They found my daddy a few miles off Dutch Harbor, floating face-down in the splintered ribcage of his fishing boat. The only thing left alive in the wreckage was the radio beacon in his survival suit. With the insurance money, Uncle Harvey and I bought him a nice casket — steel, to keep the bugs and water out. We put my daddy into the ground this morning and then came home. We didn't know what else to do.

  Before long, Harvey is staring at his bottle like a dog staring at its favorite fetch toy. I hear a light tapping, then something starts pounding the hell out of the trailer. Harvey finally breaks his stare. "Damn, that's loud."

  I watch hailstones bounce off the window, waiting for the hairline crack in the corner to blossom into a spider web of broken glass. Outside, there is still blue in the sky. Harvey takes a slug of bourbon and sucks air through clenched teeth. He clears the back of his throat. "Guess I'll be staying here now, looking after you."

  "I can take care of myself," I say. "Always have."

  "I figure your daddy would want you to be with family."

  I figure Harvey's tired of living out of his Ford, but I know better than to say so. He's always stayed with me whenever daddy went fishing, but since I started working at the processing plant, I'm hardly ever home anyway. "Got any cigarettes?" I ask.

  He snorts. "Hell no, and even if I did, I wouldn't give you none."

  "You could've just said no."

  "What the hell you want to be smoking for anyway, at a time like this." He slouches deeper into his chair and shakes his head. I catch a whiff of him, not quite masked by Brut after-shave, and slide the window open for some air. I don't know how a man builds up a sweat just sitting.

  "What the hell."He heaves himself up, the straps of his unbuckled overalls sliding down his gut, and slams the window shut. "Gonna catch yourself a cold like that."

  I don't want to argue, so I lie back on my bed and close my eyes, listening to hail beating down like God's fingertipsdrumming our roof.I feel Harvey's eyes on me and hear his breath whistling through his nose. Every few minutes his lips smack as they break suction from the bottle.

  "Your daddy used to roll his own cigarettes," he says, finally.

  "I know."

  "Rolled them real good and tight, like Tootsie Rolls." Harvey laughs, quick and quiet. "Mine, they look like hell. Burn like it, too." He stares down at his thick hands, fingers wiggling slowly like giant grubs exposed to the sun. He stretches and pats his stomach. "Your daddy might still have some tobacco somewhere if you want to look through his things. We ought to sort through it sometime anyway."

  "Forget it," I say. It doesn't seem right to root through the man's belongings. "Found his liquor quick enough though, didn't you."

  Uncle Harvey's lip curls and he looks me up and down out the corner of his eyes. "You don't know anything, boy." He takes another swig and looks away. Outside, the hail has become sheets of frozen rain and blankets half the window. Everything is white and silver and glints in slices of sunlight. It's like looking through a busted kaleidoscope.

  Suddenly I'm tired of the constant ping of ice off the roof, the stale air, Harvey's breathing. "I'm getting out of here," I say, tugging on my boots. "Might as make some money instead of sitting on my ass all day."

  "You do what you want," he says. "Always have, right?"

  I think about slamming the door on the way out, but I'm too old for that sort of thing.

~

  It's only forty degrees in the fishery, but sweat drips down the crack of my ass and vapor rises from the sides of my rubber overalls. I bust my butt because it makes the shift go faster and quick workers get moved up. I wanted to work the nets on my Daddy's boat, but he insisted I wait until next year, when I'm finished with school.

  Right now I'm a Slimer, the lowest of the low. You stand in front of the slime tanks all day, hands in ice-cold water, scraping the salmon's body cavity for membrane and popping out blood balls with your thumb and forefinger. The membrane's easy. It slides out like wet tissue paper. Popping the blood balls, though, is a bitch. It's like squeezing butterscotch candies out of their wrappers while wearing thick, neoprene gloves. Your hands get so numb and swollen by the end of the day that you have to shovel your food down because you can't hold a spoon right.

  I'm hoping to get moved up soon to Gut Runner or maybe Header. The pay's the same, but at least you stay dry and at the end of the day you can eat like a decent human being. If you work hard enough, you might make it up to Inventory Control, which means walking around all day with a clipboard in your hand and a pencil behind your ear. They usually save those jobs for the college boys from the Lower Forty-Eight, though. Like you need all that schooling to count boxes.

  High above me, speakers wrapped in plastic to protect them from the moisture pump out some kind of geezer rock. I think it's Skynyrd, because Harvey listens to that crap all the time. The layer of plastic muffles the sound and the blown-out speakers vibrate from too much bass but I can't help jamming to the music. Otherwise, it's the morbid symphony of the processing plant: the constant spray of water flushing guts to the ocean, the schunk!schunk!schunk! of machines beheading fish, and the electric pop of flies flitting into the bug traps.

  I keep thinking about those exploding flies. You'd think they'd figure it out after a while, but they can't help themselves, I guess. They see that strip of neon-blue light and they have to go for it, even though their brothers are all lying dead on the tray below.

  The gutting machines dump a steady stream of fish into the slime tanks and we grab for them like it's candy from a piñata. The salmon look sleek and strong when they slip into the water but then theylose momentum and roll to their sides to expose the pink gash of their gutless underbellies

  Slime water splatters on my face and I jerk back from the tank, my eye stinging like hell. I almost wipe it off with the back of my hand until I remember I'm up to my elbows in water, blood and membrane. I try to wipe it with my shoulder, but can only reach my cheek.

  Some idiot across the tank is cracking up.

  "Oh, sorry!" says the new girl next to me. She angles her shoulder towards me and says, "Here, use mine."

  She's wearing a heavy cotton sweatshirt which is about the stupidest thing you can do because they soak up water like crazy. Right now, though, I'm grateful for it. The sweatshirt is soft and does the job. Her hair smells like apples.

  "Are you okay?"

  "Yeah, I'm fine. Shit, that stings."

  "I'm so sorry," she says, grimacing.

  "Forget it. Just try not to splash anymore, okay?"

  A few minutes later, she's talking my ear off about how she can't believe she's in Alaska. And she's still splashing.

  "The thing I like best," she shouts over the noise, "is that you can really find yourself here, you know what I mean? It's just so beautiful and peaceful."

  That's because at the end of the season you're out of here, I'm thinking. For you, this is like a damn vacation. Every summer I hear that crap about finding yourself and I don't need to hear it again. She doesn't know any better, but I don't want to be the one to tell her how in the winter it'll be pitch black twenty hours a day and there'll be nothing to do but drink and piss your name into the snow. Might as well let her enjoy her little vacation. So I just say, "You're pressing that fish too hard. You're gonna crack the ribs."

  She looks at me like I've got a leg growing out of my forehead,so I focus back on the slime tank. A minute later I sneak a peek. She's staring at a fish carcass splayed open in her hands and Skynyrd is wailing something about being free as a bird. She seems lost in thought, full lips pursed as if she's finding herself some more. Like that dead fish holds the answers, or something.

  I figure what the hell, she's kind of cute. My mind whips around for something clever to say, but all I can come up with is, "So where are you from?"

  She looks up with a big, crooked smile that makes me look away. "Illinois."

  "You go to school there?"

  She nods and flings a string of membrane behind her. "University of Chicago. Just finished my first year."

  She goes on and on for a while, talking about how great school is and how Chicago is a real city. Her name's Roxanne and her voice goes way up and down when she talks. "How about you, where are you from?" she asks.

  "I've been living here since I was like, eight."

  "Wow, that's really cool."

  I look into her face to see if she's being sarcastic, but she's focused on her work. I grope for another fish and jump a little when it jerks back. I have a salmon by the tail and she has her finger hooked through its gills. We play a little tug-of-war until I finally give up. She gives me a wink and digs into its body cavity.

  "So why'd you move to up here?" she asks.

  I don't know what to say. It doesn't seem right to just lay everything out to someone you don't know, but I don't want to lie. Fortunately I don't have to say anything because the forklifts honk their horns to signal the end of the shift and like everyone else, I'm dying to hose myself down and get the hell out of my rain gear because after a twelve-hour shift your body creates its own microclimate inside that monkey suit. The odor clings to you like a goddamn barnacle.

~

  Walking home at the end of a shift always feels good. The sleet has stopped and the air is cold but sweet. I walk down the spit towards town, trying to glide on the thin layer of ice coating the rough asphalt. I hear the scrunch of footsteps behind me, and it's Roxanne, jogging to catch up. When she gets next to me she slips a little, and I catch her by the elbow. She puts a hand on my shoulder to right herself.

  "Careful there," I say.

  "How's the eye?"

  "I think I'll make it."

  "Poor you," she says,with a magnificent pout. "Here, let me see."

  I bend towards her and open my eye wide. She puts a hand on my cheek and gently pulls up my eyebrow with her thumb for a better look. "It's still a little red," she says. Her breath smells of peppermint. "So hey, you never answered my question."

  "Huh?"

  "Why you moved to Alaska."

  My ears still ring from the noises of the plant but our footsteps on the ice seem deafening. "You first," I say. "Why'd you come out here?"

  She shrugs. "It's someplace different."

  "That's it?"

  "Well, sure. Just hopped on a plane. No big deal."

  I lift my eyes from the pavement.The streetlights and the mist make everything look like the old movies they sometimes show at the Community Center, and in the harbor, the boats bob and rustle like race horses on the night before a Derby. "So what did your folks have to say to that?"

  "I'm in college now. They can't tell me what to do anymore." She laughs. "They weren't very happy."

  She stops before the little bridge leading to town and we turn to face each other. She points her chin to the bluff behind us. "Well," she says, "this is my stop."

  "You live up on Hotel Hill?"

  She nods. We watch the silhouettes on the hill weave between a maze of tents and campfires. "You want to come up for a bit? I mean, only if you want to."

  She looks good standing in that pool of old movie light. It makes me feel like I should somehow sweep her off her feet. Laughter and the clink of bottles trickle from the Hill. I can picture the college boys up there, drinking beer and thinking that living in a tent and wearing flannel shirts and growing a beard for a summer makes them real men. "No, thanks," I say. "I really need to get back home. Take care of the eye, you know."

  She laughs. "Well, okay. Good night, then."

  As I cross the bridge, I can't help but wonder what kind of parents would let their eighteen year-old daughter come alone up here, just like that.

~

  When I get back home, Daddy's things are spread out across the rug like he's preparing for a trip. Harvey snores, misshapen, a lump in the corner. I don't like the idea of him digging through my Daddy's stuff, though I guess he's as much family as I am. Daddy's pouch of Drum tobacco is on my bed, resting on a pack rolling paper. Sunk deep into my pillow is the old Colt .45 with a soft oil rag next to it. My Grandpa had used it for bear protection long ago, then passed it down to my daddy. I guess it's mine now.

  Its weight surprises me every time I pick it up. Finding a box of rounds on the floor, I dig my fingers through the cool, greased metal casings. I ease a bullet into the chamber. It slides home without a sound. I close it up and give her a spin, just like the Big Wheelon the Price is Right. Harvey's completely out, no doubt helped by half a bottle of Daddy's bourbon. He'll probably still be sleeping when I'm up for the next shift.

  Harvey taught me to shoot when we first moved here. We'd gone out on a fishing charter and landed a big old halibut, a two hundred pound lunker. That thing was flailing around like crazy on the hoist, the boat creaking as it rocked. The captain handed Harvey a .38, and Harvey passed it down to me. My daddy didn't want me to touch any firearms until I was grown up, but Harvey always thought it was best for children to learn about guns from family instead of from television. "You do the honors," he said. "Just line up the sights, boy, and squeeze slowly. And don't forget to breathe."

  So now I breathe, sighting down the barrel at the expanding and contracting lump in corner. I remember staring at that hanging halibut, its huge, flat body blocking out the sun as its thrashing slowly weakened. Staring at the strange eyes set on the same side of its head. The gun's recoil shot up my arm as petals of red bloomed from the hole where the bullet had passed.

  I open the chamber and see the bullet is two spaces from the firing pin. I drop the bullet back into the box and set the gun on the rug with the rest of his belongings: tattered photos of my mother and their letters to each other, wrapped in a bundle and tied with frayed twine; leather-bound journals stuffed with loose papers and envelopes until the spines broke; wooden cigar boxes with little metal clasps and hinges, rusted and chipped with age. They're all mine now, all his memories and artifacts. All the things he'd either kept hidden from me or I didn't understand now lie before me like an offering.

~

  Three boats carrying half a million pounds of Pink and Coho salmon come in this morning, so we're going to be hauling ass all week and there'll be plenty of overtime. The smell of fish and blood is so heavy I can taste it like iron in the back of my throat. The flies swarm and feed on the fish. When they're full and bloated, they lurch towards the electric light like they always do. Occasionally one gets stuck on the trap and bluish arcs of electricity flicker and buzz until it falls off, smoking.

  Roxanne and I get promoted to the packing department. We're Sleevers; our job is to shove frozen fish carcasses into plastic bags and send them down the line. It's quieter and drier than processing, but it's also colder. I remind Roxanne not to lick the fish because her tongue might stick and she kicks me in the shin.

  I'm glad we're in the same department because it's nice to have someone to talk to. To be honest, though, I'm not really sure why they promoted her. She doesn't work that hard, and she has a habit of staring off. When she gets like this, I send some of my fish down her line so it doesn't look like she's falling behind.

  During break we sit together at the picnic table in the double-wide serving as the rec room. Today she's quiet, staring out the window towards the mountains beyond the sound.I don't want to disturb her, so I stare into my mug and watch the white spiral of cream swirl and dissipate as I stir. There's only a few weeks before the season ends and I'm starting to wish I'd taken up her offer to hang out with her up on Hotel Hill. She looks away from the scenery and focuses her eyes on me in a certain way, like she has some kind of new idea but doesn't want to say what it is. It makes me nervous but I pretend not to notice.

  "You ever want to just go away somewhere?" She finally asks.

  "Like where?"

  "I don't know." She massages her palms and stretches her fingers, stiff from work.

  I take a sip from my mug, watching her through the veil of vapor that rises from the coffee. I cradle the mug to warm my hands.

  "What do you want to be?" she asks, suddenly.

  I set the mug down and empty another packet of sugar into it. "What do you mean?"

  "What do you want to do with your life?"

  "What do you want to do?" I ask, rolling the empty sugar packet between my thumb and forefinger like a miniature cigarette.

  "I want to be a marine biologist."

  I nod and wiggle the sugar packet between my lips.

  Roxanne pulls the paper from my mouth and puts it out of reach. "That's part of the reason I'm up here," she adds.

  I smile at her with the corner of my mouth. "It's is a funny place for that. I mean with all the dead fish and stuff."

  It's not exactly what I was looking for," she says, "but I love just being here. Alaska, I mean—not the fishery." Her nose crinkles and wiggles slightly when she talks. "You have it pretty good up here."

  "Shit," I say. "I don't know about that."

  "So what do you want to be?" she asks again. She puts her hand over mine. "Seriously."

  A funny feeling, tentative, in my head and gut. Like a silk scarf circling inside me, drawing tighter until the idea comes. "I want to go and make, I don't know..." I feel heat rising to my cheeks. "...make movies or something." I look up at the clock to see if our break is up. "I guess that's kind of crazy,"

  Warm breath curls from the corners of mouth as she smiles and I have to laugh, because it looks a like a she's got one of those little handlebar mustaches.

  "No, I can totally see that," she says. She leans back a little and folds her hands behind her head. "I think maybe you need to go somewhere else for a while."

  "We should probably punch back in."

  She rises and leans over the table. "Maybe you need to get away from what you're comfortable with and see what's out there."

  "It's not like I'm all that comfortable with this place."

  "You know what I mean."

  "Yeah, I guess." We walk in silence to the packing department. As I hold the door for her an idea hits me. "Hey, you ever been to the salmon spawning grounds?"

  She shakes her head.

  "We should go there", I say. "Next day off, Ms. Marine Biologist. It's quite a sight. I'll pack us a picnic."

  "Okay, Mr. Fancy-Pants Director."

~

  Uncle Harvey's been out of the house the last few days, probably spending quality time at the Totem Inn. During the fishing season, the sun's out for twenty hours; it just swings around low in the sky all day, a slow-motion yo-yo trick, barely dipping behind the mountains for a few hours. The fishermen come into port for a few days, money burning holes in their pockets, and everybody buys everybody else rounds all day and night. The bar only closes from four to six A.M, when it's dark. You can drink all day without spending a nickel.

  We cut the half million pounds of salmon in four days. More fish kept pouring in. After a couple eighty-hour weeks, we finally have some time off, so I take Roxanne out to the reservoir. I haven't been there for a couple years and am surprised at how beautiful the hike is.

  The reservoir nestles between the Sugarloaf Mountains, and the water sits smooth and bright like a mirror. We wade down a stream and she squeals with each icy step. Next thing I know she jumps on my back and plunges us both under water and this time I squeal. As we stagger out of the stream, sputtering, she punches me in the arm. "You're it!"

  I chase after her, slipping on the wet stones, and punch her back. Soon, we're in a no-holds-barred, "Two Man Enter, One Man Leave" type of free-for-all, splashing at each other like little kids until we're breathless and completely alive and reminded of how cold the water really is.

  Roxanne's teeth chatter and she shivers as she says, "I hope I can come back here someday." And then everything comes back into context.

  Up over the boulders and down the rocky slope we go, both of us a mass of gooseflesh, alternately warmed by the sun and chilled by the breeze. Every quarter mile or so we stop and do a three hundred and sixty degree turn and just look and breathe. I remember Harvey saying how this was the only place in the world he would ever want to die. Out here the air is sweet with wildflowers and fireweed, and I think maybe he and Roxanne are right about this place.

  As we get close to the spawning ground, I tell her to close her eyes. Taking her hand, I lead her to the pool. I check to see if she's peeking, but her eyes are firmly shut. I take in the slight upward curve at the corner of her lips and the way her lashes cast little spiky shadows on her face. I let go of her hand slowly, maybe reluctantly, sliding my fingers against hers and feeling the heat from our connection slowly dissipating. "Okay," I say. "You can look now."

  She opens her eyes and gasps.

  The pool is a living mass of fiery red bodies sliding through the water with a weird grace, a kind of underwater fireworks. Hundreds of spawned-out salmon bump drunkenly into each other, worn out from the upstream journey of thousands of miles. These are the ones that made it, and the journey has transformed them from sleek, iridescent daggers to hook-beaked, blood-red cudgels, still beautiful in their own eerie way. When we look closer, we see piecesof flesh flaking from their bodies. They are like zombie fish, blind and degenerate, single-mindedly working towards their goal.

  Roxanne squats down and swirls her hand through the water. "Oh my God," she says. "You can touch them."

  She swings up to face me, her breasts following the rest of her body a millisecond later. I look away, embarrassed to be caught. She steps up to me with a smile and says, "Okay, now you close your eyes."

  My heart patters and the world turns orange as sunlight burns through the thin layer of eyelid flesh. A few seconds later my lips meet something cool and moist and I gag and spit. Roxanne is laughing hysterically as a salmon wiggles weakly in her hands.

~

  The sun is low and huge in the sky by the time we make it back to town. We're cold and starving and happy. We ramble to the trailer, my arms wrapped around her shoulders like a stole. She knows now about Father and why we moved up here.

  When I open the door I expect Harvey to be gone but there he is, face-down in his bed, the bottle of bourbon beside him on the floor, empty. I try to back away, but Roxanne is like a dropped anchor and I cannot leave. She just stares at him.

  Rolling over suddenly, he clears his throat and snorts. His face is mottled and wet and it surprises me to see he's been crying. For a moment, I don't remember why. He wipes his face, pretending to wipe away sleep, but I can tell he's drunk and embarrassed and surprised to see a girl standing there and I want to tell him it's okay, it's okay to cry for your brother and I think my God, it's my father, and my eyes sting and my nose flares.

  "Henry," he says. "You're all the family I got now."

~

  The next week I take Roxanne to the field outside of town that serves as the airport. Clouds skitter and snag on the mountain peaks and cast huge shadows across the ground. She promises to come back some day and I promise to visit her in Chicago. We both promise to write. We kiss goodbye and I watch her climb up the ladder and disappear into the plane. The engines sputter and the propellers spin, pulling the plane across the gash of airstrip that starts in the middle of nowhere and ends in the same place.

  Her plane lifts and is swallowed by the clouds. A moment later it pokes out into clear sky again, heading east. I hold my arms aloft, imagining the feeling of leaving, and I can't help but picture that plane flying right into the sun and popping with an electric blue arc. But when I think of staying, all I see is the brilliant red of spawned-out salmon, still alive but heavy with decay, and I don't know what to do.

END

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