David Vann - Caribou Island

Hm, he said.

It’s all right, she said. I’ve never been with a muffin top, but I’ll adjust.

Then Monique went into the shower, and Jim lay back on the bed feeling old and disgusting. A muffin top. If you had any self-respect at all, he told himself out loud, you’d walk out of here right now. He opened his towel, and his limp little penis lying there just seemed like another target for mockery. She was going to tease him and laugh at him. That was all.

Jim groaned and decided to get under the covers. He’d hide himself. He threw the towel over a chair and settled in, used both of the pillows.

Monique turned the water off, and there was a long wait. Jim thinking of Rhoda, feeling guilty, because here he was, about to cheat. It was inevitable now. Everything until this moment could be passed off, perhaps, but not after this moment.

And then Monique appeared, walking toward him slowly in her tie and heels, nothing else.

She was very tall, especially in the heels, and she had that slim definition only youth can have, the soft lines of her ribs and collar bone, belly and thighs. Her hair still wet, her face angular.

I shaved for you, she said.

She was entirely smooth. She came to the side of the bed, turned around slowly, bent over in her heels, her tie hanging down, her young breasts, and looked at him from between her legs.

No more teasing, she said. Now you can have whatever you want.

Mark invited Carl on the boat. This was out of pity, since Carl was moping around without Monique. She had taken off somewhere.

So Carl, plastic bag of bagels and veggie-burger patties in hand, shivering in his raingear, waited at 3:30 a.m. under a dull yellow light at the end of the Pacific Salmon Fisheries pier. He looked at boats anchored in pairs in the channel of the Kenai River. The boats and water were twenty feet below him, the river lined by mud banks. He was supposed to get to Mark’s boat and climb aboard. Mark and the owner had come the evening before and slept out there. But Mark had omitted the part about how Carl would get to the boat or even find the right one. The boat was the Slippery Jay , but Carl didn’t know where it was parked.

So he stood under the pier light another twenty minutes until some of the boats in the channel switched on their cabin lights and several started their diesel engines and idled. An aluminum skiff, some kind of tender for unloading salmon, it looked like, since it carried three large aluminum bins, came from upriver. About twenty feet long, with a huge outboard, 200 horsepower, it really ripped along, leaving a wake that glowed white and slapped at the sides of the anchored boats and set them rocking. The sky just beginning to lighten at the horizon under drizzling clouds, and Carl clueless what he should do. He couldn’t just jump in and swim around. He was going to be left behind. He would spend his day here on the pier in the drizzle and eat his veggie burgers around noon, then walk or hitchhike back to the campsite.

Then a young Indian-American woman, as in parents from India, wearing fish boots and dark green rain gear, tromped past and went over the side of the pier down a long narrow ladder toward the skiffs bobbing below.

Excuse me, Carl said when she was about ten feet down.

No answer, so he said it again, louder this time, and cleared his throat.

Yes? she asked, looking up.

I’m supposed to get out to the Slippery Jay somehow. Do you know where it is or how I can get there?

That’s one of our boats, she said. I can take you.

She smiled as she said this, smiled only briefly, but Carl was encouraged and thinking Monique was not such a great find anyway. She was a bit inconsiderate, was the truth.

Carl was grinning, therefore, as he stepped into the skiff. And he made a comic little fuss about getting his last foot over the gunwale. Thanks, he said heartily, standing up straight before her.

Hold on, she said. She fired up the outboard, gunned it, and they shot into the river. Carl, seated just in time, nearly fell into the bottom of the boat, but she remained standing.

Wow, he said, but even he could hardly hear this amid the roar. The young woman kept her eyes ahead on the water. She made a tight turn upriver, zigzagged between several boats, and came to rest suddenly, the motor cut to neutral, inches from the Slippery Jay .

Carl climbed out awkwardly, having to straddle the side of the taller boat and getting rocked in opposite directions. But he did make it without falling in or dropping his lunch.

Thanks, he said.

Sure, she said, then gunned it and was gone.

Why was he here? He stood on the back deck and looked vaguely at the horizon. The question seemed larger somehow than just this boat or this sunrise or Monique or even Alaska. Something about his life, something impossible and dimly urgent, but this effect was probably only from lack of sleep.

Carl yawned hugely at the horizon, then turned around and crept into the cabin area. He put his lunch on the bench in the upper cockpit or steering area or whatever they called it. Bridge? But on a boat this small? Down a few steps was a cooking and eating area, with a small table, some cubbyhole shelves, and an old iron stove with metal rails. In front of this, through another small door, was the sleeping area. He could hear breathing in there.

So Carl sat at the galley table next to his lunch, his booted feet dangling, looked through scratched Plexiglas windows at the sky turning lighter blue then yellowish white, and waited until a watch alarm went off.

Mark said a gruff hello, then Carl said hello also to Dora, the owner, who waved her hand and fixed coffee and had a doughnut. The doughnuts looked suddenly very good to Carl, and he wondered whether he’d get through the day without sneaking one on the side. Other people’s food had always looked better to him than his own.

Soon they were under way, churning out through the channel. Mud flats and eroding cliff banks. The air through here cool and the low clouds in the distance turning orange at their edges.

Carl rode on the upper deck, above the cabin. A steering wheel and controls up here, too. Dora shared the bench seat with Carl and drove in a resigned and preoccupied way that didn’t invite conversation. She called down occasionally to Mark through a hole in the floor and asked for the depth.

Once they cleared the channel and made the inlet, they turned southwest toward open ocean, and several aluminum boats, drift-netters with one large net reel on the back, sped past. Their engines powerful, throaty over the sound of the Slippery Jay . One swooped in close, the pilot waved, Dora waved back, and then it shot ahead.

Gasoline, Dora said. They can do over twenty knots. But if one of their sniffers goes, they blow up.

Sniffers? Carl asked.

Sensors for the buildup of gas fumes in their engine housing. They can pump that air out before they start, flush it with fresh air, but still, if any fumes remain, the whole boat turns into a grenade.

And we have diesel? Carl was only trying to continue the conversation, trying to learn more, but he realized this question sounded pretty obvious and dumb.

Yep. That’s about what we have.

Carl nodded. An entire fleet of drift-netters all around them, at least fifty boats he could see heading mostly in a similar direction but some going north into other parts of the inlet.

How many boats are out here? he asked.

On the Cook Inlet? Almost six hundred, probably, and most of them are out today. Have you steered a boat before?

Little outboards, canoes and stuff.

Well take the wheel, Dora said, getting up. See this compass? Keep us going between this mark and this mark, she said, pointing. The steering’s a little slow, so don’t overcompensate. I’m going down for a while.