like a turtle, otherwise it'll catch back on you. Grandpa loves him a good organizational storage box. There you go, keep it flat. You done this before?” He took up the ripped section, then showed her how to hold the strips of plywood tight against the fence, just as Connor had once done.

“Blade's sharp as a rat turd on both ends, so watch yourself,” Newt said. He swiped the chop saw, handed her pieces to hold while he drilled. “Glue it and screw it, and you'll have something to show for the day. Hey,” he said, trying to catch her eye. “Hey, Molasses. You okay? You hanging in there?”

She fit a screw into the drill. “I'm good. Thanks.”

BUT SHE WASN'T.

As the days contracted further, the sun barely clearing the mountains to the south, the island seemed to fold in on itself, caught in a bubble of October twilight. Her bones ached despite layering undershirts, thermals, and sweatshirts to keep out the damp. At the end of the day she wanted nothing more than to crawl back into bed and float, semiconscious, waiting for the sun to return. When the clouds finally did part, the sun was halfhearted, low-angled, slicing at the buildings, sparking raindrops that dangled from spruce tips.

At odd moments a wave of sadness enveloped her, and she could hardly move. She remembered her mother's casket being lowered into the ground in the plot overlooking the Schuylkill. Standing on the green felt, wanting desperately to sink into the earth with her.

She often thought about Connor, sometimes blaming him for the wedge of his letter, at other times for sleeping with her when she was so open, so needy. But most often now there was just the steady beat of missing him, wanting to feel his warm breath on her neck.

In the evenings after work she went to the docks and walked among the boats, listening to the now-familiar squeak of the buoy balls. Sailboats, fishing vessels, and skiffs crowded the stalls, bouncing in the swell. Men on the docks who before had given her quick, sidelong glances as she approached now acknowledged her with short nods.

Newt had tried to explain to her the differences between the fishing boats—trollers with their folded poles, seiners with the elevated wheelhouses and broad decks, and longliners with the aluminum chute extending off the stern. But they all just looked like tough, tired horses in their stables.

She liked catching snippets of conversation among the fishermen, who stood with their brown-booted feet propped up on the side of a boat, smoking cigarettes and speaking in low tones. A foreign language of drags and tides and fathoms. Or who dipped stiff-bristled brushes into buckets and scrubbed down the deck, or sent wheels of orange sparks into the water from grinders. The docks, limbs extending into the water off the central work float, were alive.

As she walked she thought about how quickly the house on Wolf Street changed after her mother died. No longer the lingering smell of garlic and meat, the basil plant in the window, the electricity in the air when her mother laughed. Homesick? What home was there to be sick for?

When the ache set in, she reminded herself that she was here, on this island, safe. Then the tugboat came to mind, dark-windowed, floating there at the end of the docks. Waiting.

SHE ARRIVED AT
the hatchery at 7:50 to set up the egg treatments, check the temperature of the water in the incubator trays, fill the magazine on Betsy. With care, she hung antibiotics, piercing plastic bags with a twist of the nozzle, taking note of the survival rate in the sliding trays, recording it in the speckled journal.

Fritz had done an inspection of the warehouse, where she had labeled each compartment, grouped widths of wood together, and scrubbed the planked floor with degreaser. “You sure took your sweet time with it,” he grumbled, looking around. “And I guess now you're the only one here who knows where anything is.”

He was such a grim bastard. Newt flashed her a don't-you-dare-open-your-mouth look. And she didn't.

She fed the fry, swept the cement floor of the workroom.
Be the first with a broom in your hand, the last with a beer
—this was written on the blackboard above Fritz's desk. She had made a vow to follow the dictum.

At night she went back to her efficiency apartment, closed her eyes, and tried to think of one thing she had done since first arriving on the island that was successful. Three weeks, and she had organized a warehouse. Even sleep, the most elemental task, came with difficulty.

As she lay awake she pictured her father back home, moving up the stairs, chalky heels sticking out from his slippers. Had he just headed back to his office and smoked a cigar after he kicked her out, as if nothing had happened?

How many times had she heard the story? (The Marconis had a way of repeating family lore, the details shifting but the thread staying the same.) The doctors had told Urbano's parents, Grandpa Joe and Tara's
nonna
, that they wouldn't be able to have children because of the high lead levels in Grandpa Joe's blood. He had spent much of his teenage years working for a shoemaker on Snyder Avenue, soling nails clamped between his teeth. Tara's
nonna
miscarried four times. When she gave birth to a son, Grandpa Joe took to the streets howling, calling the neighborhood over to examine his child's large head and thick black hair.