The Alaskan Laundry by Brendan Jones Page B

that she was fine, and they’d speak sometime in the future. But she didn’t want to. If anyone needed to apologize, it was him. In the meantime, she had work to do.
    Her job was to corral the dark schools of fish up against the aluminum weir and scoop as many as she could. The spawning males, some a couple feet long, had overdeveloped snouts and jaws. Their teeth snagged on the waders she had patched so carefully, ripping new holes, letting cold water seep into her long underwear. Her legs were soaked.
    â€œThis fucking sucks,” Tara yelled up to Newt. “I’m wet as shit.”
    â€œC’mon up here then. We’ll switch.”
    Outside the killing shack, Newt showed her how to seize the male fish by the meat of their tails and fling them into the chute, while females were dropped on a stainless-steel tray. “You’re not tapping them awake, you’re knockin ’em dead,” he said, gripping a female just behind the head and setting the skull on the cinderblock. “Downright mean to be hesitant.” He raised an alder stick wrapped in heavy-gauge copper.
BANG.
The tray shook, the salmon quivered, the yellow eye dimmed as the body went slack. “There you have it. Dead as an iced catfish.”
    It was miserable work. She preferred being inside the killing shack, using a finger-razor to slice open the females’ stomachs, dumping their skeins of orange eggs into a five-gallon bucket, sealing the bucket by pounding on the lid with a rubber mallet.
    Throughout the day they switched off. Fritz had hired a couple students from the college who reminded Tara of how she had been her first weeks—trudging around, unsnapping their bibs at the end of the day while Newt and Tara loaded buckets onto the flatbed. Lazy.
    Things grew more exciting whenever Fritz came down to the slough, a doughnut or coffee in his hand, and yelled, “It’s baby-making time!” Newt showed Tara how to select seven virile males with prominent humps and long jaws. One by one she rubbed the spot just above the anus, releasing a stream of milky white liquid over the eggs of twenty-seven females. Newt patted her on the back.
    â€œKeep it up, you’ll be chief salmon jacker in no time. Just a little lower, give it a good pinch.” She pushed him out of the way. But he was right: she did have the touch. She shook the bucket until the eggs were covered in a film of milt, then tossed the writhing male salmon into the chute. “Spawn and die,” Newt chanted, two fingers held above his head like a rock star. “Spawn and motherfuckin’ die!”
    As summer wore on she refined her moves, knocking fish a centimeter behind the eye, flinging spent males over her shoulder, one after the other, into the chute. Fritz watched from the doorway of the shack. “If I don’t look out, some fisherman’s gonna steal you away and make a worker out of you.”
    He gave them Sundays off. At the Muskeg, mandolins, banjos, guitars, and fiddles emerged from beat-up cases pasted with stickers. A bright-eyed older woman pulled out an accordion, and soon they were all playing, the fiddle so mournful, it made the roots of her hair hurt. She realized she was counting again, trying to recall when Connor had sent her that short letter. Just before Christmas. A card would be good, she decided. Brief and informal. In the bookstore she selected one with an old cabin rotting into the woods.
    Â 
June 17, 1998
Hey, Connor,
I just wanted to drop a note to let you know I’m still alive up here. Putting away money with that tug I told you about in mind. It has a messed-up engine or something. The woman who owns it is an odd duck. Maybe I’ll just end up with a little fishing boat.
    Â 
    She considered what she had written, unsure why she was going on like this.
    Â 
Are you back in Philly for the summer, maybe up on the scaffold again? I’m working at the hatchery, killing fish. The