Town

The Morenos are part of this town in no less of a way than the rest of us. Their daddy brought them up here with their fat mama in tow. Trouble. We knew their daddy had to be running from something. Some said money laundering, said the res, said the IRS. Old man Moreno, though, he stuck to himself, even when the kids were starving, even when he nosed his own boat up in the wrong place at the wrong time, got a rock through the hull, had to be peeled off. It’s like those boys forgot that kindness. We see them, say hi, and they say hello—but they look past us, old horizons.

“It was Exxon that changed everything,” one of us might say, spinning on a bar stool. If we want to go further back, if we’re in the mood to reminisce.

“All those goddamn birds,” someone says, and just like that, we’re there.

March 24, 1989. Every man in the Prince William Sound for herring season. This, back in the day when you could sink your boat if you got too greedy.

We remember exactly where we were when we heard the panicked call over the radio—some of us sleeping, some of us staring out to sea, others picking up anchor. It was the season of our lives and when the tanker called on the radio, we turned up the volume, disbelieving. The mistake of a lifetime, the local newspaper would read.

Bligh Reef and a third mate driving and that tanker going the wrong way, too shallow. We all knew about that reef. Us, our seiners, our gillnetters, we knew to stay off that shelf. Too shallow for even us on a high draw. The tanker hit the reef and out spilled its guts, like carving up a fish to salt, to smoke.

We came upon that spill, heard Coast Guard and government officials panic, and when we saw it we, too, had to catch our breath. The oil a frothy milkshake, bubbling over. Glistening dark, glitter with a small bump of a wave beneath. Can’t stop the tides, the wind, the current, the gale that rose up. They had less than 24 hours to get that spill under control. We watched. Miles and miles and miles. So fresh and full of life, we watched it sink into a graveyard.

First, Coast Guard delayed the chemical cleaner. They wanted another solution. Just light a match! we said. We still imagine that blaze and our grinning at it, the glint in our eyes and the spectacle of light. Should’ve lit the whole goddamn sound on fire, we said.

Then the helicopter full of cleaner missed the target. We kept shaking our heads: Who’s driving? Who the fuck’s in charge? And all of us out there, we said to each other: what do we do? We knew that oil would ruin our boats, even a spec of it wreaking havoc on our bows. But it was hell to watch. We weren’t watchers, never have been, never will be. Doers, every last one of us. We had to do something. And they promised, they did—Exxon. Told us they’d pay us double, triple the worth: Just start picking up the dead.

And the hatcheries set, in weeks, to release the baby fry for our summer salmon season. Without the hatcheries, without the fry our industry would fold and we were watching it go. The oil slicked whales, floating belly-up. The oil slicked seals and as they decayed they sunk, their white whiskers bobbing. The oil slicked sea otters, normally lightning quick and sassy, but we watched them grow lethargic, then sink down, down. The birds were the worst. March and the migration to Valdez was in full swing. If asked, those of us who first came to Alaska to study bird patterns, we could name all the variations of murres and guillemots and murrelets. The gulls and kitties, auks and dovekies. If asked, those of us who were fishermen said the birds were brown and brown and brown.

They waited too long and we couldn’t wait anymore. We took to the beaches. We poured hot water down rocks, brushing Simple Green against screaming barnacles. Our brushes and our boots got mucked with it, and we looked down at each other, knew right away we’d done the wrong thing.

The Coast Guard evaded our radio calls.

“Our holds are full!” We heard our own panic across the radio waves.“Now what?”

When we couldn’t fit any more of the dead into our holds we made piles and piles on the beaches, stacks bigger than a football field, just brown-slicked wings, their flopping necks and coated eyeballs. The piles were forty feet high, wide, deep. Someone called up Exxon.

“What do we do with these?”

And he got back on the radio, his voice soft but hinged in the middle, a sort of door we had crawled through together. What we already knew came slow.

“They don’t know.”

“Don’t know? Don’t know?” The radio rumbled.

We sat. We were all thinking the same thing. We had imagined heat and we wanted to see it through. We knew we’d run out of options. Don’t know who did it first, but one of us stepped to the beach and lit the match.

We thought we knew what a blaze looked like, thought we wanted to see the glint of flame in each other’s eyes. But we kept our eyes down and coughed. The land engulfed and we had to look away, our throats thick with guilt. The black smoke billowed up in a hallelujah.

But the Morenos? They stayed away. We forgot about them in our haste, and it wasn’t until later we found out they’d gone behind the scenes and behind our backs. They convinced the State of Alaska that they’d keep the hatcheries clean, dedicate themselves to a cause not yet lost. They were thinking of those baby fry, they were thinking of four years later when a salmon run could disappear altogether. They were thinking of the future, but also of money. They saw through Exxon’s promise to reimburse our damage. While we burned birds, our holds coated in thick brown oil, the Morenos came out Spillionaires. They stayed away.

They’d never rub it in our faces. Not to those of us who lost our entire livelihood, a four-thousand-dollar check from Exxon in place of three million we each sacrificed, but more than that—the boats our fathers built, the bilge pump we’d saved from a scrapyard up north, the nets we’d sewn ourselves, the hull where our daughters painted their names. We never got them clean. Our engines sucked oil into the water intake. The holds coated.

Half of us had cancer within twenty years. Half of the half are already dead, young, may they rest in peace. We visit the Seafarer’s Memorial and press our knuckles to our lips to kiss the tangible, knowing that they would’ve rather gone at sea than latched to some hospital bed. “The birds,” they whispered. “Don’t you remember the birds?” We still hear them. And that smell. Oil coats the pores. They suffocated from the inside out.

And in our beds next to the warm beating bodies of a wife and perhaps a child or two between us all sticky we feel debt come creeping in bottom dreams. Why’d we light those matches? Why’d we scoop up those birds? We hear those barnacles, the smell of crude oil burnt to the roof of the mouth.

Now, we might be math teachers or business owners or cooks or tile-layers. We’ve made something new of ourselves, something we didn’t imagine we’d ever have to do. We are mechanical in our knowledge of things, calculating angles and trajectories and speed. And yet we dream of the ocean, that feeling that you might laugh and cry at the same time. Chest breaking open, spine snapping alert. The endless horizon. The breath of the salt. The salt of our breath. We bury this.

Hands

We’d like to believe the Moreno men have been here since the beginning, whenever that was, but we know too well it isn’t true. When we think of the smell of the sea, don’t we smell kelp and seagull and salt and sand? But we know, far out to sea, in the vast middle of all that ocean, that isn’t it. The ocean, surrounded by itself, smells of air, a brief and clean relief from our own body stink. Only when we broach land, with bows pushed up against gray slate cliffs, does the sea distinguish itself from counterpart. The tideline is a border. Truth is perspective. At land or at sea, which boat, which angle, there’s no such thing as one point of view.

We know our men remember the oil, thick brown sludge, the way the animals soaked deep. Even still if one of the Moreno men catch a long-dead sea otter or a bird in the seine, he’ll pretend it's alive until one of us can get it out of the net. He’ll lean over the side like he might vomit, the rot thick in the air. He’ll clear his throat and his eyes will redden, and we won’t look at him, and he won’t look at us. The long-dead bloat will sink soft back into the scrub of the sea’s top layer, and we won’t mention it again. Our captains, strongest men we know. We’re no experts in what happened before we were born.

Our men squeak above us in the mornings. Some of us roll over, pretending to still be asleep. Some of us place our cold feet to sweating floors, stretch, start the dripping and yawning coffee pot. Some of us lay there, counting, staring at the ceiling. What time is it, daylight? What day is it, again? How much longer? In any season we ricochet between boredom and tired-to-our-bones, either restless or sleeping on every corner of the deck in the sun. When they squeak above us, we pause on the lip of an inhale, hoping we have just one more minute before it all breaks into chaos.

And it does—we’re trained to rouse at the start of the engines, first starboard, then port. We’d do anything to keep in their favor, and we jostle for that first hot cup of coffee, not for us but for our men. Our men expect it. They expect three hot meals a day and prime rib on days off. They expect a rum and coke in hand as soon as our last set comes in and we haul off towards the tender. They expect us to shut the hell up when anyone asks where we caught all those salmon.

We just want to be known as people who do things no one else will do. We think of ourselves as pirates, plundering the seas and taking from those who just can’t hack it. If we’re out there, we’re out together, and the numbers we have—eleven boats in our family crew, lined up and anchored together—outnumber the rest. We want to catch more. And we want folks to know it. We want to go to town, or some big city, and proudly tell folks what we do: I commercial fish in Alaska. All summer. Ninety days, no port in sight. And we like when they stagger back, an awed expression on their face, when they clap us on the back and say words like tough and damn and I could never do it.

Out here, we bounce between pissed and reverent, between we-could-murder-you and we-love-you-too-much. Our men make us money, they catch us fish, and we, deck monkeys, shut the hell up and do what we’re told. Six fish, a water haul, a net monster, a kelp set? Nothing but little crabs? We’ll make another set. In one set we could make two grand, easy, and we might not make a hundred dollars in one month. Sometimes, it’s true, we look around—it’s those days when the sun is out and the rigging is down and our chores are done and the beer is cold and swimsuits are on and the jet skis, the skiffs, the surfboards and paddleboards, the kayaks, the corn hole across the decks and the king salmon sizzling hot fat on the grill—and we say goddamn. Goddamn, we breathe up at the wide open sky, quiet as we’ve ever been in our life. Something loosens. An almost-laugh.

When we’re in AF’inK and one of us will poke and prod them just the right way, it doesn’t take much rum to get them going on about Chenega and the natives. As soon as talk of villages comes up, Papa pipes down. He holds his cards close to his chest. We’ve heard him slip up in the moments he thinks he’s alone with the girls—he’ll talk their small ears off about the res, growing up poor, coming north with his new wife and spanking-new-son. The Homestead acts in the 50s, and he could forget his signature, pass as a white man, his blonde wife and blue-eyed baby stamping out the past forever. When we think of the stories of men claiming this land, we see Papa and his demure wife Dandy, and we see in her eyes that she’s hoping for a daughter, next—just one girl, please.

A daughter. She lives on the wind. Sometimes we can hear her in our dreams, asking our men to look for her. Asking our men to take out the skiff and ram it straight into the rocks. In ancient times there were no women on boats, and so the old-timey sailors started seeing them everywhere: on rocks, luring the men to land, under the waves, swinging towards and then away, away—and then they brought their women out tattooed on their arms, flexing their beauty. Papa still hates a woman on board, says it’s bad luck, but almost every boat will hire someone not just to cook and keep things tidy, but to listen when it’s late at night and the boys are zonked out and the captain’s had one finger too much of something-or-other, and he’s in the mood to talk.

This is how we know about a daughter.

When we’re in AFK we can feel something lift up in the air. The village, straight off our bows, quiet and sleepy, the new cell phone tower buzzing from somewhere up in the hills. Times have changed, which seems inevitable, but time is forever on the tip of their lips. They exist in the interim, between past and now, some memories they just can’t bury.

“You know they get thirty-thousand a year just for existing?” One of the uncles will start. And another: “Keep having babies and their incomes double, triple.”

“Not to mention they got all this land.”

That’s the true sore spot: We can’t fish some waters and they can. Or the opening will be complicated, there’s only so much fish and a fraction of it has to go to the village. Some of the uncles try to stay in good standing, or at least that’s what it looks like, but we all know a Moreno captain wouldn’t do anything that didn’t make him look good or make him money.

But it’s also true that their memories go back beyond their birth, that the stories they treat as their own could never be theirs. And now those stories are ours—we know them like we know to trace a knife next to the ribs, to pluck pink meat off bones. We can feel the stories build like our own popping veins in our wrists or the crook of our elbows. We mix up what happened with what could have happened, we mix their memories with our own. Weren’t we there, too, if they were? We know the stories well enough to tell them ourselves. Once they leave the cabin to go piss off the side, we could pick up right where they left off.

They remember Chenega, the village before it was AFK, before it was destined as a gift from the government to relocate the destroyed villages of the earthquake. And coincidences, is there such a thing? It was Good Friday when that tanker hit Bligh reef, when the vessel broke wide open as a wound. It was Good Friday, and the good forced-Christian Natives of Chenega were celebrating, but they were also calling up their own ghosts. It was Good Friday, twenty-five years before to the day, when the chief of the Chenega village stood on just high enough ground and watched his village swept out to the sea.

On Good Friday, 1964, the Moreno men were just boys. Shooting arrows up in the air and letting them land without flinching. A flinch meant losing, which meant a boy had to strap a chicken on his back until it scratched him bloody. Soon they’d be setting arrows on fire and hitting the neighbors’ roof, once they got desperate for attention and blood. But this was before that. Their mother had tried four times until she got it right, and that year, finally blessed with an only daughter. A girl with four older brothers has nothing to fear in the world except them, and they were, perhaps, still gentle, though Papa was still leaving them on beaches for weeks during the summer to toughen them up. A girl made them want to be soft. We suspect Papa hated what he saw. We suspect he knew it was too dangerous to be soft, here.

On Good Friday, 1964, the Moreno men still boys, the earth buckled. They were living in Seward that year, getting ready for a new salmon season and now all barely old enough to finally work on deck. Our men are always joking to their dad: Did you have us to have a full crew? The oldest could run the skiff by the time he was ten, and the youngest, at five, could at least make toast for breakfast. The two in the middle could stack gear. It was before we knew how dangerous that was, before seatbelts, even, right? It was after the homestead failed, miserably, and they’d moved to town.

When the earth buckled, we imagine that the cheap city-house started to shake. The noise must’ve been a shock in itself, the mountains crunching together and a high-pitched whining of boats, of buildings, the bands of steel holding together the cable bridge. Dandy screamed. Papa must’ve pitched open the door and started throwing boys out of it, one after another, until they were all climbing up the road and hill on all fours. The fresh spring crabgrass must’ve scratched their knees. The land, rolling like the snap of a towel, swallowed up buildings and trees, and the boys had to dodge. The earth opened in deep gashes around them, closing back up, then opening somewhere else. Fire hydrants screeched open, spraying water everywhere. The one paved road through the middle of town cracked down the middle, half of it rising twelve feet and the other sinking four.

It wasn’t until they’d gotten high enough, breathing hard with pounding limbs and lungs, and surely the youngest was whining now that the earth had stopped shattering and screeching, that someone asked, “Who grabbed the baby?”

The water in the harbor had already sucked back out and away, the mussels screaming like they did at low tide and three too-early salmon flopped under the docks, suddenly drowning without water.

We knew Dandy didn’t have a lick of mothering instinct but we have to imagine she ran towards the house. Wouldn’t she? And then what would’ve happened—would one of the boys have tackled her, wrestled her to the ground? Would Papa have looked at that water being sucked out and have known, no fucking way, we stay put? Did he know, then, looking out at the way the water had gone around the corner, still somewhere, and building beneath, did he know what would happen?

Did the boys look out at the wall of water forming just beyond their sight, did they see not just a tsunami but their futures come screaming at them? Did they see their mother disappear, first a flutter and then returned, three months later, fat around her neck and arms, scooping up everything she could to fill her hollowed loss? Did they see their father get just a bit smaller the bigger they got? Did they wonder if he even missed her? Did they see their own future wives, and their some-day sons and their one-day daughters, and did they know they would hold those loved ones just a bit farther out, just a little farther around the corner, unable to meet them where they were in the future? That this moment would be between them and those they loved forever? That each time they held something precious, they would always be shuddering back and forth between what had happened and what could happen.

We can see them sitting on the hill, quiet as they’d ever been in their lives, not quite sure why their parents were leaving their sweet baby sister, her fat cheeks shining through the bars of her crib in the attic. We can see them plucking at the grass the way every kid does, unable to sit still even in the stillness of woods and water while that tsunami grew beyond the cliffs. We can see them peering down past the church (walls gone, steeple crashed into the grassy yard in front) and the school (now a cavern to the center of the earth) and the Piggy Wiggly (its neon sign sparking as water leaked from a burst pipe) and not knowing they would never see that house, or church, or school, or grocery again.

And that’s where our made-up memories stop. The rest, we can’t imagine. The water rushing in, the snatching of bones and breakers, the boats that rushed out, never to be seen again. We’ve heard accounts of pirate ships run by no body, and the 1964 Earthquake gets brought about again. No one mentions a baby.

Maybe now she is a woman, or maybe she froze as a young girl—we don’t know the rules of the haunted. We know when we look at our men and we see them looking past the valleys and the cliffs, in the quiet of a moment, we know not to look too closely. In any case the land sunk and whole forests caved into salt water, the coastline of Prince William Sound changed forever, and the inner lives of our men took a turn. From then on out, they were out for blood. Whose? Ours, maybe—but maybe the blood of the girl they’d lost, the mother who never returned, not really, or maybe the blood of a father who refused to speak of her ever again. The first year we never even knew there was a sister. Someone else maybe took us aside, said—have you heard of the unnamed sister?

Women weren’t allowed out here, and then they were, and these men didn’t hesitate in making sure there was some opportunity for a family friend or a wife’s niece or someone’s babysitter—and Papa, silent, as his boys told their drunken tales of who they’d left in the house. When we fuck up, and something goes wrong, and they get so goddamn pissed at us (spitting and jumping on one foot like Rumple-fucking-stiltskin, red-faced) we know it’s because they’re scared we didn’t keep us safe. They’ve lost enough, haven’t they? they’ll ask in the whites of their eyes as they call us every name they’ve got in the book, anything they can think of. Maybe our men can only love what they lose. We have to forgive them, their multiplying fears. We know we weren’t there, but we could have been.

Men

We have a system and we stick to that system. One of us reads the Fish and Game manual front to back each year, makes sure he has the codes memorized. One of us sews a net like a grandmother, hands pushing soft through the holes and weaving together what’s left of the edges. One of us keeps the others on edge, always challenging, changing, catching more and more fish than the others. One of us keeps the rest of us from moving on, caught forever on that bluff.

Truth is, we’ve forgotten what fear tastes like. Sometimes we’ve got to push towards the edge of something because we need that hot blood pulsing through our ears. We need the ocean to remind us we are small, small, small. No one else will show us, and we like it that way.

But when does a man look into this future and not feel fear? When we were boys, we could shoot these fish right out of the water. We’d wrangle halibut six times our own weight. We’d string deer up across the boats like Christmas lights. We’d reel salmon thick as our own thighs on the Kenai, holler and whoop as those fat chinooks fought and thrashed and bled in the mouth, and we skewered them up once we figured out how to smoke them, watching those that came before, before they disappeared. Before they were handed a bottle of whiskey and shimmering oil money, before the Argos and the television sets and the soda pop. We were getting back to something lost, each moment, and that was the edge we chased.

Because before the feasts on the back deck, it’d been lean times. Chased by spam and dehydrated milk on a beach somewhere, lost, the oldest of us with the gun he couldn’t yet shoot, the youngest crying cold. When does a man look into this future and not feel fear that the past could come sneaking back any day, a harsh and cold reminder that this is all temporary, all of it, just look at it—fleeting. We were haunted by hunger.

When we look out at all these kids we hire in the summer, we know they’ve got no idea. Goddamn freshest shrimp on the barbecue, oysters dripping in lemon, prime rib bleeding down paper plates, and we can see greed in their eyes. Truth is, some of these kids came from hard times, some of these kids are pulling themselves out of a hole we can recognize.

The hole is its own kind of purity though. Now, a bad season means the wife won’t get her Hawaiian vacation this year, and a bad season means no new property on the beach, means less empire, means tightening the belt. We’d never look back on those starving seasons and wish for it ever again, but as least we knew those women loved us. We knew they were in it, for us, with us. Now we eat across strangers, we run as fast as we can from them in the spring as the season starts and dawdle back in the fall when it ends. We love them, we do, but we’ve lost the thread somehow.

We don’t miss the hunger, but there was something primal in it. We call it grit. Sometimes, we’ll grab a plunger from a deckhand and we’ll work like we know how to. They’ll stand back, look at us, like they didn’t know we could still do it—our fat bellies protruding, legs shaking, our arms still strong, still something.

Mama is still and always dancing with baby girl. We’ve been kicked out of the house again, and we watch her bring baby’s lips close to her own. We can’t tell them apart for a moment, where one ends the other begins, all soft flesh and happy. We don’t kick or bite or scratch each other, just watch from outside the window, our breath hot against the plexiglass. She must be telling her a secret, something she never told us. We were hungry in that moment, wanting what we’d never have. Instead, someone tweaked an ear and went off running, and we scuffled from the window, chasing the wrong thing.

We hope that those wives and kids look at us like heroes. We shot fish out of the water, we strung deer up on the back deck like they weren’t pure and whole animals but meat, sinew, scar. We were out for blood. We wanted anger, we wanted edge. They look at us like we’re strangers, now, and we are—we barely recognize our shallows reflected, we can’t silence that part of our chest that bubbles out in the wrong moment. We’re sorry, we are. We’d never say it. We want to say to each other, we want to turn and see what we each remember, we want to stitch together whatever quilt we’ve lost along the way, the hard times, the lean times, we want to remember her. We don’t ask, we don’t look. We say the wrong thing. We know we do. We say it again. We didn’t mean to leave you the world this way, we want to plead, but instead, we yell at someone else, we repeat something to ourselves like we’ll believe it someday. Fear is chasing, and we are hungry, and living that edge is what keeps us up, hunting.