The Smell of Other People's Hou - Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock Page 0,11
girls wanna Ice Classic ticket? You could win thousands.”
The Ice Classic has been going on for almost seventy years. For one buck per ticket, people guess when the ice on the river is going to go out, and if they’re right, they win a load of cash. Last year it was something crazy, like ten thousand dollars. There’s a tripod set up on the middle of the frozen river with a trip wire and a clock that stops at the exact time the ice goes out. The winner is the one closest right down to the minute. It’s hard to think about the river thawing when it’s still forty below. But when spring finally does come, it rushes in like a band of robbers. The gunshot sound of ice breaking frightens me every single year.
“Come on, ladies, one buck. Change your lives forever. Can’t really go wrong with just one buck.”
“That means no Dairy Queen,” whispers Dumpling.
“No, it means no dipped cone. We can just get a plain swirl if we each use one buck here.”
Dumpling is thinking hard about this. She loves cherry-dipped cones.
“I think it’s a sure fail,” she says. “I mean, come on, the exact minute?”
Crazy Dancing Guy’s voice is still spinning around in my brain. Five, four, ten, thirty-seven…
“One ticket, Nick,” I hear myself say. I take the stub and fill in the blank. May 4, 10:37 a.m.
We head back out into the cold, and if Dumpling is wondering what I just did, she doesn’t ask. I’m not sure I even know myself.
“Hey, Dumpling, when Crazy Dancing Guy asks what you didn’t fail at today, what do you think of?”
“Right now, I would say I didn’t fail at getting a cherry-dipped cone, but you did.”
While I wait for my Dad to finish up some last-minute details back in town, I sit on the boat reading old copies of the police blotter in the local paper. It’s better than the funnies. Like this one:
Salty Blotter, June 28, 1970: 12:15 p.m. Police received a report that a man was beating a child in the 200 block of Marine Way, but when officers arrived it appeared the two were just having a dandelion fight.
The police blotter will tell you everything you never wanted to know about this place. Here’s an example of the way nothing happens here and then becomes news:
June 29, 1970: 2:10 a.m. A woman reported three boys missing from their home on Klondike Alley. When police arrived to investigate, a man who answered the door said it was just a misunderstanding and the boys were asleep in their beds.
See what I mean? Boys asleep in their beds is hot news. This place is weird.
I was born in this tiny fishing town on the edge of the Pacific Ocean, but I don’t really remember living here. Most of my life was spent on our boat, the Squid, until my parents divorced and Mom moved us to Fairbanks to be closer to her sister, Aunt Abigail. My cousin Selma was born here, too, but like me she doesn’t remember it.
Aunt Abigail adopted her when she was only a few days old, and Selma doesn’t know who her parents are. She loves imagining them, though, and sometimes it’s tiring, listening to her fantasize about her real parents. Everything from her mother being half human/half seal living in the ocean, to her explorer father running an oil tanker back and forth from Russia to Alaska. None of it is true, but try telling Selma that.
—
“Hey, Alyce, can you retie the bow line? We’re getting too far away from the dock and I need to unload this thing.”
My uncle is coming down the dock with a cart full of groceries. Oops.
“Sorry, Uncle Gorky, I got sidetracked.”
Groceries are my job.
“I can take it from here,” I tell him, and he does that silent nod accompanied by a slight shrug that fishermen are known for; then he hops onto the boat.
Without another word he grabs a pair of insulated gloves and jumps down into the fish hold to start moving ice around. He calls it “making up the beds” for the salmon we’re going to catch.
“We’re the Holland America Squid,” he likes to joke, a cruise ship for dead fish. Uncle Gorky does all the icing—tucking of the fish into their beds, as it were—to keep them cool until we can make it to the processors to sell them.
When I was two, I called them bald little babies. Apparently I used to kiss