Читать книгу Sometimes We're Always Real Same-Same - Mattox Roesch - Страница 13

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 pole, one first-down halfway between, three-second blitz, two-hand touch, first team to fifty wins; during the game he’d sometimes yell out, “Car!” not frustrated unless the score was close, and if it was, and he was in the middle of a play that he’d drawn out on the palm of his left hand, and the receiver was down the road, running a route—cutting in and back when he got to the white pickup—Wicho would yell, “Keep play!” and would let that car wait and honk its horn until the ball was caught or dropped.

I wondered if he was playing football in prison.

Go-boy scrubbed the tarp with his hands and arms submerged, holding the long handle of the brush, pushing and pulling against the river. I joined him, waist-deep. The tattoo from his forearm bled off into the water—threads of ink unraveled into the clear water. Upriver, the fish hovered along the bottom.

“Good thing you didn’t pay too much for that,” I said, pointing at his arm.

It was then—when I was almost up to my chest in water, watching Go work—that this enormous fish swam straight at me. It was slow and ugly and right at the surface, with its back cutting out of the water, and the damn thing was the length of my leg and twice as fat. I said, “Sick!” and swung the scrubber. I nailed it behind the gills, but it wasn’t a good hit. It felt like thumping a sandbag with a baseball bat. And the fish wasn’t even fazed. It just changed directions.

“This ugly shit swam right at me!”

“Maluksuk?” he asked.

“It looked like it was covered in pus.”

Go said, “Yeah, man. Maluksuk.”

I looked around, now all thrown off. Go-boy went back to scrubbing like nothing had even happened, but I couldn’t. I asked Go what that was.

He stopped working and adjusted an elastic strap on his waders. I asked him again, and he first told me certain types of salmon run at certain times. He went through the list—kings, silvers, and so on. He told me that when they’re done running, when they’re spawned out, they become half dead.

“Like zombies?” I asked.

He said the Eskimo word for a half-dead fish was maluksuk. A maluksuk became greenish-brown and moldy-looking. It swam around like a normal fish, except way slower. It wasn’t conscious or afraid. It had lost its survival instinct of self-awareness. And a lot of times a maluksuk would swim right up and beach itself till it died.

Go-boy said, “You can sometimes see them on the shoreline, their gills opening and closing, still always trying to breathe, their bodies flipping every couple minutes.”

I asked if there were always these dying fish around, and he said, “Mostly at the end of summer.” He said I should have already known about them because we were supposed to count the maluksuks separate from the healthy fish. But from up on that tower, I couldn’t judge which ones were dying and which ones were spawning. I couldn’t tell the difference between the living fish.

Later I told Go I was done trying to wash the fish sperm off the white plastic, that the brushes were no good. He was determined to make them work, to make the tarp clean. He kept scrubbing and said, “We need to do this.”

“Shouldn’t one of us count fish?”

“Man, this is boss’s orders.”

We both bobbed along in the water. We were buoys. I slapped at a bug on the water’s surface and Go-boy leaned into the current, scrubbing at a stain the size of a manhole cover.

Then he asked, “So what did you do in town last night?”

“You know there’s nothing to do.”

“Can’t even try-make something up, ah?”

“Okay,” I said. “Truth? I was looking out for your sister.”

Go laughed, said, “Man, saglu.”

“What?”

“Kiana’s the last person who needs anyone looking out for her. Especially you.”

“What’s especially you?”

“Man, she raised herself until she was ten,” he said.

I decided that with Go-boy, silence was the best policy. Everyone knew he couldn’t hold a grudge past dinnertime, and I reminded myself of that. I told myself that even though Go loved his family more than anything, and even though he treated his stepsister like a blood sister, and even though he would hear about what we’d done, Go couldn’t hold a grudge. At least, this was what I tried telling myself.

Go said, “It doesn’t even matter what you did last night. Not to me, anyway.”

“What if I was saving the world?”

That same maluksuk I’d hit with the scrubber was paralleling the far shore, cutting its top fin out of the water, almost beaching itself.

I said, “So a seed of God grows into God, but the seed of a salmon grows into a maluksuk?”

Go looked right at me. River water channeled between us in a constant washing. With my scrubber I pointed at the dying fish. It was sloshing itself along the gravel bank, confused, not sure which direction it was supposed to swim.

I got myself into trouble with a girl back in California just a few months before moving to Alaska. I was talking to her at a mall, joking. This girl had an angry, sexy look, a face shaped like an arrowhead and hair pulled back so tight it looked painted on. I was standing around waiting for my friends by the food court. These days I was still gangbanging and I needed to ride it out without drawing too much attention to myself. My clique didn’t know I was leaving town. They didn’t know I was about to ditch them for Alaska. The girl I was talking to said her name was Lily, and I convinced myself she really was Lily and not the girlfriend of a rival banger. I convinced myself she didn’t recognize me.

It was nothing. The girl was telling me that she had left her little brother in the Legos store to play while she shopped, and we were laughing about that, and I was trying to get her number until my friend Kid Cab interrupted us and told me that my ride—him and his pristine old Cadillac—was leaving. The girl recognized Kid Cab. I could see it in her frown. She was holding a small shopping bag full of shampoos and body lotions, and she took a step back, called us assholes, flashed some Eighteenth Street shit, and bolted. I thought it was funny, but Kid Cab reminded me she ran with one of Santa Ana’s biggest cliques. One of our rival cliques.

So I forgot about the girl until a month later. I was with my friends in the parking lot of El Curtido. Our stomachs were full and we were just getting into Kid’s car. Around the center aisle a small SUV busted a hard left and came at us. I could see the girl riding shotgun, pointing and smiling like she had while she joked about her little brother. The driver wasn’t letting up and rocketed right into the grill of Kid’s Caddy before we could get out of the parking stall. The impact busted Kid Cab’s head on the wheel. The guys in back got thrown onto the seat, pinning me against the dash. When I looked up through the cracked windshield, I saw the SUV steaming, the inflated airbags like a couple clown cheeks. And I saw that girl and her Eighteenth Street boys running off, flashing signs and middle fingers and big-ass grins.

I wanted to tell Kid I should never have tried talking to her, that I was sorry about his car, but he was unconscious, and I was unable to say anything.

I sat on the picnic table and watched for maluksuks, pointing and asking Go-boy if that was one, or if that was one. He was still in the water, scrubbing the tarp. He wasn’t amused, and I couldn’t seem to find a way to make things right.

“Shouldn’t you count fish?” Go asked.

“That’s a dead one,” I said. “Right? Come on, dude, just tell me.”

Go turned away and went back to scrubbing.

This would keep up all summer. Anytime we were near water I’d ask Go if that fish was a maluksuk, or that fish. He’d say, “You should know.” And then later that summer I’d point at a seagull and ask if that was a maluksuk. A husky leashed to a steel pole in a dog lot. A Lund fishing boat in the river. A rusted bike. Is that one? He’d be trying to fix his AMC wagon and I’d ask him if it was a maluksuk. He’d laugh, say, “Poor.” Say, “For real.” What about that girl? That house? Is this village a maluksuk?

It was rare to hear a boat on a weekday morning. It was still out of sight, getting louder and quieter and louder again as it curled around each bend in the river. Go-boy came to the shore, dropping his waders on the ground and ducking into the kitchen to start organizing in case it was someone important. I climbed the tower.

A flatboat with an old guy and two Native girls pulled up to shore. The guy had gray hair that had been disrupted by the boat ride. His glasses were little bull’s-eyes and he had too much skin around his neck, like a flat tire. He was Mr. Larsen, our boss. He yelled up to me that he needed Go-boy.

One of the girls was wearing big sunglasses and they both looked college-age, intern-age, and full of confidence and self-respect.

Go came out of the kitchen and the girl without sunglasses said, “Hey, Go.” She smiled. She was sitting behind the boat’s steering wheel, holding both hands at twelve o’clock. Go smiled. It was Valerie—his girl.

“I have . . . wait,” Go said and disappeared.

Mr. Larsen put Go’s waders on.

Go-boy came out of the kitchen with the ulu he’d made and walked to the edge of the water, leaned forward over the bow of the boat, and handed it to Valerie. She smiled, said, “For me?”

“I need you in the river,” Mr. Larsen said.

The girl with Valerie said the ulu was the coolest ever.

“Quyaana,” Valerie said as Go put waders on.

Go-boy and Mr. Larsen went stomping through the river, carrying baby-food jars labeled with strips of magic tape. I watched them from the tower. They were taking samples from the deep water and samples from the shallow water. Go-boy snuck another look at Valerie as she admired her new ulu, reading the inscription.

The two girls stayed in the boat. They laughed, repeating something a little kid had said. Near the motor was an old cooler with no lid, and inside were three fresh salmon. Traces of blood were smeared along the white walls.

I climbed down the tower and from the embankment said hey to the girls.

Low clouds had moved in above us. The water now looked black. Down our same shoreline, evergreens were tipped out over the river, suspended in this position, still alive, waiting to fall.

The girl nearest to me said, “How you like Unk?”

She was wearing those goggle sunglasses and her black hair was pulled back. They both wore jeans and small retro t-shirts under zip-up hoodies, just like girls back in LA.

“Fine,” I said. “My mom’s an Ayupak. We just moved here from California.”

“I know.”

“Yeah?”

“For real,” she said, and they smiled. “We’re cousins, you and me.”

Valerie snuck another look at Go-boy as he came out of the river. She was holding the ulu, testing the sharp edge against her fingertips. She looked ready to use it, but Go wasn’t catching her glances.

I asked her how he’d gotten the nickname Go-boy.

“He couldn’t pronounce J’s very good when he was little,” Valerie said. “So he couldn’t say his name—Joe. He said Go.”

From the kitchen tent Go-boy yelled to me. I turned and told him to wait so I could hear the rest of the story, but the girls were already talking about something else, and all I could do was leave.

Mr. Larsen was in the kitchen reading through our fish counts. He said the numbers for kings seemed way too low. He said he’d counted more fish from his boat in five minutes than the logs had recorded in three days. He was exaggerating. The salty peanut smell still hung in the open, and the tin can was still spilled under the table. Go-boy gave me a nervous nod. The yellow air had heated from the sun. It was dense and still.

Mr. Larsen sat in front of us with the fish logs—notebook paper inked blue and black. Go was next to me, on one side of a small card table. He was rubbing the top of his forearm, smearing part of the tattoo that the river hadn’t blurred. I was peeling back part of a tear in the table’s vinyl covering. Next to it someone had written, BEING BORED. Mr. Larsen’s circle glasses reflected the pages in front of him.

Larsen said the river was full of fish, yet some of our shifts had recorded next to nothing. It was affecting the total count, which Fish and Game needed to be accurate in order to open and close the commercial season. Mr. Larsen said we were supposed to sign our names on each separate log. He asked, “And how can there be maluksuks already?”

“I lied!” Go said. “I wrote in guesses! I falsified the counts!”

Go-boy talked fast and loud. He talked about late shifts and exhaustion. He talked and talked, and I didn’t think there was any way he could be covering for me—not after I’d skipped a shift—so I was confused.

I said, “Man, there’s maluksuks already.”

I knew Mr. Larsen was talking about my shifts. And Go knew he was talking about my shifts. It was obvious I didn’t know how to count fish, but since neither of us had signed our logs, Mr. Larsen didn’t know who to blame. When Go-boy had trained me he’d said he didn’t believe in each of us writing our name on the fish logs because he thought we were accountable as a group, not as individuals.

“It was just a mistake,” I said to Go, and then again to Mr. Larsen.

Go-boy told him he had been falling asleep and waking up and just writing numbers in. I didn’t buy it. Go wouldn’t lie about the counts. And if he did, it was only because he was on the tower penning notebooks full of spiritual theories or carving or painting something for Valerie. After a while, his conscience got to him and he felt like he deserved punishment for not doing his job. That was just who he was. Go-boy would let the whole world stroll into heaven for free, but he would make himself pay full price. He took on too much and never gave himself any slack.

“I did it,” he said again. “I lied.”

After those kids busted Kid Cab’s ride, suspicious cops filled out reports and tow trucks hauled off the stolen SUV and the smashed Cadillac. Later that night we called a friend—Chunky, a kid too nice to run with gangs but who was cool with us—and met him at the indoor valet-parking garage where he worked. Chunky took care of cars for the late-night crowds—the servers and the bartenders and the people who filled the clubs and restaurants. We’d heard those Eighteenth Street fools were at a party over on Booth Street, so we told Chunky what was up, slipped him forty dollars, and he pointed us toward a big-ass dual-cab pickup parked in the lower level. He said there was a stripper who wouldn’t miss the truck until three or four in the morning.

Kid Cab drove because he always drove. Kid Cab drove reckless. We laughed when we turned on the stereo and heard some heavy metal. We hollered at girls. And when we came up on the block where the party was, Kid pulled out his .22 pistol and just started banging off shots, pocking the stucco between partygoers.

What we should’ve done was drive off and have some more fun with the truck before we returned it. Instead Kid Cab turned back around and drove us past the party, hoping the crew who’d busted his car would be out on the front lawn. They were. But this time they came at us hard, firing shots from two or three different guns. Our truck took a couple holes to the rear fender. Kid got us gone, quick, but a minute later the Eighteenth Street crew had caught up and a full-out chase had started. We ran red lights on West First. Kid tried losing them in parking lots. It was real cops-’n’-robbers shit, except robbers-’n’-robbers, and it was then—during the part of the chase where nothing was happening but high speeds and traffic violations—that I wondered what the hell we were doing. This was the result of me talking to a girl at a mall. At worst it was jealousy. At best a rivalry.

Two gunshots cracked the driver’s-side door with a denting sound. That girl Lily was next to us, gun in hand, elbow in the open window, that same mean smile on her face, that same mean laugh. Kid Cab ran the truck down a side road, stopped hard, started screaming. His thigh was all blood.

Sometime later we ditched the truck and Kid’s sister picked him up and drove him to the hospital. Kid Cab told the police he was at a party over on Booth Street when a big white truck drove by, shooting up the place, and one of the shots got him in the thigh. They took it all in, skeptical.

Kid spent a week in the hospital. His thigh ballooned to the size of a pumpkin, purple and black, and they had to pump him full of morphine to keep him from weeping like a pussy. I thought a leg wound would be nothing, but it was weeks before Kid was back to normal. And with no insurance, Kid’s mom was stuck with a stack of hospital bills, the payments scheduled over a decade, all because of some stupid stuff with that girl.

I wanted to hit Mr. Larsen for the way he was talking to Go. I thought about admitting to him that I was the one who’d lied, but contradicting Go-boy didn’t seem right. And before I could do either, Mr. Larsen told me to leave, to climb up the tower so he could talk to Go-boy in private. He said, “Count accurately.”

Valerie had already cut up two of the fresh salmon with Go-boy’s ulu. She was working on the last fish. A square of burlap was stretched across the picnic table, soaked with dark blood.

Valerie first cut down the belly of the fish, unloading strings of guts. Next she hacked off the head, crunching through bones and gills. It was raw—the sounds of fracture. I almost stopped watching, but what came next was different. What happened next was she traced a tender slice along the spine. Her free hand—bare—lay flat along the scales of the salmon, feeling each move she made with the ulu. The blade slid between the pinkish flesh and the branches of white spine—a clean, inaudible slice. She peeled back each fillet, now using the Eskimo knife as a gentle guide. When she was done she held up two rectangular slices of bright red meat, still connected at the tail. There was twice as much fish in her hand as waste on the table. She went to the river and rinsed the meat clean of blood and loose scales. Afterward she rinsed the ulu, the burlap, and her hands. She left a cloud of blood in the clear water—dark red and drifting down the shoreline.

I told them about Go and the fish counts.

“Araa!” my cousin said. “Larsen’s sure always bugging about stuff.”

I was hoping that as we stood there, Go-boy was telling Mr. Larsen the real reason for the unrealistic fish counts—that I didn’t know how to count fish, that I didn’t try very hard, that I skipped out and made him work a few shifts straight. I wanted to get caught without turning myself in. I wanted Go-boy to act like he knew me better than I knew myself, like he had the first day I was here.

“Is Go like this?” I asked.

“Like what?”

“Too honest.”

She didn’t answer, and neither did my cousin.

“He’s a good person,” Valerie said.

She was picking dried fish scales from the blade of the ulu. She looked up, right at me, and said, “Go-boy hates lies.”

The three of us went silent.

Valerie then told me that a friend of Go-boy’s had committed suicide the night before. His name was Jay, but everyone called him Trilogy because he was the third brother in the family and all the boys were so similar. Go had known him pretty well. Valerie had come up to the fish tower that morning with Mr. Larsen and my cousin hoping to tell Go. Some people in town were saying that Jay had hung himself; others said he had used a gun. It still wasn’t known what had happened. It was still new. Valerie had heard he’d been walking around town, drunk and soaking wet, saying cryptic things to people, and that his dad’s boat had been found swamped in the slough.

“I’ll let you tell Go,” I said.

“And I also wanted to . . .” Valerie said. “You should talk to Kiana.”

“Why?”

“About what happened last night, at the party,” she said. Valerie wasn’t looking at me. She was looking up at the kitchen tent, looking for Go.

“About what?”

“I think you know.”

“I don’t.”

Valerie turned and looked downriver.

My cousin said, “Come on. All night you were telling people you slept with her.”

“Poor,” Valerie said with half sympathy, half embarrassment.

“She has a boyfriend,” my cousin added.

When Kid Cab’s stitches were removed and the scabs were all scratched off, he decided it was time to pay back that girl who had shot him. I was feeling like he should drop the whole situation, but this was a month before I was moving to Alaska, and I needed to blend in and ride along with my friends so they didn’t get skeptical. The unspoken suspicion of each other’s loyalty was always with us. Besides, I was still running by the rules of the game—never snitch, never give, and never ever feel sorry for the shit that happens to people as a result of their own choice.

We found the girl on her walk home from working at Carlo’s Market—this made me think Kid had been planning everything for a while. I wondered then if she really was a gangbanger or if it was all a mistake. She looked so harmless in her outfit—blue slacks, yellow apron. I imagined she worked in the bakery or the deli. It had been over a month since she’d shot Kid. It looked like she was now trying to do things right, trying to play it straight. And maybe we all knew that when we grabbed her and locked her in the trunk, but we also knew—including her—how this retaliation shit worked.

At Chunky’s valet lot we parked in a corner stall of the basement. The girl was an animal, and it took five of us, at all times, to restrain her. Kid Cab lowered the tailgate of a small pickup. We drug her into the truck bed, each of us kneeling alongside her, pinning her. Kid ordered every move.

Before he started in with the button of her work pants, I wondered what would happen if I let her hand slip free—an accident. If maybe she would be able to gouge out Kid’s eyes with her nails, scratch the mania from his face, and manipulate her other arm free so she could punch and kick her way into chaos, out of the trap, into the possibility that she wouldn’t be raped, into the possibility that someone, maybe a parking lot maintenance man, would notice suspicious activity before anything happened.

Then there came this point, when the girl was pinned in the back of some stranger’s parked pickup and Kid Cab was forcing her pants and panties off, when everyone’s mood switched. Before this there had been some laughter at the shit the girl was screaming—angry and aggressive insults. There had been the occasional joke about sexual performance. Sick stuff, of course. But when Kid started in with her pants, everyone’s jaw tensed and everyone got quiet like we had all bitten down on a mouthful of sand that we couldn’t spit. We were all under each other’s microscopes. The girl stopped screaming. The air was dead like we were sealed in a bag, and the only sounds were our breathing and the girl struggling, and we all watched each other, waiting for someone to fail. Waiting for the fake one to give in first.

It was then that I hit the girl in the face. I did it because she started screaming. Or maybe I did it because I thought it would be less painful for her if she were unconscious. Or maybe I was mad at the whole game—the never-ending cycle of attacks and paybacks. I hit her in the temple, and for a second I thought she went unconscious—her shouting stopped and her eyes closed and her head tipped to the side. But instead of nodding off, the girl being raped started to cry.

Valerie told Go-boy to call her later. “Okay?” she said. He didn’t answer.

The girls got in the boat and Mr. Larsen pushed off. Valerie still held on to the ulu. After being cleaned in the river it looked new again, almost too bright against her dark fingers.

Go-boy didn’t wave or nod or say anything. He was standing on the shore, shoulders slumped. Without looking at me he turned and walked toward the picnic table, stopped halfway, and sat on the embankment between patches of crabgrass.

“He’s filing an offense,” Go-boy said.

His forehead creased near his nose and his left eye squinted more than his right. He was biting his lower lip, almost chewing. He said, “It’s something like a misdemeanor.”

“You’re in trouble?”

“We both are.”

I was right there with him, but not sure what to do. I thought about asking Go why he’d said those things, why he hadn’t sold me out and turned me in, why he felt so responsible for me. I wanted to ask if he really had lied about the counts, but in a way I already knew the answer.

After a couple minutes I headed for the tower to finish my shift. Maybe at noon I’d grab a sandwich and start a second shift, give Go some more time off for covering for me. When I was halfway up, Go said, “It’s easy not to care.”

I stopped.

It seemed like he was about to say something mean or sharp, but he said, “You’re not from here. This isn’t your home. You’re leaving.”

I thought about telling him I might not get back to California. Maybe it wouldn’t pan out right away. I thought about telling him that, not because I believed it but because it might make him feel better.

I said, “What if I do stay here? Will you still want me on your shift?”

“Man, you won’t stay.”

“But no, what if I do? What if I stay in Unalakleet?”

I daydreamed different scenarios about that night in the parking-garage basement. In one scenario I convinced Kid Cab and the rest to give up, to just dump her in a random car as a funny joke—the valet bringing someone a vehicle with a girl screaming and kicking from the trunk. In another daydream I stopped it all, I beat everyone—my friends, the girl, even Chunky when he tried getting in my way. And in another daydream the girl was laughing back at us while being raped, laughing the way she was laughing when she shot Kid Cab, mocking him and all of us, mocking me.

But somehow each daydream led to the same finale—I saw the girl being raped, and instead of Kid, it was me on top of her. I was watching myself. At first I saw everything from a detached bird’s-eye view. Then I was next to the girl and I knew I was raping her. I noticed how ugly I looked when angry. It was a disgusting and an embarrassing ugly. It was a weak ugly. A fake ugly. And each time I tried to reach out and push my face off the girl, I couldn’t. When I walked away, I couldn’t get anywhere either. I turned to see if all my friends were still there watching me with the girl. They were. Then I turned again to see if my face got any less ugly.

The fish were running strong, wiggling past the plastic, getting in little fights with other fish for sperming territory. I didn’t pay attention to which ones were kings and which ones were chums. I blurred my eyes and watched the river wash one way and the fish swim the other.

Go-boy had walked back into North River, along the white plastic, the scrub brush in his hand. He went all the way to the far shore. His back was now to me. Low tide was over and the water was getting deep—up to Go’s waist. With the brush he was working on a dark spot.

I still wasn’t counting fish. There were salmon in the river, hundreds of them, but I just stared and bounced between thoughts of the Kiana I’d had sex with and the Kiana who was Go-boy’s sister.

The last thing I remembered about my night with Kiana was how she slipped her bare feet back into those bunny boots. I was bent over, searching for my shoes in the dim light, and Kiana’s foot—dark with diagonal tan lines—pushed past my face and slipped into a big white winter boot, a bunny boot. The boots were all rubber and were cartoonish in size, and I left the party thinking of how it felt for her beautiful bare feet to be swimming in the oversized boots, walking the dirt roads home. I imagined her removing them in her own bedroom, parallel-parking them next to the door, crawling into bed with her favorite stuffed animal. And that was it, that was the place I wanted to be—in her room, discovering her routine, observing her meaningless actions—rather than the strange room where we had just been.

The smoke from the mosquito coil had my nose aching. Out in the water, the tarp didn’t look any better, but Go was still trying to wash it. His forearm was now clean where the ink-pen tattoo had been.

Then Go-boy stopped scrubbing and looked downstream, taking a break. The water wrinkled around his hips as he leaned into the flow. He held the scrub brush above his head, his hands resting on his hair. Go had a squint in his eyes like he still couldn’t believe what had just happened, but at the same time, like it was always what happened.

Upstream, about fifteen feet from him, I saw a giant maluksuk. A mammoth. It swam past the spawning fish, slow, and right toward Go-boy. The thing was an easy five feet, maybe six. I was sure it was a maluksuk—I could see its greenish moldy skin and its top fin cutting out of the water. It created its own small wake. And I was sure it was going to swim right into Go-boy.

I grabbed the clipboard to make a mark under MALUKSUK. But then I looked again at the dead fish, and something in me switched. I dropped my blue pen and was out of my seat. I was on the ladder, climbing down the tower, then I was on the riverbank. I was running toward the water with the scrub brush high above my head, ready to swing at the dead fish. I yelled, “Maluksuk!” and splashed knee-deep. But I stumbled before I could get to Go. I fell face-first.

For a moment I was underwater, with my eyes shut. The river was ice-cold and it made my muscles feel thick and lethargic. I was numb. I couldn’t feel my clothes or the current. I didn’t hear anything or touch the gravel. For a moment I stayed underwater like this. Then I opened my eyes. The white tarp inched beneath me. And even though the water was clear, I pretended that Go-boy didn’t know where I was, and that he didn’t know if I would ever come up out of the river.