The Alaskan Laundry

by Brendan Jones

  She moved her things from Betteryear’s to the Bunkhouse, paying with cash. By now she understood well the formula at the processor: work longer and harder than the person, usually male, beside you, and you’ll be fine. Trunk had put her in charge of the frozen side, except for the glazer, which Newt tended better than anyone, even with his bad eye. When trays of boxed herring came out of the flash freezer, cemented by their own sperm to the stainless steel, she jammed the flat tip of the bar beneath the cardboard and rocked the boxes loose with a thrust of her hips. If they didn’t shake free she’d push the box off the tray and the opaque, heavy ice would shatter over the concrete.

  The herring came in so fast that Trunk called the district manager and asked him to hold off on a second opening to allow the workers time to catch up. He enforced mandatory overtime and spent his days gloved, wrapping boxes in plastic, shouting to be heard above the jam of the glazer and rumble of the conveyor belt.

  She had gotten a small taste of life on the water and knew now she preferred to be catching instead of processing. She still hadn’t heard word if she was getting another shot on the Adriatic, but doubted it. At least overtime paid, and her tug account grew.

  On the last day of herring she paused for a moment in the bathroom at the Muskeg. She stood closer to the mirror, turning her head to one side. Her hair had grown coarser, the furrow over her nose deeper. A ruddiness to her skin that hadn’t been there before. She splayed her palms in front of her chest, calluses dark with work. Bring it, she thought. Bring on all of it.

  58

  AT THE HARBOR Betteryear zipped her into a one-piece float-coat to keep her warm and buoyant, then weaved the skiff between larger boats clustered just outside the breakwater. She skimmed a finger over the waves, considering this trip with him, after what had happened the other night, a last kindness.

  The Chief appeared dark and shut up. Maybe Laney would take a down payment. Or even allow her to start fixing the engine, using what little she had learned from the manual. She could drain the diesel from the lines, make sure there were no obstructions. Change out the filters. Anything to stop depending on others for shelter.

  Up on the docks people gathered, a few holding wreaths.

  “Blessing of the fleet,” Betteryear explained over the grumble of the outboard. “A ceremony to keep boats safe for the fishing season. Eleven thousand years my people have subsisted on the ocean,” he continued. “We could rake herring off the Sound. Now the Japanese businessmen show up with suitcases of cash and these boats rape until there is nothing left.”

  The harshness in his voice surprised her. She thought of the opalescent, shimmering herring frozen in the trays, unsure if he blamed her as well.

  They cruised beneath the bridge, trading off sips of nettle tea from his thermos. He shifted to one side of the bench and asked if she wanted to sit. She did, and he handed her the tiller, showing her how to twist the throttle. The hull bucked forward. Betteryear seized the gunwales with both hands.

  “Easy, easy!” His long fingers, surprisingly warm, wrapped around her hand. “Small movements.”

  On the open water it was too loud to speak. They ran the length of town, past the ferry terminal, where the road ended. He pointed out landmarks—a rockslide, the head of a stream—to steer toward. It was a thrill, opening the throttle, feeling the thud of waves beneath the hull. He pointed her toward the back of the bay, then told her to slow. He reached over the port side to lift hemlock branches frosted with herring eggs from the water, broke off a twig, and handed it to her. “Here. Try this.”

  She ran the needles between her teeth, sucking off the grain-sized eggs. Bitter and salty at once, they exploded between her teeth.

  Betteryear arranged the branches in a waxed box, then took over the engine, throttling up until they reached a collage of islands on the eastern edge of Lost Sound. The open water and rush of the wind cleared her head. When he brought the boat into a slot in the boulders of an island and helped her out, she felt good again, just happy to be in this wild place, among these slick rocks strewn with fronds of seaweed, the cinder cone of the volcano rising across the water.

  “There is a saying among the Tlingit that my grandmother repeated,” Betteryear said as he handed her a plastic bag. He crouched above a tide pool. Waves lashed the faces of stone. “‘When the tide is out, the table is set.’ You see now what she means.” With a knife blade he scraped tangled black fronds from the rock face, then stretched a sheet to the sky. “This is Porphyra. Like a woman’s stocking. Nori.”

  They fell into the quiet of work. From around the corner she could see back toward town. How small it looked, just a dash of buildings beneath the mountainous, tree-covered expanse. A pearl of light in the lowering sun.

  An oily, sickening odor filled her nostrils, a smell different from the salty, anaerobic brine of low tide in town. “That’s deep seaweed,” Betteryear said, standing. “Come. Let’s move away from it.”

  They walked into a cove, where he bent to one knee and sifted sand between his fingers. “The old tribes here, my ancestors, crushed these shells to have a place to pull up their canoes so as not to damage the bottoms.”

  Tara watched him. “My mother talked about the scraping sound the boats made at the end of the day in the town where she grew up.”

  “It must have been difficult for her to go from the old way of doing things to living in a city,” Betteryear said. “Leaving her home like that. I can’t imagine.”

  Tara picked up a seashell and ran the blade of her nail along the ridges. “I never saw her home in Italy, but I like to imagine her there. It’s like she had two homes.”

  Betteryear considered. “That’s a beautiful thought, Tara.”

  He unbuttoned his shirt and waded out into the mud flats. His skin was taut over his muscles, his arms long and sinewy. Grass swayed back and forth with the current. He timed the waves, reached into the water, and came up with a handful of dripping plants. “Eelgrass roots,” he announced. “We can make seaweed wraps with these.”

  As they walked farther along the coast, Betteryear stopped by a tide pool. He identified sculpins, purple shore crabs, pink and green anemones. “Patience,” he said as she tried to wiggle a cone-shaped limpet off a rock. When it wouldn’t come she worked her nail beneath the rim, and the creature came loose. She dropped the speckled shell into a separate bag. He gave a small nod, then walked ahead, ghosting over the rocks.

  She noticed all of it, the white and pink flowers on Siberian miner’s lettuce, the soft green frills of yarrow. He reached toward a bed of moss, selecting a stalk. “And this is bedstraw, or cleavers. Feel,” he said, handing it to her. “Run the stem between your fingers. When you swallow it, it hooks into your throat.” He pushed it against her wool jacket. “It also clings to fabric. You see? But still so tasty.” He nipped off licorice fern—the weevil-shaped roots he dug up, splitting the fruit and handing her a piece. “And this is good for sweetening tea.”

  She chewed. “Tastes like a black Twizzler.”

  “No,” he corrected. “A black Twizzler tastes like licorice fern.”

  She felt drunk on words as he continued to tell her about the difference between wild cucumber, or twisted stalk, and false hellebore, which had darker, more fibrous leaves. He grew excited when he came across a particular wild mustard plant.

  “The Latin name of this one I enjoy, Cochlearia officinalis. Notice the basal rosette, how the leaves clasp the flower stem. It looks like an ear, doesn’t it? Cochlear.” He handed her a sprig. “Spicy on the tongue.” Slowly, she put the plant in her mouth, grinding the fibers between her molars. It did taste spicy, faintly like mustard.

  “It’s so nice to be able to pass down this knowledge. And you are such a fine listener. Just like the crushed shells for the canoe, like the guano from the birds coming off the ocean that fertilizes this island—too soon we forget the stories that instruct us. Take for example yarrow,” he said, holding up the stem of the soft-frilled
plant. “Achillea millefolium, named for the great warrior of your Western tradition, Achilles. In love with his own glory. He was a student of the healing arts, and used yarrow to tend to the wounds of his soldiers. But he was no better than Katlian, the Tlingit who slayed Russians by the thousands. But who learns about Katlian? No one, this is who.”

  Moisture turned the calves of their boots shiny as they walked through tidal grasses, the bags of limpets and greens and seaweed knocking against her knees. When they reached the skiff he held out his hand, his palm cold and damp from the water. She settled on the bench as he shoved the bow off the beach and leapt in, paddling out to depth, dropping the outboard, pulling the starter, and pointing them back toward town. His running lights were out, he explained, and he wanted to be back home before dark.

  The sky had clouded over. She caught his eye and he smiled. She was eager to get back to land.

  59

  IT RAINED FOR THE NEXT COUPLE DAYS. A cold, serious rain that bled into April. She racked up hours, slept at the Bunkhouse. Newt was out of town. Packing fish and sleeping, this was her life.

  Toward the middle of the month, Trunk called Tara into his office.

  “You passed,” he told her.

  “Passed what?”

  He squinted, trying to make sense of something on his clipboard. “You’ll be starting in May on the Adriatic. Work through September. Should make a nice bit of cash long as you don’t fuck it up.” He handed her the board. “Fill out your 1999 crew license, take it on upstairs, and the girl will set you up. Jackie and Teague are driving the boat up from Petersburg, should be here the seventh. You can get in some hours on the frozen side until they arrive.”

  With the twenty-two hundred in cash in her locker, plus the thirteen thousand in her bank account, she was at just over fifteen thousand. Her meals would be covered on the tender, and she would have nowhere to spend money. If she completed the summer with Jackie, if nothing went wrong, she could have the tug come fall. Wake early, get the engine to run. Spend quiet evenings cooking by the wood stove, plucking leaves from the basil plant.

  She loaded up on the forklift and was driving it out of cold storage when she saw, by the open gate, Thomas waving at her. When she came over he hugged her long and hard.

  “What’s up?” she said, pulling away.

  Frauke stood by the roll-up door with her old-school external frame backpack.

  “We go to California,” he said.

  She could feel the burn of Trunk’s good eye through the glass. Frauke barked something in German.

  “Well, good luck,” she said.

  “And you too. You will have no regrets, you will see.”

  At the end of the day she returned to her locker. The door was half open, the lock gone. In the bottom, where the $2,200 had been, she found a note on the same paper Frauke used for her sayings. If you don’t have dreams, you have nightmares.

  “Motherfucker!” she screamed.

  She went across town to the police station, a cinderblock building by the fire station. The dispatcher, a pretty, heavy-lidded woman, told her that the police could apply to the magistrate for an arrest warrant, which would be on the books if either Frauke or Thomas came back.

  “Forget it,” Tara said. It wasn’t worth fighting. She’d just have to work harder.

  60

  WHEN TARA SAW JACKIE on the docks she was tanned, her hair straw blond.

  “Good winter off, girlfriend?” Jackie asked.

  “Made it through, with a few bumps. You and Teague?”

  “Bunch of us went down to Mexico. Surfing, palapas, back to the basics. Heard you got robbed?”

  “Yeah, well. They’ll get theirs.”

  Jackie started down the ladder. “I heard something about how you and Newt were out living with those crazies in the woods? It have anything to do with those folks?”

  “I’m done out there,” Tara said quickly. “Just ready to work.”

  “Good. It’ll be straightforward, go up the circuit, pick up our load, c’mon back and drop it off. May to September. You have time to run down to the post office before we head out. Tell them to forward your mail to the processor. Welcome aboard.”

  When Tara returned to the boat, Jackie introduced her to Miles, the engineer, a quiet, thick-bodied senior in Port Anna High School who wore faded Carhartt overalls. “Miles is the town wrestling star,” Jackie announced. “A whiz with the engine, with a nasty sweet tooth.”

  They loaded up, threw the lines, and pushed north along the channel past the tug. After a brief look, she went down to begin moving into her bunk for the summer.

  61

  AS THEY RAN she found that she enjoyed spending time in the wheelhouse with Teague. She liked his drawl and his stories, particularly when they involved landmarks along their path—how this boat ran aground in this bay here, how the Tlingits once maintained a fish camp there.

  On the second day of the trip she watched their progress on the computer screen as Teague made the gradual turn from Chatham Strait into Peril Strait. Tree-covered mountains rose, jagged, along the coastline. Teague said that all the land to her left was protected wilderness.

  “Thank god,” she said.

  “Bullshit. It was God who gave us these resources. Now here we are sitting on our hands instead of fulfilling our duty of cutting those trees down.”

  She recalled Fritz’s CUT KILL DIG DRILL bumper sticker. The men up here were funny. They seemed to pride themselves not only on surviving Alaska, but on conquering it. She thought of Connor backstage with his headset, a clipboard in one hand, making a note. He’d be good at working, she decided. But he didn’t have the swashbuckling nature of the men here. The built-in power of dudes like Miles.

  They anchored in a drizzle at the back of a bay. “On the beach over there is where a picnicking family discovered a local hunter cached by a brown bear,” Teague told her. “Kids found him folded in half like a doll. Stuffed at the base of a tree, a little after-hibernation snack.”

  She peered into the woods, and thought of telling him about the time she had been charged up on Crow Hill, how Keta had stood in front, protecting her, when Teague picked up the VHF to make an announcement that the Adriatic was buying.

  Like distant stars, the mast lights appeared on the horizon. Teague made a list of trollers ready to unload.

  “You met Irish yet?” he asked. She shook her head. “He’ll be our first. Cranky old-timer. Eighty-three, and he still works alone. Can’t wait to be at the front of the line.”

  Tara went down the stairs and pulled on her bibs and gloves in time to drop fenders off the side. As the troller eased in, she looped line over the cleat. Irish paced the deck, chewing his blistered lips. He had a shock of white hair, a weathered face, and thick-lensed glasses. Behind her she heard the snap of Jackie’s elastic wristers, and watched as her skipper hopped down onto the smaller boat and lifted the hold cover. She cursed.

  “C’mon, Irish. Coho should face the same direction, otherwise their scales come off. Jesus, what a fucking mess.”

  The man lifted a hand in the air but didn’t speak.

  “What are you waiting for?” Jackie snapped at Tara. “Fish aren’t getting any deader.”

  She lowered herself into the hold. Silver scales floated like confetti. She dug the blood-slimed straps of the brailer bag out from the pile of fish, hooked the straps to the steel eye. Jackie gave a twirl of her finger. “Up!” The hydraulics groaned, the elastic spreaders made a bang as they sprang loose from the side hooks, and the bag rose.

  “Gimme that tag,” Jackie said to Tara, stepping back onto the Adriatic.

  “What?”

  “The tag! The tag line!” Jackie reached over and grabbed the rope tied off to the bottom of the bag, threw her weight away from the Northern Star, heaving the brailer bag over a tote. With a gaff hook in one hand she went back into the hold, came up with a fish, and set it on the V-groove of Irish’s tray. She opened the belly flaps, frowned, re
ached for the Vicky knife duct-taped to her suspender.

  “This is some sloppy horseshit, Irish,” she said, scraping with the knife and flinging purple goop to the side. “Blood in the central artery and in the armpits. Swim bladder remnants. And this?” she held up a fan of ruby-red gill rakers. “Are you shitting me, Irish? You didn’t even clean out the head!”

  The old man continued to look out toward some invisible spot in the distance as Jackie used the honed edge of a spoon to squeeze out the remaining threads of blood from the sides of the fish.

  “I’ll tell you what, Irish. I wouldn’t be caught dead handling a fish like this. And I goddamn well don’t have time to do your work alongside mine. You’ve gone through your ice, your fish are belly-burned, and they’ve lost their scales. These are all gonna get number-twoed, you’re not gonna be able to afford your gas. Am I making sense to you, old man?”

  Tara stood there, feeling embarrassed for the skipper, who took a pack of cigarettes from his wool vest and shook one loose. If Jackie had yelled at Urbano like this, it would have been a much different story.

  “I’ll ask again: Am I gettin’ through, Irish? I’m not fucking getting through, am I? Waste of my fucking time. We’ll buy your shitty fish, but they’re all number-twoed, good for cat food. If you don’t like it, sell ’em elsewhere.”

  The rest of the day was more of the same—Jackie bitching out skippers, sniping at Tara, giving a quick nod of the head when the catch was acceptable. It was dark when Tara hosed down the deck, water running pink through the scuppers. She used the hand-powered pallet jack to rearrange totes to make more room for the next day’s fish. Links on the chain clacked as Teague pulled the hook and the engines fired.

  “Go grab a few while we run up the line,” Jackie told her. Zipped into her sleeping bag, staring up at the ceiling inches from her nose, her muscles felt long and tired.