He was using a black pen to redraw the Jesus tattoo on his right forearm. He’d been telling me that any day now he would fly into Anchorage and get it done for real.
“Jesus needs more hair,” I yelled down to him.
He set the pen between flakes of peeling paint on the ragged picnic table and turned to the water.
We need to scrub the tarp,” Go-boy said. He nodded at the white plastic anchored to the bottom of the river, stretching shore to shore like a submerged sidewalk.
Now I was looking for something to snack on in the kitchen tent. Now I was looking for more matches. Now I was grabbing a handful of skipping rocks to toss from the tower. I was doing anything to avoid work.
I asked, “Ain’t you tired?”
“It’s dirty. And it’s low tide.”
Go-boy already had green waders and scrub brushes piled on the picnic table.
I said, “I can still see those fish.”
I’d watched so many fish since I started this job that when I closed my eyes I’d see them swimming. I’d see fish in town, or while watching TV. I’d dream about fish. Even when I thought about home I saw fish. Fish swimming with the traffic up South Hoover back in West LA. Fish dipping into alleys. Fish hiding in the Earth Crew murals at Pico and Union.
When I thought about home now, the details were blurred—the timeline. I’d never been away from California for so long, and anytime I remembered the place it was as if the events of growing up had happened in no sequential order—the most recent seeming the least real of them all. I remembered Wicho as a fourteen-year-old kid, even on the day when he was sentenced to life in prison. It seemed I could drive back to our place in Westlake and find that kid out there on the street in front of our house, organizing a neighborhood two-on-two football league, each team consisting of a quarterback and a wide receiver. The curbs were the sidelines, meaning you could catch passes that bounced off parked cars, and Wicho would call out that his team’s end zone was the silver Plymouth Horizon and the other team’s end zone was the telephone pole, one first-down halfway between, three-second blitz, two-hand touch, first team to fifty wins; during the game he’d sometimes yell out, “Car!” not frustrated unless the score was close, and if it was, and he was in the middle of a play that he’d drawn out on the palm of his left hand, and the receiver was down the road, running a route—cutting in and back when he got to the white pickup—Wicho would yell, “Keep play!” and would let that car wait and honk its horn until the ball was caught or dropped.
I wondered if he was playing football in prison.
Go-boy scrubbed the tarp with his hands and arms submerged, holding the long handle of the brush, pushing and pulling against the river. I joined him, waist-deep. The tattoo from his forearm bled off into the water—threads of ink unraveled into the clear water. Upriver, the fish hovered along the bottom.
“Good thing you didn’t pay too much for that,” I said, pointing at his arm.
It was then—when I was almost up to my chest in water, watching Go work—that this enormous fish swam straight at me. It was slow and ugly and right at the surface, with its back cutting out of the water, and the damn thing was the length of my leg and twice as fat. I said, “Sick!” and swung the scrubber. I nailed it behind the gills, but it wasn’t a good hit. It felt like thumping a sandbag with a baseball bat. And the fish wasn’t even fazed. It just changed directions.
“This ugly shit swam right at me!”
“Maluksuk?” he asked.
“It looked like it was covered in pus.”
Go said, “Yeah, man. Maluksuk.”
I looked around, now all thrown off. Go-boy went back to scrubbing like nothing had even happened, but I couldn’t. I asked Go what that was.
He stopped working and adjusted an elastic strap on his waders. I asked him again, and he first told me certain types of salmon run at certain times. He went through the list—kings, silvers, and so on. He told me that when they’re done running, when they’re spawned out, they become half dead.
“Like zombies?” I asked.
He said the Eskimo word for a half-dead fish was maluksuk. A maluksuk became greenish-brown and moldy-looking. It swam around like a normal fish, except way slower. It wasn’t conscious or afraid. It had lost its survival instinct of self-awareness. And a lot of times a maluksuk would swim right up and beach itself till it died.
Go-boy said, “You can sometimes see them on the shoreline, their gills opening and closing, still always trying to breathe, their bodies flipping every couple minutes.”
I asked if there were always these dying fish around, and he said, “Mostly at the end of summer.” He said I should have already known about them because we were supposed to count the maluksuks separate from the healthy fish. But from up on that tower, I couldn’t judge which ones were dying and which ones were spawning. I couldn’t tell the difference between the living fish.
Later I told Go I was done trying to wash the fish sperm off the white plastic, that the brushes were no good. He was determined to make them work, to make the tarp clean. He kept scrubbing and said, “We need to do this.”
“Shouldn’t one of us count fish?”
“Man, this is boss’s orders.”
We both bobbed along in the water. We were buoys. I slapped at a bug on the water’s surface and Go-boy leaned into the current, scrubbing at a stain the size of a manhole cover.
Then he asked, “So what did you do in town last night?”
“You know there’s nothing to do.”
“Can’t even try-make something up, ah?”
“Okay,” I said. “Truth? I was looking out for your sister.”
Go laughed, said, “Man, saglu.”
“What?”
“Kiana’s the last person who needs anyone looking out for her. Especially you.”
“What’s especially you?”
“Man, she raised herself until she was ten,” he said.
I decided that with Go-boy, silence was the best policy. Everyone knew he couldn’t hold a grudge past dinnertime, and I reminded myself of that. I told myself that even though Go loved his family more than anything, and even though he treated his stepsister like a blood sister, and even though he would hear about what we’d done, Go couldn’t hold a grudge. At least, this was what I tried telling myself.
Go said, “It doesn’t even matter what you did last night. Not to me, anyway.”
“What if I was saving the world?”
That same maluksuk I’d hit with the scrubber was paralleling the far shore, cutting its top fin out of the water, almost beaching itself.
I said, “So a seed of God grows into God, but the seed of a salmon grows into a maluksuk?”
Go looked right at me. River water channeled between us in a constant washing. With my scrubber I pointed at the dying fish. It was sloshing itself along the gravel bank, confused, not sure which direction it was supposed to swim.
I got myself into trouble with a girl back in California just a few months before moving to Alaska. I was talking to her at a mall, joking. This girl had an angry, sexy look, a face shaped like an arrowhead and hair pulled back so tight it looked painted on. I was standing around waiting for my friends by the food court. These days I was still gangbanging