The Smell of Other People's Hou - Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock Page 0,47

them. He has fish blood all over his face from getting too close to the bloodline when he scrapes it. It’s a beginner problem, but I don’t say this. Over the past week, I’ve noticed that I don’t really look at Sam anymore so much as drink him up. I am trying not to be obvious.

He smiles and my stomach goes wobbly. We must have hit the wake of another boat, I tell myself, trying not to stare at the brown mole on Sam’s lip, which at this moment is blending into the other reddish-brown spots of fish blood splattered across his face.

“Okay, well, I’m done with my ten fish over here. Maybe we should run the gear again,” I say.

We have already fallen into that teasing banter that happens fast on boats. Sam has learned most of the jobs quickly, but I still clean twice as many fish as he does. I’ve never been the most experienced one on the boat before, and it’s like watching my old self back when I only got to do the humpies: disgusting, stinky pink salmon that are small and not worth a lot of money. They also poop out gray slime everywhere, which I used to think was cool, but not anymore.

Sam reminds me of what it was like to be curious about fishing, rather than bored. But then I see my dad looking at us quizzically from the wheelhouse doorway. I’m not sure if he’s thinking about the fish or the fact that his daughter is standing in the troll pit laughing with a boy she pulled from the ocean. I prefer to believe he’s thinking about the fish.

“I’ll finish that one up, Sam. Here, give me your knife.” If the fish aren’t cleaned quickly, they turn stiff as a board, and then we get a lower price. But something tells me the look on my dad’s face right now has very little to do with salmon.

Sam returns to running the gear, flipping the hydraulics that pull in the fishing lines like he’s been doing it for years. He runs all four lines that are trolling behind the boat, grabbing each hook as it goes by and clipping it onto the rail on the stern in a straight little line. Hoochies flap on the ends of the hooks—rubber squid made of all different colors and sizes—to entice the fish. “When I was a kid I used to name them,” I say, “but I got lazy and after a while they were all just called Spot.” He smiles at me. Since when did crooked teeth ever make me feel like this?

When Sam sets the gear again, he holds up each hoochie and says, “Name?” I throw out whatever comes to mind—Petey, Pinky, Fatty, Dogface—but he likes naming them after poets. “Whoever heard of a hoochie named Emily Dickinson?” I ask him, and he just says, “Whoever heard of naming a hoochie at all?”

Sam’s strong enough to land kings, so Dad lets us do all the work if we aren’t too slammed. Uncle Gorky still does all the icing in the fish hold, and he helps us clean if we get into a thick patch. I know Dad would rather sit in the wheelhouse eating peanuts and talking to Sunshine Sam on the radio. Every so often he dumps the shells out the window and they float past us, bobbing along on the waves as a reminder, to me, anyway, that there are more people than just me and Sam on this boat.

—

“So…what about those ballet slippers?” Sam asks, slapping a bright-red coho onto the deck; its scales glint silver and black in the sun, reflecting off the aluminum bait shed like disco lights.

The fish flaps around, hitting the bin boards a few times, until I stab it in the gills with a knife and blood pools out onto the black mat.

I don’t say anything. I’m out of practice talking about myself on this boat.

I grab the fish’s tail and slide it to the side so it can bleed all the way out.

“It’s really pretty, isn’t it?” Sam says, pointing his orange glove at the bloody mat. Streaks of red are smeared against the black rubber background, and they remind me of a tuxedo cummerbund or a fiery red sunset. I was going to rinse it off to keep the blood from splashing us when we land more fish, but the look on his face makes me pause. “What do you see?” he