The Alaskan Laundry

by Brendan Jones

  As for her mother, even if the idea of her daughter taking off for Alaska would have frightened her, surely Tara’s larger effort to crack open this world of fish and boats, life on the water, would have pleased Serena.

  Then her mind darkened and she saw her father in his billing office, smoking his cigars one after the other. His yellow highlighter hovering over orders for more milk, more butter, more flour.

  You told me to get out. Now you do the same. Just get out of my head and leave me alone.

  4

  OPENING HER EYES, she patted the sheets for her watch. A pale strip of light ran down the center of the curtains. “FUUUUCK!” she yelled into the rafters. It was 8:17 A.M.

  She threw off the comforter, hauled on her jeans, grabbed her Eagles hat, and ran. At the bottom of the hill she saw a door propped open with a cinderblock. Green tanks surrounded a bunkerlike building. She headed down a set of narrow wooden stairs and saw Fritz talking to a few workers slouched on stools. He crumpled a wax muffin wrapper, shot it into the trashcan, then rapped his knuckles against the glass clock above him.

  “I thought bakers woke early.”

  Breathing hard, she looked over his shoulder. It was 8:36. Not such a big deal.

  “Now, I don’t know what you thought it would be like up here, but I can tell you one thing. We get to work on time.”

  “The four hours mixed me up.”

  “If that was true, you should have been here four hours early.”

  The other workers shifted. After a moment, he continued—something about the importance of recording data in the logbook: water temperature, antibiotics, and sample growth rates of salmon. “All right, to work, then. Newt, you fill our newest addition here in on what she dozed through.”

  Fucker, she thought, watching his brown boots disappear up the stairs.

  From a shadow in the corner a small man emerged. She made out layers of clothing—a soiled thermal, T-shirt, outline of a wife beater—beneath his overalls. Knobs of bone showed along the back of his neck. With his wispy white-blond hair spinning off his skull, and moon-pale skin, he reminded her of an albino rat—or, more generously, a newborn chick.

  She moved to the side as he went for the coffee machine behind her. He filled his stainless-steel mug, shook a cigarette from a pack, and turned. “Late your first day. Classy.”

  “I’m a classy girl.”

  He wiped his nose with the back of his wrist. “Follow me.”

  They went into a concrete room packed with white plastic bins, water cascading between them. He walked like a featherweight boxer—on the balls of his feet, hips thrust forward, shoulders pulled back. Outside in the sunlight she followed him between circular vats of gurgling water, stopping on a knoll, the flat blue-gray ocean stretched out beneath them. Waves lapped on the rocks below. Islands dotted the horizon, and behind them mountains, which appeared cut out from the blue sky, the peaks delicate, like the tips of drip castles she had made on the Jersey Shore as a kid.

  A briny, spruce-tinted wind shivered the grass. Newt cupped his hands around a cigarette, squinting as he exhaled. “You do that yoga shit?” he asked, his eyes roaming her body.

  “I box,” she said, crossing her arms over her chest. “Or I did, back in Philly.”

  “Girl boxer? Makes sense anyways, where your whole ‘I’m gonna kick your ass’ act comes from.” He clamped the cigarette between his teeth, went up on his toes, and threw a convincing three-punch combination, ducking his head, bobbing and weaving, surprisingly nimble, finishing with a knockout right cross. He pivoted on his back foot, just like Gypo had taught her. Tara brushed hair from her face.

  “Back in Kentucky we fought just to get mean,” he said.

  He leaned in closer. A light down covered the skin where his eyebrows should be. She caught a whiff of fish oil. “Don’t let Grandpa get to you. He’s so thin-skinned, it’s barely enough to stop him from bleeding to death. Ends up taking it out on others.”

  “Who’s Grandpa?”

  He eyed her. “How old are you?”

  “Eighteen.”

  “Birthday?”

  “March eighteenth.”

  He flicked his cigarette butt into the rocks. “I’ll tell you one thing: old man’ll burst a blood vessel if he sees us holding our dicks out here. Word to the wicked, keep your hands out of your pockets, otherwise he’ll shitcan your ass.”

  He started back to the building, tossed a scoop of pellets from a plastic bucket over his shoulder, then another behind his back as he passed by the green vats. Tara stopped to watch as a dark cloud gathered in the water, followed by flashes like knife blades, sun reflecting off the scales of fish as they rose. Newt shouted back. “Pockets!”

  She hurried to catch up, lifting her hands from her jeans. They went down the mossy concrete steps, back into the basement.

  “You ever jack off a fish?” he asked.

  “What?”

  He turned to her. “You got those good boxer’s wrists. Might even make you top salmon jacker. Great honor here at the hatchery, something to shoot for, as we like to say.”

  “I’ll make it a goal,” she said, again trying not to laugh. She liked this stunted man in his overalls. Maybe, she thought, despite what her mother said, she just didn’t match well with quiet men like Connor.

  Newt led her to a corner. “So listen to me good here—out of the few thousand salmon eggs in those bins some eight hundred fry will hatch, just like the ones we fed in those tanks. Come May we take the fry out to the open ocean, dump ’em into a holding pen to get them acclimated. That way they’re protected from seals and otters and other ocean varmints. At which point they become smolts, maybe four hundred count. Smolts get released, go out and enjoy life, reach adulthood, maybe two hundred make it back to home sweet home. Then we kill ’em, and the process starts over.”

  “Kill them?”

  “They’re anadromous—means they die anyway. Fishermen pay us a tax to keep the business going. On top of that, when we got enough fertilized eggs we have a thing where we take extra eggs and send them over to Japan. Eye-koora or whatever the hell them rice-eaters call it. Feel like I’m forgetting something. Oh. Knife. You got one?”

  She shook her head. He pulled a small, scratched jackknife from his pocket. “Great Alaskan sin to be caught without. Who’s this you got hanging around your neck?”

  She touched her collarbone, fingering the gold medallion. “Saint Anthony. It was my grandfather’s, from Italy.”

  “Is that the one they say reached America before Columbus?” he asked, examining it. “Or is that Irish? I don’t frickin’ know.”

  “He’s the saint of lost people, keeps you safe at sea. My grandfather almost drowned in Italy, but swore Anthony saved him.”

  “You got heritage, unlike most of us mutts out here. I like it.”

  He pointed her to a series of stainless-steel racks not unlike the cooling trays at the bakery. “Last year, we checked each egg by hand, with tweezers and a pipette, to see if it was eyed up—you know, alive. Like sorting tick dung out of pepper. This last Christmas Grandpa bought Betsy, our mechanical egg picker.” He led her to the far corner, where he patted a red metal contraption that looked like a huge sewing machine, out of place in the room of bins. “All you gotta do is fill the magazine up with eggs. If they’re alive, Betsy spits ’em out the one end. Dead, the other. Then they get spread on trays.” He flicked a plastic bag hanging from a hook that resembled a hospital IV. “Antibiotics. You’ll learn how to switch ’em out. For now, though, why don’t we just start you here. With that empty look in your eyes you might fuck up any real work.”

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence,” she shot back.

  “You got it, champ,” he said, absorbing her sarcasm like a light punch. “Anyone who pisses Grandpa off on their first day at school is all right in my book. Just remember the secret to this state, and you heard it here first. Do what you can, and let the rough end drag. Don’t matter what saints you
wear around your neck. Here it’s just your head, and your hands—and your gut. And now, it’s time for you to get dirty.”

  5

  HER JOB was to keep Betsy in action by scooping the pink pellets from the bins, watching as the wheel spun, and then standing by while the laser considered each egg. The work was mind-numbing, not much different from the bakery, and certainly easier than scooping water ice.

  That afternoon Fritz stopped her on her way out to dump a bowl of dead eggs. He shouted over the rumble of the pumps. “Work treating you all right?”

  She shrugged. “Okay. Where’s your dog?”

  “Back with the neighbors. I thought I said he wasn’t mine.”

  She could see pits in his teeth, black with tobacco.

  “Listen, I volunteer over at the fire department, so you can understand I’m not a huge fan of being late. I tried to make that clear last night.”

  She looked into the bin of frothing water, imagining landing a right cross on his doughy cheek. Hills of pink eggs filled the bin. She wanted to reach in, squeeze the eggs until they oozed from her fist.

  “I’ll tell you what, Tara. When I spoke on the phone with Coozy he said you were in tough shape, something about crashing on a friend’s couch after a fight with your father. Now, I don’t know a thing about what you have going, but as I said in the truck I need a good hand. All these eggs in here become fish in a couple months. Along with that we send roe overseas. And if that doesn’t happen, none of us gets paid. Is that clear?”

  She lifted her chin and tried to arrange her features in a way that would cut him off—some approximation of how her father stared down men. But she could already feel it backfiring into an insolent, childish expression. “I’m sorry.”

  He considered, as if judging the sincerity of her words, hitched his pants, and walked off.

  Standing in the middle of the room, listening to the rush of water, she decided her time on this Rock would be a boxing match. Keep your hands up, your eyes open.

  She’d show them all.

  6

  IN THE WANING EVENING LIGHT she walked down the hill. Across the channel, mountains made black triangles against the clouds. Not yet four and the sky had already turned ashy.

  She went past the basketball and tennis courts, past the small harbor at the bottom of the hill. She caught alternating scents of wet grass, fish, diesel, and seaweed. Despite Connor once telling her that living in Philly was the equivalent of smoking a pack of cigarettes a month, she had never really thought about the smell of the air until she arrived in Port Anna.

  She passed the volunteer fire station, middle school, a baseball diamond. She paused to watch men with brown boots pulled up over their calves reading newspapers in the laundromat, sipping from coffee cups while the machines revolved. Everything—the bushes, the trees, even these men waiting for their laundry—seemed to have a sodden quality. As if nothing on the island ever fully dried.

  And so quiet. No aircraft rumbling across the sky, leaving contrails. No more bruised purple dome at night. Acuzio had been right. Alaska was no rolling cannolis.

  On the other side of a parking lot she found a covered ramp leading down to a broad wooden dock. She went along a central walkway, parked boats rocking on either side of her. Sailboats, fishing boats, yachts, one boat that looked like the landing craft from World War II. Most were rough-looking vessels, long metal poles on either side, webs of wire around the masts. She jumped as water spilled out from the side of a hull. Boats chafed against the rubber balls, making a high-pitched squeak. She ran her fingers along the dull wooden cap on a deck. So different from the slim boats in her mother’s picture.

  When she reached the end of the main walkway she turned left. A sign bolted to the light post read TRANSIENT DOCK: FOR BOATS WAITING FOR PERMANENT SLIPS, OR VESSELS PASSING THROUGH. ALL MOORAGE MUST BE PAID IN ADVANCE. These were sad, stripped-down skeletons of boats, seemingly lost here at the end of the docks.

  At the far end of the walkway she finally arrived at the tug Fritz had pointed out that first day. A high front with a knobby rusted anchor, and an exhaust stack about twice the size of a manhole. The blue-green wheelhouse, built high over the hull, rose and dropped in the surge.

  A few dandelions growing from the deck shook in the wind. A curved visor protected the wheelhouse windows. The boat felt to her like one drawn-out sigh, beautiful, lonely and neglected.

  Looking either way, seeing no one, she pulled herself up the gangplank, fit her head into a tarnished brass porthole, and peered through the thick glass. Darkness. She stepped back. In the next porthole over, written in block letters, was a For Sale sign.

  What sort of person would abandon something so beautiful? How quiet, just the soft squish of the buoy ball against the hull. Waves brushing the planks.

  Fritz had mentioned payphones by the library. Eager to share what she had found with Connor, her steps quickened along the docks. She took what seemed to be a shortcut back through town, along a road that curved between buildings clad in corrugated sheet metal. Steam blended into the darkening cloud cover. Thick-woven nets with corks as big as her boss’s oversized head were piled in a gravel lot, reminding her of the abandoned piers on the Delaware River, graffiti-stained concrete and broken windows in old factories, weeds growing from truck trailer beds.

  A honk snapped her from her thoughts. She looked up in time to see a man at the wheel of a forklift, his wrists swirled with ink. “Look out!” he shouted. She stepped back, out of the way of a procession of men in orange bibs and hairnets following behind the forklift, receding into the billows of steam coming off the building. This must be the fish processor where Acuzio worked, she thought—where boats dropped off their catch.

  The road dead-ended and she turned onto Main Street. At the far end was the Russian Orthodox church—its blocky base softened by the oxidized copper dome on top. She followed a street to the water, to a one-story wood-paneled building built on a spit of land. A sign with a carving of an orca leaping out of the water read PORT ANNA PUBLIC LIBRARY. Phone booths were arranged in a circle by the entrance.

  She jangled the coins in her pocket. It was just after ten P.M. on the East Coast. Her stomach turned. Maybe Connor would be out in Manhattan, seeing a show, enjoying his new friends. Surprisingly, she missed him. Or, then again, maybe she was just nervous.

  Looking at the phone bank, she thought of her father, probably in his favorite corner on the couch, watching a crime show, getting ready to trudge up the stairs to bed. Or perhaps he’d still be at the bakery, in his billing office, working late, leafing through orders for cranberries and candied fruit for panettone—the bread of the rich—in preparation for the Christmas season.

  The story of panettone was one her mother loved to tell, of the handsome young noble who flew his falcons by a poor baker’s shop and fell in love and married the baker’s daughter. He sold his birds to make the luxurious bread to impress the daughter—all in the name of love. “Colpo di fulmine, ‘the love that is like lightning,’” her mother would say when Tara complained about her father or was irritated with Connor. “It is the men like this, the ones with the big hearts that know in one second—these are the ones for us, figlia. But they must wait for us to catch up. It is how it happens with your father—he is so stubborn. We are not easy, figlia mia. It is the patient ones who are made for us.”

  She wondered if her mother had ever seen Urbano drive a fist into the wall. Or use that voice that started way down in his chest. She’d rather rip the phone boxes off their mounts and toss them into the ocean than waste quarters calling Wolf Street. It was Connor she wanted to talk to. Shy, pale, freckled, long-boned Connor, asking in a shaky voice after school one day in ninth grade if she wanted to go ice-skating by the Delaware.

  To settle her nerves she walked into the library. People were crowded at the tables reading. An older man in a yellowed engineer’s cap glanced up from a magazine. His long fingers clenched the glossy pages. He must be Native, Ta
ra thought. Tlingit. Pronounced kling-kit—she recalled from her reading about the island. The man smiled thinly, and she nodded back.

  At the phone bank she dropped in quarters and pushed the cold metal buttons. She pressed the receiver to her ear, trying to hear through the rush of wind.

  “Hello?”

  “C?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s Tara,” she said, letting relief bleed through her voice. She wanted to add I miss you. And even, I’m sorry.

  Silence, followed by a shuffling. “Jesus. Where are you?”

  “Timbuktu. Where do you think? Alaska.”

  She listened to his quiet breathing. To the ship that goes beneath the water, all winds go the wrong way. This saying of her mother’s flashed through her head.

  “How’s Archangel Island?” he finally asked.

  “Fine. I wrote you a letter.”

  “Did you get mine?”

  She pinned the cold plastic of the receiver to her ear. It was because he hated the phone that he sounded so strained.

  “No. I haven’t checked.”

  “Check. I sent it to general delivery.”

  She bristled at the order. A recorded voice came on, demanding seventy-five more cents.

  “I sent you something,” he repeated. “You should read it, I guess, whenever you have a chance.”

  With a shoulder she pressed the phone to her and dug in her jeans for quarters. He let out his breath, as if he was pondering something.

  “Con? Hang on one sec. I’ll call you right—”

  And they were cut off.

  The change worked through the phone. Instinctively, she looked around for a convenience store or a gas station. Gulls floated in the updraft, heads pivoting. The sound of waves against the rocks. Fuck. The post office might have quarters, she decided. And she could get his letter.

  Just up from the church she found it, a single room with a wall of wooden boxes, in the process of closing up. When Tara gave her name, a slight woman handed her an envelope addressed with Connor’s large-lettered cursive.