The Smell of Other People's Hou - Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock Page 0,17

this,” he said, showing me an article he’d clipped out. It was already two months old.

May 5, 1970, Fairbanks: The tripod on the Nenana River fell at exactly 10:37 a.m. yesterday to mark the end of the 1970 Nenana Ice Classic and signal the beginning of spring. Five lucky winners will split the $10,000 pot. One of the five is a sixteen-year-old native girl, who has asked not to be identified. She is the youngest winner yet for the Ice Classic tournament, which was started as a betting pool in 1906 as a way for miners to entertain themselves in anticipation of the spring breakup.

“She’s going to get two thousand dollars, that girl is,” Jack said. “That’s a hell of a lot of money.”

Jack isn’t a jealous person, but he was obviously jealous about this.

“Jack?” I said. “What would you do with all that money?”

“I’d leave,” he said, without even thinking about it. “I’d take that money and I’d get on a ferry and I’d leave.”

Right about then the window blew open, banging against the garage wall and making us both jump. A cold wind started blowing all the old newspapers and receipts around the garage. It sounded like the flapping of a hundred invisible wings whipping up the last bits of my dad, trying to resurrect him. When the dust settled, all I could smell was that Old Spice aftershave, and right then I knew I had to listen to Jack.

“Let’s go,” I said to him. “Let’s get Sam and let’s go.”

—

“We won’t have to stay hidden the whole time, if that’s what you’re asking,” I told Sam in answer to his question about looking for whales. “But I think it’s rare to see orcas.”

Sam remembered every single fishing story Dad ever told us. I could hear my mother’s voice in my head—you boys think those fishing stories are so mysterious and romantic, always keeping him up on a pedestal—but I pushed it away and thought about what Dad told us instead, about the time he was longlining for black cod. The baited lines sit on the bottom of the ocean for a few hours, then get pulled up by hydraulics, hopefully loaded with fish. By the time they were pulling in the gear, orcas had totally surrounded the boat.

“Gorgeous animals,” Dad said. “So quick, so powerful. They can pull bait right off the gear. The only thing left on the hook after we pulled in the line was a pair of black cod lips.”

Sam hung on to the stories like the lips had hung on to the hook, and he could recite every single one, even though it’s been years since Dad disappeared.

Sam was the poet, the one who would keep Dad alive regardless of the facts. Those facts included his entire boat being swallowed in a tsunami. The one that hit right after the Good Friday earthquake had rocked the rest of the state—houses broke in half and slid into the bay in Anchorage; broken roads twisted all the way from Valdez to Turnagain Arm. But hundreds of miles away from the epicenter, it was the ocean that wreaked havoc, swallowing a whole fleet of boats, including our father’s.

I had begged him to take me on that particular trip to Massacre Bay. I was eleven. It was his favorite place to fish because the mountains jutted straight out of the ocean. “It feels like they’re hugging your boat and keeping you safe while you pull in the fish,” he’d said. I could not imagine a place called Massacre Bay feeling safe and secure like a hug. And I was right about that, wasn’t I?

I’ve never been able to shake that feeling of Dad’s hand on top of my head, ruffling my hair while he said, “You stay home and be the man of the house for me this one time. There will be other trips.”

I didn’t realize that being the man of the house was going to get so goddamn tiring.

—

Hiding in the baggage cart is getting tiring as well, but since we didn’t win a pot of money like that girl in Fairbanks, it was the only way I could think of to sneak aboard. Thank God people have so much baggage when they leave Alaska. Just in this cart alone there are duffel bags, suitcases, boxes of frozen salmon, padded gun cases—and us. I move a box covered in duct tape closer to my left foot, trying to hide my legs. The shutters on the