West of Here (18 page)

Swiveling around in his squeaky office chair, Krig discovered an Indian kid standing in the doorway of his cubicle. The boy, at least he thought it was a boy, looked about thirteen, but he had to be older. The counselor lady said she was sending a junior. His baggy gray T-shirt read:
WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU LOOKING AT?
His jeans
looked like a wolverine had gotten to them. He wore his greasy black hair to the shoulders, framing a perfectly round face. He was squinty-eyed and impassive. Krig thought he looked baked.

“So,” said Krig. “You must be my shadow, right? Curtis? Chris?” Curtis or Chris didn’t say anything. He just stood there.

“Okay, then. Let’s do this thing. You got a notepad or anything? Aren’t you supposed to take notes or something?”

The kid shifted his weight, just barely, from one foot to another.

“All right, then, fuck it,” said Krig. “Let’s get started. First things first: I’m Dave, the production manager around here. You can call me Krig. That little prick in the brown office is Jared. He’s the GM. That stands for Gay Man.”

The kid didn’t even blink. Tough nut to crack, thought Krig. Figures he’d get a weirdo. I mean, really, what kind of kid wants to work
here
when he grows up? Why did he ever agree to this job-shadow bullshit in the first place?

“So what do you know about this place? You know what we do here?”

The kid gave no indication one way or another.

“Right. Well. We process seafood, since you asked. About four million pounds a year. Most of it salmon. Sounds like a lot, right? … Right. But before you get the idea you’re gonna just waltz into a job here after graduation, you oughta know that we’re the last commercial fish processor in Port Bonita. This whole industry went tits up around here long before your old man ever squirted you out, even before logging hit the skids. There used to be like twenty of these places working around the clock. The whole harbor was lined with them. My old man and my uncles and their old men all used to do this shit. Back in the day, my great-grandfather used to pull hundred-pound chinooks out of the Elwha — June Hogs, they called them. That was then. Most of the fish are in Alaska now. There ain’t beans for fish around here. So you see, kid, it’s all about sustainability — but I’m not here to give you any history lessons or environmental crap. All you need to know is this: you wanna process fish in P.B., you’re working for me. And this here,” Krig said, indicating his murky cubicle with a panoramic sweep of his hand, “is the nerve center of High Tide.”

The kid was apparently unimpressed. Sullen little fucker, eh? Wait’ll he’s spooning fish guts for a living. Wait’ll he’s squaring his tab at the Bushwhacker five nights a week at closing, pining for some waitress who looks like a mud shark.

“Any questions before we get started? … Okay then, good. Let’s walk you through this. Out there is the processing center.”

They stepped out of Krig’s cubicle and walked a short ways down the corridor, past a big blurry window, through a heavy door and down some metal stairs. The processing center was a cement gray cavern reeking of fish, a hissing, rumbling dungeon in the bowels of the plant. Curtis saw his mother slitting bellies near the front of the line. She looked stupid in her rubber apron and her paper hat. She waved. Curtis ignored her.

“You know Rita, huh?” said Krig. “Rita’s cool. So, how do you know her?”

Curtis didn’t answer.

The closer they got to the line, the more deafening became the hissing and rumbling, so that Krig was forced to project his voice over the racket.

“That big fucker right there is a hydraulic tote dumper. Fish comes in, that fucker picks it up, slaps it onto this fucker here — this is the conveyor — and
boom,
we’re locked and loaded. First the cutters —
thwack —
there go your heads. Next, we slit the belly, slice the neck, and scoop out the guts. Then we slit the bloodline and bleed the fucker. We spoon the bloodline, rinse the bitch, and —
boom
— this fucker’s ready for market. Any questions? Good, I need a smoke.”

Curtis followed Krig out back to the parking lot, where Krig offered him a smoke. Curtis accepted with the slightest of nods.

“So, what, you don’t talk?”

Curtis lit his cigarette and let the question pass.

“Suit yourself,” said Krig, pocketing his lighter. “You smoke weed?”

The kid arched an eyebrow.

“Yay or nay?”

Curtis tendered another slight nod.

“Well, then, I’d say it’s about four twenty, how about you? C’mon, time for a safety meeting.”

Curtis followed Krig around the back of the warehouse, past the loading dock, and across another dirt parking lot to a lobster red GTO.

“This is the Goat,” said Krig. “Pretty sweet, huh? ’Seventy-three. Got it off of some schlub who lost his nut down at Seven Cedars.”

“Cool,” lied Curtis.

In the car, Krig procured a slim joint from an Altoids container in the glove box. “Kind of a pinner,” he said, by way of an apology. “But I gotta maintain at work.”

Krig sparked it and took greens. “This shit’s the chronic,” he said, holding his breath. “No sticks, no stems, no seeds.
Whoo-ee gimme some-a-that-sticky-icky-icky.
” He passed the joint to Curtis and exhaled a cloud of blue smoke, which hung in the air.

Curtis thought the guy was an idiot. How old was this guy, anyway? He had to be older than his mom. He took a long pull and passed the joint back to Krig.

“So, what,” said Krig. “You’re an Indian, right?”

Curtis didn’t say anything.

“That’s what I thought. I got a buddy who’s an Indian. Doesn’t pay shit for taxes. So, you believe in Bigfoot, or what?”

“Nah,” said Curtis.

“I thought all Indians believed in Sasquatch.”

“That shit’s made up.”

Krig took another pull from the joint, which was down to a nub already. “Yeah, well, you never know,” said Krig, exhaling. “I’ve seen some shit.”

“You were high.”

“Heard, anyway. Couple of them. And I’ve seen a pile of dookie about this big on the Crooked Thumb trail.”

“Yeah, and I’m a medicine man.”

Krig let the subject pass. Nobody wanted to believe him. “So, how do you know Rita?”

“I live with her.”

“She’s your sister?”

“Yeah, right.”

“Your mom?”

“So what?”

“So nothin’, just asking. What about your old man?”

“Nothin’ about my old man.”

“That’s cool. I gotcha.” Krig handed him the joint. Curtis hit it and looked out the window. “So, your mom’s like single or whatever?”

“She’s whatever.”

Krig let this subject pass, too. Better not to push it. “So, this is seriously what you wanna do when you get out of school?”

Curtis shrugged it off, still gazing sullenly out the window.

“It’s not exactly glamorous, as you can see,” pursued Krig. “It may seem like good money, but —”

“But you’re doing it.”

“Well, yeah, that’s true,” said Krig, reaching for the joint. “As long as I can remember. It was different back when I started, though. It’s different now. If I was you, I’d blow this town.”

“Well, you’re still here.”

“That’s what I’m saying. I just mean if I were
you,
I’d go to college and party my ass off and get a degree or whatever so I’d have some options, you know?”

“I gotta go,” said Curtis, opening the door.

“Later,” said Krig.

Stubbing the roach out in the ashtray, Krig watched Curtis go. The kid ambled across the lot and crossed Marine without looking. He headed south toward Front Street. Weird little dude. But Krig was willing to give the kid a break. He was a little antisocial, but whatever. Who could blame the kid?

Krig checked his eyes in the rearview mirror, fished an Altoid out of the glove box, and reminded himself to order wet-locks.

SOMETIMES IT WASN’T
enough for Jared to hide in his office, where Dee Dee was likely to molest his solitude with inventory discrepancies,
or Don Buford from Prime Seafoods might call to badger him about the ALS charity golf tournament in Sequim next weekend, or worst of all, Janis might call to dispatch him on some errand — color swatches from Sherwin-Williams, Bubble Wrap from Office Depot — thus negating his lunch hour, which Jared preferred to spend sleeping in the SUV (and why not, it was costing him six and change per month?). But sleep wouldn’t have Jared this afternoon, as he reclined in the driver’s seat of his GL-450. After five months, the job was getting to him. It wasn’t the stress; the workload was manageable enough. It was the nature of the details now populating his life, the things he was forced to think about, all the shit that rolled uphill instead of down. For instance, the wet-locks that Krigstadt would no doubt forget to order (again), and the two hundred pounds of coho that would subsequently thaw (again), resulting in a phone call Thursday morning (again) from an irate retailer in Spokane.

How had his life been reduced to such trivialities? What happened to expectations — his and everyone else’s? He was a Thornburgh. Thornburghs didn’t ponder the shipping cost of canned clams, didn’t fret about the flagging market for pickled herring in the southwest; Thornburghs authored public policy, they legislated, they built dams out of mountains and put towns on maps!

But wasn’t he being a little hard on himself? Was it really owing to some flaw in his own character that he had wound up here, in what ought to be the prime of his life, with nothing more to show than a dwindling trust fund and a head full of canned crab? Where were the opportunities? He had his ducks in line; he was networked, educated, sufficiently energetic. And contrary to the perception around High Tide, Jared had put in his time — maybe not in the trenches but at least in the classroom. So where were the rivers to be dammed, the policies to be forged? How did one fashion a future from smoked oysters?

A tap on the window startled Jared from these meditations — it was Dee Dee, clutching a fax. Jared lowered the window with an electric whir.

“This rush just came in from Longview,” she said. “Oh, and Don Buford called about your tee time on Saturday.”

JUNE
2006

When Timmon Tillman stepped off the 136 bus in Port Bonita into a mud puddle, with $843 in his wallet and a letter from the parole board testifying to his status as a reformed ward of the State Corrections Center in Clallam Bay, nobody was there to greet him, which is exactly how Timmon Tillman preferred it. When the board asked him what future he envisioned for himself, Timmon told them simply, “A place of my own.” When they asked him what kind of work he’d like to do, he told them, “Something with my hands.” And when, in conclusion, they asked him if he had a goal in life, Timmon said, “To live my life one day at a time.”

But what Timmon had wanted to say was, “To be left alone.”

In the Circle K, he bought two pepperoni sticks and a Snapple. The clerk snuck furtive glances at his tattooed hand: the washed-out gun-metal blue Egyptian ankh (which looked more like an upside-down gingerbread man), the would-be bar code, which having presented his cell mate Gooch with far too great a challenge from a design standpoint resulted in an amorphous blotch on Timmon’s wrist, and above the knuckles, a single word scripted in a scrolling cursive hand:
onward!

Timmon left his four cents change in the Kool Menthol penny tray and started drifting toward the center of town under a steady drizzle. The mountains were socked in from the foothills to the ridge, and the strait was hardly visible through the haze. The speeding cars on U.S. Route 101 threw a gritty spray in their wake, and when he closed his eyes, the sound of the swishing tires sounded almost natural to Timmon, like the surf. But the moment he opened them again he longed to be outside the prison of himself. He could almost feel the fizz of tonic on his tongue, the warm suffusion of vodka in his belly. The world was teeming with possibilities, and the overwhelming majority
of them were too excruciating to ponder: a nowhere job, a crummy motel room, an issue of
Juggs
— then what? The endless reiteration of hot plate dinners and naked lightbulbs? The perpetual sound of his own spinning wheels? How was marking time any different on the outside?

Only the thought of a steak dinner brightened Timmon’s outlook as he booked a room at the Wharf Side, where there was nothing even remotely surreptitious in the appraisal of the carbuncled old desk woman when she looked Timmon up and down with particular attention to his tattoos.

“The coat hangers stay,” she wheezed. “And we like to keep things quiet around here.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Timmon.

The room afforded Timmon a dramatic view of an auto body shop, a Chevron, a Jack in the Box, and a Taco Bell. The walls were orange, the pea green carpet was piebald, and the residue of twenty-year-old smoke clung to the yellow drapes. The bathroom was so small that in order to stand in it, the door had to be shut. There was a rusty ring around the shower drain. Something smelled like mop water.

Timmon unpacked his duffel bag: some jeans, a windbreaker, some socks, a pair of prison-issue black rubber flip-flops, and a copy of Whitman’s
Leaves of Grass,
which might have been kicked there from Peoria.
O me! O life!
He arranged these things sparsely about the room in an attempt at hominess. And looking upon his work with a hollow ache, he fled the room immediately in favor of the open air.

It was still dumping rain at dusk. The sky was low. The mountains remained invisible. The unmistakable odor of deep-fried fat hung in the air. Timmon trudged north past Taco Bell, brimming eerily with light in the gathering darkness. Jack in the Crack, Chevron, the Dollar Store. He could have been anywhere. He proceeded over the hump and onward.

In the murky confines of the Bushwhacker, Timmon ordered a vodka tonic and leveled his gaze on the bartop in front of him, avoiding even the most casual eye contact with the bartender or anyone else. Despite lethal doses of Whitman’s tireless curiosity and optimism,
which he spoon-fed himself daily in the dank perimeters of his cell, Timmon’s most recent stint in prison had done little to awaken his curiosity in people.