The Smell of Other People's Houses Read online

  While I wait for my Dad to finish up some last-minute details back in town, I sit on the boat reading old copies of the police blotter in the local paper. It’s better than the funnies. Like this one:

  Salty Blotter, June 28, 1970: 12:15 p.m. Police received a report that a man was beating a child in the 200 block of Marine Way, but when officers arrived it appeared the two were just having a dandelion fight.

  The police blotter will tell you everything you never wanted to know about this place. Here’s an example of the way nothing happens here and then becomes news:

  June 29, 1970: 2:10 a.m. A woman reported three boys missing from their home on Klondike Alley. When police arrived to investigate, a man who answered the door said it was just a misunderstanding and the boys were asleep in their beds.

  See what I mean? Boys asleep in their beds is hot news. This place is weird.

  I was born in this tiny fishing town on the edge of the Pacific Ocean, but I don’t really remember living here. Most of my life was spent on our boat, the Squid, until my parents divorced and Mom moved us to Fairbanks to be closer to her sister, Aunt Abigail. My cousin Selma was born here, too, but like me she doesn’t remember it.

  Aunt Abigail adopted her when she was only a few days old, and Selma doesn’t know who her parents are. She loves imagining them, though, and sometimes it’s tiring, listening to her fantasize about her real parents. Everything from her mother being half human/half seal living in the ocean, to her explorer father running an oil tanker back and forth from Russia to Alaska. None of it is true, but try telling Selma that.

  —

  “Hey, Alyce, can you retie the bow line? We’re getting too far away from the dock and I need to unload this thing.”

  My uncle is coming down the dock with a cart full of groceries. Oops.

  “Sorry, Uncle Gorky, I got sidetracked.”

  Groceries are my job.

  “I can take it from here,” I tell him, and he does that silent nod accompanied by a slight shrug that fishermen are known for; then he hops onto the boat.

  Without another word he grabs a pair of insulated gloves and jumps down into the fish hold to start moving ice around. He calls it “making up the beds” for the salmon we’re going to catch.

  “We’re the Holland America Squid,” he likes to joke, a cruise ship for dead fish. Uncle Gorky does all the icing—tucking of the fish into their beds, as it were—to keep them cool until we can make it to the processors to sell them.

  When I was two, I called them bald little babies. Apparently I used to kiss every single fish before it was put down to bed in the fish hold, or so the story goes.

  Uncle Gorky didn’t fish then, just me and my parents. I’ve been told that if my father tried to speed up the process and throw a couple down without me seeing, I would scream my head off until he climbed down and got them again so I could kiss them good night. One of a million stories, as it happens, that I hear from both my parents over and over again.

  We used to live on the boat all year round until I was five. That’s when Mom took us to the interior part of the state, where there’s no sea—just mountains and tundra and long ribbons of rivers. I know she misses being near the ocean. Just the other day when we were at the airport waiting for my flight, she was dabbing her eyes and sniffling as she handed me my float coat.

  “I just miss it,” she said.

  It, not him.

  “Don’t forget you have to pull the cord to inflate your coat,” she told me as if I was still two.

  “Mom, I know that. Duh.”

  My dance friends, Sally and Izzy, had come to the airport to say good-bye, and it was embarrassing that they had to hear Mom talk to me like that.

  “Let’s go get some gum in the gift shop,” Izzy whispered.

  “I just don’t understand how she can still get so emotional after this many years,” I told them.

  But when I glanced back at her sitting at the gate holding my dry bag and rubber boots, I felt a twinge of guilt. She and Dad just couldn’t make it work, so she gave up a life she loved and came here, where she had more “emotional support,” as she says.

  Sally and Izzy have never been out of Fairbanks, but they’re both hoping to get college scholarships and go Outside to major in dance. The thing is, you have to audition the summer before senior year—this summer—because schools are looking way down the road. It’s too late once you’ve graduated. We were supposed to be the Swan Lake version of the Three Musketeers, always together, even in college.

  They’re trying not to show it, but I can tell I’m letting them down by going fishing. I can’t imagine either of them working on a boat, touching a slimy salmon, or even having to set a dainty foot on a blood-soaked deck.

  “Did you ask if you could come back in a couple weeks, just for the audition?” Izzy asked, holding up a sweatshirt showing a cartoon moose batting its eyes and wearing bright-red lipstick. It said, “I’ll moose you when you leave Alaska.” Tourists will buy anything.

  “It’s too expensive to fly back and forth. Besides, my dad needs me for the whole summer; it’s a lot of work.”

  “Too bad your mom can’t fill in for you,” Sally said, looking over at Mom holding on to my float coat as if somehow she needed it to keep her head above water, even in the middle of a landlocked airport.

  But Mom’s never going fishing again and there’s no way I can tell Dad that I don’t want to go, either. Worse than not getting the audition would be getting accepted, which would mean attending preprofessional classes next summer before the official college courses start. I would never be able to skip a whole summer of fishing; it’s the only time I see my dad.

  Sally and Izzy mean well, but they have simple parents who are married and like to volunteer to sweep snow backstage at The Nutcracker. The Nutcracker is my winter life, where I get minor roles because everyone else has danced all summer and is in way better shape. My mom comes to it—she usually volunteers to sell tickets—but my dad has never seen me dance. Dad’s life, and mine with him, is on the boat.

  If I didn’t fish, who would bag the salmon eggs and make sure the bloodlines along the coho backbones are totally clean? Those have been my jobs since forever. Dad says not even Uncle Gorky can cut the heads off as cleanly as I do, right through the neck bone. I don’t explain that to Sally and Izzy. It’s another world, another language.

  When my flight was announced, we shuffled back to the gate where Mom had to make one last attempt to show my friends how smart she was about all things fish-related.

  “Don’t forget to pour a can of Coke in the washer to get the fish-blood smell out of your clothes,” she said.

  “Dad says you used to puke through the whole season. How can you miss it?” I asked.

  “Perhaps your father should try fishing when he’s six months pregnant.”

  —

  Nice one, Mom.

  Pregnant.

  With me.

  Everything is always my fault.

  Sally and Izzy just stood there with fake smiles pasted on their faces, as if they were watching a dance choreographed by my mother and me where we alternate playing the tragic heroine depending on whose song is loudest. She loves fishing, but not my dad. I love my dad, but I’m tired of fishing. Especially when it gets between me and other things I love.

  —

  “Earth to Alyce,” Dad says, swinging his legs over the side and climbing aboard. He caught me sitting on the fish hold, flexing the toes of my rubber boots, admiring my extension.

  “Did you put the groceries away?” he asks.

  “Of course; labeled all the cans, too.”

  Canned goods go under the floor in the galley, and my job is to write the contents on the top of each lid so you can read them by looking down from above. Apparently I learned to write by spelling corned beef hash and kidney beans on the tin lids. Every single thing on this boat is either about me or about how my parents lived their lives through me. “Do you want the big
bunk?” Dad asks.

  “Really? I can have it?”

  It’s a great bunk. Dad had wanted Mom to be happy, and being a man of very few words, he’d widened the bunk for his pregnant wife and thought that would be enough. Maybe it had worked for a little while anyway.

  I fly down into the fo’c’sle and quickly claim the space before he changes his mind. I can hear my uncle moving totes around on deck, and without even seeing him I know there’s a cigarette hanging from his lips and a steaming mug within his reach, no less than six Lipton tea bags in it. Uncle Gorky is a recovering alcoholic, so he has other vices to see him through a fishing trip.

  Dad starts up the engine and the noise down here is deafening, although I know it won’t take long to get used to and soon will sound no louder than a purring kitten. I breathe in diesel, the smell of my childhood, of sleeping in the belly of this boat that has always made my dreams bouncy. I never sleep as well anywhere as I do here on the Squid. And now I get the big bunk, too, which even has a little shelf built in for all my favorite books to make it cozier. See how hard my dad tried?

  There’s a nail sticking out of the wooden beam, and I remember the bouquet of dried wildflowers my mom had hung there, even though flowers are supposed to be bad luck on a boat. Maybe they were? I hang my pointe shoes on the nail and scramble up to help untie.

  Dad is already talking on the VHF radio, which is the only time he actually seems to enjoy talking. The slow, drawling voice on the other end is obviously Dad’s oldest fishing pal, Sunshine Sam. People are known by their boat name first, followed by the skipper name. Chatham Frank, Dixie Don, Chanty Ken. I hate that everyone calls Dad Squiddly George. But it’s bad luck to change the name of a boat, so he must have expected it when he bought the Squid. It’s also bad luck to have bananas on board, whistle in the wheelhouse, and leave town on a Friday, but we’ve done all those things at some point. If he did change the name, he says it would be the F/V Alyce and then he’d be Alyce George, and that’s not much better.

  I listen to Dad and Sunshine Sam speak their strange boat language.

  “Oh yeah…” Long pause. Interminably long pause. “Yep, Marty over at the Cape.” Long, long pause. “Twenty-two pounder…”

  “Huh…” Long pause.

  “ ’S that when he gaffed his own leg?”

  It’s like speaking in code.

  —

  “You going to dance for me?” Uncle Gorky hands me a mug of tea.

  I shrug, sliding into boat-speak as easy as pulling on my rain gear. Dad is unrolling charts and plotting our course, a bit more focused than usual, as if it’s the first time we’ve ever left the harbor. I know he heard Uncle Gorky’s question, but you’d never know it by looking at him.

  I watch his calloused finger move along the nautical chart. He’s trying to decide which direction to go—the best place to anchor that’s protected in case the weather kicks up, but still close to the fishing grounds. We are running now, a day early, so we can get the gear in the water right when the season opens. Every minute spent getting to the fishing grounds is money lost. Dad likes to have the hooks in the water right at midnight on July first, opening day.

  The chart he’s reading is creased from wear and there is Scotch tape holding it in spots that tore over time. Some of the bays on the chart are covered in coffee stains, or crusted with dried salt from my father’s wet gloves, the paper crinkled where it was gripped too tight during a storm. I notice a dried spot of blood marking Murder Cove, a safe, secluded bay with a horrible name. That purplish spot bruising the chart could be fish blood, or blood from a hand that got stuck with a hook, or just blood from a bloody nose. The older the charts get, the more history they contain.

  The names of the bays tell their own stories, and some have given me nightmares over the years—just knowing we were anchored in places called Murder Cove or Deadman’s Reach, or even running against fifty-knot winds through a strait ominously named Peril. Whoever decided on these names was trying to tell us something. I prefer the handwritten notes beside other bays and landmarks inked in Uncle Gorky’s familiar scrawl: “good anchorage,” or “caught 10 halibut on a hand line,” or “Dungeness crab—lots!”

  It’s considered really bad manners to snoop and read other mariner’s charts. It’s the closest thing to a journal for men who trust no one but the sea. If you happen to climb aboard another boat and their chart is lying out on the table, you better not get caught looking directly at it. Men have been thrown overboard just for glancing.

  Dad unrolls another chart and spreads it out, tracing the route we’ll take today. Scribbled in the margin of a passage along a narrow stretch, my mother’s tight, bossy handwriting jumps out at me: “Right on red returning.” It’s the most basic nautical rule of them all.

  I point to it and nudge Dad’s shoulder.

  He tugs at his whiskers, which is what he always does any time the subject of my mother comes up, or worse, if he has to talk to her himself. Once he came back from the pay phone at the top of the dock with whole sections of his mustache pulled out.

  Luckily, Uncle Gorky jumps in when he sees that gesture: Dad ripping his hair out.

  “Uh, someone almost hit a rock there. Thought the marker was in the wrong place.” A smile lurks at the corner of his mouth. He tries to hide it, lifting his mug and slurping tea louder than necessary.

  Oh, Mom, I think. You documented your most serious fishing blunder on the chart? She might as well have written it on her tombstone.

  —

  We’re slowly crawling out of town at just a little over four knots. Through the window I can see the other boat harbor, and just beyond it the ferry terminal on the starboard side as we pass.

  Once we’re past the harbor bathroom, I let out the air I’ve been holding, aware that Uncle Gorky is watching me, smiling. It’s a game a bunch of us fishing kids made up a long time ago, the equivalent of holding your breath and making a wish while driving over a bridge. I don’t really know why, but the rumor is that the bathroom is haunted. My parents said that was ridiculous and refused to even hear about it.

  “And even if it was, how is holding your breath going to help?” Mom had asked, and Dad agreed. (Oddly, it was one of the few things they absolutely agreed on, and they got equally annoyed when I talked about it.)

  I figure it’s no different from all the other superstitions fishermen live by. I mean, seriously, if bananas are dangerous on a boat, can’t a bathroom be haunted?

  —

  The M/V Matanuska is tied up at the ferry terminal, but I can see them loading cars onto her as we go by. She’ll probably pass us since the most the Squid can do is eight knots, and a huge ferry goes way faster than that. It’ll rock us around in its wake, so Dad is busy putting dishes in the drawers and cleaning off the table. I glance up at the dried oatmeal that’s still on the ceiling from another trip when things went flying in the wake of a ferry, combined with some nasty weather. If Mom were still on the boat, she’d probably go apeshit because nobody’s bothered to clean it up, but I think Dad and Uncle Gorky use it as a reminder to put things away. Or maybe she’s right and they’re just lazy.

  I can feel my frustration about not being able to dance start to slip away, even though part of me wants to hold on to it—to roll it around like a hard little stone in my pocket, mine and mine alone.

  Even if I do wish I could dance, it smells so much better in this part of Alaska, thanks to the minty Tongass rain forest with its huge cedars and hemlocks and all its lush greenery. Up north the skinny black spruce trees look like they’re constantly trying to fill their lungs, their roots suffocating underground in permafrost. Same state, two climates, each as different as my parents; and like my parents, there’s a part of me in both.

  —

  “Dad, I’m going up on the flying bridge.” I grab my life jacket on the way out. I want to practice that last combination we learned just before I left so I don’t forget it.

  On the flying bri
dge the smells are even stronger, trying to draw me out of myself. Salt and mint and fish and wind, mingled with diesel. My arms and legs relax, as if they are made of moss. I used to pretend my parents found me in the rain forest, a magical creature born of spongy muskeg and old man’s beard. It seems almost possible now as I spin around a couple times, trying to get my sea legs, feeling the rhythm of the boat making its own dance.

  And there she is, the Pelican, my inflatable blue raft that has been my best friend on this boat every summer of my life. She knows me better than anyone, and when I climb inside her my whole body relaxes and I can hear her whisper how happy she is that I am back. I drift slowly off to sleep.

  A while later I wake up groggy and not sure where I am, feeling the Squid pounding beneath the wake of another boat. The Matanuska ferry is passing us, and nearby is a pod of orcas, closer than I’ve ever seen them get to a boat that large. And then I see something else that shouldn’t be there. Even if I yelled, no one would hear me. It isn’t until it’s too late that my voice finally finds its way out of my throat, but by then I can’t tell whether it’s me or the orcas that are screaming.

  If I didn’t believe that people we love are still taking care of us after they die, I wouldn’t be sitting here now, hugging my knees, surrounded by baggage, trying not to wiggle or sneeze. Fourteen-year-old Jack is asleep with his head lying against a canvas army bag with a Seattle address—looking for all the world like he sleeps every day of his life in a baggage cart bound for the lower forty-eight. My other brother, Sam, is sixteen, just a year younger than me; but he’s a dreamy, innocent sixteen, so naive it scares me sometimes. He’s not as relaxed as Jack at the moment, maybe because his long legs barely fit in the cart and he’s pulled them up to his chin. Also because he’s not so sure stowing away on the ferry was a very good idea.

  But we’re doing it anyway, stowing away on the M/V Matanuska. And before you start wondering if my elevator doesn’t go all the way to the top floor, I should say right now that between me and Jack and Sam, I’m not only the oldest, I’m also the most levelheaded.