Читать книгу Secondhand Summer - Dan L. Walker - Страница 10

Chapter 3

At the end of March, Joe left home for Anchorage. It was a quiet, casual departure as if he was just going to the beach site for a couple of days instead of moving out on his own to the city two hundred miles away. Mom, Mary, and I were still on the porch and the sound of his car had just faded when Art Mitkof pulled up in his green Chevy pickup. He came in and sat at the table as he often did on winter mornings, sipping his sweetened coffee while Mom worked.

Mom started washing dishes, then worked restlessly across the kitchen to tend pans of rising bread. She had taken to baking bread again, the one thing she truly loved to do. There was even a touch of color back in her cheeks.

Art rubbed his pant leg with a nervous hand. “Spring’s out there somewhere,” he said. “Soon be time to hang some new web.”

“John always said winter was for hanging web,” said Mom. “Spring seems kinda late.”

Art had grown up in Ninilchik. He was part Russian and part Dena’ina Indian, with his slick black hair and thin mustache. He had fished the beach beside us all my life. “Yeah, John, he was always a little ahead o’ me on that one.”

“That was his way.” Mom leaned on her bread dough and took a deep breath.

Art ran a handful of fingers through his hair and rubbed the back of his neck. “I gotta tell ya,” he said, “I don’t like to see you sell off like this.”

Mom slammed a fist into the bread dough and turned to face him. “Art, I gotta sell the fish sites and go to Anchorage. There’s no two ways about it. What am I going to live on here? I can’t fish. I’m not about to put myself in a dory and pretend I know what I’m doing. It’s not what I want, Art. I just don’t see another way. We are keeping the land and the house, but the fish sites gotta go.”

Her chubby body seemed to sag in the dress she wore. “Joe’s already gone to Anchorage to get a construction job. Without him, fishing’s out of the question. You know I can’t run that skiff, much less set a net. Sam here is eager, but he doesn’t have the beef for it, and I sure can’t afford to hire a hand. Those sites barely fed us as it was, and John still had to hire on to that oil exploration crew and go doodle-buggin’ most every winter.”

“You know I’d help you,” said Art. I could see his face as he imagined himself trying to keep his nets mended and in the water while he babysat the Barger clan.

“Art, you’re a doll, but face it, you can’t hardly get around to your own work much less help me.”

I could see Mom had hurt his feelings, but she was right. Dad always said the only thing Art would work at was fishing and sometimes even that got to be too much like work. I saw him look away out the window and down the road like he hoped Dad would pull into the driveway.

“I can take Joe’s place in the skiff,” I said. I took a seat at the table as if invited. “I could. I know how to run the motor; I can set the nets, me and Mary.” Just saying it put a knot in my stomach, and I knew I was wasting my breath.

There would be new faces in the rain gear at the beach this summer. Someone else would haul our gillnets off the racks and into the boats. Someone else would run the boats that pulled the nets out from shore. Someone else would have my bunk in the shack on the beach, where they’d sleep every chance they got, so they could wake at every change of the tide to pick fish from the nets, pull the nets out of the water, set the nets back in the water. Someone else would learn that days didn’t matter, and by July they’d only know tides and the opening and closing of the fishing period.

Someone else would have that odor of salmon fishing; the sweet ocean cologne of sand, salt, and fish. The smell filled your pores until even a good hot bath wouldn’t drive it out, and people could tell that you were a fisherman. Someone else would have that odor this summer. I wouldn’t be there when the tide was running, and the nets were bent into a bow. I wouldn’t be mending the web, patching holes that let fish escape, costing money. Dad would say, “No time to sleep when the net’s in rags. Can’t make money with a ragged net.”

I would just be a regular kid at a time I was ready to be more than a regular kid, to be a fisherman. I wanted to be in the bow of the dory when the surf was running and the waves were higher than Dad’s head. That’s the sea my mother feared. She believed she’d die in that water, and she was scared for me too.

“You kids stay out of the boats,” she insisted every spring when she took us to the beach cabin for the first time. “You fall in that water and you’ll freeze to death in a minute.”

She passed her fears on to me with her lectures, and I avoided the water until the urge to be older and bolder grew too strong. It was as if her phobia finally pushed me toward the sea. The first calm day of 1964, I talked my way over the gunwale and into the open dory as it bobbed in the surf. I lay in the belly of a great sea creature with ribs of spruce and a skin of plywood. The aroma of fish was like a drug that reeked of adventure.

Mom came stomping down the beach from the cabin, yelling at Dad. “John Barger,” she growled, “you know how I feel about those kids being out on the water.”

Dad was leaning on the gunwale, rocking with it up and down on the edge of the water. “I know,” he said. “I also know that you’re wrong. How are we supposed to be fishermen and sit on the beach?” I hung over the bow and looked into the sand as they fought. When the water was shallow the land beneath it was bright and visible, then surges of murky water came in, and I saw nothing.

“What if that boat tips? What if the motor stops, or you spring a leak? What are you going to tell me then? ‘I’m sorry, Arlene, but your kids drowned because we have to go fishing’.”

Dad stomped off, muttering, “Don’t know why in the hell she even let ’em out of diapers. Wants ’em to be babies forever.”

I went out anyway, splashing through the meager waves of a sunny day, tasting salt water when it fell on our faces like rain, pretending I was helping when actually I just got in the way, pretending I was strong and able when I was weak and scared. Mom went home and tended her garden rather than pace the beach and watch her youngest baby porpoising around with the men who belonged out where the danger was.

We approached the end of each net and lifted it onboard, first the cork line and then the rest of the web and the lead line, and hopefully some fish. We pulled the boat along the net so it passed over one gunwale and then the other and back in the water to fish another tide. Some salmon were tangled and dead with the web choking them into grotesque shapes. That made me glad to see the live ones held only by a single mesh at their gills, flashing silver torpedoes turning more green-like on the bottom of the skiff. They piled up around our feet, sliding back and forth with the rock of the boat.

“Striker there!” yelled Joe from the stern and we looked up from the net to see a flashing tail thrash at the cork line as a fresh salmon slammed into the wall of the net. I cheered.

Another fish jumped south of the net, and I wondered as it leaped again, driving toward our net, and it rammed in splashing and thrashing. “Striker!” I cried, but the fish was small and squirted through to jump again north of the net.

“Just a stupid humpy,” sneered Joe.

“How do you know?”

“Humpies almost always squirt through. They’re like you, too small to be worth anything.”

“All fish are money fish, Joe,” Dad said, “even little pinks. Just like Sam here. He’s kind of a humpy.” He tousled my hair and laughed. He called me “Humpy” all summer. Then everybody did.

Humpy Barger, a good name for a salmon fisherman, I figured. No one else in the family had a nickname; I treasured it as my father’s gift. I would be like I remembered him, standing spraddle-legged in the boat with sleeves cut off at the elbows and the patched rain pants hanging down over rubber boots. A scruffy beard, the battered dory, and the magic smell of the salmon summer I wouldn’t have because my boat was empty.

Leaving the beach was the first step in letting myself leave this place on Cook Inlet, these people in their log cabins and trailer houses, these woods full of mystery. The town I was leaving wasn’t really a town at all. A person driving through Ninilchik would see a gas station, a café, and a couple of churches. The houses were strung out along the highway or hidden on bad back roads too muddy to drive much of the time in the spring.

There were people there too, people with names and lives mixed with mine, kids I’d been babies with, like we were hairs on the same head. I knew people’s trucks and jeeps and carryalls; I knew their skiffs and winter coats, which men smoked Camels or rolled their own Prince Albert, who made the best sticky buns and the worst pie. All these important things wouldn’t matter any more. Even Becky.

Becky was the only girl in my class that looked like she might be a woman someday. All the others were gawky little girls with silly faces and skinny legs. But Becky filled out her jeans, and her sweaters didn’t lie flat on her chest. Right after Christmas I got to sit by her during a movie about Holland.

“I wish I had a coat like that,” I said, pointing to a boy in a blue short jacket like the kid on the paint cans.

“You’d be so cute,” she teased.

We giggled and she touched my arm. With this kind of encouragement I began to perform. I named each strange character after someone in town. It was the best of my eighth grade antics, and sitting with Becky in the near dark was close to total perfection. After that day she sat by me during school movies and gave me secret glances in class. She let me give her a piece of ivory that I found on the beach, and she wore it around her neck on a chain.

When Dad died and I came back to school with that everybody’s-looking-at-me feeling, she acted normal as ever. She and Harry Munson were the ones who just treated me the same as ever. Harry was either my best friend or worst enemy depending on the day, or even the time of day.

Harry was born and raised in Ninilchik but had some magic that made it seem that he was from somewhere else, somewhere far away enough to be unreal, somewhere like Seattle or California. He was tall and athletic with natural waves to his hair, and he kept it combed like a high schooler. His clothes were from the catalog, not homemade or hand-me-downs, and he wore loafers.

Harry and I invented the game “Run the Gauntlet,” which made us leaders in the school, and we tended to swagger. Run the Gauntlet was a reenactment of the challenge used by the Iroquois and Huron Indians in my late night readings. The captured warrior was given a chance of freedom by running between lines of angry people armed with fists, clubs, and feet. The warrior had only to reach the end of the brutal lines and run to freedom. It seemed the perfect game for us middle schoolers.

We were playing our daily version of the game and I was the captured warrior. I dashed at the narrow opening in the line, knocking down two seventh graders right at the start. Bart and Jimmy scored good hits on my back. I was twisting and dodging my way to daylight when Harry stretched out a long leg and tripped me. I went down hard in the packed snow. The laughter and jeers were part of the game. When Harry leaned down to help me up, I saw Becky laughing with the others.

“By the way,” Harry said, “did I tell you Becky was at church last night? We held hands all through Pastor Peterson’s slide show about his trip to Jerusalem.”

The truth of it didn’t matter to me, or him. Saying it, imagining it, was enough. I came up swinging and caught Harry by surprise with a fist in the stomach. He nearly fell and I pranced in front of him with my fists raised. “Come on, you liar!” I snarled. He stuck out his chin and charged.

“Liar? Nobody calls me that.”

Any friendship between us melted into rage. We pushed and thumped and slugged until we were both dirty and out of breath. Finally I threw one lucky punch that caught my best friend in the nose and drew blood. Our classmates were whooping and yelling then were silent. Only then did I realize that the other kids were running for school and the principal was running for us.

“I know losing a father is tough on a boy,” said Mr. Morris, the fat principal, staring at me over his eyeglasses from behind his metal desk, “but you’ve got to learn to sit on that anger and let things pass. I know these are rough times, with your dad gone and all, but look at you, brawling with one of your pals like this.”

I looked at him confused and irritated, and my jutting lower lip probably showed it. What did my fight with Harry have to do with Dad?

He turned to Harry. “Mr. Munson, I’d appreciate it if you would show some consideration for a grieving friend. You have got to understand that Sam needs us, each and every one of the people in his life, to help him through this. He has enough challenges right now.”

Neither of us was sure what he was talking about, but it was obvious that we weren’t getting in trouble. Mr. Morris shook his head in surrender and waved a tired hand.

“Go on now, get back to class, and let’s have no more of this.”

That afternoon we had another movie in class: Barges in the Rhine.

“Did you get in trouble?” Becky whispered, leaning close so I could feel her hair brush my arm.

“No, but no thanks to you.”

“Me? What did I do?” We both jerked around when Mr. Scott paused mid-sentence and everyone stared right at us.

The dreary monologue about hauling coal and wheat through Europe continued. “Harry told me,” I hissed.

“Told you what?”

“About last night. You sitting with him at church.”

“So!”

I waited a full three slide frames before I delivered the crushing blow. “That’s why I hit him.”

Fighting with Harry got me through that last couple of months. Hardly a day went by that we didn’t have some kind of shoving match, and sometimes they turned to full-blown fistfights. Of course, he said he won most of the fights, but Becky didn’t give back the piece of ivory, and she didn’t sit by him during any of the movies.

Mr. Morris did a lot of coddling, patting me on the back and letting me off easy when I acted up in class. One time he held me in class during recess. He sat on the edge of the desk and fiddled with the crease in his pants. “You know, Sam, I lost my dad too when I was very young. I know what you’re going through.”

“Yeah. At least he won’t have to go to your funeral.”

“Huh? I don’t understand.”

“My grandpa did. He had to go to his son’s funeral. Just seems kinda weird, that’s all.”

I know he didn’t understand. I probably made no sense at all. Mr. Morris just shook his head and nodded. He didn’t speak to me again until the last day of school then he called me aside. “Samuel, I have a gift for you,” he said, handing me a book from one of those church publishers. I think he was glad to see the last of me when the final school bell rang and we all ran screaming into the sunlight of summer vacation.

I never read the book, but I kept a card that Becky gave me. It was a valentine with a red heart and a Cupid with wings. She signed it, “Your girlfriend, Becky.”