Like You'd Understand, Anyway

Set-net fishermen mostly work for families that hold the fishing permits and leases, which are not easy to get. The families sell during the season to vendors who buy fish along the beach. The season runs from mid-June to late July. We fished at Coffee Point on Bristol Bay. Two people lived there: a three-hundred-pound white guy and his mail-order bride. The bride was from the Philippines and didn't seem to know what had hit her. Nobody could pronounce her name. The town nearest the Point had a phone book that was a single mimeographed sheet with thirty-two names and numbers. The road signs were handpainted, but it had a liquor store, a grocery store, and a superhardened airstrip that looked capable of landing 747s, because the bigger companies had started figuring out how much money there was in shipping mass quantities of flash-frozen salmon.

We strung fifty-foot nets perpendicular to the shore just south of the King Salmon River: cork floats on top, lead weights on the bottom. Pickers like me rubber-rafted our way along the cork floats, hauling in a little net, freeing snagged salmon gills and filling the raft at our feet. When we had enough we paddled ashore and emptied the rafts and started over again.

Everybody knew what they were doing but me. And in that water with that much protective gear, people drowned when things went wrong. Learning the ropes meant figuring out what the real fishermen wanted, and the real fishermen never said boo. It was like I was in the land of the deaf and dumb and a million messages were going by. Someone might squint at me, or give me a look, and I'd give him a look back, and finally someone else would say to me, “That's too tight.” It was nice training on how you could get in the way even when your help was essential.

How could you do such a thing if you love her so much? I think to myself with some regularity, lying there in bed. Well, that's the question, isn't it? is usually my next thought. “What's the Saturday before Memorial Day circled for?” my wife asked a week ago, standing near our kitchen calendar. Memorial Day at that point stood two weeks off. The whole extended family would be showing up at Don and Nila's for a cookout. I'd probably be a little hobbled when it came to the annual volleyball game.

“Should you even have kids? Should you even have a wife?” my wife asked once, after our first real fight. I'd taken a charter all the way up to Dry Bay and stayed a couple of extra nights without calling. I hadn't even called in to the office. She'd been beside herself with worry and then anger. Before I'd left, I'd told her to call me back and then when she hadn't, I'd been like, Okay, if you don't want to talk, you don't want to talk. I'd left my cell phone off. That I'm not supposed to do. The office even thought about calling Air-Sea Rescue.

“Bad move, Chief,” even Doris, our girl working the phones, told me when I got back.

“So I'm wondering if I should go back to work,” my wife tells me today. We're eating something she whipped up in her new wok. It's an off day — nothing scheduled except some maintenance paperwork — and I was slow getting out of the house, and she invited me to lunch. She was distracted during the rinsing the greens part, and every bite reminds me of a trip to the beach. She must notice the grit. She hates stuff like that more than I do.

“They still need someone to help out with the online accounts,” she says. She has an expression like every single thing today has gone wrong.

“Do you want to go back to work?” I ask her. “Do you miss it?”

“I don't know if I miss it,” she says. She adds something in a lower voice that I can't hear because of the crunch of the grit. She seems bothered that I don't respond.

“I think it's more, you know, if we're not going to do the other thing,” she says. “Have the baby.” She keeps herself from looking away, as if she wants to make clear that I'm not the only one humiliated by talks like this.

I push some spinach around and she pushes some spinach around. “I feel like first we need to talk about us,” I finally tell her. I put my fork down and she puts her fork down.

“All right,” she says. She turns both her palms up and raises her eyebrows like, Here I am.

One time she came and found me in one of the hangars at two o'clock in the afternoon and turned me around by the shoulders and pinned me to one of the workstations with her kiss. A plane two hangars down warmed up, taxied over, and took off while we kissed. She kissed me the way lost people must act when they find water in the desert.

“Do you think about me the way you used to think about me?” I ask her.

She gives me a look. “How did I used to think about you?”

There aren't any particular ways of describing it that occur to me. I imagine myself saying with a pitiful voice, “Remember that time in the hangar?”