The Alaskan Laundry (9 page)

“Just do it.”

In quick twists she tied a bowline, looping the rope along the crease of his skin, then pulling it tight.

“Not bad,” he said. “You know how to put a bend at the end?”

But she was already doing it. After that she made a clove hitch, a trucker's hitch, a mooring hitch, a double-half hitch, until his smile was gone, and he just looked down at his wrist as the knots pulled together.

“Well, call me an asshole,” he said, chugging his beer and standing. “Is that what you were up to all those hours organizing that warehouse?”

“Go to hell.”

She meant it, and her heart beat, waiting for his response. He just beamed up at her, lifting his empty can. “Another?”

When he returned from the kitchen with two beers, he said, “You talk to Laney in there about that tug you seem to have taken a shine to?”

“What makes you think that?”

“You kidding? I saw you googly-eyed the other day. Miracle that it's still floating.”

She thought of the boat rocking in the waves, then suddenly saw it slipping beneath the surface—a horrible image.

“That's coming back,” she muttered at the screen.

The referee picked up his yellow flag, flipped on his mic, and called “holding.” Fritz smiled. “You know your football.”

Fran called them to the table. Glasses clinked. Chipped clay bowls of stuffing and sweet potatoes and cranberry sauce with ginger and orange, as well as various dishes incorporating Fritz's Dungeness crabs collected from the bottom of the chute at the hatchery, made their way around. There was no turkey, just venison Fritz had shot a couple weeks back on Crow Hill. Laney ladled a scoop of thick, dark gravy over Tara's meat. “So you've got that city look in your eyes. East Coast? Boston?”

“Philly.”

“The city that bombs itself, right?”

Frozen for a moment by the memory of her mother sobbing at the bakery, Tara stayed silent. By the time she recovered, Laney was speaking with her neighbor. Fran leaned toward her, patchouli scent mixing with crab and gravy, and started in on the story of how the Russians made Port Anna the capital of their fur-trading enterprise, bringing down Aleuts to hunt otter. Then how the Tlingits had stood up to the Russians, destroying their village. She felt a tap on her shoulder.

“Can I interrupt the history lesson?” Laney said. “I could use company.”

Tara excused herself and followed the woman out the sliding door. It was windy on the deck. Clouds skirted across the sky. Laney repinned her hair with a chopstick, then cupped her hands and flicked up a flame.

“You're on edge, I can tell,” she said to Tara, exhaling smoke into the wind. “I get it, all these men around. Like you can't find your groove.”

“I'm doing all right.”

They both turned to a rumble and tracked the path of a plane as it descended over the smaller islands. “Fritz told me you were asking after my boat. If you're interested, come out for a glass of wine some evening. For a go-getter like yourself, I'd halve the price. Say an even thirty K.”

Before she could respond, the door opened and a crowd joined them. Tara and Laney watched as a dog on the beach knocked over a toddler who cried until she found a shell and forgot about it.

Back inside, Tara dropped down in front of the television. The game was in the fourth quarter, and Dallas was losing. Laney balanced a plate of pumpkin pie on her knobby knees.

“Lord above, this is amazing,” she said, holding up her fork. “Your mom teach you?”

Tara shook her head, watching the screen. There was a
thunk
in the kitchen followed by a tinkle of glasses. Fritz came in with three whiskeys.

“Drink up, ladies,” he said. “Tara, that pie in there is off the charts. Coozy sure couldn't do anything like that. I never asked—where is that kid these days?”

“Last I talked to him he was out in Santa Fe, working on an organ for a church or something. Yeah, baby,” she said as the Oilers kneeled on the ball.

Laney held out her glass. “May our daughters have rich fathers, beautiful mothers, and dry homes.”

“That's supposed to be ‘sons,'” Fritz said as they clinked and drank.

“Yeah, well. Us girls over here changed it to ‘daughters,' didn't we?” Laney winked at Tara, and they drank.

EACH AFTERNOON
she walked to the post office, only to see the white light from the workroom in the back of her mailbox. She had written on Wednesday the twenty-sixth. Connor should have sent a letter back by now.

Finally, on the second Friday of December, an envelope arrived, postmarked from New York City. Resisting the temptation to tear it open in the post office, she hurried down to the Muskeg. Her heart quickened as she used her knife to slit open the envelope.

4 December 1997

Dear Tara,

Thank you for the last two letters. I apologize for not responding earlier. I do appreciate you writing instead of calling. It gives me time to sort my thoughts. It was hard and nice to hear that you miss me. But thank you for taking time out of that snowy night to write.

Empty doesn't strike me as such a bad way to be.

It's good also that you've discovered a small well-lit place for a cup of coffee where you can read and write letters. Down here I have Caffe Reggio, by Washington Square, home of the first cappuccino. I feel a bit like an animal in my high-rise cage so it's good to get out and walk around.

What else? I found an off-Broadway theater to intern in. I'm taking these theory classes where we study the affects of colonialism. It sheds interesting light on South Philly.

That's all.

It's good that you're finding your true north.

Godspeed in your journey,

Connor

She flung the sheets on the table in front of her. It was bullshit. This wasn't Connor, who looked at her with such careful concern that awful summer. Who waited for her to walk home after school. There was nothing personal in the letter. It was detached. She read it again, then decided it was worse—pompous. Like he was at this fancy college, and all of a sudden he was beyond cool, while she was shucking baby salmon from their mothers' bellies in Alaska. She was pouring out her soul, writing about the hardest thing she had ever experienced, and he came back with this cold piece of shit.

She crumpled the letter and threw it into the wastebasket.
Fuck you, Connor Macauley. I'll show you separate paths.

A WEEK BEFORE
December twenty-third, she and Newt perched on the drizzle-wet concrete pad of the channel marker, the red light blinking silently above, a soggy eighteen-pack of beer torn open between them.

For a while they talked about Plume, the excruciating details of her letter describing the birth of her baby boy. Two days later, she reported, the father was arrested on assault charges.

Newt snapped open a fresh can. He had been drinking two beers to her one. “I'm tired of making shit money being a cleaning lady at the hatchery. I'm a goddamn fisherman,” he said, shaking his head. “Needing to get my fisherwoman up here beside me.”

Earlier that day they had finished a deep clean of the killing shack, dipping wooden brushes into buckets of bleach and water, scrubbing dried blood from the nubby walls.

“What about the processor?” she asked.

“It pays good when you get overtime—but a spot on the
Adriatic
, the tender. That's when you start pulling away from the rest of these mules.”

“It'll pan out,” she told him.

He took a swig, looked to the side, and burped, giving her a glance. “That what they teach you in Catholic school? It'll pan out? Like it panned out for Jesus?” He sighed, running fingers through his hair.

She didn't consider herself religious, and was surprised when this offhand comment offended her. “You should just shave it,” she told him.

“I should, shouldn't I?” he said, picking loose strands from his fingers. “Like feathers hangin' on for dear life.”

They drank in silence.

“I met that woman who owns the tugboat,” Tara said.

“Laney?”

“Yeah. She told me there's a story. Grandpa ignored me when I asked about it.”

“There most certainly is a story.”

“Tell.”

He crushed his can against a rock, reached for another. “That boat's got its hooks into you, doesn't it? You know what B-O-A-T stands for? Break out another thousand.”

“Tell me the story.”

“You tell me first. What's got you so gaga over it?”

She shrugged. “Maybe it's a ridiculous idea. I don't know. Maybe it's like falling in love. It just . . . is.”

Newt watched her carefully. She didn't feel like talking about this. “Your turn. Tell me the story.”

He grinned. “So I finish up with the navy down in San Diego, then hitchhiked north.”

“I got that.”

“Up in Seattle I found out Plume was pregnant.”

“Living with the guy who just got put away.”

“That one. So I spent a couple weeks on the streets, stole a tray of croissants from a bakery, threw them up, ate a hamburger from a trashcan, that sorta of thing. Slept with the hobos by the tracks—I mean bad, rough shit. Caught a break on a ride north on a tender out of Seattle, and picked up a job at the processor just in time for herring. First day at work, fish coming in at all ends—you can't imagine. Air chunky with salt, no spit left for a swallow. And all the while I'm workin' hard, thinking about Plume in Washington, how to give her and her baby a good home.”

“And you thought of the tug.”

He gave her a stern expression, took a long swig of beer.

“Sorry. Go on.”

“So I go over to the Frontier on my break, and it was like stepping into a cattle car, full of hairy, cigarette-smoking, fish-smelling, beer-swilling motherfuckers. Boys doing bumps right off the bar. And that she-man of a tender pouring tequila quick as old boys could shoot 'em back.”

“Nice.”

“And I see on the chalkboard someone's put a World War II tugboat up for sale.”

“
Pacific Chief.
”

“That's the one, out there on the transient. I ask a fisherman about it, and he tells me it's two thousand square feet of living space, couple wood stoves, one you can cook on. Married couple had it until the bride fucked some seiner while the husband was off playing grab-ass, chaining himself to the Forest Service building. Keep in mind here, this is my third day in town. Follow?”

“Got it.”

“So that same night I go down to the harbor to have a look at the tug sitting at the end of the docks like a queen on her throne. Those brass portholes, horseshoe stern, even that sea mist color they painted her. Loved it, just like you do. So anyways, the next night I get the number off the chalkboard and go to the library and call. I tell the gal Laney I'm making bank at the processor and maybe I could rent to own or some shit. She says meet me in twenty at the Front, she'll be in a red cape or whatever she calls that fancy blanket of hers.”

He tossed his can to the side, then fished around for the last one.

“Nasty March storm that night, wind going forty out of the southeast like a dog blown sideways. I wedged my way through the herd to the head, and there in the urinal was a hundred-dollar bill, right beneath the scent cake, left by some highliner. Idea being, as I later found out, your boat's not catching fish, you need that bill good, don't matter it's been pissed and spit on more than a Nashville whore. And the guy who put it there couldn't care less because his boat is catchin'.”

“Did you take it?”

“Like a babe out of the fire! Snatched that bill right up, ran it under the faucet, stuffed it into my jeans. I got the Plume fund to worry about, after all. I don't give a hairy shit. Plus I needed a good luck omen to get me that tug.

“So I get back out to the bar, and there's the pretty lady herself, wrapped up like a Christmas gift, waiting beneath this big ol' scratched bell with a knocker the size of a bull nut. Lady like that needs a drink a-sap, I figured. I took hold of the crab line on that bell and pulled, hard as I could. CLANG CLANG CLANG. And you shoulda seen it, T. Suddenly me, little old Newt, was the hot shit. It was like I grew a foot and got some hair and straightened out my teeth and had my own boat. Big guys—king crabbers, loggers—slapping me on the back, the whole place happier than a stump full of ants. All I was missing was Plume in Laney's place, but I knew the way things were going that would soon change.”

She took a sip from her warm beer.

“I started whooping it up, ringing the shit out of that bell. CLANG CLANG CLANG! Didn't matter that Laney was yelling at me, only made me ring harder. Then there's the bartender looking at me colder than a mother-in-law's love. I turn to Laney, to ask like a good Kentucky gentleman what she's having. She yells into my ear that I probably owe the bar a thousand bucks.” Newt shook his head. “And it dawns on my thick skull that you ring the bell, you're buying drinks. For the whole damn place. I tell the tender I hardly got half that to my name. I was scared I'd be the death of her, her face got so red. Then out came her baseball bat.”

He looked out as a boat eased past the breakwater. “Tara, it was not my proudest moment, but I ran like a black man from a Klan meeting. Past the processor, into that wind, rain like carpet tacks in my eyes. For god knows why I went to the end of those docks, straight to that tug of yours, hid right behind the windlass on the bow. When I peeked out I seen what musta been the whole damn police force at the top of the ramp, all the blue lights goin' at once. This one cop yelling through the bullhorn”—he cupped his hands around his lips—“‘NEWTON SCARPE. YOU RUNG THE DAMN BELL. TIME TO PAY UP, SON.' End up standing the next day in front of the judge, who says, and I kid you not, ‘Boy, get the hell outta my courtroom, and don't let me ever set eyes on you again.' So now I'm banned at the Front. And it's just as well, because all that money I'd be spending on pull-tabs and beers really needs to be going to the fund.”