I decided to go into the Salty Dog because there was nothing else to do in Homer and it was my last day in town. Eagles made dolphin sounds in the trees and a light breeze wrapped me up like a blanket and the mountains shone so gloriously I squinted through my sunglasses as I walked through swinging saloon doors.
It was dim and quiet, Ray Wylie Hubbard played soft and light on the juke, and dollar bills covered every inch of the walls like a giant shag carpet. I sat at the bar two or three seats down from a group of guys and asked the bartender for a lager.
“Thanks, Rita,” I said when she put the beer down in front of me.
“Yeeeuuuuur wulcome.” That’s how she always said it. Like a creaky wooden door and a croaking frog.
I recognized some guys down the bar. Local middle aged tenuously employed fishermen who lived like single high schoolers and beat up their girlfriends when they got too drunk.
Two of them were shaking their heads and looking away and giggling.
The other was gesticulating and getting louder and louder the more his friends laughed. He said, “I’m tellin’ ya, that’s where they start. Always. They got underwater footage and I seen it. When they start eatin’ dead bodies and shit. Cause’ fish’ll do that, ya know. Something’s gotta eat the dead bodies floating out there.” He was looking around with dark eyes like a raving pastor.
“Yer bullshittin us John. He’s bullshittin’ us.”
“Underwater footage,” John nodded with severity. “They go for the butthole.”
It’s almost like he thinks he’s Quint from Jaws, I thought.
“Now what in the hell are you guys talkin’ about?” Rita said. And I was really grateful because I also wanted to know what the hell they were talking about.
John remained hunched over the bar and he looked up at her squarely and said with that grave, sermonic look still on his face, “that’s what happens when fish eat ya, Rita. Ever’time. They always start with the butthole.”
Rita was not shocked and peered over her glasses and into his eyes for a long while. She appeared stoic but inquisitive. “Well, that settles it, I think I’m cuttin’ ya off, John.” The gray had almost completely overtaken the red in her frizzy ponytail, but it swung brilliantly over her shoulder as she turned and strutted down to the other end of the bar like an ancient cowgirl. No matter how hard she’d been knocked around, she was beautiful right then and there and I could have kissed her.
“Awww…Rita…come on…Rita…I didn’t even do anything…”
She turned back from down the bar and pointed at him and with her own tone of religious solemnity growled, “John, I don’t wanna hear it.”
You never quite knew what you were going to get at The Salty Dog. It was either full of tourists or it was full of locals who for the most part were fishermen. It was always busy and it was usually a good time and I liked the place.
My captain came in the door and went up to the bar and said, “hey Rita, how’s it going?”
“Hey, Dewey, been a while,” she smiled at him and she reached for the bottle of Pendleton behind her and said “let me guess.”
I joined him.
“Bless you nurse,” I grinned, “and two IPAs.” She poured doubles like a demon.
“Here you go, boys. Keep it open?”
I passed her my card, noddedprofusely.
“Thanks, honey,” she winked.
We looked for somewhere to go sit down and saw a couple guys we knew. They were off a Seattle boat called The Golden Chalice. We went over to sit with them. “What’s up Clint, how you doing?” I said.
We started bullshitting, mostly talking about our catches, how the season was going, how much more we had to catch. Talking shop. It was fucking boring. I watched the bubbles in my beer.
But there were some girls sitting at the bench behind Clint and his guys. It was obvious that they were from one of the neighboring Russian villages like Soldotna or Seldovia because all three of them wore matching homemade dresses and hats. And they also had thick Russian accents.
I thought they were kind of cute.
One of them, who I thought was the cutest of the three, made eye contact with me a few times and I was got focused on figuring out what her deal was. For the past two months we’d been out in the Aleutian Islands, fishing out of Dutch Harbor, and it felt like a lifetime since I’d seen a girl. They say that a beautiful woman is hiding behind every tree out in the Aleutians. They say that because there aren’t any trees that far West.
To my complete surprise the girl I liked got up and plopped down right across from me and beside Clint. I couldn’t fucking believe it.
She said her name was Yvonna. Y-von-na. I liked that name. I tried to get something going with her, but before I knew it Clint had snuck his southern charm into the mix and boxed me out. I told myself I didn’t care too much and gave up entirely, looked back down at my beer and thought about something else. I tried to ignore them. But I didn’t ignore them.
They were talking about arm wrestling or something. And then commercial fishing. Then more arm wrestling. I thought it was pretty boring. I wished anybody in Alaska had anything to talk about other than fishing and how tough they were.
But then she pointed at me and said that she wanted to wrestle me.
All the guys were laughing and I reddened. I had become the butt of some joke.
“She wants to arm wrestle you, you pussy…. you’re the only one of us she thinks she can beat!” They all cackled and clapped and coughed and I scowled.
“No not arm wrestle for him. Wrestle in bedroom.”
They stopped laughing. I started laughing.
“Oh do you now?” I said.
“She is slut,” one of her friends interjected from their table behind.
“You are whore. Do not listen to her, she is crazy whore,” the other corroborated.
“So you wanna wrestle me, huh? You don’t look like too much to me,” I said.
“You will be surprise.”
We kept on flirting a bit longer until Rita started to get agitated, and reminded us that the bar was closing in five minutes. I begged her, “come on Rita can I please just get one more round really quick? I’ll do anything.”
“Nope, get out.”
So it was finished, and I was sad. And the Russian girls recovered their wayward friend from me, and strutted out the rickety bar door with their dresses blowing around like great colorful garbage bags.
We sucked the last drops out of our glasses in silence and followed them out.
And then when I got outside, I saw them getting into a fancy black lifted Dodge double cab.
As soon as I saw the tail lights flick on I grabbed Clint and Dewey, and said “come on.” I was drunk and horny and feeling brazen.
I walked over, opened the door behind the passenger seat and hopped right into the truck. My girl was sitting in the back with her friends up forward. They couldn’t stop laughing and asking us what the hell we were doing. I didn’t know. “Where we going now?” I said.
“Ok, ok, you all get out of truck,” the one who was driving said.
I just kept asking over and over again, “where we going now?”
It didn’t take long to persuade them to get a few more drinks up in town at the other bar, Character’s.
I guess the girl in the passenger seat decided she liked Clint, because she swapped her seat with Dewey and crammed into the back next to him, forcing my girl over until she was halfway sitting on my lap. She leaned back against me harder than she had to and looked down the bridge of my nose in coquettish apology. She smelled like beer and body odor and old wood and smoked fish. I put my hands around her belly and she put hers on my upper left thigh. Soft flesh. It felt fucking good.
Within a minute or two of driving we were kissing and her friends were making disgusted groans and laughing at us. Little shrieks of pervish delight colored with disapproval.
When I looked up I saw Clint rolling around like a big bear with the Russian girl who’d sat on his lap beside me. For a fraction of a second, we shared a look that might as well have been a fist bump. The night was turning out to be much more than we could have expected.
We went to Character’s and bought the girls and ourselves several more drinks until that bar too had last call. I fell into a stupor of beer and lust and don’t think I talked much. I wanted to go back in the truck. When they kicked us out, we decided to go back down the spit to the harbor, because there wasn’t anywhere else to go.
But first we had to drive about twenty minutes outside town to this massive estate with a separate garage bigger than most houses and a stable next to it. I couldn’t understand how anybody in the Kenai peninsula could manage to have that many horses out in the open like that with all the bears around.
“Who’s horses are these?” I kept saying.
“Who’s house is this,” Dewey said.
We could ask and ask, but the Russian girls weren’t going to tell us who the house belonged to. All they would say was that they were staying there and that we had to be quiet because their kids were sleeping inside.
I don’t think any of us, not even the girls as they tried to explain, really gave one shit about any of it either way.
They ran inside and came back out to the truck with a very strange but sufficient assortment of beers and seltzers and ciders. It felt like we were in high school.
“Let me see that bag,” I said, my fingers opening and closing towards myself. I selected a can of pilsner and let out sigh of relief when it hit my lips.
We went back to the boat.
Thinking that I might be able to get this girl down into my bunk, I was advocating as well as I could that we go back to our boat, The Republic. But the Golden Chalice was closer, and Clint won out.
When we got on board everybody went in the galley to sit down.
But Yvonna dragged me out of the galley onto the open deck.
“Where do we go?” she said.
“To be alone?”
She spanked me and nodded.
I said maybe the bait shed had a spot so we poked our heads through over towards the stern. I flipped the lights on and we walked around.
“It smells fish in here,”she said.
I looked around to see the chunks of bait of guts that had dried to the bait shed walls where the guys had missed pieces when they scrubbed down. I nodded gravely.
We walked over and inspected one of the baiting benches. It was like a work bench with 2/4’s around the sides to make it like an open box. It was covered in paint and Pliobond glue that looked like hideous dried fish slime, and hideous dried fish slime, and bait pieces, and gills and gore. I imagined her sitting on it and lifting up her dress. “Hello ladies.”
I walked over and looked at a stack of tied up skates. She started to lay down on it, and then she yelped and stood up and her dress tore. She carefully removed a massive hook from the hole where it had poked into her thigh.
“This isn’t going to work,” I said.
“Huh, this perfect,” she seemed confused.
“Nah, let’s go back in the galley. It’s raining anyway.”
We ended up sitting at the galley table there for the rest of the night drinking beers and eating the scrambled eggs with hot dogs and rye toast that Clint made up for us. Talking, laughing, kissing, howling, dreaming.
When the sun started to poke its head up over the glaciers and the snowcaps across Kachemak Bay like the angry spotlights of so many accusers, the girls said they had to leave so that they could still make it to church on time.
“Church?” I said. I thought they were kidding.
But they weren’t.
They said they could drop me and Dewey off at our boat on the way.
Clint walked us to the rail where we swung down onto the dock. He shook our hands and wished us luck with a sad smile and we stepped off The Golden Chalice and headed back for the truck.
In my mind, there was still no question that I was getting laid. This girl wanted it bad. All night she’d hardly said much more than “god damn” and then grabbed my ass or my cock. I felt like a supermodel. And I was ready. Church could wait. We were going to my bunk.
But when we got to the boat ramp and Dewey and I began to get out of the truck and they didn’t move, it sunk in. It was all a ruse. We were never going to get laid in the first place. We were just a kiss-and-fondle joyride for a few orthodox housewives on vacation. Fuck.
“Bye, bye, fisher boys,” the three of them smiled and blew us kisses while we stood there in the dirt watching them go.
Watching them go.
As the truck drove down the dusty road into the sunrise like a row of triumphant cowboys, a great melancholy descended upon me and a hangover began to take hold. I watched the great dust cloud their massive truck kicked up. It looked like a big halibut. Then it looked like a raven. Then it turned red like the rising sun and drifted into nothingness. The dust came back and it caught me in my throat and I choked and gagged on it. All the dust in the world was in the air and turning into Alaskan folk-tales and telling me that the Russians were never to be trusted in that place. It was a place of horror and deceit, the dust said. I asked and it told me, it was a place of brutality and murder. It was a place where invaders never stopped invading even after somebody else invaded them. Where there were no conquerors or moral heroes, only animal violence and powerful wills. That nobody ever won or lost, just struggled and changed. That nothing would ever be easy there.