LITMIR.BIZ

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he approached. He stopped in front of the snaking wooden corks with his hands jammed in his pockets.

      “You get your boat off my skiff?” Anne Girl said without looking up. She continued picking out the salmon and throwing them around her, narrowly missing John.

      John laughed nervously. “That was your skiff? I haven’t yet, but I’m sure there’s a way we can do it. Frederik was telling me that the cannery has some rollers we can put it on . . .”

      Anne Girl stood up slowly and stretched her back. She nodded toward John, barely taking him in, and picked up the cork end of the net where a salmon was entangled and handed it to him. And then she returned to where she had crouched before and continued to pull out salmon after salmon.

      John took the salmon and turned it in his hands. But when he tugged on the line, it slipped from his fingers and fell to the ground, coating itself in a layer of gravel.

      Anne Girl glanced up and saw John redden as if caught in a lie. His cheeks and forehead flushed until it seemed that his blond hair would catch fire too. Watching him, she saw his story in those colors. She knew before he said anything that he had left Seattle, telling everyone that he was going to Alaska to fish the deep waters for salmon or crab or anything that lived beneath the waves. Of course he had read about Bristol Bay and how it was swimming with heads and tails and millions of dollars. Or maybe he thought, because he looked like a Norwegian, that fishing was in his blood. Her stomach sank, because she knew she was stuck with him and that it was going to be a while before she would get her skiff back.

      “Don’t say nothing,” she said, and took the salmon by the gills. She yanked it twice and the fish dropped freely to the ground. She handed him a different section of net.

      John took another salmon and mimicked her hands. He pulled hard until the web was securely lodged in the gills. He pulled again and ripped the gills clean off. He held the bloody salmon by its tail fin in front of Anne Girl and smiled.

      Once again, Anne Girl stopped and stared at him, her eyes dark and peering as if she were trying to make a decision about this large white man before her. She didn’t have a pretty face, and when she was thinking, her broad forehead became one horizontal crease in the middle. But no one would disagree that she was hard and sturdy. Her skin was light tan, like that of most of the residents in the village, but seemed almost gray against the color of her black hair.

      “You here to fish?” she asked. Her voice carried over the crash of the waves. “’Cause you don’t know nothing about fish.” She took the salmon from him and showed him how to pull a salmon from a net without getting its gills further caught or ripped off. “Fish are food, uh.”

      “I thought about fishing, but maybe I’ll work for the cannery.” John nodded toward the little town on stilts and winked at her.

      “You don’t want to work for them,” she said. “See these hands.” She took off her gloves and held up her hands. The knuckles were swollen, and the fingers were scarred white where they had been repeatedly nicked and burned.

      “Oh, you’ve worked then in a cannery, I see. Which one?”

      “No, I never. I still got all my fingers, and they work too.” She laughed. “You like your fingers? You shouldn’t work in the cannery.” She wiped her forehead, leaving a string of slime gleaming on her skin.

      Anne Girl saw John’s pale skin become whiter, as if the moon had risen inside of him, making his eyes lighter. He was weak-blooded too, she thought. She laughed again and pointed toward another caught salmon. “I jokes. Maybe you can fish. Here, fish with me.” She picked up a flounder and traced its white underside with her finger. “You know the Killweathers, then?” she asked.

      “Well, not really. We’re accidental friends,” John said.

      As John recounted his arrival to Nushagak Village, of how he left at high tide from Dillingham and ended up on the beach, Anne Girl kicked the gravel to the rhythm of his speech, enjoying the fact that she was correct about him. Right down to the length of his legs. She almost believed that she had made him appear before her. She partially listened to his story about tea with Frederik and Nora and how their daughter, Kristen, was teething. It was too much detail for Anne Girl. His voice was getting in the way of her thinking. Her foot continued to tap, and her head nodded as a smile played out on her face.

      Tap, tap, tap. And here he was.

      Three

      You see our prop is bent. I am pretty sure of it. Where the hell is everyone? Don’t people fish around here? This isn’t like the old days with the double ender sailboats where we could try to make an outrigger with the mast. We wouldn’t have to worry about capsizing then.

       I was talking about Marulia, huh? Yes, there are so many things I wish I could share with you about her, like how she did her hair or whether she loved hard or just enough so it was easy to say goodbye. You might want to know these things about her one day, just as I wanted to know. Yet, your Nan spoke little of her mom. Yes, there were other stories, but not the juicy ones. So Marulia’s story is locked up with the village women, who prefer to talk over smoked fish and a cup of dark tea. The village women, you say? Oh yes. Wait till you meet them. They are round and skinny, loud and quiet. But it is the fat one you will like the most. But I am not there yet. You will meet her in time.

      The sailboat remained latched to the skiff until it was clear to everyone that John was not leaving. His presence made Anne Girl restless, but she had always been on edge. Born on the shores of the salty waters in Nushagak, she grew up with mud in her fingernails and tundra leaves in her hair. The farthest she had traveled was to King Salmon, so that she could work in the cannery. She didn’t last long in that village, though. The buildings there were stacked against each other, and Anne Girl couldn’t breathe. It reminded her of flies swarming around a dead fish, and she felt like she was suffocating. She didn’t even make it to the run before she returned home to help her mother put up meat for the winter.

      It was difficult for Anne Girl to sit too long in one spot. She found that if her hands kept busy, then she felt better, calmer. But once they stopped, a rising anxious knot formed in her stomach that made her want to run to that place where the tundra met the blue sky. Where there was an end to the earth. She was scared of the knot and always felt its presence, even during the summers when she was too busy fishing, berry picking, and gathering wood. Some days were devoted to avoiding its tightness, and when she was still short of breath after gathering wood for the maqi or putting up fish, Anne Girl understood that the knot might never leave.

      One afternoon, Anne Girl and her mother pulled the cutting table down the beach where the salmon that Anne Girl had picked earlier lay gleaming on the gravel floor. The seagulls flapped in irritation and scattered as they approached but landed just far enough so that when the cutting began, their meals of guts and tails would be fresh.

      While Anne Girl filled a bucket with water, Marulia stood near the table sharpening her uluaq with a round stone. She tested the half-moon blade with her finger before lobbing off the head of the first salmon.

      “You were with that kass’aq again fishing today? He looks clumsy.” She grunted and threw the silver head in a bucket. They would have boiled heads sprinkled with wild celery tonight.

      “Yeah, he’s no good at fishing,” Anne Girl agreed. She didn’t let on that John’s clumsiness made her laugh, that watching slime trickle down his forearms as he wrestled with a salmon made her want to reach out and pick off the scales that stuck to his skin. She could almost feel his arms beneath her fingertips and imagined how the coarseness of her own hands would soften against his.

      “He’s staying at those missionaries’ place, then?” Marulia asked. “You know how long?”

      Marulia didn’t give Anne Girl the chance to answer, and continued with her question. She set down her uluaq and waved her arm to the seagulls. “Did he invite you to the church, saying ‘Please join us for services and cookies. We are the only ones on the beach with cookies and Bibles in Yup’ik.’?”

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