The North Line

Adam was looking for a red-haired man. The fleet superintendent said that Nash had red hair, couldn’t be missed. He said Nash was different. He didn’t say from what.
 
Adam walked the dirt road from the cannery office down to the river. Everywhere that wasn’t road was snow or tundra. Tundra turned out to be a carpet of mud-colored sponge, half-filled with frigid water. It exhaled puffs of vegetable rot when Adam stepped on it. Brown and red patches poked through retreating snow cover, making for a shaggy calico land­scape. The superintendent had also used the word beach, but beach was not what Adam found when he got to the edge of the land, where gritty mud dissolved into the swirling brown water of the wide Nushagak River. He watched the river and gave serious consideration to the idea that he might be in the wrong place.
 
He was waiting on a red-haired man, and a red-haired man was  exactly what came into view, but still Adam was a little surprised that someone in this place was looking for him. Two men in an aluminum skiff appeared, and as the skiff got closer, Adam saw that the man in the front had red hair. From the time he first spotted them the skiff kept on over the water, right at him, for a solid twenty seconds. A solid twenty seconds is a long time to think. 
 
Adam waved. Nash looked dead at him but didn’t wave back. He stepped up on the seat before the skiff reached the shore. When it slid up on the gravel he jumped and hit the ground at a trot without removing his hands from the pockets of his hoodie. He was about Adam’s height, just shy of six feet, but wiry. Nash closed the distance between them. He had a stripe of freckles across his cheeks, and his nose changed its angle of descent just below the eyes. You could see how the skin would hang when he got old. As described, he had long red hair, pulled back in a ponytail and tucked through the back of his baseball cap. Adam started to introduce himself, but Nash interrupted him. 
 
“You’re Adam,” he said. “The boyfriend.” 
 
Adam put a smile on his face but didn’t say anything. He didn’t have a girlfriend, but he avoided giving information away for no good reason. He knew Nash was talking about Betsy. 
 
“Yeah. That’s me.” 
 
Nash was sizing him up. That didn’t concern Adam. He would observe, work hard, and do whatever was required to obscure the difference between them and him. Making himself unobtrusive was a skill he had cultivated for as long as he could remember, for so long now that he acquired speech patterns and gestures almost as a reflex. He considered the process a kind of adaptation to obstacles, rather than performance of a fundamental deceit. He had done this before. More than once. He counted it a strength.
 
 
Nash patted around in his jacket until he found cigarettes. “I’m Nash,” he said. “Kaid tells me you never been fishing before. Totally green.” Adam had never spoken to Kaid. All of his phone calls had been with a Neptune Seafoods employee sitting at a desk in Seattle. 
 
“Well—” 
 
Nash was lighting up. He spoke with the cigarette in his lips. “I’m not talking about sports fishing. That’s teasing animals for fun. I’m talking about seining, gillnetting, crabbing, long-lining—any way you catch fish for money. You done any of that?” 
 
Adam didn’t answer. From Betsy’s dorm room in Massachusetts this plan had seemed outlandish, but it had the degree of fuck you in it that the situation seemed to demand. He would show up back at school in September to pay his tuition not with a check from his parents or a grant or some other reward for compliant citizenship. No, he would lay down cash he had squeezed out of the wilderness on his own terms. Cash earned killing fish. Fuck you. But standing in the melting muck, the fuck you part of the plan evaporated, leaving only a job he knew nothing about. Looking at this place, talking to this man, he was reminded that every tale he had ever heard of ripe-for-the-taking riches also featured gangs of the foolhardy suffering a lethal comeuppance. This comported more or less with Adam’s sense of the moral universe, in which stupid was always punished more harshly than evil. 
 
“I was hoping for somebody bigger,” said Nash. 
 
Adam stood up straight. 
 
“Not saying you’re small, but you’re not the deck ape I was looking for either. Kaid said you were an athlete, and I was thinking lineman. Well, you are going to have to do. I’m the skipper on this trip, but it’s Kaid’s boat. I’m guessing you don’t know anything about Kaid.” 
 
Nash poked Adam’s lacrosse bag with the toe of his boot. It was full of brand-new waterproof gear and a pair of deck boots that Adam had bought in town, significantly depleting his meager cash reserve. 
 
“So, you have any experience at all?” 
 
“I’ve never worked on a commercial fishing vessel,” Adam said.
 
“Vessel?” Nash shook his head. “Listen, chief, around here, it’s a fucking boat.” Nash took a step back. “So, you don’t know anything about this? Nothing at all?” 
 
“I’m sure I can learn,” said Adam. 
 
“Christ,” said Nash. “Fucking Kaid. You know what, right here I’m going to do you a solid, so listen close. As of this afternoon they’re pull­ing green herring out of Togiak, so I really got no time to go hunting up another man, but somebody ought to warn you. The truth is this work ain’t for everybody. Probably a lot worse than you think. This year especially. The price the Japanese are posting for reds is shit, and in the boatyard they’re already talking strike. You got this last chance to back out. Once you get on the boat it’s too late, and I don’t like the idea of dragging you out there without some warning.” Nash shot a look over his shoulder at the river before turning back to Adam. “So, you think it over one more time. Right now. You can walk away, maybe go look for a cannery job. No shame in that.” 
 
For a moment Adam visualized that failure, and the possibility of forgiving himself. He could sit out a year of school and sort out some method of tuition finance from the comfort of home. But home wasn’t all that comfortable, and Adam feared the cruel gravity of Port Marion. He had seen his hometown hang on to those luckless fuckers who failed to attain escape velocity. He didn’t love Denby, or covet the life it pointed him at, but if he lost that, he didn’t know where he would go. Brown water swirled behind Nash. Adam wondered what it would taste like. Mud? Salt? 
 
“Look,” said Adam, “I’ve come a long way—” 
 
“That’s a sunk-cost fallacy,” said Nash. “You know what that is, right?” 
 
“Is there another job around here where I can make as much money?” 
 
“No. No, there is not.” 
 
Adam reached down for his bag. “Let’s go.” 
 
Nash looked Adam over again. “Fair enough,” he said. “Come on.” 
 
Adam gave no further thought to turning around, but felt he should defend himself, so he hustled after Nash and started to explain that he was no stranger to hard work, that he was a quick study, and that he would pull his own weight. All those things were true, and they were the kind of thing he usually said when he was someplace new, the words serving to grease institutional skids, but the words sounded corny and stupid even as he spoke them.