The Alaskan Laundry

by Brendan Jones

  The pages were ripped from a yellow legal pad, and the letters were slanted and jerky instead of his usual neat handwriting. She read as she walked back to the phone bank, where she deposited the change.

  19 September 1997

  Dear Tara,

  If you’re reading this now it means you made it to Port Anna. Congratulations. Me I’m sitting here on a beanbag in this high rise in the West Village. Sirens wail over the snores of my hung-over roommate. He still has on eyeliner from last night. It’s bizarre here. I mean it beats bricklaying don’t get me wrong.

  But that’s not what I want to write about.

  You always encouraged me to say what was on my mind. Maybe it’s an ancestral thing. Like my Scots-Irish and Southern blood just doesn’t get your first-generation Italian impulse to wear your feelings. How offensive does that sound—but I can’t find any better reason for what’s happened.

  Having a father like I do I understand something about people whose natural tendency is to leave. But who talks these days about staying? What about when things fall apart? I got a taste of how you leave with no warning back in tenth grade. And now you’ve done it again.

  With her index finger she pulled at the metal tongue on the phone, hardly hearing as the quarters spilled into the coin return.

  So here’s what I want to know. How can I be of service to you now? Because looking back on the past few years I feel like that has been my role. This summer you showed up on my doorstep in the early morning, spent the next three months with me, and ended up in my bed. Saying all sorts of things like maybe you were falling in love. And then poof. Like you’re on your own quest for absolution redemption—all that shit they rammed down our throats in school.

  It’s only memories that stop me from cutting you off now. Times when I felt you softening. Like the night on the lifeguard chair. Or Rittenhouse Square. When you slid your head beneath my chin. Whispering in my ear that this, this is where you want to be.

  I don’t trust you anymore. That’s what it is. You hurt people by not having the courage or even taking the time to figure out how you feel. And while you go off and get clean of your sadness or whatever the rest of us are left trying to make heads or tails of it. You’re so fierce and impulsive and you expect the world to just heal itself behind you. But that’s not how it works.

  In the worst moments (like now) I think maybe your father was right. Not in what he said to you—that’s horrible, no person should ever have to hear those words—but in what he did thrusting you into the world. Maybe it will shake you free of whatever weight you carry (I wish I knew) that causes you to hurt others so badly.

  Connor

  Slowly she collected her change and slipped it into her pocket. Back along Main Street she went, not caring when the rain turned the lined sheets in her hands soggy, not paying attention to stares of people on the sidewalk. She stumbled over the wooden bridge, down the hall into her apartment, letting her wet jeans fall to the floor. Steam filled the bathroom as she ran the shower.

  What had he wanted to say to her at the end of the phone call? What weight I carry, Connor? Try losing your mother.

  She stepped under the showerhead, eyes closed, hands by her sides, willing herself to stay still in the scald. What an awful letter, Connor Macauley. You who pride yourself on being so constant.

  Her hands slipped against the walls, and she curled up into a corner. “To hell with you,” she said, jabbing at the shower door with her toe, then kicking at it with her heel. The plastic shattered, slicing into the ball of her foot. Blood mixed with water, rivulets flowing into the drain. Still, she sat there, until the water grew cold. Maybe I should call him back, wake him and his punk roommate up, and tell him to go fuck himself. He was just as lost as she was, alone there in New York City. It was a sign of weakness—passing his shyness off as quiet assurance. She saw through it.

  She turned off the shower and hobbled to the sink. The toilet paper she used to wrap her foot quickly soaked through. It was a small cut. She wouldn’t call him, she decided. Not tonight. Not tomorrow. Maybe not ever. Her life now was on this island. It was a relief to have this truth in front of her. Everything and everyone else could take a flying fuck at the moon.

  Superheated, she willed her mind blank until her breathing returned to normal. Calm, despite the throb in her foot. Her thoughts returned to the boat, floating out there at the end of the harbor. How excited she had been to share with Connor what it might be like to live on the water, with a view of the ocean and mountains and islands. It was a clear signal. Separated from the bullshit, the capriciousness of others, that’s where she needed to be.

  When she thought about the East Coast, she saw it as cities revolving around the sun of New York—Philadelphia like Mercury, Washington like Mars, Boston, Saturn. Here on this island, it was as if her planet had slipped its ellipse and she was floating around some gentler, more mysterious sun. She couldn’t see it yet, but she could already feel it, the few times when she stopped fighting and allowed herself to be guided by this new force. It was somewhere in those woods, hidden beneath the ice fields, deep in the river valleys.

  7

  WHEN SHE CAME INTO THE YARD early Tuesday morning, Newt lay on his back in the grass, smoking a cigarette, a brown boot crossed over a knee.

  “Boxer girl! Ten minutes early. Back for more already?”

  After barely sleeping, she was in no mood to talk. She hobbled past, tossing a scoop of feed into the tank, then watched as the black cloud of fish converged, showing glimmers of white lips as they fed.

  Newt sat up, tossed his cigarette, and took a long sip of coffee from his scratched mug. “You gimped up already?”

  “I cut my foot.”

  “You get a Band-Aid for it?”

  A muffled voice called her name. It took her a minute to find the source—Fritz’s stubby legs extending from one of the green tanks where he had dug out the gravel. “Go into the warehouse,” he ordered. “Fetch me a section of two-by-four—I gotta slip a shim in here. We have a leak.”

  She trudged across the yard between the sliding barn doors into the warehouse. Her eyes took a moment to adjust. The smell of turpentine and oil and wood reminded her of Connor’s workshop, although the place was nowhere near as neat. Strewn across the shelves were wrenches, screws, pipe elbows, fan blades, rubber belts in various sizes. She blew dust off a section of hose and peered through one end, then picked up a wood cutoff.

  “The hell are you doing?”

  Fritz’s round shape blocked light in the doorway.

  “Sorry—I was just—”

  “Sniffing wood while I’m stuck beneath a two-thousand-pound fish tank?”

  He snatched the block from her hands. “You like it in here so much, how about you organize the place. How does that sound?”

  “Okay.”

  He turned on her. “Is that your favorite word? ‘Okay’?”

  Just go away, you big slug. “No.”

  “Well, then stop saying it. You’re starting to annoy me.”

  Her fists pulsed as he stalked back into the sunshine. I’ll show you annoyed.

  She spent the rest of the day removing objects from shelves, making a mess she had no idea how to clean up, thinking all the while of how good it would feel to hit Fritz.

  “Boxer girl’s in the doghouse with Grandpa,” Newt said, crossing the floor, holding up a first-aid kit. She took off her boot. He watched as she cleaned the cut.

  “Let’s get a beer after work. Looks like you could blow off some steam.”

  She thought for a moment he was asking her out. “At the Frontier Bar?”

  “Hell, no. I’m persona non-gratuity there. Surprised Grandpa didn’t tell you that story. Anyways, we don’t need that warped-table rat-hole. I got an eighteen-pack of Raindogs burning a hole in my backpack. C’mon. You just continue doing whatever you’re doing in here”—he let his eyes rove around the clutter of objects—“and I’ll introduce you to my favorite drinking
spot come quitting time.”

  When he was gone she wiped down the scarred plywood shelves with a wet rag, then squeezed it out over a bucket. Glancing at the door, she wrapped a rag around each fist and began bobbing and weaving, throwing combinations. She willed her shoulders to relax, the punches coming out more quickly, snapping when she brought them back in. Take the gun out of the holster, put it back. Reach for the cookie, bring it to your mouth.

  The first time Gypo put her in the ring, she lost it. She had been fighting a Cambodian girl who had placed in Golden Gloves the year before.

  “Just go easy. Breathe,” Gypo told her as he held the ropes apart.

  But when the bell went off Tara swung wildly. The girl went into a corner, covered her face. Tara thought she was winning until she heard Gypo: “Okay, see if she can take a few.” A moment later a hook landed on her temple, then another on the bridge of her nose, sending white flashes across her vision. “You need to settle down, kid,” Gypo yelled. But it was no use. She plowed forward, head down, slashing with her arms. The girl stepped back and to the side, and landed an uppercut that hit low, smashing Tara’s throat.

  “The fuck are you doing?” Tara yelled, lunging at the girl, trying to grab her with the gloves. Gypo separated the two.

  “Chick’s a brawler,” the girl said, spitting out her mouthpiece.

  “C’mon,” Gypo said, taking Tara by the shoulder and unlacing her gloves. “Hit the showers.”

  She didn’t know why he kept working with her after that. Maybe because of her father, who had dragged her to the gym in the tenth grade when she wouldn’t break out of her funk. “You didn’t tell me it was no girl, Fava,” Gypo said at the time. He put out his hands, pleading. “And c’mon, your only child?”

  Urbano just stared back with those serene eyes. Gypo Barsani, a flat-nosed, balding man with thick lips and a purple tint to his rubbery skin, finally shook his head, and it wasn’t much later that the smell of sweat and canvas and meat, the snap of jump rope on concrete, the whomp of the heavy bag, followed by the tingle of the chain, became the center of her life.

  After the fiasco in the ring, Gypo tied a rope between two pillars and had her bob to one side, then the other, move forward a step, pushing off the balls of her feet. “Get the rhythm of it—you know, hear it in your head, like a rap song or whatever crap it is you kids listen to.” He gave her a routine: three rounds jumping rope, three rounds shadowboxing in the mirror. Followed by pad work. He’d swing at her and she’d weave out of the way. “Good. Now watch the eyes. That’s the secret to it all.”

  She’d do a few rounds on the speed bag before hitting the showers, which meant going back to Wolf Street because there were no showers for women at the gym.

  Just after her seventeenth birthday, Tara went back into the ring with a senior, an experienced featherweight boy who weighed less than she did but had a long reach.

  “Just move around,” Gypo told them both. “Keep it light.”

  This time when the bell rang, she focused on his eyes, how they narrowed before he shifted to the left and jabbed. The next time it happened she stepped to the side, put out her own jab, and felt the pressure of his forehead on the end of her glove. From the corner of her eye she saw Gypo nod.

  “Thirteen fellas,” Gypo said the next day when she came into the gym. “Atlantic City, and a couple over there at the Purple Horizon on Broad Street. That’s how many I knocked out with the left hook. You got the jab down. Now it’s time we make you dangerous. Go get wrapped up.”

  That day he demonstrated how to twist from the waist, guard her right cheek, keeping the elbow high as she corkscrewed back around with the left hook. Do it well, he told her, and you could get people three times—once when they were standing, once after their legs gave out, and once more just before they hit the canvas.

  Huffing, trying to catch her breath as she stood in the middle of the dimly lit warehouse, she unwrapped her hands, dipped a rag into the bucket, and began to drag it across the shelves, exhausted, just wanting to be left alone.

  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.”

  8

  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.