Sea Change

by Diane Tullson

Still deep below the boat, I can see what looks like a massive green disc. “Halibut?”

  “And on salmon tackle. She must not know she’s hooked. Maybe you snagged her in the cheek.”

  My arms are threatening to snap. “How big?”

  “Very big. Over a hundred pounds, easy. Don’t let her see the boat. If she figures out what’s going on she’ll take everything you’ve got.”

  “She’s got everything already. How do you know she’s female?”

  “A hali this size has to be female. Only the breeding females get this big.”

  I look at the net. “Uh, how do we get her into the boat?”

  Sumi rummages in her tackle box and brings out a length of rope. Then she grabs a wooden pole with a nasty hooked end. “We’ll use the gaff like a harpoon. We’ll tie her to the side of the boat and let her bleed out. She has to be good and dead before we bring her in with us. I’ve heard of boats busted up by a thrashing hali.” Sumi whistles and says, “She is one amazing fish.” She stands with the gaff poised like a spear and says, “Ready?”

  The halibut is almost motionless on the end of the line. It’s like she’s sleeping.

  “How can she not know that she’s hooked?”

  Sumi says, “Hook is so light she doesn’t feel it.”

  “So she’s not going to fight?”

  She laughs. “If she wanted off, you wouldn’t be able to keep her on this light line. No one catches big fish like this, not without major halibut gear, and not without a hell of a lot of luck. Not many big halibut anymore, not here. My grandmother hasn’t had a freezer full of halibut in years.”

  “So you’ve never caught a big halibut?”

  She doesn’t answer for a minute, and then she says, “I’ve kept some small ones.”

  My hands are starting to cramp. I say, “I’ve got a camera. Take a picture of it.”

  “Now?”

  “It’s in my pack. Get it and take a picture.”

  Sumi looks at me for a moment and then puts down the gaff. “You’re letting her go.”

  I nod.

  She digs out the camera and takes the picture. She takes another of me with the rod bent almost in two. I try to grin but I’m sure it looks more like a grimace. The halibut is taking every bit of strength just to hold it. I can only imagine what would happen if she fought.

  Sumi takes out her knife. “Reel her in as close as you can.”

  It’s stupid but I feel like crying. I’m exhausted and my feet are numb and I’m letting go the biggest fish ever.

  Sumi leans down beside the boat and then looks up at me. “Are you sure?”

  I’m not sure, not sure of anything. “Just do it.”

  Sumi smiles and cuts the line.

  Chapter Six

  We’ve got enough wood in the stove that the metal sides glow red. I’m wrapped in my sleeping bag wearing everything I own, plus Sumi’s jacket, and finally I’ve stopped shivering. Sumi hands me a mug of something hot, sweet and clearly alcoholic. I’m sure St. John’s First Aid would be thrilled to know she’s using alcohol to treat hypothermia. Still, the drink leaves vapor trails of heat all through my gut and I feel ridiculously happy. Sumi pours the booze from a silver flask, tipping it over my mug to get the last drops.

  I say, “So, no sign of my old man.”

  Sumi looks out the window at the sun, already low. “If he’s not here by now, we won’t see him today. He must be having a good time.”

  That should piss me off but I really don’t care. Sumi turns to the stove and starts a pan for the salmon. I say, “At school we do this thing with salmon. It’s like a crust of herbs. We wrap it in parchment and bake it over a pan of water.”

  Sumi digs out a blob of the ever-present Crisco. “Sounds like work.” She moves the pan to the back of the stove and lays in a fat fillet of coho, skin side down. Then she grabs a bottle of maple syrup and douses the fish. She throws a lid on the pan and sits down across the table. “If you want rice or something, go ahead and cook it.”

  I get up but leave the sleeping bag wrapped around my shoulders. In the boxes at the side of the room I find a carton of rice and something way better.

  “KD! I love KD!” So much for cook training. I grab two boxes of the mac and cheese. “It’s a feast!”

  Sumi shrugs, which I take as an enthusiastic yes, so I pour water into a pot and set it on the stove. “I’d like to be the guy who invented Kraft Dinner.”

  “You’re a simple guy, Lucas.”

  Dinner is remarkably orange: salmon, KD and canned carrots. The salmon is amazing, clear-coated with an amber stickiness from the syrup. We both scarf down two plates, then mop up with a slice of bread. We sit back and groan.

  “What’s the biggest fish you’ve caught with a guest? Before today, that is.”

  She snorts. “You think you caught the biggest fish today?”

  “I did. I know it.”

  She says, “I had a record coho jump right into my boat.”

  “You get a picture?”

  “It jumped back out.”

  “You’re full of it.”

  “No, that’s the way it happened. Then another jumped in, and another. I had to put my arms over my head so I wouldn’t get clobbered. It was like it was raining fish.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Then, right under my boat, the water turned black.”

  “Black.”

  “It was a whale, an orca. It surfaced right beside my boat. It blew and sprayed me with whale snot.”

  “I think we saw the same movie. Did it look at you with one wise whale eye?”

  “It did! Then it dove and it had these enormous tail flukes, it just about swamped me. But that’s why the fish landed in my boat. They were trying to get away from the whale. No one caught another fish that day. They were all long gone because of the whale.”

  “So your guest, maybe he got a picture? Otherwise how can you prove you’re not totally bullshitting me?”

  “There wasn’t a guest. I don’t guide. Your dad says I’m no good with people.”

  “Well, you’re not, actually.”

  She ignores that. “But that night, when I was tying up, the tide was coming in and I spotted something white at the edge of the water, snagged up in some kelp. I had to wade in and get it. It was a whale’s tooth.”

  “Let me guess, it was the one from the killer whale. It gave you its tooth.”

  She grins. “That’s right. It was the whale’s way of saying sorry for scaring all the fish.”

  She’s very pretty when she smiles. I say, “I didn’t know whales lost their teeth. I thought it was sharks that could regrow their teeth.”

  “Well, it was a big tooth. It would have to be a big shark.”

  “Kind of like my dad. Maybe it was my dad’s tooth.”

  She laughs. “Denny is harmless.”

  “No offence to your aunt or anything, but why haven’t they got married?”

  “Maybe they don’t want to.”

  “Maybe he knows he can’t commit.”

  “You’re pissed because your parents got divorced,” she says. “It happens. I don’t know why you’re not talking to him about it, Lucas.” She chews her lip, as if she’s thinking about what she wants to say. Finally she says, “There are way worse guys than your father.”

  I let that sink in while I wait for her to elaborate. But she doesn’t. So I say, “Okay, so you’ve got a whale’s tooth. Is that why you always release the first fish you catch—for the whale? In return for the tooth?”

  “No.” She gets up. From the set of her shoulders I can see she’s done talking. She says, “That’s for my mother.” She leaves and goes outside.

  I drop the crusty plates into the dishpan and pour water over them, which I figure is a good start to cleaning up. Then I go out to the porch. The sun has almost dropped beneath the horizon. It’s cold and feels like it could snow.

  Sumi’s rifle is leaning by the door. I go over and pick it up. The stock is
some kind of wood, burnished like it’s old. I put the rifle up to my shoulder and look down the sight. I imagine a deer, standing broadside, chewing grass. A tree becomes my imaginary deer. I take aim and squeeze the trigger.

  Click. It’s not loaded, of course. I reach in my pocket for the cartridge I found earlier. In the dim light I’m not really sure what I’m doing, but I slip in the shell. I lift the rifle again and take aim at the tree.

  Just then I hear Sumi’s footsteps on the gravel path. I put the gun down and hope she doesn’t see me with it.

  If she does, she doesn’t seem to care. She says, “What would be good right now is another drink.”

  Chapter Seven

  Why would I argue with her? “Might be some in the main lodge.”

  “You want to break into your father’s fishing lodge and steal his booze?”

  “We’ll be careful. He won’t ever know.”

  “Like the tackle room and how you were so careful with the fishing rods?” She laughs. “He’ll know. And anyway, there’s no booze in there. They clear everything out at the end of the season.”

  “Maybe,” I say.

  It’s dark now and I start across the grounds toward the main lodge.

  “He won’t be happy,” she says, but she walks with me.

  I don’t really care how my father feels, but Sumi has to work with him, so I’m more careful with the plastic over the door than I was at the tackle room. I use Sumi’s knife to pry out the staples holding the poly to the doorframe.

  The lodge is dark and it feels colder than the air outside. Sumi pulls a small flashlight from her pocket. We’re in a huge room. Tables and chairs are stacked against the windows. A great stone fireplace lines an entire wall. I spot the bar area, but the shelves behind the bar are bare. “Maybe the kitchen?”

  “I doubt it,” Sumi says.

  She pads toward the back of the lodge, past a glass-walled office. My dad’s name is stenciled on the glass by the door. I say, “He’ll have some.”

  “No he won’t. And anyway, it will be locked,” she says.

  I try the door and she’s right. I peer in through the glass. Sumi hands me the flashlight, and I pan the light over the desk and bookshelves. Everything is tidy, but there’s a mug on the bookshelf. I wonder if it’s his coffee cup from the last day before shutdown and he left it there, the coffee congealed in the bottom of the cup.

  My beam pauses on a series of picture frames on the bookshelf. My mouth goes a bit dry. I’ve stopped sending him a school photo. I’ve stopped going up to Vancouver at Christmas. I’ve stopped answering his emails. But no, these aren’t my school photos. I don’t recognize the people in the pictures. Each frame holds a shot of a guest with a big fish. Some are holding salmon, some are standing beside their fish hanging from the scale. There is a shot of a guy with a big hali—but not as big as the one we got today. Except for the coffee mug, there’s nothing personal in my father’s office. He could have my old school photo, at least.

  “Come on,” Sumi says.

  The kitchen is long and narrow, smaller than the one at school but with nice prep tables. It’s open to the dining area, and everything gleams in polished steel. I dive into the cabinets, rummaging in kettles and stock pots. Nothing has been left except a pail of dishwashing detergent. It’s the same kind we use at school. From deep back on one shelf I see the gleam of glass.

  “Bingo.”

  I emerge with a dusty almost-full bottle of something black. I pry off the lid and take a sniff.

  “Fake Kahlúa. Yuck.”

  It’s cold and thick but has the desired effect. I hand Sumi the bottle. She wrinkles her nose but takes a drink.

  She slides down the cupboard to sit on the floor, holding out her hand so that I join her. She hands me the bottle. I’m not feeling so cold anymore. I take a drink. She takes a drink. I’m not a lightweight at parties, but this stuff goes right to my head.

  Sumi reaches across and takes the flashlight from me. “We don’t want to waste the batteries.” She turns it off and the sudden blackness of the kitchen makes me gasp. She laughs. “Open your eyes.”

  “My eyes are wide open and I can’t see a thing.”

  “Yes you can.”

  I feel her more than see her, like she’s shifted so her face is in front of mine.

  Do I imagine it, or can I smell maple syrup? If I leaned forward just a fraction, would I find her lips? Would she pull away? I say, “Sumi?”

  I swear she is so close that I’m breathing her warm air. But she doesn’t speak. I sense her moving away from me and I want to reach out and pull her back.

  And then I can see her. It’s like she breathed into the darkness and made it settle more lightly. I can see the outline of her hair and now the shape of her face. She’s looking at me and I sense that she’s smiling. I say, “Okay, yes, I can see.”

  She laughs and then rests her head on my shoulder. “You’re more like your father than you know.”

  “My father?” I shudder. “That’s a bit of a buzz kill.”

  She hands me the bottle. “Your dad doesn’t touch this stuff.”

  I say, “No? Maybe it interacts badly with his male enhancement drugs.”

  She says, “Yesterday, when he lost it with me? He wasn’t pissed about me killing the deer. He taught me how to shoot. My grandmother gave me the rifle. It’s an old .303—used to be my grandfather’s. She grew up in Japan and never learned to use a rifle. Anyway, the first time I tried, I managed to shoot a buck. But I nailed it in the flank. I was gone for two days tracking the deer before I could finally finish it.”

  I’m tempted to ask her how she got the deer out of the woods, that far away, but something tells me she didn’t. And that it would bother Sumi, having to leave the deer.

  She says, “So your dad, he showed me how to hit a deer clean in the lungs and heart.”

  “And you did. You got that deer with one shot.”

  “It helped that it was so close. I’m actually a terrible shot. Your dad knows that too.”

  I lean closer to her. Her hair smells good, like fresh air.

  She says, “What he was pissed about was me shooting so close to the helicopter.”

  I sit up. “You mean you might have hit the helicopter?” I imagine the fiery carnage. “You could have killed us!”

  She takes the bottle back from me. “And ruined a perfectly good helicopter.”

  “Jeez, Sumi, you have no idea how happy I am that you killed that deer.”

  She wipes her mouth with her sleeve. “He’ll get over it. At least now my grandmother has meat for the winter.”

  “My dad might get over it. I’m not sure I will.”

  She gets to her feet and stretches. “Come on, let’s get out of here while we still can.”

  I struggle to follow her, but it’s dark, and on the way out I trip over a serving cart, which makes Sumi laugh really hard. At the front desk we snag a stapler and do a passable job resealing the poly around the front door. The staples are half the size of the ones we took out, but so long as no one gets too close, it looks like it did before.

  The sky is clear and the moon hangs huge and yellow. There’s barely anything left in the bottle. Sumi sways a bit, or else I’m swaying, it’s tough to know. Then she stops still. “Listen,” she says.

  I don’t hear anything at first. Then, faintly, I hear the clunk of a chain turning.

  Sumi’s eyes get big. “My deer!”

  Chapter Eight

  “The bear’s got my deer!” Sumi starts running toward the generator hut.

  “Shouldn’t we get your gun?”

  She doesn’t stop to answer, so I stumble across to her cabin and grab the gun. I can barely see her, but the moon lights the path. I feel the booze in my legs, but I’m not about to be left out here alone. I catch up with her.

  I say, “What are you going to do if it’s the bear?”

  She’s breathing hard. “First I’m going to take back my deer. Then I’m g
oing to kick the bear’s big butt. Then I’m going to run away just a bit faster than you.” She holds her finger up to her mouth. “Quiet now.”

  “We’re going to sneak up on it?”

  She doesn’t respond, just creeps toward the corner of the generator hut.

  I’m beginning to question her judgement. Still, I follow her, my hands sweaty on the rifle. At the edge of the building she stops and motions for me to stay still. Then she tips her head around the corner. Quickly, she motions for me to join her.

  The deer is swinging from the chain. So is the bear. The bear is clamped by its teeth onto the deer’s antler. It would be funny except it’s a very large bear.

  Sumi bends to pick up a rock. Whooping, she jumps out and hurls the rock, nailing the bear in the ass. It grunts as if it is startled and drops to the ground. Sumi starts screaming and waving her hands, jumping up and down. The bear sits back on its haunches, looking at her.

  “It doesn’t seem too scared, Sumi.”

  “Jump up and down.”

  I jump up and down. Also I shout, scream and do something like jumping jacks.

  The bear lowers its head. Then it gets onto its feet. Its head bobs back and forth as it sniffs the air. It’s looking right at me.

  Sumi throws another rock and I hear it thud on the bear’s skull. It shakes its head and takes a step toward us.

  My voice cracks. “Why don’t you shoot it?”

  She glances at me, then at the rifle. “Give me that thing.” She swings the rifle up and aims it at the bear. I cover my ears and wait for the shot. But she doesn’t shoot. Instead, she says, “Bang.”

  Amazingly, the bear runs. There’s the sound of crashing underbrush and he’s gone. Sumi strides over and checks the deer. I’m keeping my eyes on the edge of the forest just in case the bear returns. My knees are actually shaking.

  Sumi hefts the rifle over her head. “I am Sumi the Slayer!” She pumps the rifle in the air.

  I duck out of the path of the gun. “Careful,” I say.

  She drops the rifle to her shoulder. “Like I’d let you run around the forest with a loaded gun.” She aims the rifle at the ground, and it occurs to me she’s going to fire it. She thinks it is unloaded because that’s how she keeps the gun, but I’m thinking about the cartridge I loaded, and I can’t get the words out in time. She squeezes the trigger.