Far Cry, page 4
I thought the waste was bad that first season. It was nothing to what would come.
* * *
Kit lies in the bow, the skiff drifting on the falling tide. Last time she looked, the jacklight at the far end of the net showed the set following, good and taut. You couldn’t help but marvel at the reach of it: twenty feet deep, nine hundred long. Now and then the slightest tug—not even that, more of a tick. The sound of another sockeye catching itself by the gills.
When she was small, she would play fisherman in the stockroom while Mama worked the weekend rush with Uncle Anders in the store. For a net, she stretched a length of sacking across the floor. The old zinc washtub served as a skiff, but she wouldn’t climb aboard until she’d laid out a whole box of spoon lures, each one a homing sockeye headed for its end. What was it about guiding those glinting shapes across the boards? Skygge rested his chin on his paws and watched, a great grey island. For an occasional thrill, Kit made a shark of her arm and drove it through the school.
Meantime, fishermen crowded into the store. All lineup and no letup, Mama used to say—the sound of them relentless, the week-without-washing animal smell. Mama’s voice, bright and lilting, rose above it all. From time to time she remembered Kit and swept back through the stockroom curtain with a cup of canned milk or a slice of buttered bread. How’s my girl? If too long passed between visits, Kit could always catch sight of her through the curtain’s gap.
Daddy would be in to fetch her later on; she was big enough now to walk beside him down to the docks. There was real work to be done on the skiff. He’d sit her down on the forward thwart while he checked the net, testing every lead weight along the bottom edge, every cork float along the top.
It was easy to tell when he arrived at the store: the men made sounds as he pushed his way through the line. Easy, boys, I’m not buying. Why not come in through the side door the way Kit and Mama did? Kit came to stand by the curtain. Mama was laughing, standing alongside Uncle Anders behind the counter, the dust cloth in her hand. Uncle Anders had the register open. Daddy came up beside the man who had his hand out waiting for change.
“Hi, Frank,” Mama said.
“Hi yourself.” Daddy looked from her to the man and back. Behind him, the lineup quieted. “What’s the joke?”
“Huh? Oh, nothing.”
“Just Carson here,” Uncle Anders said. “Telling tales.”
“Nothing new there,” Daddy said. He was smiling—Kit could see his teeth from where she stood. Mama smiled too, but Kit witnessed the dimming. Like a gull on the wing, flaring then folding, becoming a gull on the dock.
* * *
That first summer in Steveston set the pattern. Come early June, I would drop whatever work I had taken in the city and ride the carriage twenty miles or so out to the Fraser’s mouth. Then came days of labour with Desmond in the boat, off-hours in the bar of the Tolmie Hotel, the stumble back to the bunkhouse along the boards. On Sundays, the long walk out around Garry Point, a breath of clean air if the wind was willing, and a swim.
Steveston dies at the close of season—the boarded-up hulks of the canneries, not a soul in the streets—but while the fish ran, the town was alive all hours of the day and night. People sorted themselves out along the familiar lines—Indian shacks down one end, bunkhouses for the unmarried fishermen, cottages for the family men. The Chinese slitters kept to themselves, except for those white men who gambled alongside them in the China House. There were Norwegians, just as Desmond had said, but I found ways to keep my distance from them, among all the Japanese and Irish, Greeks and Swedes. At times a group of Yugoslavs came in from the surrounding farms, bringing the homey smell of cow shit from the fields. And all that was without a ship in port.
The sight of a square-rigger’s sails always brought the children down to the docks—there was sure to be a monkey or parrot on board. The crews made the most of their time ashore before loading up with cans for the return trip to Liverpool around the Horn. Those nights, the Tolmie felt like a hold full of horses—half-fed and barely watered, penned in the dark for months.
On the night the Godwit came in, Steveston was already overfull—four years after the run of ’93 and everyone calling for another big year. I might have turned round and gone back to my bunk when I saw the crowd, but it was a long time since I had fallen asleep without a drink. I pushed my way forward until a space opened up at the bar.
I was used to having an inch or two over most men, but the sailor beside me was taller by at least a hand. My own age, or was he older? I remember his earring, not far from my eye. The weight of it dragging down his earlobe. The yellow gleam.
He held up a hand and made his order understood. A pair of whiskeys, a pair of beers.
“Fisherman?” he said, pushing his coins across in exchange for the drinks. I nodded. “Thought as much.” He made a show of pinching his nose.
“You think you smell so sweet?”
He laughed. “Not sweet, no. Let’s say strong.” An Englishman, the accent rough. It was loud in there, men shouting each other down, but when he met my eye, I felt my head go quiet. Together we drank our shots and took up our beers. He told me what I had already guessed, he had come in on the Godwit.
“Just dumped our ballast, whole load of sand from Valparaíso. You think sand is sand, but I’ve shovelled up all sorts—pink, black, some of it fine as flour. Port Elizabeth, Sydney Harbour. Ever think of that? All them countries lying down there on the riverbed?”
“—No, I never did.”
He took a long swallow, draining his beer. “Christ, how many is that now?” He glanced at me. “There a backhouse?”
“There will be a lineup,” I said. “You can go behind the forge.”
He nodded, waiting. My heart hammered.
“Or there are the warehouses.” I gestured westward with my chin.
“Right.”
Can I really be telling you, Kit? I console myself with a thought—I can always tear out these pages and drop them in the stove.
I kept my eyes forward when he left. The silence in my head filled with the sound of my own blood. I drank down my beer. I turned and made a path through all those men.
Outside the Tolmie, the crowd carried on, the boards sticky underfoot with tobacco juice. As I left the lantern light behind, I could hear someone retching, then a woman’s laughter from one of the upstairs rooms. I made myself walk slowly. At the alley between two warehouses, I steadied myself as though drunk, looked behind me and slipped into the gap.
Soon I was feeling my way forward. When the thought of myself rose up before me, I shouldered it aside.
I heard him first, the rush of his piss hitting the warehouse wall. I smelled him. As the sound trailed off, I strained my eyes to see. The glint of the earring, him turning, still holding himself in his hand.
If he had spoken, I might have run. As it was, I let him back me up against the wall. My God, the shock of his mouth on mine. I felt as though my lips had been sewed shut, as though he had cut his way in with his tongue.
I drew back, gasping. “I never—”
“What?” He laughed, his fingers at my trouser buttons. “At your age?”
I said nothing, fighting for air.
“You poor love.” His hand was inside my smalls. “Did you think you were the only one?”
* * *
—
How I made my way back to my bunk, I cannot tell. I know I did not sleep. I stared into the dark of the bunk above, my body humming so I could almost hear it.
You did not mean it. You were drunk.
Drunk? On a shot and a beer?
The fellow above me snored. From across the room there came the low sounds of a man seeing to his own needs. Familiar sounds—bunkhouse and boarding house, tent and clapboard shed. Even all the way back to the crossing from Kristiania, the below-decks berths for single men. On occasion I had joined in silently from a distance, taking the other man’s groans for my own. That night in Steveston, I lay with my arms stiff and buzzing at my sides.
Late became early, and when I could no longer bear to lie there in my own skin, I dressed and went down to the Kerry Maid. Over at the long dock, the masts of the Godwit stood up black in the gloom. How many crates of good red fish to fill her hold? How many hours before she was ready to set sail?
Before long, Desmond came swinging his jacklight. “What’s this,” he said, “up with the shark?” He slipped the line off the cleat and stepped aboard. “Jesus, son, you look like death himself.”
Staring past him, I bent to the oars.
We felt the change in the run long before we reached the set. I had heard fish hit the hull before, but never at such a rate. Soon I was striking them with each pull of the oars. The water was silty a long way out, but their backs broke the brown surface, so many they changed the light. We all knew stories of the old days, early traders afraid to enter the river for fear the homing schools would capsize their boats. Desmond reached over the side to touch them. For a moment the night and all I had done left me, and the two of us sat grinning at each other like dogs.
It took all our strength to wind in the net. A single set and we were full to the gunwales. The cannery quota was two hundred sockeye per fisherman’s licence—we picked over nine hundred that day. While Desmond hoisted the sail, I pushed back to my place and sat packed around with fish.
One rough swell and we would have been swamped. There were a dozen other boats in view, no doubt wrestling with their own hauls. Trained by my mother, I could swim for the nearest skiff—though not if I had to drag Desmond along. The fins of the salmon sharks were cutting all around. They would not normally take interest in a man, but in a school like that, there was no telling where a bite might land.
“Lean on those oars, Norway!” Desmond shouted. “Gotta beat the boys closer in!”
But by the time we made it back, the wharves and cannery floors were already piled high. We were under contract to South Arm Cannery. Desmond was amazed when they took our entire haul, the pitchers tossing the fish onto a nearby scow. The next morning they shovelled those same salmon overboard.
Over the coming days, the price per fish dropped from eight cents to two. Soon you could not give the over-catch away. Those of us in the boats had less work—no sense rowing out to a favourite drift when men were dragging up the day’s quota by dropping a net off the end of the dock. Desmond drank more and spoke less. Around us the wonder began to sour.
The Big Run lasted for three weeks. The cannery workers saw no rest. There was talk of accidents—all that blood and fish slime, you can imagine the cracked skulls, the broken limbs. A spill of solder, a stumble against the boiling retort. Fillers cut themselves on cans. One of the slitters took two fingers off his own hand. All day, all night the machines ran, and still they lifted the floorboards to let piles of best Pacific sockeye drop away.
5
It may be that the fish sense gets into your blood, the homing. I cannot say why else I returned to Steveston the year after the Big Run—Desmond and every other man who knew the river mouth were calling for ’98 to be an off year.
You will not have forgotten the sailor, Kit. Nor had I. My heart kicked every time I came down to the boat before sunrise to find the great shadow of a square-rigger alongside the dock. Fear, yes, in part. But it was never the Godwit, never him.
As a rule, boatpullers did not spend time inside the canneries—no one without cause did. On the day I am thinking of, though, Desmond had business with the net boss.
“Come on,” he said. “I’ll do the talking, you just puff up big.”
I do not recall the meat of the argument, only that I stood silent in the office doorway until the shouting was done. I remember the difference as Desmond and I walked out across the cannery floor, a let-down in my shoulders where there had been an electric strain.
You know the air in a cannery—half-light at midday, the dripping, stinking heat. The noise. Wailing belts and clattering cans, the beat of the knives, the always-running water piped down over the washers’ raw hands. Underneath it all, the terrible quiet of no one talking—slitters and washers, fillers and packers, all of them lost in keeping up.
Our boots sounded on the plank floor, then again in the echoing drop to the river below. Passing the slitters’ workbench, I could not help but watch. You grew up with the machine, but in those days men did all the cutting—lopping off head, tail and fins before opening the belly to slip out the guts. Whistle three quick notes and it was done.
I followed Desmond past a long line of their backs. In the heat, the men had stripped to the waist. Thin black queues lay along spines, muscles twisting against bone—I doubt they ever got enough to eat. At the end of the bench in the light of the open door, a back younger than the rest. This man wore no braid—his hair was cropped short, shaved up around the ears. The bare bend of his neck. Did he feel my gaze? Was that why he looked back at me over his shoulder, the knife gone still in his hand?
* * *
—
The week turned much as it does here—the nets brought ashore on Friday evening to be mended and cleaned, then whatever work the boat and gear required, then a wash and the week’s supplies. After that, every bachelor and most of the family men were drunk or asleep until they could set their nets again. I was no different, except in one regard. On Sunday mornings, I swam.
If I met anyone on my walk around Garry Point, it would be one of the Tsawwassen women returning with a basket of salmonberries or, later in the season, crabapples from the twisted trees. On the flats the seagrass was full of fish heads and fins, the mud littered with guts. I had a long way to go to reach water that was any way clean. I did not mind the walk. You are too young to know the binding a fisherman’s legs can suffer in the boat, but I was thirty-eight that summer, and my knees gave me trouble when I stood up after a day at the oars.
I had been following the beach for an hour or more on the morning I saw him. The sun was just up, the new light hurting my drinker’s head. For a second I thought it was a dream. He was sitting on a log at the high-tide line, straight-backed, looking out to sea. Pure chance, or had he noticed me setting out the week before? I glanced behind me. Not a soul. I stood with my heart pounding, watching him from a distance of a hundred yards. Again he turned his face to me. This time he did not look away.
It was the natural thing to approach and pass the time of day—or it would have been, if the two of us had been of a kind. I had no cause to expect much English. I bid him good morning all the same.
He nodded. “Morning.”
I stood there not knowing what to do. Finally I sat down on the log.
He looked back at the water, sea light moving on his face. “Air good here.”
“Yes,” I said. “It is bad in town. Some nights a man can hardly breathe.”
He gave a snort. “You try China House.”
“Yes, I am sure.”
It was difficult not to stare. His hair was a shining cap, lit up rosy at the back. That strip of bare scalp showing above his neck.
“Chinatown bad too,” he said.
“Yes?”
He turned to me, holding his hands up to show a space the width of his own shoulders. “I have bed in room. Half bed,” he added. “Nighttime mine, daytime other man.”
“Ah, yes.” I looked down at my hands, the palms ridged to the shape of the oars. Always some beggar worse off than you.
The beggar beside me gave a sharp laugh. “Okay if he no have bug.”
“Yes.” The only word I could seem to find. I could not stop myself looking at him again.
He met my gaze. “What your bed like?”
“Narrow.” I closed my eyes. “Lonely.”
I thought he would not speak. “Lonely,” he said. “I know this word.”
Again, like a thief, I looked behind me. I looked all around. My fingers moved. The coarse fabric of his trouser leg and, beneath it, the muscle of his thigh. He held perfectly still. Then he lifted my hand to his mouth.
* * *
—
Afterwards, when he sat up to tie his trousers, I said, “Sometimes I walk early, when it is still dark.” But he was already squatting on his heels, peering out of the high grass. He stepped out, climbing down over the jumble of beached logs. I rose up on my knees to watch him hurry away—his dark trousers and loose blue blouse the cannery standard, the naked base of his skull a shape I knew.
* * *
A decent catch for her first night out. Kit watches the collector boat carry it away, steaming on to a distant skiff. Tired or not, she sluices the boards and bails, sea water buzzing in the cracks of her hands. At last she sits down.
Movement on shore, a murrelet leaving the trees to skim out over the waves. Catch a sand lance, maybe. Carry it back to its chick.
She should eat breakfast, but the stove seems like too much work. Cracking the grub box lid, she feels for the damp loaf of bread and tears off a chunk. The sky is dark for this hour of the morning, the clouds swollen. Sure enough, rain.
Crawling in under the canvas at the bow, Kit turns over on her back. Her legs stick out, dry enough in oilskin apron and boots. She eats her bread, the downpour shuddering above her, spilling a thin curtain from the shelter’s peaked hem. It’s all right, the light is taking on a pearly cast; the rain won’t last long enough to sweeten the surface, drive the salmon below the net.
