The Night my Brother Worked the Header

Last day of the salmon season, Old Windell gave a knife to Larry Olseth and put him on the butcher line next to me. "Be nice to him, Agnes," Windell said. The salmon dropped every three and a half seconds from the stainless-steel header and crowded through the open gate as if still alive. They plopped onto the belt headless, one to a slot. We kept up pretty well. Uma-san and Saka-san, the Japanese butchers, slit the bellies, throats and bloodlines. I separated the egg sacs from the guts and dropped them down the metal chute to the egg house. The sacs toppled into the flow like lopped-off pairs of orange fingers and dissappeared around the first bend in the rickety converted rain gutter. Windell winked at me.

"OK, Agnes?" he said.

"OK," I answered.

"Aa-o!" sang Paolo, the big Filipino slimer at die end of the belt.

"Aa-o!" sang Dung-Dong, the old Vietnamese scraper two positions down.

On the butcher line, that's how we talked, a sung language. But as soon as Larry Olsedi started butchering fish, the singing stopped. He stood on the line between Uma-san and me, as tall and awkward as an ostrich. His thin wrists stuck out from his sleeves like bare bones. His blond, feathery-haired head stuck up a foot above everybody else's, on a neck as thin and gristly as boat line. He was cute enough, but he'd never butchered salmon before. Uma-san let him try every sixth fish, and believe me, it wasn't pretty. He gouged stomachs open and ripped into meat. He wrecked egg sacs without blinking an eye. When he told me he loved me, I nearly took his knife and slit his throat.

We were processing grade-A sockeye salmon, the only fish that came to our cannery and freezing plant that were anywhere near good enough to vacuum-pack in cellophane and sell to the Japanese. Most of the fish we got were soft, smelly chum salmon, silver salmon bloated with gas, humpy salmon falling off the bone and covered with growths. Sometimes we got king salmon as large as men; they smelled worse by far than any other fish, on account of the extra meat. But the salmon on the belt that morning were fine, marvelous fish that shimmered under the overhead lights. Were it not for the blood that drained from their necks and bellies, they might've passed for fish brooches inlaid with turquoise and quartz, like those worn by women east of here, in places like Wrangell and Ketchikan.

So we handled them with care. No one wanted to bruise a freezer fish. Old Windell had told us at breakfast he would be counting the number of fish Ido-san, the Japanese grader, tossed into the plastic tote marked cannery. We had to be careful, he said, if we wanted our jobs back next season. Every fish that went to the cannery troughs, through the washers, fin shredders and rotary mincers, every fish that got stuffed into a can, sent down the chinks over the weights and scales, down the long greased rail into the 500-gallon pressurized steam cooker, meant a loss for the company. Add it up, he told us. Weigh it against the cost of labor. Anybody here think he's inex-pendable?

"I said I love you, Agnes." Larry Olseth had blue eyes that could turn a person to stone.

"I heard you," I said.

There was a window on the butcher line. It was huge and without glass. During the winter, you could look through it to the sea, but in salmon season, it was blocked by two stainless-steel crab cookers, one stacked on top of the other. The morning Larry Olseth started butchering, a beam passed over the top of them and made a rectangle of light on the belt between him and me. The salmon moved into it and became flames I wanted to touch, not through gloves with cotton liners but with bare hands. But I'd handled enough fish to know how cold and wet they were. Fingering the rough skin would only have wrecked the illusion. To me, the salmon looked foil-wrapped, as beautiful as the chocolate Christmas fish the outpost store in Ahkiok received each year in time for Lent.

"Leave with me tomorrow on the plane," Larry Olseth said. I knew, without having to look up, that he was making himself look more pitiful than any dog in our village.

I was glad Carl was out of earshot. I didn't want my brother, the butcher-line foreman, thinking anything funny was going on. Five feet above the rest of us, on a platform made out of pine boards and reinforced metal, he operated the salmon header, a circular saw for taking the heads off fish. From where I stood on the line, I could see him out of the corner of my eye, in yellow rain pants and brown plaid shirt, his braid coiled snakelike in the hair net outside his collar, his thumbs hooked in the gills of a sockeye salmon. His job was to clamp the fish into the six spring-loaded adjustable collars on the crown of the header and make sure none of them fell off before hitting the 16-inch circular blade. Loaded with salmon, the header looked like one of those merry-go-rounds at the fair, the kind with swings, only when the fish got three quarters of the way around, they dropped like sausage links onto a tray table and their heads tumbled down a wooden slide into a 4x4 plastic tote.

(continued on page 170)The Header(continued from page 96)

"We'll live with my friends Eric and Fran," Larry Olseth said. "They're spray-paint artists. They've got a studio next to the electrical plant in Union Way. Wait till you see it, Agnes. Graffiti poems on the walls and ceiling. Paintings of shrunken heads and bicycle handle bars. Eric's got one of a fire hydrant, and all around it are these yellow cats. Not dogs but cats. It's terrific. He's got it displayed in their bedroom, under the basketball hoop."

"Someone's missing throats!" Dung-Dong said, and he didn't mean Uma-san or Saka-san.

"Throat, throat, throat," his brother Hwen-Mao said. "Three throats!"

Larry Olseth hummed a song when he told me we'd hike the Tibetan plain. "I've got this friend, Arun. He owns a restaurant in Mussoorie, India. We'll leave from his place. Think of it, masala dosa for lunch, tandoori chicken for dinner. In the evenings, we'll bathe in the headwaters of the Ganges, pray to the sacred Siva, sleep under the Hindu heaven. Imagine, Agnes, riding a one-humped camel, meals served to us on banana leaves, sipping arrack and reading Upanishads to each other until dawn."

The crew was quickly becoming annoyed. No one liked the looks of Larry Olseth's fish. We kept looking down the belt to see how Ido-san was grading them. If too many fish went into the wrong tote, we might have to find new jobs. Windell wouldn't fire a college boy, we knew that, even if he sent 5000 fish to the cannery. Larry Olseth butchered in jerks, like he was gutting a deer. He shoved in the knife the way you would bust open a sternum, and he carved mouths in the gullets, complete with curling lips. After a while, I had to stop watching him.

"Cut the throats!" Dung-Dong said.

"The bloodlines!" Hwen-Mao said. "Cut the bloodlines!"

"This is what we'll do," Larry Olseth said. "We'll stock a cupboard with sex tools. Vibrators, dildos, fruit-flavored jellies. We'll only use condoms with little nubbins on them, and we'll video-tape our sexcapades. In Korea, Agnes, men and women pull strings of pearls out of each other. We can order through the mail. I'll get two, one for each of us."

"Look," I said and held up a fish. Eggs poured out its open neck like bath-oil beads. "I'm behind because of you."

Dung-Dong was losing his patience. "Goddamn," he said, and shook his head. "Goddamn."

Paolo's voice boomed from the end of the line. "Too much blood in the fish!"

"Goddamn." Dung-Dong couldn't scrape the blood if the bloodlines weren't cut.

The fish with guts in them were two slots from Hwen-Mao's scraping spoon. Between them and me were no fewer than six fish. Larry Olseth turned his eyes on me. They were as blue as a pair of marbles. "What's eating you, Agnes?" he asked. Just then, I backed into the steel toe of Hwen-Mao's rubber boot and I landed flat on my back on the carpet of guts. Spleens and intestines covered my face. Larry Olseth offered me his hand.

"Stop the belt!" Hwen-Mao said when he opened a fish and saw its guts and eggs intact.

Carl turned off the belt and came around the far end of the header. "What's going on?" he asked, picking up an end wrench from the box of tools and slapping it in his palm a few times. No one wanted to annoy Carl. He was strong enough to throw a wrench five times the length of the one in his hand, sure-sighted enough to hit an empty beer can from 12 yards. When Carl was only 15, Windell had caught him with his daughter up on Alitak Mountain, fucking on the flat slab of rock next to the fallen-down radio tower. Windell marched him down the side of the mountain back to the cannery, a rifle barrel pointed at his head. Then he handcuffed Carl to the flagpole for the night, and in the morning, Carl watched the helicopter lift off with the girl in the cockpit. The next summer, Windell made Carl foreman. At 19, he was a better foreman than men twice his age.

"The new guy," Dung-Dong said.

"What new guy?" Carl asked. He knew who Dung-Dong was talking about, but playing stupid was part of the game. Most of the people on the butcher line couldn't have explained a situation in English to save their lives, which was why we made an effort to get along.

"The new guy," Dung-Dong said, and motioned with his head.

Carl looked at Larry Olseth, but his back was turned, helping me pick gonads and bladders off my jacket. Anger flashed in my brother's eyes, but Larry Olseth was as oblivious to it as a fish on the belt. "I'd like to take you right here, Agnes. Right here in the guts," Larry Olseth whispered. Carl lowered himself off the platform, came up to me on the other side of the belt and slid two slick fingers underneath my chin.

"You all right, Agnes?" he asked.

"Yes, Carl," I said, and pushed Larry Olseth away.

"You fall by accident, or somebody push you?"

"Nobody pushed me, Carl," I said.

He looked at me. "You need to be meaner," he said.

One of the ways he had tried to make me meaner was by putting the barrel of a deer rifle to my temple. "Look out the window and make up a story," he would say, punching out the safety on the magazine. And looking into the winter fog, which rose up our of the sea as thick as grass, I would begin a story about the Japanese glass float, the plastic doll's leg or the teacup handle of Chinese porcelain—all bits of exotic jetsam I'd discovered while digging for steamer clams. But before I could get past the setting, he would make the hammer click-click-click in the hollow chamber. "You're boring me, Agnes," he would say. He believed that to live year round in Ahkiok, Alaska, a person had to be mean. I believe a person mustn't get bored.

He withdrew his fingers, which left my throat wet. I watched him grab the rail of the platform and pull himself back up. When Carl was halfway back, Dung-Dong said, "Aren't you going to say something to the new guy?"

Carl spun around. He thought a moment. "I might tell Windell Dung-Dong's getting too old to work."

"I'm not too old!" Dung-Dong shrieked. Some refugees worked until they were 100.

Carl started up the header. "Life's short, Agnes," Larry Olseth said. The fish came one to a slot, packed in as tight as the links on a watch band. Larry Olseth said, "All right, Agnes. I'll do the job right."

"You couldn't if you tried," I said.

"Oh, yeah?"

"Yeah," I said.

But he did. He bowed to Uma-san and asked him to teach him the Japanese way of salmon butchering. Uma-san raised his eyebrows so they looked like little V-shaped temples on his forehead. "Japanese way?" he asked.

"Yes," Larry Olseth said.

I was amazed. Larry Olseth's fish improved as soon as Uma-san showed him how to hold the knife and glide the blade. He slit the throats, bellies and bloodlines perfectly, so that the egg sacs slid out as smoothly as Popsicles. We were happy. Hwen-Mao and Dung-Dong scraped the snakes of blood off the spinal columns and flung them at Chung-Soo when he came to collect the tote of fish heads. "Good job, Larry," Uma-san said. Paolo's voice boomed in song.

For a while, total harmony united us, from the slimers and the scrapers on down the line to me, the egg puller. I asked Larry Olseth, "Why'd Windell put you on the butcher line? You've never even butchered before."

"Because I asked him to," Larry Olseth said.

"And he just did it?"

"Sure. I told him I was in love with you, Agnes. I said, 'Listen, Windell, if you don't let me butcher fish next to Agnes Agnug, it'll be your fault if I leave tomorrow and never see her again.'

"He said, 'You're absolutely right, Larry. If I did that to you, I'd be unable to sleep nights, I'd be so disgusted with myself. I'll put you on the butcher line first thing after ten-o'clock mug-up.' "

I shook my head.

"Seriously, Agnes. I asked him to put me here and he did."

That didn't surprise me. The college boys wore caps advertising the names of their fathers' firms: National Can Company, American Clip Manufacturers, Mermaid Ocean Delicacies. Larry Olseth's cap said Cryovac, the company that made the bags we froze the fish in. Still, it angered me.

Larry Olseth said, "Leave with me tomorrow and you'll never be poor."

"But I don't love you," I said.

"You don't?"

"No," I said.

"But you told me you did."

•

True. Three nights earlier, I had told Larry Olseth I loved him. How it happened was, I was sitting on his bed when he handed me a mirror with two biglines of cocaine on it. "Use this," he said, and handed me a rolled-up $100 bill. We took turns snorting, and when we were through, he set up two more lines and told me I could have them both. I did, and when they were gone, Ithought I'd never seen a handsomer boy.

I said, "Let's go for a walk on the pier." He slipped a pint of Johnnie Walker into his jacket and held the door for me. Outside the dorm, a big full moon had risen over the ocean. I said, "The killer whales will be feeding tonight."

We sipped whiskey as we passed the machine shop. Through the cracked window, the drill presses and band saws looked like people hunched over in the darkness, but I wasn't afraid. I'd walked to the end of the pier plenty of nights—sometimes alone. In front of the freezer, I bit Larry Olseth's ear and told him, "Put your arms around me, Larry." He did, and I asked him if he wanted to go to a place only I knew about, a secret place under the dock.

"Yes," he said, and I led him by the hand to the slippery wooden ladder at the end of the pier.

The rungs were wet and cold. When I came within three feet of the glistening water, I called up to him, "Come on, Larry." As I reached with my foot for the slick plank, I could see him start down the ladder, one foot at a time, the soles of his sneakers flitting between the rungs like ghosts. I gripped the rope railing and balanced across the narrow beam, crunching barnacles under my boots, to the bed made out of old two-by-fours. "Come on," I said. A good two feet above the high-water mark, the bed was the perfect place to keep blankets and cigarettes. I reached for Larry Olseth and he handed me the bottle and climbed in next to me. Above us, moonlight filtered through planks in the pier, making bars across our faces. Below us, we heard the swish in water, killer whales drawn to the shimmering schools of Dolly Vardens underneath the dock. I said, "Kiss me, Larry." He unzipped my pants. I said, "Yes, finger me, Larry." And while he did, I said I loved him.

•

At the end of the line, Paolo sang a love song with French words in it. Larry Olseth butchered only every fifth fish, but they were turning out as good as either Uma-san's or Saka-san's, so Uma-san asked him to try every fourth fish. "OK," Larry Olseth said.

"You're the little girl that I adore" Paolo sang.

"Love needs time to evolve," Larry Olseth said. "It doesn't happen overnight. Like a seed, it needs to be nurtured, watered, given sunlight."

"I could never love you," I said.

"Then forget about love," Larry Olseth said. "Think of the drugs."

•

I did. Underneath the pier, I told Larry Olseth about the deaths, about kids I knew killing themselves for no reason. Most of them did it in the winter, when the horizontal rains slashed against the aluminum siding of the houses for months at a time and no one had any hope of cocaine coming around until May. A boy told his family he was going out to kill a deer. A girl said she was going for a walk and her father hung the rifle on her shoulder for protection against bears. They'd place the end of the barrel against the roof of their mouths and push the trigger with their thumbs. I told Larry Olseth to imagine ripping planks for coffin wood from the floors of the abandoned seiners south of the cannery. That's what little kids in the village did. I told Larry Olseth about the suicides of E.J., Myra and T. Pontiac, and before that of Rhoda, Ewell and Buster, kids who had climbed up the mountain out of the world. Then I told him what I had told many people, that the way to end all the discontent and needless destruction of our youth was to maintain a steady flow of drugs into our community year round.

•

"I love you, I love you, I lo-o-ove you," Paolo sang. Things were going fine. Only diseased fish went to the cannery. Ido-san sent the rest to the freezer.

"We send the coke third-class parcel post," Larry Olseth said. "It's cheap. Nobody checks it. It gets here."

Uma-san said, "Real good, Larry. Real good." He was referring to Larry Olseth's fish, which were good, mostly. A couple of times, I noticed a throat or a bloodline that wasn't cut all the way, but I wasn't going to say anything about a couple of salmon. For never having butchered before, he was doing a very good job. Then Uma-san raised his eyebrows. "You try every third fish, Larry?"

"Sure," Larry Olseth said, and Uma-san made a joke in Japanese that I didn't understand.Larry Olseth had to work his knife fast now, and some of his cuts were a little sloppy. "Your dream, Agnes. You said it was a sign.

•

Yes. Underneath the pier, I told Larry Olseth about the night last March when T. Pontiac came to my house all drunk, asking me whether I had anything to smoke. Just cigarettes, I whispered. He wanted sheesh, he said. But he stood in the kitchen, anyway, eying me as if I were the drugs themselves. I pushed him toward the door. From inside his jacket, he pulled out a pack of Viceroys. They were drenched through. He said he was going to smoke them one after another until they were gone, and then he was going up the mountain to blow off his head.

I said, Not now, Pontiac, you'll wake people. We both laughed hard—but quietly—so that we wouldn't wake people. So many kids had killed themselves, mentioning it was almost a joke between us. Pontiac kissed me on the mouth and left through the side door into the rain.

I crawled back into bed with my sister's baby. Carol had won a scholarship to pharmacology school in Anchorage, so every night after she left, I put her little girl, Sarah, between my breasts and went to sleep listening to the little puffs of air, in and out. When the gun went off, I dreamed I'd been shot through the heart. I felt the penetration of bullets and the flip of my body onto the pebbles. I looked up and seven hunters in mukluks formed a circle around me. A boy with feathery blond hair knelt beside me. Move her from the spot and she'll die, said one of the men. No, she won't, said the boy. He stood me up on the stones to show them. Thank you, I said, thank you very much. When I awoke in the morning, no one had to tell me that Pontiac was now dead, for I knew it as if I had had a vision.

•

"Remember, Agnes," Larry Olseth said. "Underneath the pier. You told me I was the blond-haired boy of your dream. You can't deny it. You said it was a sign."

"A sign of what?" I asked.

"How should I know?" said Larry Olseth. He missed some more throats and bloodlines. He cut them, just not deeply enough, so the egg sacs came apart in my glove. Still, I said nothing. He was trying to do a good job.

"Very fast learner, Larry." Uma-san could say that because he didn't have to pull the egg sacs or scrape the blood from fish that were only half finished. Then he said, "I leave now. Bye-bye, Larry," and set down his knife. "You butcher with Saka-san. Every other fish. Japanese." Taking off his apron, he made another joke that nobody except Saka-san understood, then removed his gloves and hung them on the wall behind him. He was done for the summer. Even though it wasn't quite noon, he was going to Japan House to pack his things for the flight to Tokyo in the morning. As he walked through the fork gate behind the header, the fish rolled upon Larry Olseth like waves, pushing him like a raft at sea, until he was butchering fish right next to me, jamming me in the ribs with his elbow.

"Throat!" Dung-Dong said.

"Bloodline!" Hwen-Mao said.

"Agnes," said Larry Olseth. None of the throats and bloodlines were cut now. Sac upon sac ripped in my glove. "Leave with me. It's written in the cosmos. It's meant to be."

Two more sacs ripped in my glove. "I'll leave with you, Larry"—these were my exact words—"when all the throats are cut!"

My brother Carl looked at me from the header. All he had heard me say was that I'd leave with Larry.

•

Around three in the afternoon, we finished butchering the last tote of salmon. Carl told us that before we could leave, we had to sweep all the guts into the drains, hose down the header, belt and tray tables and sponge-mop all the fish scales off the butcher-line wall. I beat Dung-Dong to the broom, which meant that the old Vietnamese had to wipe down the header, which was an OK job if Paolo kept the fire hose down. Carl started up the crown lift, forked the tote of fish heads and drove off to dump it from the end of the pier. While the rest of us worked, Larry Olseth leaned against a runner of the garnge door, smoked cigarettes and stared at me with his blue eyes. He had kept up all afternoon, the same as Saka-san. Once he'd adjusted to the pace, nobody could complain about his work, not me, not Dung-Dong, not Hwen-Mao.

I kept my eyes on my broom. The purple livers, floppy white gonads and pink strings of tissue swirled like sunset clouds in the whirlpools above the drains. Larry Olseth was going to leave tomorrow on the plane. I had that thought as I swept out fish heads from underneath the belt and sent them coasting off the end of my broom like shuffleboard pucks. I aimed them at the drains, where they plopped through to the ocean below. Maybe we could be pen pals for a year or two or until we forgot the looks of each other's faces.

"Goddamn."

I looked up. Mario, the quiet slimer, was talking to Paolo about orange picking in Stockton, California, where the Filipinos spent the nine months they didn't spend here. This sort of thing happened every day. Paolo got interested and forgot he was holding the fire hose. My face had been blasted plenty of times. This time, though, it was Dung-Dong. The water came straight up and exploded off Dung-Dong's face like fireworks.

Of the 20 or so people who had seen Dung-Dong carried off the line on a stretcher two seasons earlier with a collapsed aorta, not one stepped in to do anything. Larry Olseth, of all people, pushed the fire hose down, and when he did, Paolo said, "Keep your hands off me, you white fucker." His stomach was as big around as a back-yard cooker.

The old Vietnamese climbed down off the platform, his hair as wet and bristly as a newly hatched bird. "Where's Carl?" he asked. "He'll take that goddamn thing out of your hands."

Paolo called the old man a cocksucker and held the nozzle level with the crotch of his rain pants. Dung-Dong made a beeline for the garage door, his wrinkled face trembling like fish wrap in the breeze. Larry Olseth followed him out the door and leaned against a stack of pallets. It made me sick to think he was above having to help us with cleanup.

I climbed the header platform to finish wiping off the scales and blood from the collars, crown and blade. I loosened the bolt on the blade and took it off so that I could pick out the globs of guts that were wrapped around the rotisserie like rubber bands. Dung-Dong returned as I was tightening the blade down. "I thought you went to get Carl," Paolo said as he wheeled around.

"Carl went to the village," Dung-Dong said. "I saw him driving the skiff."

Ahkiok was four miles away by water, which meant Carl had left for the day.

"No," Paolo said, beaming.

"Go ahead, call me a liar," Dung-Dong said.

The fire hose twisted on the floor like a snake. "Another day, another dollar," Paolo said as he turned off the water. I climbed off the platform, though I hadn't finished cleaning it, walked past the fish house, the egg house, the freezer plant, but I found only Carl's crown lift, plugged into a socket in the side of the warehouse, and the hosed-out tote drying in the sun. In the slip where Carl tied up the skiff each morning hung the bowline. Its frayed end wafted back and forth in the current like hair, entangling the legs of starfish stuck to the piling. Normally, he wound and tied the rope and set it neatly under the seat.

"Agnes." I felt Larry Olseth's cool hands soft as a down-filled hood over my ears. "I'm gone from here."

"What do you mean?" I asked, trying to size him. He had dark plates under his eyes that made him look pitiful and charming at the same time.

"This place is not reality," he said. "I'm here, yes. But really, I'm not." He put a wad of Red Man as big as a jawbreaker under his lip. "I've lost my mind, Agnes. It's aeons from here. Off the coast of Egypt where Odysseus' men ate lotus leaves and dreamed of mountains and waterfalls so real they wanted to stay there." He cleared his throat and drooled a string of saliva a foot long off the end of the pier.

"So I't saving that old Vietnamese man's life back there—what's-his-name, Ding-Bat. But what I'm thinking about is this thing I read about how botanists identified a certain hallucinogenic fern they believed to be the actual lotus eaten by the mariners. You saw that Filipino giant. He wanted to rend me limb from limb, but what I'm thinking about, Agnes, is picking the little ferns and stuffing them in my bag."

"Come on," I said. "Let's get out of here."

"All right," he said. We took off our rain gear and boots, hung our pants and jackets on nails in the cloakroom, clipped our gloves to the clothesline. I asked Larry Olseth whether he had any coke.

"Of course," he said, so we walked side by side in broad daylight past the open door of the machine shop, past the high-pitched whir of the power grinder, past the flying sparks of old Dan the machinist. We walked through the center of the mess hall, past Tiny, the head cook, singing, "Doo-doo-doo-didlee-doo-didlee-doo-doo!" He would be gone tomorrow. At the top of the stairs, we walked past work boots, deck boots, tennis shoes, past coveralls hanging from hooks and spotted with grease. No girls or women were allowed in the men's dorm. That was Windell's law. Larry Olseth opened the door to room six.

"We should be quiet," I said. Larry Olseth locked the door. His underwear, socks, shampoo, washcloths lay on his bed, ready to be packed. I moved a couple of his shirts and made a place for myself on the bedspread. He opened the drawer of the bureau, removed a blue bag with a black drawstring. Inside it were the mirror and the canister of coke. "Tomorrow, Agnes, I'll be back in Seattle." He dumped some of the chunky white powder onto the mirror and began to chop it with a razor blade. We spoke through our noses because a misdirected breath could send the particles flying. "The first place I'm going," Larry Olseth said, "is Umberto's Italian Ice. For some raspberry." With the edge of the blade he made four thick lines. "You ever wanted something so bad you could taste it?" he asked.

"It wasn't raspberry," I said.

"Coke whore," Larry Olseth said. He handed me the mirror and the rolled-up bill. I snorted my lines a third at a time, each one a burst of coolness like a breeze in my head, like the mist that curls off the breakers at high tide. I asked whether there was more.

"More what?"

"You know," I said.

"What's left on the mirror. Go ahead, lick it off." I did, and felt the tingle on my gums and tongue as I reached for the fly of Larry Olseth's jeans.

•

At three a.m., we woke to Carl's pounding. He wanted us to let him in or he'd blow down the door.

"What do you want?" Larry Olseth asked. My hand rested on his bare chest. My lips were at his ear.

"I'm going to hide in the closet," I said. "If he finds me here, he'll cut me into strips and stuff me into a crab pot."

Larry Olseth looked at me. "I'm serious," I said.

"Let me in," Carl said. As quietly as I could, I slipped off the bed, put on my clothes, picked my shoes and socks up off the floor. I didn't do the zipper because I thought it would make too much of a sound.

"Can't we ignore him?" Larry Olseth said from the bed. "Won't he just go away?"

Carl pounded the door.

"Give me a minute." Larry Olseth rose from the bed and covered himself with a white bathrobe. As I moved into the closet, my head nudged a bunch of loose hangers. "Dang," I said, trying to steady about 30 of them with my hand, but they clanged anyway like chimes inside a clock. I pulled the closet door shut from the inside, slowly, to keep the hinges from snapping.

"Now," Carl said, "or I'll blow down the door."

"I'm coming," Larry Olseth said. I heard the lock on the door click and my brother step into the room. The overhead light came on, making shafts inside the closet at my feet, above my head and through the cracks in the panels. I moved to the far end of the closet and pressed myself against the wall.

"Where's Agnes?" Carl asked. He was scanning the room, taking in the stuff on Larry Olseth's bed and the indentations left by our bodies. I knew he was looking for things of mine in the mess the way he looked for deer droppings on the side of the mountain. "She's been here," he said. "Her scent is here."

"She left hours ago," Larry Olseth said. "She said she was going back to the village."

"I've been to the village," Carl said.

"Yeah?" said Larry Olseth.

"She wasn't there." He paused. "You two fuck like rabbits, or what?" he asked.

Larry Olseth shook his head. "This is crazy, Carl."

"So you two think you're leaving tomorrow on the plane?"

It was funny. Larry Olseth was in the bedroom and I was in the closet, but in that instant—the instant when we knew why Carl had come—our heads were as linked to each other as boats in tow. Larry Olseth laughed, not because anything was humorous. "We were kidding around, Carl. She never said she'd go."

"I heard what she said."

"I've got a girlfriend, Carl," said Larry Olseth. "Allison's her name. Allison Wheeler. We've set the date."

"What were you doing with a fifteen-year-old, then?" Carl asked. I heard the click of the safety and knew then that Carl had brought the deer rifle along with him. But I wasn't worried about Larry Olseth. The gun never had any bullets in it. Besides, it was me Carl wanted, not him.

"So what did you promise her?" Carl asked. "The world?"

"I didn't promise her anything."

"We'll wait for her and see," Carl said. "In the meantime, I want you to tell me a story."

"OK," Larry Olseth said. "Ever hear the one about the sailor?"

"The sailor and the midget?" Carl asked.

"That's a different one," Larry Olseth said. "In this one, he's sitting at supper with his wife and kid."

"Tell it," Carl said.

"The guy's spent his whole life collecting things," Larry Olseth said. "He's done pretty well for himself. Even on the junky items. One day, a dervish passes his house and sees the marble pillars and onion domes and thinks to himself, Why should he get to bask in Allah's favor, eat pecans, drink tea, when I'm lucky to get a slice of goat cheese? The more he thinks about it, the more pissed off he gets. 'I work at least as hard as him. Yet I go hungry while he dines on the brains of monkeys.' "

"Get up," Carl said. I heard the rustle of bedding, the sigh of the mattress, as Larry Olseth stood up. "We're going for a walk," Carl said, and I heard Larry Olseth's feet on the carpet. "Keep talking," Carl said. "You're getting me interested." The hinges creaked as Larry Olseth opened the door. Through the wall of the closet, I heard them in the hall. I opened the closet door and crept across the room. I peeked around the molding as the two boys moved past rooms 11 and 13.

"So the sailor invites the guy in," Larry Olseth said, "puts him at the head of the table, says, 'Eat.' So the guy eats. The sailor says, 'Perhaps when you've heard my story, you'll think twice before you envy me again.' " Larry Olseth opened the door of the second-floor landing.

"Out," Carl said, and pushed the barrel into the back of his head.

They were moving down the steps. I crept down the hall after them and opened the door at the end of the hall and slipped into the night. Their footsteps creaked on the stairs like boats against the pier. ' "On my first voyage,' says the sailor, 'the captain mistook the back of a sea monster for a small island.' " Larry Olseth stepped onto the sidewalk, a ghost in his white bathrobe. The rifle barrel linked them like a horse and rider. ' "Some of us disembarked. Soon the ocean quaked. The island sank beneath our feet. We watched our ship depart without us.' " I followed them past the nurse's office, the laundry room, the main desk. The moon was as full as the underbelly of a whale. There were no clouds, no colors, only shades of white and black.' "Some were devoured by the monster. Others by the sea. But by the mercy of the waves, a few of us were thrown ashore on the island of Cassel, once the waiting grounds for grooms of the benevolent maharaja but now the home of the giant, man-eating Cyclops.' "

I stayed in the shadows next to the carpentry shed, crouching behind the concrete blocks stacked next to it. They disappeared behind the corner of the machine shop. When I came to the corner, I made myself as long and narrow as a drain spout and poked my head into the walkway.

"She's out there," Carl said. "She's listening." He pushed Larry Olseth past the cannery, the paint-supply closet, the scale room, luring me along with the sound of Larry Olseth's sweet voice.

' "He scooped us up in his hands the second we arrived and locked us in his cave.' " They came to a halt in front of the entrance to the butcher line. I followed in the darkness, darting between the stacks of pallets.

Carl dropped the key to the garage door on the concrete apron. "Open it," he said. As Larry Olseth picked up the key, I realized he was telling this story to save my life. He thought the longer he kept Carl interested, the more time I would have to go get help. And the truth was, I'd have banged on the door of Windell's cottage, screamed bloody murder to the stars had I truly beleved Larry Olseth was in danger.

The garage door rattled on its runners. ' "He looked at each of us. He picked me up by the neck. Then he set me down. I wasn't savory enough for him. He had his eye on our captain.' " I moved along the outside of the corrugated shed. Lights came on above the butcher line. A thousand tiny rays shot out holes in the metal sheeting. On the other side were the belt, tray tables and header.

"She's out there," Carl said. "I smell her." I was beside the entrance, next to the block of light, my back pressed against the runner.

"The Cyclops ran a spit through the head of our captain, then hung him over the fire to cook.' " From the butcher line came the clank of bolts being loosened. Larry Olseth saw what I had been trying to tell him all along—that there was nothing Carl wouldn't try if he thought it had the power to frighten.

"Louder!" Carl said.

" 'That night, I dreamed of a plan! When the Cyclops asked my name, I told him it was Noman!' "

Carl started up the motor on the header. "She's out there! Tell the story louder!"

The belt started to roll with Larry Olseth collared to it. ' "When the Cyclops was fast asleep, I took a spit out of the fire! I climbed his hair! I stood before the huge closed eye!' "

"Agnes!" Carl screamed.

' "I lifted the orange tip!' "

"Agnes!" he screamed again.

' "I drove it into the yellow yolk——' "

I stepped into the light as Carl shifted the rotisserie into gear. Behind it, in a convergence of steel orbits, the blade spun at hundreds of revolutions per second. I walked through the puddles behind the belt. "Go ahead," I said.

"Agnes," Carl said, and shouldered the rifle.

"Agnes!" screamed Larry Olseth, legs flailing as he came round the other side of the machine, arms struggling with the spring-loaded collar.

Carl fixed my forehead in the sight. I saw his eye, brown and luminous, on the lens of the scope. As I climbed onto the header platform, I heard the click-click-click of the hammer in the chamber.

"Carl," I said. I put up my hand and knocked the barrel of the rifle aside. He stumbled against the gear shift, knocking it into neutral. Before he could recover, I turned off the switch. I reached for the rifle and threw it down the wooden slide for fish heads.

"You're a whore," Carl said.

"I'm a whore. Right, Carl," I said.

I unlocked the collar from around Larry Olseth's neck. Under his jaw was a red welt that would turn blue on the plane.

"Larry Olseth," I said. My boots were inches deep in the slime we hadn't cleaned up, and I pickel a length of intestine off his white robe. "Here," I said, and handed it to him. "To practice on." My eyes met his as the slimy piece slipped from his hand onto the floor.

"Don't forget," I said to them both, and I made a little bow, the way Larry Olseth had done to Uma-san, and I left. Someone else could clean up.