Killing Grounds

by Dana Stabenow

  She didn’t recognize the voice, and she couldn’t make out who it was against the light from the window, but her stomach made up her mind for her and she threaded her way through the tables and chairs and wildly gesticulating hands.

  Arriving at the booth, she discovered Lamar Rousch. He was occupying his entire booth in isolated splendor, probably because he wore the brown uniform of the fish hawk, by any other name smelling as sweet as a state trooper.

  “How are you, Kate?” Lamar said, pumping her hand. “I just ordered. Sit down, take a load off.”

  “Sure.” Kate slid in opposite him. Terry Nicolo scowled at her for consorting with the enemy.

  Kate returned a bland smile, which widened into something more genuine when the waitress arrived. A cheerful, gum-popping teenage heartthrob with long blond hair tied back in a pony tail, she looked maybe one day out of her cheerleader’s uniform. She plunked down a plate of eggs over easy, link sausage, home fries, two slices of wholewheat toast and a side order of French toast.

  “Hey. Kate.” The heartthrob wrestled an order pad from a rear pocket that was extremely reluctant to give it up. All activity in the restaurant paused until the extraction was complete. The pad slid free and up went a collective sigh at the resulting wiggle as the jeans slipped back into place. “What can I get you for?”

  “Everything,” Kate said comprehensively.

  The heartthrob cocked her head. “Three scrambled soft, bacon crisp, home fries, biscuit with honey?”

  “And coffee,” Kate said, bowing her head in the presence of greatness. “You know me so well, Ruthie.”

  Ruthie flashed a grin and stuck her order pad back into her hip pocket, sliding it home with another tiny wiggle. The fisherman sitting directly behind her choked and coughed coffee all over his bacon waffle. “Just you remember to tell Dandy Mike I turned eighteen last month.”

  “You bet,” Kate lied, and Ruthie swished off, if it was possible to swish in jeans. Judging by the whiplash her wake caused, it was. “So, Lamar.” Kate said. “When’s the next period, Wednesday or Friday?”

  Lamar had cornflower-blue eyes and fair, straight, silky blond hair that he kept in a brush cut in the secret hope that it would make him look like an ex-Marine. It only succeeded in drawing attention to the plump pink curves of his babycakes cheeks, giving him all the authority of a cherub. He spread whipped butter over his French toast in a painfully even layer. “Give me a break, Shugak. I haven’t even got the escapement numbers yet, let alone the cannery pack.”

  “Yeah, but I saw you coming down Calhoun Creek late yesterday afternoon. You must have some idea how many fish got up the river.”

  Loud voices sounded from the counter, followed by a crash of crockery. “It’s Craig off the Rose,” Lamar said, rising up to peer over the back of the booth. “And Les off the Deliah.”

  “I thought Les broke it off with Rose,” Kate said, leaning to look around him, just in time to see Joe Anahonak grab both men by the scruffs of their necks, shake them like dogs and assist them ungently out the door, to the accompaniment of general applause.

  “He did,” Lamar said, settling back in his seat. “Looks like he started up again.”

  “Or not,” Kate said, leaning back to look out the window. Craig and Les picked themselves up and marched off in opposite directions, one with a rapidly swelling eye and the other checking to see that he still had all his teeth. “I saw Les cork Craig’s line yesterday about two minutes after the official opening.”

  “Ah.” Lamar nodded his appreciation of the difference. Adultery was forgivable. Corking was not.

  Ruthie arrived with Kate’s breakfast. The eggs were perfect, the bacon crisp, the spuds done and the biscuit hot. Conversation, at their table at least, suffered a momentary lapse.

  It went on nonstop around them. One table over, a burly man in a checked wool shirt and a gimme cap with a Gulf logo on it said, “I didn’t do squat in herring this spring. Those goddam Japs are getting pickier about what they’ll take every year.”

  “You’re lucky you caught anything to show them,” the man next to him said. His eyes were bright blue in a tanned face, lines fanning out from the corners, the result of squinting at the same horizon for thirty-five years. He was the only one at the table without a hat, which probably meant he was the only one at the table with any hair left. It was pure white and thick and combed carefully back from a broad brow. “We had five boats and a spotter plane and we barely caught enough to pay for fuel.”

  There was a grunt of agreement from the table next door. “There hasn’t been a decent run of herring since the spill.”

  “It’s not just the herring,” someone else said. “It’s the salmon. If it weren’t for the hatcheries, we’d be up the creek our own selves.”

  “Yeah, but because of the hatcheries we’ve got humpies coming out our ears and no place to sell them.”

  “Why don’t sport fishermen have to apply for limited-entry permits?” someone else demanded. “Tell me sport guides aren’t commercial fishermen, and I’ll call you a liar.”

  “They ought to have to fill out fish tickets, same as us,” someone else agreed.

  “And pay the raw fish tax.”

  “Not to mention the enhancement tax,” the first man added, “to restore the creek habitat they tear up every year with those friggin’ speedboats.”

  “It all goes back to the spill,” the first man insisted stubbornly, and there wasn’t a lot of disagreement.

  Watching their faces, Kate saw anger and a consistent, pervasive bitterness that would never go away. The ten-million-gallon, eight-hundred-mile-long spill of Prudhoe Bay crude was nine years old, but it might as well have been yesterday. These men had been fishing Prince William Sound since they were old enough to walk the decks of their fathers’ boats. They fed their families and paid their mortgages and put their kids through school with what they wrested from the jealous grasp of the Mother of Storms.

  When the TransAlaska Pipeline project had first been proposed, shortly after the discovery of nine and a half billion barrels of oil and twenty-five trillion cubic feet of natural gas seven thousand feet below the surface of Prudhoe Bay, these same fishermen, who individually had more hands-on experience of Prince William Sound than any twenty tanker captains, drunk or sober, had lobbied long and hard for an overland, transCanada route, as opposed to the all-Alaska route that would culminate in Valdez and require shipping by tanker.

  Supported in their efforts by economists and environmentalists alike, they were roundly defeated by a coalition of local and state businessmen frankly drooling at the prospect of opening up to development an eight-hundred-mile corridor of Alaskan wilderness. The fishermen freely prophesied disaster, and the grounding of the RPetCo Anchorage on Bligh Reef sixteen years later was a Pyrrhic victory for their viewpoint.

  There is no worse triumph, Kate thought, than the one that results only in saying, “I told you so.”

  She leaned forward, fork momentarily suspended, the better to look at the faded T-shirt worn by a fisherman a few tables down. Don’t Shoot, it read. I'm Not Denton Harvey!

  She sat back in her seat. “Who’s Denton Harvey?”

  “Huh?” She pointed, and Lamar leaned out to look, only to turn back to her with a wide grin. “The superintendent of Whitfield Seafoods.”

  “Oh?” Whitfield was one of the major fish buyers and processors in Prince William Sound, but until now she hadn’t known the name of its superintendent, and she would do her best to forget it at the first opportunity. She made it a point of honor to tune out fishing politics, which seemed to be dictated from Seattle and Tokyo and acquiesced to by a weak-kneed state legislature in Juneau. So long as the check for her deckhand share cleared the bank, she went home happy. “What’s with the T-shirt?”

  “He put the price of reds in the toilet the first week of July last year—something like fifty cents a pound, I think it was—and of course all the rest of the processors followed his lea
d.”

  “Ah.”

  “Yes. I sent him a thank-you card.”

  Kate was amused. “What’d it say?”

  Lamar’s grin widened around a mouthful of toast. He swallowed and quoted, “ ‘Thanks to you, Denton, I didn’t have to duck once this summer. Keep up the good work!’ ’

  Kate laughed. “Denton Harvey superintendent at Whitfield again this year?”

  Lamar beamed. “He sure is. Gotta love the guy.”

  Kate didn’t, but she sympathized. The fish hawk was not the most welcome sight to rise up over a fisherman’s horizon, and over the years more than one fisherman had been moved to express his displeasure, sometimes at the business end of a .30-06. “Listen, Lamar, you ever hear of a guy name of Calvin Meany?”

  “Cal Meany?” Lamar’s coffee cup halted, suspended in midair. “What do you want with that asshole?”

  “Just curious. He delivered to the Freya yesterday. I’ve never met him before.”

  “Lucky you,” Lamar said, and paused when their cheerleader came around with the coffeepot. He stirred four packets of creamer into his coffee with more vigor than was necessary.

  Kate used six. “So you know him,” she said, sipping cautiously at the still-dark brew. She didn’t gag at the resulting taste, but only because she was a strong woman.

  “Yeah, I know him.” Lamar fortified himself with a long swallow. “He lives in Anchorage. He’s got the setnet site east of the beach from Amartuq Creek, right next to the Flanagans’.”

  “What?” Kate was confused. “No, he’s not a setnetter, he’s a drifter, he delivered off the—ah, that’s right, a no-namer, all he’s got is an AK number on the bow.”

  “No, he owns the setnet site, too, and God only knows what else.”

  “Wait a minute. I thought you couldn’t own two permits, I thought it was against the law.”

  Lamar set down his mug, and leaned forward, eager and earnest. Lamar loved his job, almost as much as he did explaining its labyrinthine ramifications to the unenlightened, maybe even more than he did catching a perpetrator and soon-to-be felon in the act. “You can’t own more than one drift permit, Kate. But you can own a drift permit and a setnet permit and a seine permit and fish them at different times of the year. Of course,” he added, “that’s just here, in Prince William. You can’t own a drift permit in Prince William Sound, another in Cook Inlet and a third in Bristol Bay. Or you can,” he amended, “but you can’t fish them all the same year, Prince William in June, Bristol Bay in July, Cook Inlet in August, you can’t do that.”

  “You can’t follow the fish,” Kate said, nodding.

  “Exactly.”

  “So who’s fishing Meany’s setnet site while he’s drifting?”

  “His brother. And,” Lamar added, “before you ask, they’ve got a formal lease agreement. I checked.”

  “So, they’re within the letter of the law." If not its spirit, she thought, and thought again of the boy, and of the boy’s sullen fury, and of the expression on Auntie Joy’s face. In the normal course of events Auntie Joy and Calvin Meany would have had nothing to do with each other, personally or professionally. Auntie Joy lived in the Park, Meany lived in Anchorage. Auntie Joy fished a mile up the creek, Meany drifted. Auntie Joy fished subsistence, Meany commercially. They were forty years apart in age, a world apart in culture. How had Meany managed to come into contact with Auntie Joy and offend her to the point of speechlessness?

  As if he’d been reading her thoughts, Lamar said, “Are Joyce and Viola up at fish camp this year, Kate?”

  Evidently he had been too busy to see the four aunties the day before. With perfect truth Kate said, “I haven’t been up the creek yet this year, Lamar.”

  He raised a skeptical eyebrow. “There’s still an injunction against subsistence fishing there.”

  Tim Sarakovikoff burst through the door and rescued Kate from dancing any further around the truth. He grabbed the first fisherman he saw and babbled out the news. The second man, at first disbelieving, asked him a question. Tim gave a violent nod. The fisherman turned to the man next to him and repeated the news. Tim spotted Kate and hustled over. “Kate! Have you heard?”

  “No, what?”

  Tim saw Lamar and paused, but only infinitesimally. “Denton Harvey, that prick, is sticking it to us again! He’s dropping the price on reds to fifty cents a pound!”

  Kate set her mug down. Across the table Lamar beamed. “Gotta love that guy.”

  Fortunately for his continued survival, his comment went unnoticed. “We’re not even a week into fishing,” Jerry Nicolo said hotly. “It’s not like the market is saturated.”

  “Fucking farmed salmon are gonna put us all outta business,” a loud voice said from across the room. “Norwegians, Scots, even the fucking Canucks are getting into it.”

  “No way.”

  “It’s a fact. They got fish farms in B.C. now. I hear pretty soon the Japanese are gonna be starting some up.”

  “It’s that fucking spill,” Dewey Dineen said morosely. “Nobody wants to buy Alaskan salmon anymore.”

  “It’s that goddam Harvey again. This time I say we shoot the bastard and use him for halibut bait!”

  “Don’t blame Harvey,” another man said, “blame the goddam Japs. Hiroshi Limited’s the major stockholder in Whitfield.”

  “So you want to fly to Tokyo, Dick?” someone else said. “Maybe take the matter up with Hiroshi-san personally?”

  A stocky man sitting at the counter turned on his stool and surveyed the room, mug in hand. His jeans and plaid shirt weren’t any different from what anyone else was wearing, but they were too clean, and the jeans might even have been ironed. “I’ll beat Harvey’s price a penny a pound.”

  His words were not greeted with loud hosannas; the drop in price had been too substantial for a penny a pound to make too much difference.

  “Delivered to the dock in Cordova,” he added, drained his mug and walked out.

  “Who was that?” Kate said.

  “Joe Durrell.” Lamar said. “Independent fish buyer from Anchorage. Middleman for restaurants from Anchorage all the way down to San Diego. First buyer in when the first king hits the Kanuyaq, first buyer out when the last red goes up. He’s not interested in anything else.”

  “Looks like he’s going into wholesale,” Kate said.

  “He does that sometimes. Never by much, just by a cent or two, and there’s always a couple of fishermen pissed off enough to sell to him instead.”

  “What’s he do with the salmon?”

  Lamar shrugged. “Like I said, he’s a middleman for the gourmet fish processing industry. Probably a lot of folks with more money than sense willing to pay top dollar for the first king up the Kanuyaq.”

  “But they won’t be,” Kate said, adding, at his look, “the fish he buys after today. They won’t be the first fish up.”

  Lamar smiled kindly at her. “That’s why they call it marketing, Kate.”

  Kate sat back in the booth. “Right. My mistake.”

  The shock of Tim’s news was giving way to indignation. Four out of five of the men in the room had boat and insurance payments due in September. Three out of five of them would lose their impellers at least once during the summer, two of the five would snag a drifting log, known colloquially as a deadhead, in their gear—or a monster halibut, Kate thought—and rip it beyond repair, and at least one of the five would have trusted his rebuilt engine one season too many, break down and miss out on the remainder of the fishing season altogether. They all went head to head with the IRS every year of their working lives, which bureaucracy failed repeatedly to understand why fishermen had difficulty in making quarterly tax payments on arbitrarily set dates that had nothing whatever to do with when fish were or were not in the Sound.

  And now, with the prospect of the first good run in five years, the price per pound was dropping almost before they’d had a chance to get their nets wet. It wasn’t five minutes after Tim had burst
into the room that the word “Strike!” was hanging in the air.

  A brunette shorter than Kate whose brown uniform was belted around her petite body with as much style as a burlap sack came in the door and spotted Lamar. She waded through the incipient mob to their table. Strong men gave way at her approach, probably due to the sour smell of vomit that emanated from her in a miasmic cloud. It reached the booth well in advance of the trooper herself.

  Lamar looked her over, taking in the stained front of her uniform shirt, and said with more severity than Kate had thought him capable of, “Becky, I told you, you go up to count fish, not watch the trees. Leave the flying to the pilot and you’ll be fine.”

  An expression of nausea crossed Becky’s face, and she swallowed hard.

  “So what’s the story?” Lamar said.

  She fished a slip of paper out of her pocket. “We’re over,” she said, handing it to him.

  Some of the stain had soaked through the pocket. Lamar touched only corners of the paper with the tips of his fingers, and held it as far away as he could and still read it. He nodded. “Way over. Okay then, put out the word. We’re open Wednesday, six to six.”

  He handed the paper back, and Becky folded it and stowed it carefully in the same pocket as before. Kate wondered if it would become part of the official record of this fishing period. She also wondered how many official records were marked with the puke of fledgling fish hawks, trying to reconcile their stomachs with a profession that kept them in the air in a small plane for half of their working lives. It was one way to weed out the faint of heart.

  Lamar’s words were overheard, and on any other day it would have been enough to move the subject off Denton Harvey, the price drop and the incipient strike. Not today.

  Lamar was aware of it. “For what it’s worth,” he said, and adjusted the flat brim of his round-crowned hat just so over his eyes in a gesture worthy of Chopper Jim. “Be seeing you, Kate.”

  She watched him thread his way through the crowd, babycakes face stiffened into as much of an expression of authority as he was capable of with those cheeks, his diminutive sidekick trailing along behind like a limp, smelly tail.