Caribou Island

10

Mark invited Carl on the boat. This was out of pity, since Carl was moping around without Monique. She had taken off somewhere.

So Carl, plastic bag of bagels and veggie-burger patties in hand, shivering in his raingear, waited at 3:30 a.m. under a dull yellow light at the end of the Pacific Salmon Fisheries pier. He looked at boats anchored in pairs in the channel of the Kenai River. The boats and water were twenty feet below him, the river lined by mud banks. He was supposed to get to Mark’s boat and climb aboard. Mark and the owner had come the evening before and slept out there. But Mark had omitted the part about how Carl would get to the boat or even find the right one. The boat was the Slippery Jay, but Carl didn’t know where it was parked.

So he stood under the pier light another twenty minutes until some of the boats in the channel switched on their cabin lights and several started their diesel engines and idled. An aluminum skiff, some kind of tender for unloading salmon, it looked like, since it carried three large aluminum bins, came from upriver. About twenty feet long, with a huge outboard, 200 horsepower, it really ripped along, leaving a wake that glowed white and slapped at the sides of the anchored boats and set them rocking. The sky just beginning to lighten at the horizon under drizzling clouds, and Carl clueless what he should do. He couldn’t just jump in and swim around. He was going to be left behind. He would spend his day here on the pier in the drizzle and eat his veggie burgers around noon, then walk or hitchhike back to the campsite.

Then a young Indian-American woman, as in parents from India, wearing fish boots and dark green rain gear, tromped past and went over the side of the pier down a long narrow ladder toward the skiffs bobbing below.

Excuse me, Carl said when she was about ten feet down.

No answer, so he said it again, louder this time, and cleared his throat.

Yes? she asked, looking up.

I’m supposed to get out to the Slippery Jay somehow. Do you know where it is or how I can get there?

That’s one of our boats, she said. I can take you.

She smiled as she said this, smiled only briefly, but Carl was encouraged and thinking Monique was not such a great find anyway. She was a bit inconsiderate, was the truth.

Carl was grinning, therefore, as he stepped into the skiff. And he made a comic little fuss about getting his last foot over the gunwale. Thanks, he said heartily, standing up straight before her.

Hold on, she said. She fired up the outboard, gunned it, and they shot into the river. Carl, seated just in time, nearly fell into the bottom of the boat, but she remained standing.

Wow, he said, but even he could hardly hear this amid the roar. The young woman kept her eyes ahead on the water. She made a tight turn upriver, zigzagged between several boats, and came to rest suddenly, the motor cut to neutral, inches from the Slippery Jay.

Carl climbed out awkwardly, having to straddle the side of the taller boat and getting rocked in opposite directions. But he did make it without falling in or dropping his lunch.

Thanks, he said.

Sure, she said, then gunned it and was gone.

Why was he here? He stood on the back deck and looked vaguely at the horizon. The question seemed larger somehow than just this boat or this sunrise or Monique or even Alaska. Something about his life, something impossible and dimly urgent, but this effect was probably only from lack of sleep.

Carl yawned hugely at the horizon, then turned around and crept into the cabin area. He put his lunch on the bench in the upper cockpit or steering area or whatever they called it. Bridge? But on a boat this small? Down a few steps was a cooking and eating area, with a small table, some cubbyhole shelves, and an old iron stove with metal rails. In front of this, through another small door, was the sleeping area. He could hear breathing in there.

So Carl sat at the galley table next to his lunch, his booted feet dangling, looked through scratched Plexiglas windows at the sky turning lighter blue then yellowish white, and waited until a watch alarm went off.

Mark said a gruff hello, then Carl said hello also to Dora, the owner, who waved her hand and fixed coffee and had a doughnut. The doughnuts looked suddenly very good to Carl, and he wondered whether he’d get through the day without sneaking one on the side. Other people’s food had always looked better to him than his own.

Soon they were under way, churning out through the channel. Mud flats and eroding cliff banks. The air through here cool and the low clouds in the distance turning orange at their edges.

Carl rode on the upper deck, above the cabin. A steering wheel and controls up here, too. Dora shared the bench seat with Carl and drove in a resigned and preoccupied way that didn’t invite conversation. She called down occasionally to Mark through a hole in the floor and asked for the depth.

Once they cleared the channel and made the inlet, they turned southwest toward open ocean, and several aluminum boats, drift-netters with one large net reel on the back, sped past. Their engines powerful, throaty over the sound of the Slippery Jay. One swooped in close, the pilot waved, Dora waved back, and then it shot ahead.

Gasoline, Dora said. They can do over twenty knots. But if one of their sniffers goes, they blow up.

Sniffers? Carl asked.

Sensors for the buildup of gas fumes in their engine housing. They can pump that air out before they start, flush it with fresh air, but still, if any fumes remain, the whole boat turns into a grenade.

And we have diesel? Carl was only trying to continue the conversation, trying to learn more, but he realized this question sounded pretty obvious and dumb.

Yep. That’s about what we have.

Carl nodded. An entire fleet of drift-netters all around them, at least fifty boats he could see heading mostly in a similar direction but some going north into other parts of the inlet.

How many boats are out here? he asked.

On the Cook Inlet? Almost six hundred, probably, and most of them are out today. Have you steered a boat before?

Little outboards, canoes and stuff.

Well take the wheel, Dora said, getting up. See this compass? Keep us going between this mark and this mark, she said, pointing. The steering’s a little slow, so don’t overcompensate. I’m going down for a while.

Okay, Carl said. Thanks.

So Dora went below and Carl watched the compass and the horizon. He never went straight exactly. He’d drift a little too far one way, turn the wheel and drift too far the other way, then overcorrect again. Turning constantly. The waves only slow, small rolls, the surface smooth, and the only wind of their own creation, and he was high up, with good visibility, the bow below him, so it should have been easy, but there was some kind of current, it seemed, underneath. It did feel like a river, the entire inlet. He tried to watch for logs, also, figuring he was not supposed to run over those.

How you doing up there? Mark called after a while through the hole.

Fine, Carl said.

Good. Just let it have a little play. Then Carl was on his own again, for a long time. He wondered whether he was still going the right direction, and he wondered whether the two of them were taking naps. There didn’t seem to be anything else to do. They could be playing cards.

Almost two hours passed before Mark appeared wearing the bottom half of his rain gear, held up by suspenders. The gear dark green, same as the woman’s had been, and he was wearing the same dark rubber fish boots.

Mark pointed off to the right and slightly ahead. Pukers, he said.

What? Carl asked.

Pukers. Sport fishermen. The cabin cruiser drifting up there, though they probably think they’ve stopped. Going for halibut.

Nice name, Carl said. Does everyone call them that? If I lived here, and I went out sport fishing, would I be a puker?

Mark grinned. Do you cook?

Sure.

Mind fixing breakfast?

So as they reached the fishing grounds, finally, Carl was down in the kitchen cracking eggs. They stopped for some reason, started up and stopped again, then called back and forth, and Carl caught a glimpse of Mark on the back deck letting out the net. The boat rocked tremendously from side to side, far more than the low waves seemed to warrant, so Carl couldn’t afford more than a glimpse.

Mark had wanted all twelve eggs scrambled, and the only bowl was small. As Carl braced himself against one of the counters and avoided falling onto the stove, he tried to keep the bowl full of eggs level in midair, and he scrambled these eggs when he could with his other hand.

Then he realized he had to fry the bacon first, so he held this bowl and kept it rocking level with one hand while he bent down to get the bacon out of the small fridge.

Carl ripped the package open with his teeth then flopped it down onto the counter, where it slid back and forth as he went for a pan. The boat rocked suddenly much harder, and he banged his head against a cabinet. Some of the scrambled egg sloshed over yellow and goopy onto his jeans, where it oozed slowly downward and sank in.

Very nice, Carl said over the roar of the diesel. He held the back of his head with his free hand while he watched the remaining eggs, a little lower now, and kept them rocking.

When Carl had finally gotten a pan on the stovetop, the burner lit, and a few pieces of bacon in the pan, Mark ducked his head into the cabin and yelled, Get up here. I need you to throw fish. Then he was gone.

Carl stood rocking in place for a moment, trying to figure out what to do. Then he dumped the eggs into the pan with the raw bacon, turned off the gas, and hauled out onto the deck.

Jesus, he said. There were salmon everywhere, all over the deck and a few even getting wrapped up with the net in the reel.

Get over here! Mark yelled. He was between the reel and the stern, picking the salmon. This didn’t look easy. As the net came up over the edge, he untangled a salmon until it hung only by its gills, then yanked down hard until it fell out and hit the deck. Salmon all around his feet, silvery and gasping, flopping and sliding in their own froth of slime, blood, and sea water.

Throw these into the side bins! Mark yelled. The engine and the hydraulic reel combined made a lot of noise.

So Carl grabbed fish and threw. But he kept dropping or threw too low, the salmon thudding against the side of the bins and sliding back, and then he slipped and fell onto them.

Mark grabbed him by his collar and yanked him to his feet. Grab ’em by the gills! he yelled. And get out of my way!

Carl moved a few steps and scooped by the gills, which was easier unless they were clamped closed. But most were gasping, their dark red gills exposed and crenellated like seaweed. Their backs darker, greenish blue, like the ocean itself, then silver on their sides becoming white on their bellies. Their eyes large and roving, bewildered-looking. Carl threw as fast as he could. They were cutting his fingers, something sharp in there.