BY PIPER LANE
DECKHAND, F/V CARLA MARIE
Before the accident, we’d been at sea for eighty days, no port in sight. On that day we wound through the coves, tundra on each side of each boat, a long string of pearls, we were. Our nets waiting on the aft. Ready to fish. It’d been a starving season.
We heard their fins before we saw them. First the waterfall from every angle of the cove, then salmon beating up their stream. They were trying to get home to die. Glitter on the water. When the light hits the back of them fins, scales all lit up? We call that salmon sparkle. We were sick with wanting them.
The captains told us we could go ashore so we loaded down the skiff, twenty bodies or more, the edge low to the water. From the skiff we reached out to touch the charcoaled bodies, their little humps already starting to rot as they stuck out from the surface. Each one of us jumped off and felt flat ground beneath our feet. We scattered, then, trying to get away from each other.
I stood in the river. My boots filled with water. To catch salmon with your bare hands you’ve got to hold real still—let them forget you’re there. It’s a magic that way. Rain shedding down my gear, hands numb and maybe even bleeding. By August we can’t feel anything, trying everything just to feel. Empty land for miles, our closest thing to freedom. We wait for summer’s end and hope it comes soon.
I caught one, just about yelled—but I didn’t make a sound. I kept my mouth shut. Inside we might be screaming but we don’t let on, can’t let on. I dropped it and it fell back towards the cove. Before the accident I hadn’t realized how hard it was to get all the way up there. That fish had to start over. From the bottom, they’ll try so hard to get up that they’ll die fighting. From the top, it looks too easy.
Every time we recall what happened, every time it comes back up, the millionth time, all I’m thinking about is standing in that stream, wet and cold to my bones, trying to fucking feel something.
CAPTAIN, F/V PELICAN
We were just trying to keep our fish and make our money. They was our fish. And I’ll tell you, I’ll tell anyone—suicide mission. We all saw the Tion, Kodiak boat, nosing its way towards us. Those guys knew exactly what they were doing when they came hauling in towards Bristol’s bow going ten, fifteen knots. Speeding up like they did. Puffing black smoke up in the air. Winding up, they was—heading straight at her.
We were bunched up together in Hidden Cove. Don’t get too creative with names around here, you know? See a flat island? It’s probably called Flat Island. A cove you can hole up in to sleep when the weather gets bad? Sleepy Cove. We were supposed to be hidden. But that other boat weaved its way in between two points, slow, like something from a movie, something you watch with your face all twisted up.
It’d been pouring fucking rain for weeks. We sat on those fish. We couldn’t go anywhere, couldn’t do anything. It’d been closed and closed again, another week came and went. We waited and waited for Fish and Game to open this area, finally give us permission to fish, finally let us weld together the sharp edges of a starving year. No trouble buckling our belts over bellies. Late August. People getting desperate. No fish anywhere except here in this itty bitty cove. All trying to make boat payments and shit.
This kid wouldn’t have done what he did if it’d been any other season. If it’d been any other month. August drags on like a slow bleed of a not-so-bad wound—keep cracking open the scab, keep grinding down, some high-pitched dull noise like metal on metal.
DECKHAND, F/V GLACIER POINT
We all heard it, though. We can’t deny that we heard Bristol’s dad, Tom, screaming on the radio. “Ram him, ram him! Don’t let him in!” Tom’s voice gets hoarse when he yells, and the radio pops. Daddy tells you to ram him and you’d better fucking do it.
CAPTAIN, F/V GOLDEN PEARL (DEFENDANT)
I started getting messages within hours: I hope you rot in jail. Threats on Facebook, text messages. I saved them all for evidence. I put up cameras on my boat over the winter. I hired two different lawyers: civil and criminal. The owner of Trident called me himself to let me know they had lawyers for me. And the co-op: they’re helping me with costs and all that. It’s still taken a toll. I haven’t been eating much. My mom calls it the courtroom diet, keeps complimenting me on how skinny I look.
I never tell people my last name around this state unless they ask for it. On a first date, I won’t tell people who I am or what I do for a living. I fly under their radar. I mean, we’ve had deckhands get in fights for defending the Morenos. It’s not like any of this has ever been easy. What do we love? If someone asked me, what do you love? but no one asks. The iron blood smell, the fresh brown freckles, the starfish peeking out between bull kelp strands. Early mornings, late nights. The way a body remembers work. In winter we are skeletons of our own strength, and when spring rolls around, the body remembers to grow, to expand, to stand ground. We love it all too much to think much about what’s easy, though—if it were easy then everyone would be this rich.
In the back of my head I just keep seeing that boat, red blistered paint, the slow drawl of it as it veered away, then straight back at me. It’s my fault, isn’t it?
CAPTAIN, F/V MIDNIGHT PEARL
My advice, dear daughter, is to just sue the shit out of the entire Alaska State Trooper force. It doesn’t matter, Bristol. You sue them all. Think you don’t already have your head marked? Sue them Kodiak boats, conspiracy, we all know it—and then sue the people meant to protect and serve. We’ll get them all, I swear to god. I didn’t build this dynasty with you and your brother for you to be taken advantage of and illegally persecuted by some shitty shoddy police work. We’ll go down to Kodiak ourselves and your uncle will pull his .45 and go to town on all those meth head losers. You’ve just got to do what I tell you to do, okay? I’ll never let you down. Have I ever let you down before?
DECKHAND, F/V PELICAN
We replay and hit replay and someone slits the seal on a bottle of rum and we start in again with What happened? So we go over it again. Out here, we borrow each other’s glassy memories. We steal what isn’t ours. Something like blood mixes with salt water and all we have is pink and useless. By the end of the summer, we’re talking like each other, taken on phrases that aren’t ours. Whose memory is this, mine? We call to each other in August dark and since then we can’t stop, can’t stop talking about it.
DECKHAND, F/V SCALLYWAG
You want to know what happened? Doesn’t everybody. Every single person we’ve met out here, on land, they’ve all got questions—our parents, our lovers, our girls, our men. Our buddies are the worst, horsing around, jacked up, probing until we blow up. We tell one type of story.
Everyone in the cove knew those was our fish. We’d scouted and prepared and we sat there, waiting. Out of our eleven-boat co-op, Tom chose four boats as our shield. The second generation—Jace and Ty and Drew and Bristol. Our men were inside, ready to take the first sets, the big sets, the higher stakes. But maybe they miscalculated what was high and low. It’s true that they’d forgotten what it meant to be small, or new, or a target. No one messes with the Moreno men, that’s what we knew and said, especially to each other.
Four minutes until the cove opened. The fish waited in a mass, a darkened bloated blob, and we watched them, hungry. Four boats held the line from point-to-point of the cove, holding the fish there nice and steady. They guarded salmon.
On the inside of the barricade, two more of our boats idled in the pocket by the waterfall, getting ready to make a set at 6am sharp—Randy and Lou. Tom would make the third set, the trickiest set, the clean up—and he circled nearby, trying to figure out the best angle.
At four minutes that Kodiak boat, the Tion, started winding up outside the line. He did a quick little circle, gaining speed, looked like he’d go in a different direction. Black smoke gag. Way too fast. At the last second he made a hard left turn towards Bristol’s boat, shooting for the gap at the end.
Bristol probably did hit the gas. She saw him coming and tried to shorten the opening. But the crack between boats was already less than fifteen feet. There was never room for him to make it. He knew it, she knew it—we all knew it.
When she saw that he was still coming in as fast as he was, she threw her boat out of gear, but it was too late. Her anchor winch hit the other stack. It fell back on deck and hit the kid standing at the pancake. He bounced back against the net, all limbs. No one was watching him, though.
The Tion hit her or she hit him and the small boat ricocheted between the bigger boats and towards the dark black water of fish, swirling prop wash towards the rocks. And then at 6am sharp, it opened.
We were officially allowed to set a net.
CAPTAIN, F/V SCALLYWAG
I’ll tell you what, though, that motherfucking cunt deserved everything that happened to him. Feel bad for his crew, but you don’t just get on any boat—that’s a dumb move. You’ve gotta trust your captain and this guy is not a guy you trust with your life.
I’ll tell you what else, if it’d been me on that outside ring, he wouldn’t have just lost his stack. Lou Moreno don’t take no shit. I’d have rammed him so hard that that shitty little boat would have folded like a goddamn accordion. They’d have medivaced the captain, too. Moreno ain’t a name you mess with, you hear? That’s known.
If it’d been me he challenged, my tongue would’ve fallen right out of my mouth it turned so black from all the cussing.
If it’d been me, if I hadn’t been making a set at the time, if he’d gotten through that ring of boats, I’d have fucked him in the ass here to Pluto and I’d have enjoyed every second of it. If it’d just been me, damnit, you know none of this would’ve happened. Can’t let goddamn chicks run boats, and I told my brother that. I told him.
DECKHAND, F/V PELICAN
We were in that inner circle about to make a set. On the fish—god, they were everywhere. Salmon sparkle a hundred feet wide, never seen so many tips out there. They looked like little bird wings, if birds were drowned and struggling in a foot of water, but quiet—so quiet. They pulsed there and never made a sound. I was about to release the pancake when, what do you know, I see black smoke from the corner of my eye. Some boat’s hauling ass towards our inner circle. Going way too fast in the wrong direction. And then someone’s yelling, and Randy yells down to us, Let her go! like he always does and I pop it and out goes the skiff and the net—fast, a whoosh, and then we look back at the line. We stand there watching, helpless, as this chintzy red boat bounces off Bristol’s bow, metal on fiberglass—we watched the stack fall. We watched both kids stagger back. I thought I saw someone fall in the water. Prop wash and blood. Swear I seen blood.
CAPTAIN, F/V GLACIER POINT
What kind of a guy picks on a little girl like that? Have you seen her? My niece is maybe five-foot-nothing, pretty little thing, hates being called princess, but how can I help it? She’s got these big brown eyes, and that ass? Oof.
Of course we’re all thinking it’s a little strange to have a bunch of females out there. A whole crew! I’m not complaining though, who would? On hot days when they start jumping off the top house in bikinis? I’m the first in line to watch. I’ll judge the splash, determine the grace and poise. I might be her uncle but we’re all glad. After I slept with that one chick the wife wouldn’t let me hire another girl. We’re lucky to have them. Wouldn’t have it any other way and I mean that. We are sincere. We are lucky. The boys’ll get distracted but they don’t work as hard as them girls do, to be honest. The boys don’t have quite as much to prove.
This guy, though, that piece-of-shit boat churning water up in a circle, spinning around that last second. We saw him coming at her and knew it was too late. What do you do in that situation? Yield? Can’t yield. Can’t let on. Can’t show weakness. No weakness on the water. What was she supposed to do? I’d have done the same damn thing.
CAPTAIN, F/V GOLDEN PEARL (DEFENDANT)
I found those fish! I needed Randy to help me get through the cove, with the shallow spots and sharp turns, but it was my idea to go in there. I love Hidden Cove. The green hills, blueberries, all the hidden rocky pools just shallow enough to wade into. My idea. I got lucky. I freaked the fuck out when I saw all those fish. Dark water. It was my call, and I found them first, and so I keep asking myself: why wasn’t I making one of the first sets? Why’d they put me on the outside? How come Lou and Randy got to make those first sets, while I held the line? Didn’t they know someone might try something?
DECKHAND, F/V CARLA MARIE
I just couldn’t get that bad taste out of my mouth. Like accidentally licking metal. Shards on your tongue. Cut glass. Blood. Iron. But the season ended and that was it. We didn’t even have each other around to keep talking about it.
And I know we’re all supposed to be okay with this kind of thing. The kid was fine, really, he was. We’re supposed to laugh at the idiocy and I do, I do with my dad and with my cousins and my uncles, we sit out in the shop sometimes and we say Goddamn, what a dumbass. But it took a while to laugh. These things happen, of course. That’s what we say. But things got dirty real quick, and we’d never seen blood like that.
DECKHAND, F/V MIDNIGHT PEARL
They took a video of the whole thing, camera pointed on their back deck so no one could see that they were headed straight at us, so no one could see it was suicidal. The boys back there are smiling. The guys are smiling before they hit and they’re smiling afterwards, even with one of their own bleeding out his head. There’s black smoke. The skiff turns at the last second. All the audio is on, people screaming at each other, the captain upset, cussing her out.
But the goddamn crew doesn’t stop smiling, all the way through. That’s on the tape.
CAPTAIN, F/V SCALLYWAG
The motherfucker wound up, spun, and hit her. He headed straight at her out of nowhere, on purpose. They’re saying she was going ten knots? I’ll tell you right now that big ol’ boat can’t even go six. Can’t even go eight on a good day with the current and the right wind. Too goddamn heavy. Old engines. Girl chose bamboo counters instead of what she really needed, engines. Get me in that courtroom, I’ll say what
I’d never tell her—no, I never would, but god, girl. We keep waiting for the day when she puts that big pretty boat away, let’s one of her cousins or her brothers take over. She’s a chick! She’s bound to have a whim every now and then. This just happened to be a four million dollar whim. It’ll be over soon. She’ll give up. Go home. I just know it, I do. I know chicks like this.
CAPTAIN, F/V GOLDEN PEARL (DEFENDANT)
I don’t think people realize: if I hadn’t done what I did? I had to. My uncles wouldn’t let me fish by them if I hadn’t, you know? They wouldn’t co-op with me. It’d confirm everything they think they know. I’m the girl, small hands, the one who cries when she’s mad, they ask me to sew back on their buttons and they ask me how to make bread and they come over for carrot cake and fresh fruit. I’d be the weakest part of our chain, and no matter where I went in the Sound, someone could just roll up next to me and try to shove me off my very own fish. I’m the target. Even surrounded on all sides by these men I call my family. No one could stop them. Just me.
CAPTAIN, F/V PELICAN
Look, okay? We know what the fuck we’re doing. If you take me, Lou, Tom, Randy—add up the years, we’ve got over 150 years of fishing under our belts, okay? Over a century and a half of experience. Some forty-some years ago, at just seventeen years of age! I memorized the Coast Guard maritime law regulations and the Department of Fish and Game regulations. You know how useful it is to call up Charlie from Fish & Game and ask him, hey Charlie, hey, any idea why you guys closed this stream when the intertidal shoreline is in effect? Or why you opened AFK when you closed the waters surrounding it, when subsection C104.17 states otherwise? What the hell were you thinking, Charlie?
Maritime law states that you yield on the right. It also states that you yield to the larger boat. It also states that you keep control of your motherfucking vessel in controlled waters and that you stay the fuck away from other boats. I mean who did this? She’s just a little girl, for Christ’s sakes.
Next thing we know, Coast Guard’s up there with a chopper circling. Some kid’s bleeding from the head.
This reflects on us, don’t it? On all of us? That we can’t keep ourselves out of trouble? Some people saying we ask for this kind of trouble. But it hardly seems fair to charge a girl with something like felony, even manslaughter. I’d have done the same thing. People talking, but I’d have done the same thing, and they would’ve, too.
DECKHAND, F/V ARCTIC MISTRESS
I’ve made diagrams of it. Lots of us are visual folks, got to see it to believe it. We had to show the lawyers and the judges and all those fancy-ass men who’ve never been in a cove like this before. We needed everyone to understand the scale of Hidden Cove to really understand the story.
You’ve got 320 ft between point to point, and in this little corner of a cove, you’ve got 300,000 lbs of fish sitting there.
In between each point, you’ve got four boats. They’re lined up bow to stern. Some of these boats are sixty feet, but most are eighty with their skiffs attached to the back. Four times seventy-plus average? 280-300. It’s simple math. Between each boat there was anywhere from 10-15 feet. Absolutely no room for another seiner to make it between them. The “gap” he was shooting for would’ve never fit him in it.
That was the whole point. He chose who he chose for a reason.
CAPTAIN, F/V GOLDEN PEARL (DEFENDANT)
Not sure what’s next. Jail? Community service? I’m chained to this state in a way I never was before. Used to spend winters hurling myself into waves, sputtering up, sitting on the board with my skin grazed by Caribbean sunset pink. They’ve got lawyers for me, three of them, each doing some other thing so that I don’t even know who to call when I need them.
I’m not giving this up. I was born to these waters and each spring we come home. Each spring we smell that salt on the wind coming in off the mountains, and it drops down, and we feel the cold sun slipping into our veins. My family has been fishing these waters for thirty years. I will fish, won’t I? They’ve got to let me stay.
DECKHAND, F/V SCALLYWAG
It’s easy to hate the people at the top. We raft up eleven boats long. Crews together total forty to fifty people. On nice days we jump off the top houses, one after one after one. We’ve got jet skis and waterskis and wake boards, and we get drunk on our days off and play corn hole across the boat decks. We run up to the lake and get high and play ultimate frisbee in the blueberry bogs, boys against girls, mud caked up our legs and mosquitoes hovering in the air. In the lake we lean back and let our heads go numb with glacier liquid gold. We pop beers and let them guzzle into our veins and feel good.
We’re always in the top five, no matter what, and I’d say it’s because of the unity. We share damn near everything. We tell each other where the fish are. Compete with each other, too. And we fish the south line in wicked currents, when no one else is brave enough to be there. We make eighteen, twenty sets a day. We don’t slow down. My muscles get jacked and I can’t even eat enough to keep up my calories. Work hard, play hard—that’s the motto. Live by the motto, live and die.
We are the first ones to the fishing grounds, making sets when there’s only six fish in a set, and the very last ones to leave. Not until there’s white jizz covering our rain gear and eggs spilt all over deck. Not until late August. Not until we’ve all lost our minds, ’til we’ve all got glazed eyes—’til we’d do anything just to feel something, the end coming slow and fast at the same time. We can’t look at each other in August because we’re wet with longing for land and the smell of undergrowth. We won’t look and we won’t go home yet. We won’t go home—not until we’re numb and drunk and rich.
DECKHAND, F/V GOLDEN PEARL
Everybody in town has asked me if I saw the video. I don’t want to talk to these people, strangers, coming up in a bar or at a concert, somewhere I think I’m anonymous.
Usually the men talking at me weren’t even in the cove. They were off on some other opener in another part of the Sound. Or they don’t even know what happened because they were in a different fishery or in another part of the state and heard it second, third, or fourth hand. I was there, okay? Why isn’t anyone listening to me?
What I want to say, to scream, is this isn’t about fishing. This isn’t about explaining marine law to me, you dick. But what do we do? We shut the hell up. We work twice as hard. When it comes down to it, I carry double. I don’t flinch when shit cuts through my hands, when it’s my blood gushing all over deck. I don’t let anyone do anything for me. This is about being a girl. It’s about a girl trying to prove herself, trying to blend into the backdrop at the same time. Trying to fight some old ways and losing every day.
And I know, too, that everyone on Bristol’s side is almost just as fucking bad. Having someone’s back doesn’t mean the same here. I’ve been looking hard for kindness and it looks like something else—darker, and mostly underwater. It’s stroking the belly of a halibut as it slowly drowns in oxygen instead of beating it across the head. Dipping those salmon in freezing holds until they go so slow. Hard to find, but there.
I’m watching this through double-paned glass, my eyes wide, knowing this could be any of us. That just because it was her, doesn’t mean it isn’t all of us suffering for being in an industry that doesn’t want us there. Bristol gets called a cunt by these strangers, men who only know she’s a Moreno, but I know her uncles call all of us that when we’re not around.
There’s talk of quitting, talk of reputations. If we quit, we’re scared, and if we stay? What are we saying yes to?
DECKHAND, F/V MIDNIGHT PEARL
Whenever we’re all back together, whether it’s at the wedding or back in port or someone’s house for a final team dinner before we all go our separate ways, no matter whose boat we’re on, every time something changes, we all have to come back together. What happened. Tell what happened again. Repeat the part about the troopers. Explain again how the lawyer told you this was part of the deal. Listen in on a courtroom proceeding and tell us, again, what that asshole prosecutor said to you? Tell us again.
We can’t stop. We’ll say it one more time. We’ll go through it again. This is what happened no this is what happened and how will we deal with that this is how we’ll deal with it and next time, next time—there’s no precedent, here. There’s no what do we do if. There’s no way around and no way out and so tell it again—what happened? We have to practice getting our stories straight, not because we’re lying, but because we’ve heard it so many times in so many ways we’re losing grip on the gap, some crack in our collective burning memories.
DECKHAND, F/V PELICAN
In August fish run close to the beach. So close we plunge from the bow, the middle, and the stern. All hands on-deck plunging, trying to corral them into the net, trying to keep them off land. Forcing them off rocks. Sometimes even hitting their blackening green bodies with the tip of the plunger—that’s how desperate. They’re heading home—it’s time to go home. By August we are feeling like those fish, desperate, and distant, and aching for land. Aching for home. Maybe it’s even worth dying for. That can’t be right, can it? Do we get to die together, too? No. We die alone.
CAPTAIN, F/V GOLDEN PEARL (DEFENDANT)
My nieces, Marine and Elli, come over to the girl boat every few days. They are eight. They get into our glitter, our lipstick, our silly wigs and streamers and sparkle temporary tattoos. They have sleepovers on the princess bed. We make them jellybean pancakes. They eat all our strawberries and ice cream. They snuggle in the booths and hide in the pantry, farting and giggling and screaming at each other. They pinch each other’s skin so hard it bruises.
I tried to quit. Last year I drove to town and said: no more. I can’t do this. I still feel that way sometimes, everything chomping at my bits. Like I have no goddamn business being out here. But who came to collect me in their arms? Not my mother, who hasn’t spoken to me directly since, speaks through my brother. Not my father, who stayed out to fish. Even my brother was days behind and couldn’t keep up with the long haul home. The girls I’ve hired, the same ones who have been with me each summer, it was them who sat staring at me at the galley table while I cried and it was them who held me and one of them said: what about Marine? What about Elli? Where will they go when they don’t have this boat to go to? To escape the boys and their already-roving eyes on eight-year-old skin-and-bone bodies? When some uncle or cousin will tell them to put peanut butter on their titties if they want them to be bigger than a B-cup? Marine told me once that she doesn’t know how engines work because, and her voice got low and angry, she’s a girl. Elli gets this hard look on her face when someone tells her she can’t do something. Marine doesn’t take showers and lets her long hair form rats. Elli feels no pain. Jamming her fingers into the scarring mouths of salmon, their teeth drawing blood across her knuckles.
What I do is I put the girls in the crow’s nest and I tell them to steer us south. I watch as they focus, hone in. They’re trained to spot a jumper from three hundred feet away. They already know when the engines fire up, it’s time to go, time to fish.
When we catch a king salmon we girls scale the body together. We girls wipe glitter slime on our faces like makeup. We sparkle and know about a girl’s best friend. When Elli helps me cut open the belly, I let her hold the heart. I have her touch it, each atrium, ventricles, the chambers of each long hallway full of twists and turns. I want her to understand the bloodline, the way it weaves the spine. Hopefully it’s fresh, and still beating, because even outside the body there’s one last little pump. Although the fish is dead the heart will always pump one last time, an involuntary twitch, and we wait, expectant, locking eyes, and her eyebrows raise. She holds it in her hands and when the last line of blood squirts out, she laughs and laughs.
Piper Lane graduated with an MFA from the University of Washington, and she is currently a Made at Hugo House Fellow for 2019-2020 (Seattle, WA). This piece was chosen as a finalist for the Bellingham Review Tobias Wolff fiction contest and the Katherine Anne Porter prize last spring. She also won the Eugene Van Buren award and the David Guterson outstanding thesis award at UW. This is her first major publication.