The Alaskan Laundry (2 page)

A tremor moved through her as they turned onto a gravel road. Trees were on one side, a river on the other. Drops from the branches thudded onto the bright carpet of moss. She looked deeper into the woods, over the plush green mounds along the forest floor. “Do bears actually eat people?” she asked.

Fritz reached for the pouch in his back pocket. “Not if you got your trusty sow stopper.”

He took out a gun, big and silver, the kind men with sideburns used in those crime movies her father loved. She stopped walking. “Relax,” he said, easing it back into the case. “I'm not holding up gas stations.” But all she could think was
GUN
, in the hands of this tired-looking man with blueberry juice staining the tips of his whiskers. Who had a sticker that said
KILL
on the bumper of his shitty, rusted-out pickup.

“Kid, it's for protection,” he said in a soothing voice.

Thorns snagged her jeans as they picked their way along the sandy bank. Scrubby dim beaches with stalks of flattened, sodden grass stretched out on the far side of the stream. Screeching gulls, white as paper, wheeled against the dark sky. The sight of water comforted her, how it curled behind rocks, shadows of stones beneath the rush. One of the stones freed itself from the streambed and darted upriver. A few others followed. With an intake of breath she realized these were fish, thousands of fish, finning in the current.

“There's your smell,” Fritz murmured. “Dying salmon.”

She watched, stunned, as a gull took a couple of steps in the shallows before jamming its beak into the stomach of a fish carcass. Orange eggs spilled into the current. Tara cupped a hand over her mouth. A grotesque-looking creature, backlit, tore a strip of flesh from a salmon struggling in its talons. It swallowed the meat in gulps, head cocked in her direction. This was an eagle, she realized, not much smaller than the brass statues outside the central post office in Philadelphia.

“Pink salmon. We call 'em humpies,” Fritz said. “Males like that”—he pointed to a fish with a hump along its back—“it'll be your job to toss them down the chute. Females we give a whack on the head with a stick of alder, slice open the stomach, and shuck out the eggs.”

She put a hand up. “Hold on. Cooz told me this was a
hatchery.
Like we're
hatching
fish, not killing them.”

He gazed at her, his melon of a head tilted to one side. Behind him the eagle lofted into a tree.

“How about you hold that thought until tomorrow,” Fritz said.

But tomorrow suddenly seemed far away. Right now she was thinking of getting back on that ferry, zipping up in her sleeping bag, and snuggling beneath the heat lamps. Far from this gun-toting man, these zombie fish decaying on the banks, blood-hungry bears, and prehistoric birds.

“So if the females are killed, what about the males?” she asked, ignoring his comment.

“We get a few studs to spray semen over a bucket of eggs. And the rest, like I said, go down the chute. Which dumps”—he ricocheted one hand off the other—“right into my crab pots. Skookum setup. Makes for great stuffing come Thanksgiving.”

She bit her lip. The question of whether she'd make it to the holiday hung in the air. This man was challenging her, she decided, some manner of Alaskan hazing. A dull anger lit up beneath her breastbone. The last thing she needed was some fat fuck of a boss ordering her around. If she wanted to, she could be in New York City, by Connor's side, in less than a week. She could reassess. Make a new plan.

When they returned to the parking lot she saw the bright brake lights of one last car receding into the boat. She stood by the flatbed. Her shoes were sandy and damp. Fritz heaved himself into the bench seat.

And then, across the water, behind a number of smaller islands, a thumbnail of sunshine along the rim of the volcano. Just like Mount Etna in the photos her mother had shown her, a dark cone to guide the fishermen of Aci Trezza home each night. Above her, clouds opened to a patch of blue.

“Call those sucker holes,” Fritz said. “For the suckers who think it's about to get sunny.”

She looked away, leaning into the truck window. Among the squished muffin wrappers and Styrofoam coffee cups, stretched out on the bench, was a hefty white dog with a black and gold streak up his back.

“This here's Keta,” Fritz said. The dog peered up at her with clear brown eyes, his whiskers twitching. The smell of mildew and tobacco and wet fur in the truck was almost worse than the dying fish.

Fritz hooked his thumbs into his suspenders. “Listen, Tara,” he said, staring ahead through the mud-streaked windshield. “I sure wouldn't think any the less of you if you got right back on that ferry. Save us both a lot of trouble.” She waited, listening to his heavy breathing. “Your cousin Acuzio, he was here, what, ten years ago? Long enough to forget what the winters are like, and the sting of hard work.”

He was right. Cold sky, the coming winter, the nauseating smells, even this lumbering, weary man—
I don't need this. Not now
. If she didn't go crawling back to Connor—and part of her wanted to, to explain that this was all some awful mistake—she could at least find someplace dry. The Southwest. Santa Fe, even, where Acuzio was working. Get a job scooping ice cream. Find a boxing gym. Train in the afternoons. Just be alone and get her head on straight.

“I should add,” Fritz said, rubbing his eyes, “that the last thing I need this fall is someone dragging ass at my operation. We got production goals. It's hop-skip, and I sure don't take well to slackers—especially as we start prepping for next year's run.”

The heat beneath her breastbone spread. She thought of her father, at the foot of the stairs, mustard cardigan tucked into his sweatpants, calling her a spoiled brat. How dare he. She had grown up walking each morning to the family bakery, switching on the tiny incandescent bulbs of the Marconi's sign, rolling dough, cleaning display cases, wiping down the aluminum cladding on the storefront. Maybe she hadn't given work at the bakery her all over the past year—but after what had happened . . .
Spoiled brat, my ass.

The dog perked up as Fritz keyed the engine. The ferry horn blew. Her anger grew hot in her chest. And there, at the far end of the flame's heat, something new. Quieter, reassuring.

An attendant stretched a chain across the pedestrian entrance, as if to say, No, you're not crossing these thirty-five hundred miles back to Philadelphia. Not yet.

She opened the door and got in.

AFTER SPENDING
most of the muggy Philadelphia summer in Connor's room, scooping water ice during the day, raging about her father at night, she couldn't take it anymore. The “it” being herself, subsisting on Wheat Thins and chive cream cheese, hardly getting out of her torn sweatpants, taping episodes of
The X-Files
to watch over and over, showering only when she and Connor started sleeping together. She had thought the sex would help—and it did, briefly. But after the rush of blood and warmth she only felt emptier. She wanted to disappear, like the dot when she turned off her TV, reduced to a point. To reanimate on some different planet, find some new sun to orbit. Connor tried to help, going out to fetch another box of crackers, a block of cream cheese. If she heard once more that he was there if she needed to talk, she thought she might scream.

One day in early August, while Connor was at his job bricklaying, she woke up barely able to catch her breath. At first she thought she was having a heart attack, or her lungs were shutting down. The walls seemed to close in. She panicked. That same day she tracked down her cousin Acuzio Marconi in Santa Fe.

She remembered his stories about working in what he called the Last Frontier. Catching salmon with his bare hands, running into grizzlies, working at the hatchery, then a fish processor. “Place is huge!” he said. “Instead of America it should be called Alaska and Its Forty-Nine Bitches.” Her father at the far end of the table, silencing Acuzio with a glare.

“Are there girls too?” Tara asked, from her chair beside her mother.

“If they're born there. But it's a man's world, shows you what
you're made of.”

Afterward, as they did dishes in their burnt orange and avocado Formica kitchen, her mother shut off the faucet and took Tara by the shoulders. “This young man, your cousin, he don't know nothing. Alaska, it is like where I come from, where these”—her mother held up her hands and spread long sudsy fingers in front of Tara's face, her nickel-sized medallion dangling over her breasts—“these are how you grow strong.
Si?
It doesn't matter what is here.” She patted between her thighs. “
Capisce?
”

When she was in fifth grade Tara did a social studies report on Alaska. She glued eight stars onto purple construction paper, coloring them in with the yellow highlighter her father used to mark late orders at the bakery.

“No, that can't be right,” Sister Delaney said when Tara taped a cutout of the state over the rest of the country. Its borders stretched from Canada to Mexico, from Rhode Island to Los Angeles. But it
was
right, Tara insisted. Alaska, she announced proudly to the class, could absorb more than two Texases.

So that horrible day in August, when she was so desperate to leave the city she could hardly breathe, Alaska came to mind. “Cooz,” she said, a cloud of wood dust rising as she dropped into Connor's couch. “Help me out here.”

“Aren't you going to college or something?”

“I was, to Temple or CCP, but things got fucked. Didn't you work on some island? Can't you find me something? Cleaning houses, it doesn't matter.”

“Tara, it ain't no rolling cannolis up there.” Over the phone she could hear screaming, kids at a motel pool, perhaps. “I'm telling you, T. It's about as many people on that island as the Italian Market on a Monday, you feel me? I mean, bears try to chew your brain for fucksake.”

Bring it,
Tara thought. As far as she could get from the clogged gutters of South Philly, the burn barrels, Oldsmobiles sliding past stop signs. As far as she could get from her father—that was where she wanted to be.

A few days later, Acuzio reached her before a shift.

“Hey. I heard what happened. You and your pop talking yet?” he asked. “I heard—”

“Did you find me a job?” she interrupted.

“Dag,” he said, his voice going soft. “I'm just so sorry. I mean, I know your pops explained. I was on the road for the wake, and . . .”

Over the past year Tara had perfected her response to this sort of awkward condolence: silence. She was beginning to discover that she could use this to her advantage; just let the quiet echo until you got what you wanted.

Acuzio sighed. “So this guy Fritz, pissy dude with a good heart. He said he could use a hand at the hatchery, starting at the end of September. No overtime. Only other condition is you stick around for the year.”

“Done,” she said. “You tell him anything about me?”

“Just that you boxed, and could keep up. But I'm tellin' you, he's grumpy as a garden gnome, and you already got two counts against you.”

“What,” she laughed. “I'm a girl, that's one. And the other?”

She could hear him chuckling on the other end of the line. “That island's gonna turn your head around, little cuz. That's about all I can say about that.”

She thought about times in the boxing ring when she had been hit so hard, she thought her head might twist off her spine. “It sounds perfect,” she said.

What wasn't perfect was telling Connor two days before she left. Connor, who had held her hand in third grade to cross Broad Street. Who played Jesus in the Stations of the Cross in fourth grade, and let her color red squiggles across his forehead for the blood of Christ. Connor, who asked her out in ninth grade and who, when she broke up with him after her sixteenth birthday, sent flowers. Connor, who took her in after she fled her father's house, then became her lover. And now she was sitting him down after a long day on the scaffold, his hands spattered with dried mortar, to say she was leaving in two days for Alaska.

His features tightened. The furrow above his nose took on shadow. He wasn't like her father. He didn't rage. In fact, he didn't say much of anything.

She knew it was cruel. But it was time to change her life. And Alaska was the place she'd do it.

TARA WAS SILENT
as they turned out of the ferry terminal parking lot.

“As I said before, you got two main roads on the island. Think of them like eagle wings. This one here's called Chinook Way. Then you got Papermill Road on the other side. Main Street in town with the Russian Orthodox church—call that the beak of the bird—library down by the water, where there's payphones. Only place you get lost is the woods.”

Chinook Way hugged a mountain to one side, and dropped off to the ocean on the other. Islands tufted with trees rose from the water, the surface rustled dark by the wind. There was a newness, a scrubbed quality to the rock faces pushing out from the trees, even the mottled surface of the ocean. Her lungs drank in the clean, moist air. It felt like a place where anything could happen.

They drove into a cloudbank, creamy white outside the windshield, the silence in the cab broken by the steady click of Fritz's blinker. He pulled into a parking lot and stopped the truck at the top of a ramp leading to docks.

“This here's the main harbor. Just to get you situated.”

Below was a mishmash of boats of all shapes and sizes, bobbing in their parking spots. “See that big old dark one in the distance there, at the end of the docks? That's a tugboat, where one of my workers tried to hide the other night after getting himself in trouble at the Frontier Bar.”

When her eyes found it, black smokestack visible behind the masts and poles, a jolt ran through her. Thick-set, powerful, like the tugs she had watched with her mother on the Delaware River, jockeying barges of garbage upriver. She had to fight the urge to get out of the truck and inspect it more closely.