The Seal Wife - Kathryn Harrison [51]
Deprived of oxygen, the fish are sluggish; they slide onto the mud bank in slimy, shining heaps, gills wide, eyes staring. A few slap convulsively against one another as they wait to be decapitated. The saddest noise, Bigelow thinks, like clumsy, drunken applause. It’s his job to hatchet off their heads. Another guy takes off the fins and tails; someone else pulls out the guts. Then the last in line packs the meat into drums to be hauled off to cold storage.
The time of day, bruised and sleepy, the backdrop of mud and endless tree stumps, the adhesive scum of blood clotting underfoot, the suck of mud pulling at his heels, the fact that he never has enough money to last from one check to the next, the impossibility of his position in relation to Miriam—surely he hasn’t gotten himself engaged—it all conspires to ruin Bigelow’s mood. Even sunrise, splattered pink and gold over the water’s dark surface, can’t offset the vileness of butchering in such quantity. Still, thirty-nine cents an hour. Bigelow can make a dollar on his way home from the new wireless office, just a half mile up the bluff.
The Koniak chugs off with his crew invisible, squatting in the empty, fish-stinking hold, their lips stretched over chaws of tobacco, and then it’s just the packers, however many of them show up. They divide, four or five to a line, and fall into a kind of rhythm: chop, slice, splat. Gulls stand ten and twenty deep around them, guzzling offal. They hang in the air with their beaks yawning wide, don’t even have to flap if the wind’s just right, unnerving, like a painted backdrop. Motionless, waiting to drop down and yank off a pink coil of intestine, sometimes fighting in midair, stretching a length of it between them until it tears or snaps, until one of them wins. Once, at the Art Institute of Chicago, Bigelow saw a painting with an angel speaking scrolls, annunciation unfurling from his lips on a pink ribbon. It disturbs him that the gulls remind him of this. The Swede who does fins is always hung over, or maybe he’s sick, either with ulcers or from the work at hand; every so often he steps out of line and vomits in a curiously workaday manner, as if it meant no more to him than blowing snot from a nostril, which he also does, but without bothering to step back. Packing such quantities of fish, none of them could stomach a bite of it; they no longer think of salmon as food, they don’t worry about sanitary conditions. Each of them has been issued gloves, and no one wears them.
The two or three hours pass more quickly, Bigelow discovers, if he forgoes his coffee and his breakfast. He gets out of bed in the dark, reads instruments with automatic accuracy, no higher consciousness to distract him from the simple task. He submits and collects ciphers with barely a syllable passing between himself and the telegraph operator, arrives on the dock only to slip further into a dulled stupor. The sound of the tide, the drizzle, the fog—it’s as if he never got up, the rest of him sleeping while his arms go on chopping.
One morning, the Koniak shows up with a live hair seal hanging by its hindquarters, full-grown, perhaps a hundred and fifty pounds. He has it strung up over the prow, an upside-down figurehead, and Bigelow can see the weird beauty of its eyes, black and wet and shining, the fur around them stained dark. Not that he’s sentimental, but it looks like weeping. The Swede makes a strangled noise, a cough of regret or disgust; or maybe he’s just clearing his throat.
Bigelow doesn’t want to look at the seal, but he can’t help it. “Siwash cosho mamook tumtum?” he asks in Chinook. What’s it for? At least he thinks that’s what he says. What he means is why, but he’s almost given up on pidgin, words that get him nowhere.
The Koniak doesn’t answer. He spits on his ring and shines it on his sleeve.
“Probably got in the trap,” the gutter