longer than a year, maybe forever, and he’d even bet I would. He seemed more confident that I would stay than I was confident that I would leave, even though I had already started planning my trip home and now was working and saving money.
But there was a part of me that didn’t want Go-boy to act so close, like family, so quick, or act like he’d known me for so long. And I didn’t know how to say it. And I didn’t know if that was even the problem.
It was hard to tell how Kiana and me went from talking in the kitchen over rum and diet soda, to walking down a hall, to messing around in a bedroom. I don’t remember much. She was a lot shorter after taking off those bunny boots. She left them by the closed door. Through flashes of nakedness—long thigh, collarbone, brown plains of skin stretching chest to waist—and my hands—my hands and her movements inviting them to explore the soft and the wet and the hot—through it all I kept seeing those enormous white winter boots, each puffy and padded like a volleyball.
Later, at another house, I was passed out between a beanbag and an open window. I felt that swimming sensation as I lay on the gnarled, gritty floor. When I woke the sun was ironing my forehead. It was morning. I was still a little drunk. I couldn’t remember specifics, but I knew right away. I knew Kiana and me had had sex. I didn’t have any idea of where or how or what, only a handful of images, and that mysterious other feeling—the guilt—the knowledge that I had just jeopardized my friendship with Go.
MALUKSUKS
Go-boy said, “Where you been?”
He wouldn’t look at me. He bumped a tin can of peanuts and it fell under the table, spilling open. I could smell the salt. The CB radio was switched off. The pale glow of sunlight through the tent walls gave everything a dead yellow color—the same dead yellow color of old curtains, of bedrooms at two o’clock in the morning.
“I thought the moment is all that exists,” I said.
“You saglu, man, you said you’d come back.”
I knew it wasn’t possible for a normal person to count fish for twelve or sixteen hours straight. It was crazy exhausting, but I also knew that Go-boy would be the type of guy to try something like that.
I said, “You should’ve just penciled in the numbers.”
“If we count wrong—” Go said, but didn’t finish.
I tried telling him we couldn’t be expected to sit on that tower and count every single fish that swam up or down. I tried telling him it was a give-and-take thing. Shoot for the averages. But he left the kitchen and went back to his sleeping tent, zipping me out. Go-boy had been doing this for a few summers, so questioning his knowledge of the job wasn’t a good idea. But neither was telling him why I was late.
Inside his sleeping tent he zipped and unzipped a mummy bag.
“I brought breakfast,” I said, lying.
Go-boy told me I should be on the tower, counting. His voice behind the canvas was sluggish. He flipped in his bag, sending a wave along the tent wall. He let out a deep-lung exhale that was so long and full it seemed it would balloon his whole shelter.
Within minutes on the tower the mosquitoes caught up with me, so I lit a coil and balanced it on the empty soup can that was buried under a month’s worth of ashes. I overlooked the river, trying to count fish, trying to record their numbers and wondering about Kiana. Wondering why she hadn’t stopped us. Wondering why I hadn’t stopped us.
Yet when I just thought of Kiana—of the way she looked through me, and of the way she laughed, diverted her flat smile, and slipped her white thumb ring on and off—I allowed myself to remember.
Fish were everywhere in the water. Fish swam past the tower and it was my job to count them, to mark an ink slash under each type that I saw and add up the total every half hour. I had never thought about fish before we’d moved here, before I’d started working this job. But in rural Alaska fish was money. Fish had Natives banking their year’s income in a few months and stocking their freezers full for the winter. People woke up in the morning for fish. People stayed up all night for fish. There were jobs catching them and cutting them, jobs weighing them and shipping them. All for fish. Even the people who’d left for college and gotten master’s degrees and doctorates—they had nets in the river and vacuum-packed meat in their freezers.
I first learned these kind were salmon. Silvers. Humpies. Kings. Reds. Chums. All salmon. The fish swam upriver to spawn, and they did the same thing every year at about the same time. I figured the rest of the job was simple—tower—clipboard—eyes—count the fish. But from twenty-five feet up, I couldn’t tell the humpies from the kings and the silvers. I’d grown up in California. I hadn’t spent every summer of my life on the river like most people. And even after the training, with all the instruction about the different colorings and markings and sizes, there was still a built-in skill to recognizing and identifying a fish that was in the water, and I didn’t have it.
When Go-boy woke up he sat at the picnic table below the tower. He gulped coffee from a plastic sports bottle, wearing a tight gold t-shirt that said UNITED STATES OF ALASKA around a map of the state.
He was using a black pen to redraw the Jesus tattoo on his right forearm. He’d been telling me that any day now he would fly into Anchorage and get it done for real.
“Jesus needs more hair,” I yelled down to him.
He set the pen between flakes of peeling paint on the ragged picnic table and turned to the water.
We need to scrub the tarp,” Go-boy said. He nodded at the white plastic anchored to the bottom of the river, stretching shore to shore like a submerged sidewalk.
Now I was looking for something to snack on in the kitchen tent. Now I was looking for more matches. Now I was grabbing a handful of skipping rocks to toss from the tower. I was doing anything to avoid work.
I asked, “Ain’t you tired?”
“It’s dirty. And it’s low tide.”
Go-boy already had green waders and scrub brushes piled on the picnic table.
I said, “I can still see those fish.”
I’d watched so many fish since I started this job that when I closed my eyes I’d see them swimming. I’d see fish in town, or while watching TV. I’d dream about fish. Even when I thought about home I saw fish. Fish swimming with the traffic up South Hoover back in West LA. Fish dipping into alleys. Fish hiding in the Earth Crew murals at Pico and Union.
When I thought about home now, the details were blurred—the timeline. I’d never been away from California for so long, and anytime I remembered the place it was as if the events of growing up had happened in no sequential order—the most recent seeming the least real of them all. I remembered Wicho as a fourteen-year-old kid, even on the day when he was sentenced to life in prison. It seemed I could drive back to our place in Westlake and find that kid out there on the street in front of our house, organizing a neighborhood two-on-two football league, each team consisting of a quarterback and a wide receiver. The curbs were the sidelines, meaning you could catch passes that bounced off parked cars, and Wicho would call out that his team’s end zone was the silver Plymouth Horizon and the other team’s end zone was the telephone
