The Smell of Other People's Hou - Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock Page 0,14

along the nautical chart. He’s trying to decide which direction to go—the best place to anchor that’s protected in case the weather kicks up, but still close to the fishing grounds. We are running now, a day early, so we can get the gear in the water right when the season opens. Every minute spent getting to the fishing grounds is money lost. Dad likes to have the hooks in the water right at midnight on July first, opening day.

The chart he’s reading is creased from wear and there is Scotch tape holding it in spots that tore over time. Some of the bays on the chart are covered in coffee stains, or crusted with dried salt from my father’s wet gloves, the paper crinkled where it was gripped too tight during a storm. I notice a dried spot of blood marking Murder Cove, a safe, secluded bay with a horrible name. That purplish spot bruising the chart could be fish blood, or blood from a hand that got stuck with a hook, or just blood from a bloody nose. The older the charts get, the more history they contain.

The names of the bays tell their own stories, and some have given me nightmares over the years—just knowing we were anchored in places called Murder Cove or Deadman’s Reach, or even running against fifty-knot winds through a strait ominously named Peril. Whoever decided on these names was trying to tell us something. I prefer the handwritten notes beside other bays and landmarks inked in Uncle Gorky’s familiar scrawl: “good anchorage,” or “caught 10 halibut on a hand line,” or “Dungeness crab—lots!”

It’s considered really bad manners to snoop and read other mariner’s charts. It’s the closest thing to a journal for men who trust no one but the sea. If you happen to climb aboard another boat and their chart is lying out on the table, you better not get caught looking directly at it. Men have been thrown overboard just for glancing.

Dad unrolls another chart and spreads it out, tracing the route we’ll take today. Scribbled in the margin of a passage along a narrow stretch, my mother’s tight, bossy handwriting jumps out at me: “Right on red returning.” It’s the most basic nautical rule of them all.

I point to it and nudge Dad’s shoulder.

He tugs at his whiskers, which is what he always does any time the subject of my mother comes up, or worse, if he has to talk to her himself. Once he came back from the pay phone at the top of the dock with whole sections of his mustache pulled out.

Luckily, Uncle Gorky jumps in when he sees that gesture: Dad ripping his hair out.

“Uh, someone almost hit a rock there. Thought the marker was in the wrong place.” A smile lurks at the corner of his mouth. He tries to hide it, lifting his mug and slurping tea louder than necessary.

Oh, Mom, I think. You documented your most serious fishing blunder on the chart? She might as well have written it on her tombstone.

—

We’re slowly crawling out of town at just a little over four knots. Through the window I can see the other boat harbor, and just beyond it the ferry terminal on the starboard side as we pass.

Once we’re past the harbor bathroom, I let out the air I’ve been holding, aware that Uncle Gorky is watching me, smiling. It’s a game a bunch of us fishing kids made up a long time ago, the equivalent of holding your breath and making a wish while driving over a bridge. I don’t really know why, but the rumor is that the bathroom is haunted. My parents said that was ridiculous and refused to even hear about it.

“And even if it was, how is holding your breath going to help?” Mom had asked, and Dad agreed. (Oddly, it was one of the few things they absolutely agreed on, and they got equally annoyed when I talked about it.)

I figure it’s no different from all the other superstitions fishermen live by. I mean, seriously, if bananas are dangerous on a boat, can’t a bathroom be haunted?

—

The M/V Matanuska is tied up at the ferry terminal, but I can see them loading cars onto her as we go by. She’ll probably pass us since the most the Squid can do is eight knots, and a huge ferry goes way faster than that. It’ll rock us around in its wake, so Dad is busy putting dishes in