YEARS LATER, I WAS DRINKING AT A BAR IN CHICAGO called the Bowman when an older woman, a nurse, wandered in. She’d just come off a graveyard shift, and she looked exhausted, like she’d survived the worst night of her life. She took a seat next to me at the bar and got drunk fast. Her name was Martha or Marta. “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat” was playing on the jukebox, and she said the song reminded her of northern Michigan, where she’d grown up—the train tracks that ran behind her parents’ house, the ice storms, the wheat field where they’d released the family dog after he bit a neighbor. I have to admit I found her endearing, the way her eyes teared up, the way she fell into nostalgia after just a few bars of music.
“What was it like,” she asked me, “what was it like where you grew up?”
“I hardly remember,” I said. “It’s been so long.”
What I didn’t say was that in Chicago sometimes the smell of the sewer would blow up through the grates in the sidewalk, or the wind would kick up as though spell-cast, snapping banners, swinging traffic lights, and I would find myself back home. The details of that past were just too strong—they refused to untangle from the present. The sour reek of the sewer was the smell of Greene Harbor. The sting of wind was the cold howling through the Strait of Juan de Fuca. The grinning drunks at the Bowman were the men who lined the bar at Eric’s Quilt. The music leaking from the jukebox was my mother’s music, and the nurse crying softly to it was my mother.
THE NIGHT AFTER RICHARD destroyed Loyalty Island, I couldn’t sleep. I got out of bed to see if my mother was in her studio. I’d done this so many times I knew exactly where along the maroon runner to step. It was a minefield, and though I knew it was more than a little childish, I walked an imaginary path that weaved through fallen vines. One hand gliding along the banister, I snuck past the bathroom, under the searchlight moon shining through the hall window, under the hanging spider fern, back into shadows, to the top of the stairs.
I had a method for the stairs too, but I froze a step past the bathroom when I smelled cigarettes. Neither of my parents smoked. I flattened myself against the wall and slid to the floor, nearly slipping as the runner bunched underneath my feet. I knew who was downstairs even before I heard the voices.
“I guess it is that complicated, ’cause I still don’t understand a fucking word.” Don’s voice. “Hank, I’m sorry you’ve had to spend all your time with these lawyers, but don’t talk like one, all right?”
“Basically, Richard is John’s heir for everything,” I heard my father say. “Just like we always knew. If he says don’t fish, then we don’t.”
“And if he wants to sell off all the goddamn fucking everything that we’ve nearly killed ourselves over?”
“That too.”
“How could someone as smart as John have blinders on with this?” Don said. “He must have been the only person who didn’t see this coming all the way from Asia.”
They burst into laughter. “Maybe that’s the wrong way to say it.” Sam North now. “I guess he wasn’t expecting to die so fast. Anyway, everyone’s an idiot when it comes to their children, Don. If you had any, you’d know that.”
“That’s right,” my father said. “Every parent is the fool of the world. We can’t blame John, really.”
“Don, you’re the fool of Canadian Club,” my father said.
“In that case, I’ll have one more,” Don said.
“Maybe you should switch to sake,” Sam said.
More laughter. I inched closer to the banister.
“Maybe if this all does go, I’ll head to Japan. Why not? I could get a couple of porcupines.”
“They’re called concubines,” Sam said.
“No, it’s perfect, though,” my father said. “Didn’t we used to call you needle dick anyway?”
“I know what they’re called,” Don said. “I was joking. But I have to go somewhere, don’t I? What else can we do?”
There was no answer. I heard a lighter flick, and someone—Sam, I thought—sighed. I heard a bottle being uncorked, dishes clinking. I could picture the three of them, elbows on the dining room table, smoke weaving through the chandelier. They were sitting in the exact same place where, just a day before, Richard had told them that the only work they’d ever known was no longer theirs.
I don’t want to romanticize their work because I’ve never done it. But they romanticized it because they suffered for it. They stumbled from their bunks, having slept two hours in seventy, onto decks sheathed in ice, onto twenty-foot seas. They winched up enormous crab pots dripping foam, dredged from the bottom of the coldest ocean. How could each man explain to himself a lifetime of red eyes and frostbitten ears, of knees in salt water, elbows in chopped herring? It had to be part of some larger destiny; the fight to stay awake and alive had to be turned, somehow, from drudgery to heroism.
To venture from the wheelhouse, on the rare clear day when the sea lay as still as glass, the live wells plugged with red king crab that would sell for $1. 50 a pound—already negotiated with the cannery—was, to them, as good as it would ever get. To pilot a steel ship that slid over fathoms of ocean churning secretly below was art. Out there you had the freedom to do anything. Out there, who could tell you otherwise?
But their freedom came with risk and was shaped by consequence. Don Brooke lost his index finger at the knuckle. My father shattered his ankle on the second day of tanner season and had to grimace through two weeks of constant work. But it was Sam North who’d suffered the most. My father told me one night the true reason Sam had temporarily quit fishing. If I ever breathed a word of it to Jamie or anyone else, he said, I’d be red-assed and out on the street.
Normally John Gaunt’s boats were worked exclusively by men from Loyalty Island, but that year one of the crew learned of a family emergency just before they shipped out of Dutch Harbor, and was obliged to fly home. They filled his slot with a kid named Ramo who’d arrived in Dutch Harbor with a duffel bag and half a diploma from USC. By the time they’d motored out fifty miles, Ramo was green with nausea. Seasickness was permissible, even an omen of good luck. But Ramo refused to work through it. Apparently it wasn’t even the rollers that dropped his stomach; it was the smell of the bait herring.
The crew a man short, Sam left the wheelhouse to take shifts on deck. With one of the eight-hundred-pound crab pots—a steel frame the size of a double bed, covered in nylon mesh—in the launch, Sam crawled in to bait it with the same herring that had driven Ramo into fits of nausea. But his fingers were numb from the cold, and, at forty-five, he was no longer built for baiting. He lagged an extra ten seconds, more than enough time to invite calamity.
A rogue wave—a real monster—washed the deck, knocking everyone off their feet and sending the crab pot over the rail, Sam along with it. The pot was weighted to sink five hundred feet to the bottom of the Bering Sea, and as the door shut behind him, Sam realized that he would be coming along.
How many times have I seen this in nightmares? Liquid ice flooding Sam’s boots, sleeves, and nostrils. His fingers curling around the mesh of the pot. The pressure after only two fathoms beginning to rattle in his ears, the vertigo of black water and weightlessness. He tries to pull his hands away but his fingers are claws in the net; the electricity in his blood and brain is already slowing, freezing.
The pot races downward, wrapped in violent foam. Sam’s hands still won’t release, and he writhes against the mesh. He feels the shallowness of the pot, the narrowness. In the black rush of water the pot feels, of course, like a coffin. He’s deep enough now to have been buried four times over. The pressure is in his sinuses, his inner ear, and his temples; it seems to curl up his fingernails and earlobes. Somehow, amazingly, he resists the temptation to scream and to breathe. He imagines he can smell the herring as its slotted plastic jar floats beside him like a streamer on the back of a bicycle. The herring that will be a siren call to armies of king crab, three feet wide, scuttling across the bottom of the sea, pincers raised and swinging like lanterns. Sam pictures himself dead, after a two-day soak. The pull of the hydraulic winch, the pot rising, breaking the surface, banging against the Cordilleran’s steel hull. He is unceremoniously dumped onto the deck, his body swollen by seawater, half devoured to white bone.
His feet stab the dark, and, miraculously, the pot breaks open at the bottom—or the top? His fingers finally release; he pulls back his arms. He slides from the pot into open water and is tempted to breathe it like air. He wants to kick his legs, but is afraid they might only take him deeper. He spins, trying to locate himself in the gauze of bubbles, and spies the buoy line, nearly phosphorescent in the darkness. With the line to orient him, he can see the pot rushing away like a train.
He’s down fifty, maybe sixty feet. He follows the buoy line up, hand over hand, starving for breath as his ears pop again and again. He bursts from the water and has just time enough to draw a three-quarter breath before a breaker hurls him back down. When he comes up a second time, the ship is nowhere to be seen. He doesn’t expect to live, but is grateful that he won’t die caged on the ocean floor. He gropes for the buoy, brings it to his chest with both arms.
He wakes below deck, wrapped in blankets, shaking and vomiting. He can hardly feel his body but figures the crew would not be gazing at him with such openmouthed amazement if he were dead.
When Sam returned home, he told my father and only my father that he couldn’t face the Bering Sea again. And perhaps he did suffer from vertigo afterward, but it was the vertigo of those moments twisting in the dark of the crab pot, locked in a terror he would never be able to describe or forget.
I was about to slink back to my room when I heard Sam speak. “There are still two things we can do.”
My father spoke then. “We can try to convince Richard to go out with us. I still think if he just got a taste of it he’d feel different.”
“That’s not going to do any good,” Sam said. “Let’s go over it again. For Don’s benefit.”
“If you want to do something for me, shut up,” Don said.
“What does the will say?” Sam asked.
“Everything goes to Richard. How many more times do I have to say that?”
“And if Richard is somehow unable to assume ownership?”
“Then the estate, including the company, goes into probate court. Meanwhile the company goes to a trust, to be run by the trustees for Richard’s benefit until he can take ownership. I guess I’ve read the thing enough times to memorize it.”
“Never thought you’d memorize someone else’s will?” Sam asked.
“Better than my own,” my father said. More laughter.
“And what if Richard never takes ownership?”
“I don’t know. They’d have to find an heir, and far as I know there’s no close family, so it could take years to sort that out in court.”
“And during all that time we keep fishing.”
“Yes.”
“Who are the trustees?”
“You sound like the lawyer. A few people. The three of us, for example. The lawyer. But what’s the difference? All Richard has to do is show up and sign his name and none of it matters anymore.”
“But he hasn’t yet,” Sam said.
I could see the light from the dining room sloping up the staircase, but little else. I felt like Jim Hawkins in Treasure Island, hidden in the apple barrel, listening to John Silver and the rest of the pirates plan mutiny. Except I’d known the pirates my entire life, and I had no one to report the news to. I was a spy for myself only. I closed my eyes so I could hear everything.
“Sam,” Don said, “you better slow down. We’ll find work. Ours aren’t the only boats in Alaska.”
“If you think you’re just going to show up in Dutch Harbor and have someone hand over the keys to the wheelhouse, best of luck.” Sam spoke with a blade in his voice. “And what did you just say, Don? You said ‘our boats.’ Those are our boats, not some prick’s. You want more reasons? What did John always teach us about safety? Even if some of our guys do find work up there, fifty-fifty chance it will be with some cokehead. How many of our guys might die over the next five years? The next ten?”
I strained to hear my father. I imagined he must have been talking too quietly for his voice to carry up the stairs.
“It would be easy,” Sam said.
“It?” Don asked.
“People die out there all the time. They never find them.”
I held my breath. Finally I heard my father’s voice. “We need to talk to Richard. I think he’ll get it eventually. He has to.”
“Not everyone needs it like us, Hank,” Sam said. “In fact, most people don’t.”
“Hey, none of us need to stick it to your wife, but we do it anyway,” my father said.
“I appreciate that,” Sam said. “Christ, have any more of that Glenlivet? This whole thing hurts, doesn’t it?”
“The bottle’s upstairs,” my father said. “I had to hide it from Don at the party so he could get through his story. Only guy I’ve ever met who gets whiskey dick and whiskey tongue.”
Using their laughter as cover, I streaked back to my room.
THE NEXT MORNING my doorknob squeaked and my footsteps thumped, the blue notes of an empty house. Around noon the phone rang. My mother was in Seattle, shopping. There was a Malle film playing at the university. She’d catch the last Edmonds ferry, she said. I kept her talking. What’s the movie about? Who stars? Same director who did the one with the blonde walking in the rain? I was buying time, trying to decide if I should tell her what I’d heard the night before. Through the line, the bustle of Pike Place overpowered her curt answers, but at least I knew she was telling the truth about where she was.
“I would have come with you,” I said.
“I know,” she said. “I just needed a little time by myself.”
“Why?” I asked. “Why do you need so much time by yourself?”
There was a crash, maybe someone dumping ice. I knew the pay phone. There was a bakery and a lunch counter a few steps away, a vegetable stand just beyond that. They had the best apples, my mother said.
“That’s a question I don’t think I can answer.”
“Try,” I said.
“Well. This morning I woke up thinking about that green screen next to John’s bed. I kept thinking about how his blood pressure fell little by little until he was dead.”
“Did you even see that?” I asked.
“I went to get you out in the yard, remember? And the door was locked when we got back. So, no, I didn’t see it.”
“Is that my fault?”
“No. No, of course not.” She took a loud breath. “See, I told you I can’t explain it. Anyway, I’m late. I’ll tell you about the movie after I see it.”
My father was gone all day too. He didn’t call. I went to bed that night without speaking to another soul. But I planned to listen.
In the old days, when John, Sam, and Don came to our house for dinner, I always knew there was something under the surface of their talk that I wasn’t allowed to hear, something that emerged after my mother had sent me to bed. I felt like I’d finally caught some of it the night before, but what I’d caught was terrifying.
I set my clock radio for 1:12 a.m. Why I chose this particular time, I don’t know, but I felt a strange satisfaction when the glowing green numbers hit. I turned the volume on the clock radio up all the way. I put earphones on and slept on my back, still as a vampire. I awoke to a brass section playing James Brown on the oldies station.
I crept through the hall to the top of the stairs. From the living room I could hear my father’s voice swinging behind a screen of noise. The same James Brown song played, then faded, as if someone had turned down the volume.
“If you see another way, then tell me,” he said. “I’ll listen. I promise I will.”
I dropped to all fours, my left hand slipping on the fallen brown leaves of our spider fern. I hadn’t heard my mother come home. Had she missed the Edmonds ferry?
The volume spiked again. Not James Brown now, but the Platters’ “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” The singer’s voice seemed to shred the tinny speakers before the volume plummeted.
“Help me,” my father said. “I need help.”
Something crashed to the ground. A chair? From where I lay on the landing I could see only the top third of the room, the brass curtain rods, the highest bookshelf. I noticed a blue hardback I’d always thought was called Exotic Washrooms. From my angle on the landing I saw that the title was actually Exotic Mushrooms. Below, in the dining room, my father was talking loudly, but the radio was up again. The music was maddening, distorting every syllable. Midway through the bridge the song snapped off, leaving only dry, clear voices.
“I’ll smash that fucking thing, I promise. Who is ‘him’? Who are you talking about?”
“John,” my mother said. “You shouldn’t be asking me about Richard, you should be asking me about John. You’ve heard what people used to say. Isn’t that why you’re telling me this?”
The muscles in my back tightened. I looked at the blue book spine and read: Exotic Mushrooms, Exotic Mushrooms, Exotic Mushrooms.
“Are you crazy? I’m thinking about that now?” my father said. “Rumors don’t bother me. I know too much about you.”
“What do you know? What do you think you know?”
“Let’s leave it.”
“I’d love to hear what you know about me,” she said. “I’ve been wondering for years.”
“That you’re moral, I guess.”
“Would you like to know how moral I am? I used to daydream about the chances that you wouldn’t come home one spring. There’s your permission if you need it.”
The blood felt thick behind my eyes. The volume on the radio spiked again, but cut out before I could tell what was playing. I heard another crash, metal skidding across tile. For a while no one said anything. I heard a door open, the broom scraping the kitchen floor. When they spoke again they both sounded exhausted.
“Did you really?” my father asked.
She didn’t answer.
“Okay,” I heard him say then, “okay, okay, okay,” almost like a chant. His boots tapped the tiles, and I could picture him pacing back and forth, saying okay, okay, okay, patting his pockets to make sure he had everything he needed before he left for work.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have said that. It’s just that I’m afraid of everything and I feel like I can barely lift my arms.”
“There’s something wrong with you.”
“Everyone knows that. You should’ve paid more attention.”
“I have. Paying attention and talking about it aren’t the same thing. But now we have to talk about it.”
Without warning, my mother stepped from the dining room into the living room. She stood at the foot of the stairs, her red hair in a bun, her dress the color of lead, belly heavy, feet bare. She saw me immediately but said nothing, just raised her hand, palm down, and flicked her wrist. Get out of here. I couldn’t read her expression. Her eyes were slits. Her face had the warm rawness of winter Sundays I remembered from early childhood, when we’d both slept late and awoken to a deserted and smoke-colored day.
THERE WAS NO PRAYER of sleep. I listened, ear to keyhole, ear to the slit beneath my door. Not a sound, but I didn’t give up for an hour. Still, I couldn’t bring myself to open the door. At two, I got back into bed and closed my eyes and, as I’d done often that year when I couldn’t sleep, pretended to ride the rocket.
I’d read a book about Voyager and in my mind I followed the satellite’s route. I’d read that Voyager was sent to space with a golden record aboard, bearing greetings in fifty-five languages, many of them dead. I’d hear those recordings in my mind as the rocket plunged through cold darkness—alien, unknowable, but no longer wordless. “Hello, hello,” I’d say in Quechua, the language of the Incan Empire. But Voyager was pathetically slow. I’d shoot past cue ball–smooth Io and the lonely crust of Triton in seconds, not decades. Beyond Pluto the sky opened like a garden. I’d recognize the Horsehead Nebula, the Crab Nebula, and the Cat’s Eye Nebula from photographs I’d seen in my mother’s books, colors that grew from the darkness as if on stems.
I returned to these images, I think, because they brought back one of my earliest memories. Night on Black’s Beach. My father wrapped me in his coat during a red tide. We sat on dry kelp, watching the plankton shine, their bioluminescence smearing a bright sea onto the dark one. We shared a cup of hot chocolate as the cold light crested and fell.
But that night another memory of Black’s Beach bled in. My father and I were skipping stones. He had just hit a seven, and I was trying to keep pace. I took a running start. My stone only skipped once or twice, but my momentum spun me a quarter turn so that I was staring up the beach. About fifty feet ahead, two naked legs poked from the valley between a drift log and a gray boulder. I knew instinctively that the man was dead.
My father grabbed me by the arm and told me not to move. He jogged down the beach and, when he reached the man, put one of his own legs up on the wood and bent down as if to speak. When he returned, he squeezed my shoulder. “Don’t worry,” he said. “It’s nobody we know.”
Around three, I heard footsteps in the hall. The door opened and my mother stood in a wedge of yellow light.
“Cal,” she said. “You’re not sleeping.”
“What were you talking about?” I asked.
She stepped past the blue windows and stopped a few feet from my bed. There was sweat on her forehead, and she seemed out of breath.
“You know your father wouldn’t actually hurt anyone. Don’t worry about what we said.”
She stepped closer and sat down, her hands around her belly.
“What do you mean? Who would he hurt?”
She’d never come into my room in the middle of the night. She’d never sat there in the darkness, and there was something unnatural about it, something staged.
“But what you do isn’t the only important thing,” she said. “What you think, what even seems possible, those things are important too. I’m not saying I’m better than him.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.
She looked out the window and frowned, though it was dark and there was nothing to see. “I’m going to Santa Cruz. Do you want to come?”
She looked at me as if I could give her an answer. What could I possibly say: Yes? No? Those words didn’t mean what they’d meant before.
“We’ll stay with Meg. It could be fun.”
“For how long?”
“We’ll figure that out.”
“I’d go to school?”
“We’ll figure that out too. We’ll figure everything out.”
“Have you thought about this at all?”
“It’s all I’ve thought about.”
“Have you thought about what I would do?”
Her skin was red and raw, her expression as blank as the marquee of an abandoned theater. In that moment, all I wanted from her was distance. I’d heard my father in the kitchen. He hadn’t mentioned hurting anyone. He’d been trying to tell her something about Richard, about the future we were all supposed to share, and she had been unwilling to listen. He was the one who needed help. Not her. And I needed help, not her.
“I don’t want to go,” I said. “But I think you should go think about him dying wherever you feel most comfortable.”
“Cal.”
“I heard what you said.”
Maybe I spoke too loudly, or maybe, in the half-light of the room, my face said something more than my words, because she leaned away, then shot up from the bed as if electricity were running through the blanket.
“People say things they don’t mean,” she said. “Maybe you are too.”
But I had meant what I’d said. And I didn’t say anything else.
AT SEVEN I was within my rights to open the door. It was morning. Still, I listened at the keyhole for a full minute before walking a hall of land mines. The light in the living room window belonged more to dusk than dawn. The harbor roiled in the distance under clouds like knots in the sky.
In the dining room a green bottle of Glenlivet stood empty on the table. I examined the bottle, a tiny chip on the rim, the label curled at one corner. The cap was turned up, the cork pointing like a hitchhiker’s thumb.
The basement door was closed. Oil stains marked the space in our driveway where the Chevette was usually parked. The kitchen was spotless. The house roared like an empty shell.
I pulled Exotic Mushrooms from the shelf. My father had promised to take me to collect, but we’d never gotten around to it. I decided I’d study the English and Latin names of as many of the mushrooms as I could, but I got only as far as Amanita ocreata, The Destroying Angel. The cap was centimeters wide, the stalk salt-white.
I flipped back to the beginning of the book—was in the process of flipping the glossy paper—when my father appeared at the head of the stairs. He took one heavy step, then another, his hand fumbling for the banister. He wore yesterday’s shirt buttoned to a V at the collar. But what had happened to yesterday’s pants? His pale legs were naked up to his boxer shorts.
He missed a step, crashed down two more, his hip creaking the railing. His eyes were closed, his lips parted like a wall-mounted fish. He wore white ankle socks. There was a hole in the left sock’s heel, and only a stirrup of cloth held it to his foot.
He was headed for his tiki chair, and in my mind I saw him collapse into it and scrape the sleep from his face. I saw myself—Exotic Mushrooms on my lap, my elbows on the book—saying, “Dad, what the hell has been happening? I’ve tried to figure it out like you said, but now I just want you to tell me.” I saw him look at me somberly, respecting the gravity of my question, appreciating the moment I’d chosen. His mind was still foggy, and at such an early hour everything seemed simple enough to explain. He had to give me a little credit. “All right,” he said. “Here’s the thing.”
But none of that happened. My father bent over the chair and pulled up the seat cushion. He pulled out his dick, exhaled, and began to piss on the chair. He put his hands on his hips and arched his back. Eventually he wiped his hands on the tail of his shirt and dropped the cushion back into place. I might have tried to stop him, had I been able to move.
I WOKE HOURS LATER when my father flung open my bedroom door, rippling a wake across the bookshelf. He took a step into the room, but only one, as if he’d forgotten why he’d come. His shirt was the same, but he’d found pants somewhere, and boots. He’d shaved his beard.
“You’re awake. Good.” But he didn’t look pleased. “Good. It’s almost three.” He played with the wristband of one fingerless glove. He put a hand to the back of his neck.
“You and I are leaving today,” he said.
“You don’t know how to say anything,” I said, rubbing my eyes, trying to snap my mind back from sleep.
My father’s stare was like a steel bar. He shifted his weight to his back foot. He took off one of the gloves, and for a second I thought he might slap me across the face. “Thanks for letting me know. I’ll look into it when I get back from Alaska.”
I shot up in bed. “Since when?”
“We’re leaving today. All the boats.”
“Richard?”
“He’s coming with us,” my father said. I studied his face. It was a vault.
“How did you change his mind?” I scissored in the sheets, trying to leap up. He raised one hand, still gloved. The tips of his fingers were red as tongues.
“That’s a fine question, but I have a lot to tell you and no time.” He took a step toward the bed. “Don’t you have a chair?”
“Just the beanbag.”
He sank into the blue lump on the floor where, years before, he’d chronicled the life of Captain Flint. “It happened too fast,” he said, “so you’ll have to pack fast.”
“I’m going with you?”
“No. You’re going to the Norths’. You’re going to stay there until I get back. I can’t leave you here alone.”
I felt my eyes burn, my neck start to sweat. “What about Mom?”
“She’s on her way to Santa Cruz,” he said.
“Didn’t she?” He seemed to consider this for a moment before focusing his gaze back on me. “Listen, I’m sure you’ve noticed she hasn’t been all that well. You’ve noticed that, haven’t you?”
“Yes.”
He looked at me hard. “Do you want me to tell you what she said?” I didn’t answer, but he went on. “She said she can’t stand to be in this place anymore, not even if I’m gone. Is that how you feel too?”
“No.”
“Good.” He smiled, but his smile was sad. “We decided together. We decided that she shouldn’t be here alone, with the baby coming. She wanted to go right away. She really didn’t tell you?”
Yes, she had asked me to go, and, yes, I’d told her I wouldn’t. But the conversation already seemed like a dream. I’d been sure I’d wake the next morning to find her sitting at the kitchen table, that I’d hear her music from the basement at least. Without meaning to, I jumped out of bed, took a couple of steps across the room and froze. “She wouldn’t have been alone,” I said.
“Grab some pants,” my father said.
I was in tighty-whiteys, a plum-size rip in the left side below the elastic. As I scooped my jeans from the floor and fed them my legs, my father looked at me with a puzzled expression. Not displeased or angry exactly, but confused, almost amused. It was an expression that never failed to fill me with cold shame. How can I be more like you if you don’t help me? I wanted to ask this question but never did, because sometimes he did try to help me, and that was even worse.
Three years before, the boats had come back heavy. The season was highline. There would be a summer with money for everyone. You could feel the vibrations of this everywhere, in the pitch of voices in line at Belinda’s Deli, in the popcorn at the Orpheum Theatre, in the starch in Mrs. Zhou’s laundry. Money, as my father used to say, is only energy, energy that—in this case—began as worms and mollusks on the floor of the Bering Sea. Energy that passed to the bellies of king crabs, to the bellies of steel ships, to the bellies of steel banks.
My father brought home a VCR for my mother, a luxury in those days, along with an armload of the movies she loved by Kurosawa, Antonioni, and Bresson.
“Anything for me?” I asked.
“Get in the car,” he said. “You’ll need this when we get to the Laurentide.” He handed me a fillet knife in a black plastic sheath.
We parked in front of the Laurentide’s slip and climbed the steel ladder. The deck had just been washed down; fresh water beaded the rails. My father breathed in with his nose and slapped his thighs.
“I’ll be back in a minute,” he said, grinning, “so no ideas about joyriding, okay?” He went below deck, returning a few minutes later with an enormous king salmon slung over his shoulder. Before I could say anything, he swung the fish by its tail and whacked me in the arm. I slipped on the deck and went down hard. “That’s my present?” I asked, but my disappointment was faked. We were both laughing.
We set the salmon on the worktable in the stern. My father took a white handkerchief from his back pocket, folded it in half, and tied it around my forehead. “We don’t want sweat in your eyes. Now, the scalpel, Doctor.”
He unsheathed the fillet knife and presented it to me on the flats of his hands. I’d seen him do this a hundred times. I rolled up my sleeves and took the knife as two brown pelicans flapped onto the rail, tucking long beaks against their breasts.
“Gills first, right?” I asked.
“Yeah, now careful. I can’t take you home with a finger like Don’s.”
I dug the blade into the salmon’s head, just behind the gills, sliced vertically, and then drew the knife toward the mouth. The flesh was as cold as the water it had come from, but the knife glided. Above me, gulls screamed. The gills, on the inside, looked like maroon clay. I tossed the scraps overboard without looking, the way I’d seen my father do it. I could hear wings beating, a chorus of shrieks and splashes. I flipped the salmon and attacked the other side.
“That’s it, Doctor,” my father said. “Belly-dance him, now.”
I looked up at a swirl of feathers. More birds had descended around the table. They swooped and dove, coming close enough that I could feel a rush of air.
“What are you waiting for?” my father said. “Not too deep. Don’t slit the stomach or these birds will go crazy.”
Bits of scale clung beneath my fingernails. My hands felt covered in sticky snow. I wiped a palm on my doctor’s bandana and pointed the tip of the fillet knife just below the gills.
“Stay on the beam,” my father said. “Steady hands. Watch the stomach, now.”
I knew the trick was to go just deep enough to flay the flesh without messing the organs. But as I sliced, I imagined the gulls alighting on my shoulder, felt their feathers under my nose and their beaks in my ears. The knife clung to a scale and I pushed smoothly through, not sawing, just the way I’d seen him do it. But too deep. I was carving through the stomach. I knew it, but I couldn’t stop. I looked up at the swirling white birds, and when I looked down again my hands were covered with black needlefish. The needlefish poured from the stomach, hundreds of them, over the cleaning table and onto my pants and shoes.
I dropped the knife and stumbled three or four steps back, brushing at the needlefish as if they were sparks. I think I managed not to cry out. The gulls descended, shrieking, stabbing the fish, puffing their wings. They tore at the deck, all white feathers and black eyes. Then they fell silent, mouths too full to shriek, and the deck churned as if under white clouds.
My father shooed three gulls with his boot and stooped for his knife. “All right, wash up before you get in the car. I’ll finish this off.”
“Let me help you,” I said.
Three years later, standing in my bedroom, I said it again. I meant to demand that he explain the night before, that he explain how my mother could have left like that. I meant to accuse him of a crime, but different words came. “Let me help you. Let me go with you.”
As he smiled, the skin around his eyes crinkled like cellophane. There was a square flesh-tone bandage on the side of his neck that I hadn’t noticed before.
“I don’t think so,” he said. “Richard on board’s too much already. Anyway, I’m almost sure you have school this year.”
“Did you really change Richard’s mind?”
“No,” he said. His mouth shrank as his eyes carved mine. “I didn’t have to. He never wanted to sell. I took your mother’s advice, and I drove Richard around this morning, to the Orpheum and Zhou’s and Belinda’s, and explained that it was up to him to keep them alive. He finally understood that.”
“But why? Why now?”
As an answer, he gently cuffed the back of my neck and rubbed it with his rough thumb.
MY ARMY-GREEN DUFFEL, too stuffed to lift, thumped each step down to the living room. Exotic Mushrooms was back in its place on the top shelf. The tiki chair was nowhere to be seen. My father walked in from the kitchen, gulping water from a frosted Coca-Cola glass. The dirt under his nails looked like ten black moons.
“I need your keys,” he said.
“What for?” I asked.
“I need to leave an extra set with Marty at the office, in case.”
“In case of what?” I asked.
“You know what.”
I dug my house key from my pocket. It was terrible luck even to allude to not coming home, no matter the circumstances.
“Anyway, you won’t need to come back,” my father said. “Looks like you packed the whole house.” He slung the bag over his shoulder with an exaggerated groan, and we headed outside. It was raining, so we stood under the eaves with our backs to the wall.
“Jamie’s mom is coming to pick you up,” he said.
“You don’t need to wait.”
“Betty will be here any minute.”
Too much had happened. I couldn’t keep any one thought in place. I could have asked a hundred questions, but, though the silence was unbearable, talking about anything important seemed pointless. There wasn’t enough time.
“I was reading your mushroom book,” I said. “Ever know anyone who died from eating Amanita?”
“No.” He scratched the bandage on his neck. Then, as if doing his best to be a good sport, “But I’ve known people who’ve died for dumber reasons.”
The tips of our shoes were shaded with rain. The Norths’ blue Skylark pulled into the driveway, wipers blinking. My father dumped my bag into the backseat, clutched me briefly with one arm, then dumped me into the front.
“The road’s slippery, Cal,” Betty said. “Seat belt, please.”
Metal tongue. Plastic snap. When I looked up again our front door was closed and shrinking behind a screen of rain.
JAMIE’S ROOM was unusually neat and spare—a blond wood table for a desk, a bunk bed, a gleaming hardwood floor—but every inch of wall was covered in movie posters. Some I recognized—Jaws, Blade Runner, The French Connection—but most featured wild-eyed swordsmen with black hair and white robes. Betty had told me not to bother knocking. I lived here now; I should act like it. Those words weren’t as comforting as she probably hoped.
Jamie was bent over his desk, but he turned when he heard my duffel thud against the floor.
“Meissenier, chelat te’jeneten cormer.”
“What?”
“That’s the new language I’ve been working on. It sounds like French, right?”
“What did you actually just say?”
“Hmmm, well, I haven’t gotten that far.”
He popped up from his desk and grabbed my duffel, sliding it across the hardwood, halfway under the bed. I felt a sudden, scalding hatred for him, though I must have at least had a dim sense that he had nothing to do with my problems.
“I’m just messing around,” he said, “but I should—actually we should—make a language. It could be like a project while you’re my guest.”
I’d never punched anyone, not really. I imagined my fist sailing like an arrow to a bull’s-eye. I imagined standing splay-legged over an unconscious ball of Jamie on the floor. Instead, I landed only a glancing blow on Jamie’s shoulder. He spun away, his face more surprised than hurt. I lunged shoulder first, catching him from the side, just below his armpit. We tumbled toward the bed. He ducked to avoid the top bunk and his feet slid out from under him. My cheek smacked the floor and seemed to stick there like batter to a griddle. I didn’t recognize what my arms or legs were doing and could barely tell them from Jamie’s. I felt him pull away, rise to his feet. I caught him by the knee and beat it with my fist. He took another step—tried to—and crashed to the ground. I took one more halfhearted shot before collapsing onto my back.
“J’emaine tulouse confitette.” Jamie sat up, panting.
“What?” I said.
“I think I asked why you did that.”
But I couldn’t even explain why to myself.
I LAY IN BED that night, as I did every night for the next few months, staring into the eyes of Sigourney Weaver dressed as Zuul from Ghostbusters. But in the darkness I saw Richard Gaunt’s face as he emptied the suitcase onto our dining room table. For all the frenzy of the broken glass his face was still. It was the face of a man killing his sick dog. How could Richard have planned a performance like that if he’d intended to go back on it? I tried to picture him on the Laurentide, heading north to Dutch Harbor.
Jamie’s father had seemed to suggest killing Richard. But even so, my father had said he’d talk to Richard again, he’d convince him. And now it seemed that this was exactly what he had done. Maybe Richard had just changed his mind. Why not? Did I know enough about him to say that he couldn’t have? I knew more about my own father. I knew he wasn’t a murderer.
But did my mother know that? “He would never hurt anyone,” she’d said.
I thought of her, standing in my doorway the night before, sitting on the edge of my bed. She had to have known my father was leaving the next morning. She’d known, and she’d gone anyway. Had I driven her away? I’d meant to be cruel. I wished I could take back the words I’d said to her in the half-light, and yet now that she’d left, I meant them more than ever.
I stretched my legs over the sheets. They were soft, worn thin. I could almost feel Jamie’s old sleep under my back. The blanket was made of mothy wool, too warm for the weather. New sheets, new blanket. New space. Everything was new.
Every minute or so a spot of light darted onto the far wall. I heard pages turning in the bunk below.
“Penthouse or Playboy?” I asked.
“I’m usually strictly Hustler. But lately I’ve been more into Film Comment,” Jamie said.
“Right at home,” I said.
“How’s that?”
“My mother subscribes to Film Comment. What are you reading it for?”
“Sometimes they have stuff about samurai movies. Will at the Orpheum told me about it. Actually he said I should read it when I got older, but I didn’t want to wait. That’s funny. I didn’t think anyone else on the peninsula had a subscription.”
“It’s like you and I were switched at birth or something.”
“Okay, asshole.” I heard Jamie turn the next page, the next and the next. “Where is she anyway?” he asked. “Your mother?”
“Santa Cruz? I don’t really know.”
“You don’t know? That’s beastly.”
“Who are you, fucking Roald Dahl down there? I’m sure your mother will be in here to breast-feed you any minute.”
“I doubt it,” Jamie said quietly. “She’s out.”
“She’s probably in her room. But when Daj leaves she gets this way.”
“Daj?”
“My dad. When he leaves for the season she just sort of goes out. You’ll see soon enough, I guess.”
It was true that few people in the world seemed as scattered as Betty North. She had willowy, freckled arms that fell toward her waist like extensions of her dark blond hair. Her eyes were like windshields on a bright day. My father had often encouraged my mother to strike up a friendship with Betty. They had a lot in common, he said. Beauty, sons the same age, smelly and insensitive fishermen for husbands. “Get together and complain about us,” my father said.
“I spend enough time alone,” my mother answered.
“Be fair.”
“Try making eye contact with her sometime,” my mother said. “It’s about as easy as catching the gaze of a lighthouse. It’s like she’s phasing in and out of the room.”
“Is that hard?” I asked Jamie from the top bunk. “About your mother?”
“I don’t really have anything to compare it to.”
“Did you ever talk to your dad about it?”
“Are you serious?”
“Well, anyway,” I said, “thanks for the bed.”
“It wasn’t up to me,” he said.
“It was a sad fucking surprise for me too.”
Jamie clicked off the flashlight and lowered his voice. “A surprise, yeah. I didn’t think Richard would ever go to Dutch Harbor. Did you?”
Of course. Jamie was wondering the same things I was. But let him wonder. I didn’t need his help, and he wouldn’t get mine.
“You’ve never changed your mind about anything?” I asked.
“Not after dumping a shopping cart’s worth of pickled pig organs and bugs onto a dining room table. There was also that thing about selling everything. Did you catch that part?”
I sat up, nearly bumping my head on the ceiling. “No, I hadn’t thought about it. In fact, where am I? This doesn’t seem like my room. I don’t have all of these gay posters. How did I get here?”
“Sarcasm is the refuge of the weak,” he said. “John Knowles.”
“Jamie North is a whiny little bitch. Everybody.” He didn’t respond, so I went on. “I’d bet you anything that all Richard wanted was for people to beg him, for our dads to beg him. That’s the kind of guy he is. How could he actually sell everything? It’s been in his family for like a hundred years.”
As I spoke the words I began to believe they were true.
MY MOTHER CALLED TWICE the next day, a Friday. The first time I pretended to be sleeping, but the second time Betty cornered me in the kitchen and handed me the phone. She’d made breakfast that morning, and the room still smelled of bacon smoke. The walls were cluttered with framed photographs—family portraits, Christmas-morning candids of Jamie as a toddler, yellowing shots of dead relatives—pair after pair of investigating eyes.
Without putting the phone to my ear I pressed the receiver back into the cradle. I turned to Betty, half expecting her to slap me—maybe I deserved to be slapped. Her smile was sympathetic, but her eyes were tired. She lit a cigarette with a match, shook it out, and kept shaking it after the flame had died. I thought of her among the crowds in Greene Harbor in September, waving until long after the boats had disappeared in the distance. Whistling, with two fingers in her mouth, a shrill, sad sound.
“Why did you do that?” she asked.
“I can’t talk to her,” I said.
Betty nodded, as if she understood. “Maybe she’d do the talking.”
“Will you tell her?” I asked. “Will you tell her I can’t speak to her?”
Betty had freckles under her eyes that made her look younger than she must have been. I wondered if she had taken all the photos. A series of landscapes hung in the living room—storms and mountains and fields—but there weren’t any of Alaska.
“Oh, honey,” she said. “Your mother would never forgive me.”
The phone rang again.
“I can’t forgive her,” I said.
“Hear what she says before you decide.”
“I’ll try,” I said. “Could I do it alone?”
As soon as the kitchen door swung shut I picked up the phone and hung it up again. After another moment I took the phone off the hook and went out the back door. The streets downtown were deserted, as they always were in early September. Still I kept walking, all the way to Greene Harbor.
Sleepy birds lined the pier. The big ships were gone. I could almost see the impression they’d left on the water.
WE STARTED SCHOOL that Monday. On Wednesday we came home to find Betty standing at the kitchen counter, drinking white grape juice from the carton.
“I’ve asked you not to do that,” Jamie said.
She glided to him and put the back of her hand to his cheek. “I’ve just had some bad news from Don Brooke,” she said. “Richard Gaunt went overboard in the Inside Passage. They’ve called off the search.”
I wasn’t upset or surprised. I only wished my own mother had been there to tell me the news.