Pinch Point 

The salmon fell so fast the blood tank overflowed and whoever was nearest had to toss them back in.  I was the one sorting, smashing the foot pedal down as hard as I could to keep up.

The offload had totaled 300,000 pounds and had gone from just after sunset until four thirty that morning. I’d stood on the edge of the dock with sharp pains in my knees, the pump’s hose (which was wide enough you could fit a puppy or small child in it) sucking the fish out of the boats in a violent monotony.

We’d cleaned the dock while wandering in a haze of wood smoke from the pallets we’d set ablaze before offload, the slimy web of jellyfish run-off from the seiners sucking at our boots, leaving us stumbling around with arms in front to catch a fall like fish processing zombies. And then the sun rose in a fiery way, burning off the haze, while a silhouetted sailboat in the harbor looked like it was being vacuumed up into the horizon.

 

I smashed the foot pedal again and suddenly nothing.  The conveyor belt stopped moving, and the salmon came from the slime line and dropped into the blood tank with heavy smacking sounds as they landed on each other.

Dan came over.  His eyes were sunken in his head; he hadn’t been to sleep in two days.  He inspected the control box on the side of the conveyor belt, opposite from the big red EMERGENCY STOP button, and then retreated to his work room in the back of the cannery to get his tools.

He sent us to break and no one said a word but Herb who was asking how late we’d been on the docks offloading. Herb had slept at his house because he lived in town.  While we’d offloaded, he’d been in bed, dreaming whatever kind of dreams an autistic middle-aged man has.  No one responded.  There was only smoking and groaning and a lot of rolled eyes as Herb went from guy to guy asking the same question.

When we came back Dan was putting away his tools and there was no foot pedal on the ground.

“What’s up?” Josh said.

“I don’t have time to fix the pedal right now. I rigged the conveyor belt to just be on or off.”

“How do we keep up?” I said.

“Don’t stop,” Dan said.  “You’ve got the extra body helping out now anyway.”

“You mean Herb?” Josh said.

Herb was standing right there, some wire diverted or frayed up in his brain behind his glassy green eyes, causing him to stare out into the rolling gray waves of the harbor as if it was the most fascinating sight he’d ever seen.

“Look it’s only until we get through the pinks,” Dan said.

“What about tomorrow?” I said. “We’ll have to process them again. Is it gonna be fixed tomorrow?”

“Don’t you guys fucking bitch to me. You broke it.  I said not to stretch the cable around the edge of the table.”

“That’s bullshit,” I said.  “That wasn’t my fault.”

“Sort the fucking fish,” Dan said and walked back to his forklift, which was loaded with a tote of salmon.

And so we sorted. The others on the line didn’t stop their work and neither could we. My bandana was sour with fish slime, and it dripped down my nose, some of it getting in the corners of my eyes and burning.

We rotated and had about fifteen more totes of pink salmon to go, everyone breathing hard.

“Herb! More racks!” I yelled.

“Where?” He looked around and there were a couple stacks behind him, and he was wasn’t sure if he could use them, even though we’d already explained to him he could ten times that week.

“There!” I said. “Now!”

He sauntered off and I loaded a rack and then another. A salmon fell over the conveyor belt and lodged itself between the table and the rack.  I leaned across to get it. The pain between my shoulder blades was white hot.

Suddenly a rack smashed into my side – a drilling pain that stole my breath.  Herb was lining them up all in row like I’d asked but not paying attention to the one nearest me.

“Fuck! What is wrong with you?” There was a sharp pain from the effort of raising my voice.

I leaned on the rack to gather my breath, but it was too far over the edge of the table and flipped over and I went backwards with it.  The concrete lit through my head like an electric current, and the whole plant whined down to just a ringing in my ears.  I sat up and fish fell to floor with no tray to catch them, sending a slurry of guts splashing back at me. Five, ten, fifteen fell to the floor.

“Herb! Hit the stop button,” I said.  My voice sounded like when you cover you head with your hands. The button was on the left side of the conveyor belt and Josh couldn’t reach it without having to crawl under the machine.

“It’s on the side,” Josh yelled to Herb. “On the belt!” Josh picked me up and grabbed the rack.

Herb walked up to the conveyor belt, but he couldn’t see the EMERGENCY STOP button like Josh and me because it was on the inside corner of the machine next to the hotwired box.

“Jesus Fucking Christ,” Josh yelled pointing at the button. “The STOP button, the STOP.”

Herb moved in close, leaning over the table and his head was within a few inches of the conveyor belt and then he saw the button.  He went to hit it with his left hand and set his other arm against the metal plate with the Pinch Point sign to brace himself.

Herb started to scream. High and reedy until it broke apart into a pitch that matched the whine in my ears.

Josh crawled under the sorting table through the fish and guts and hit the manual stop button, partially straddling Herb. All the other people on the line in front of us were looking back like we’d killed someone.

Herb fell to a knee, moaning.  I got up and walked to him and put my arm on his back. He shuddered and popped up ripping his arm out of the machine.  The sleeve of his sweatshirt was torn, and there was a long gash that spurted blood like a broken hydraulic line.

Now everyone on the line had stopped working and was down at our end of the line in a circle around us.

Dan jumped off the forklift and came chugging up.

“Back off.  Everyone back the fuck off.”

Dan took Herb’s good arm and held it.

“It’s all right big guy.  It’s all right.” He took a clean rag from his back pocket, and tied it around Herb’s gashed forearm.

Herb was crying – huge sobs that turned to a steady whimper like a dog hit by a car.

“I didn’t touch it.  I didn’t touch it.  I didn’t touch it,” was all he would say.

“What the fuck happened?” Dan shouted.

“It was an accident,” Josh said.  “He got caught in the pinch point.” And Josh pointed to the sign, which with now splattered with fresh blood.

In half an hour, Herb was gone to the hospital and we went back to work, totes of unprocessed fish still stacked from the floor to the ceiling.

 

The Deer 

A few days before I broke up with my fiancée my family gathered around my brother’s hospital bed and held hands. I have no memory of what everyone’s faces looked like. There was just the light and the sound. The desert dusk swathed the hospital room in a haze of purplish red, and when the nurse removed the tubes from my brother’s lungs he gasped and wheezed, quietly then quieter, until his breathing came to an end.

 

It was months later, near the middle of June, when I left Glacier. I’d been drinking too much since Matt died of cancer – a bottle of scotch the day the Fed-Ex man delivered an updated copy of my parent’s will and Matt wasn’t in it, a couple of six packs when I ran into his old girlfriend in the cereal aisle at the store– but I’d been drinking too much before he died, too, a little bit more all the time until I didn’t know how to stay on top of it anymore. Three weeks into a road trip that had started at graduation and now there was a burning all through my upper stomach.  It burrowed into my back and caused me to switch to spliffs made of cheap Mexican weed.

The road out of Glacier was a rutted two-laner lined by half-melted snow and roadkill of all manner.  Everywhere I went the cold had lingered deep into spring – most nights I had spent wrapped up in a Pendleton blanket watching my breath fog in the lantern light while rain splattered against my tent – and the past few days in Montana I had felt like I was trapped in a landscape of water.  Lakes and rain and snow and blown out rivers coursing with winter’s debris.

 

Not all of it had been easy going.  In Oregon, I’d had a tire pop on a sharp turn and nearly splashed landed in the Hoback River.  A man who had been right behind me stopped and offered help.  He’d told me that he owned a tire shop just up the road and I should just follow him.  I’d told him I had a spare and then he insisted.  “It’s dark,” he’d said.  “You shouldn’t be out here on a donut.  I live next door to the shop anyway.  You could spend the night.”  He hadn’t left until another truck had pulled over to offer help, and I’d practically begged the second driver to stay until I was done changing the tire.

In California, I’d rolled into a state campground near Mt. Shasta at midnight.  It was a self-serve place where you left the money in a locked box by the entrance.  There were only twenty or so sites and they were hidden back from the highway in a cluster of oaks. There had been only one other car, a small sedan with a one-person tent beside it, and I had parked at a site as far from the sedan as I could.  I was awakened in the night to the sound of motorcycles and breaking glass. Was someone stealing my truck? I’d looked out into the dark, my eyes taking a while to focus and saw two bikes going around the small dirt track that connected the sites.  One biker had a dark shape extended over his head like a club or an axe.  I dove into my tent and rifled through my bag for my dull hatchet and waited. They sped off in minute, whooping above the roar of engines like dying eagles crying out in the night.  The next morning there was a bottle smashed up in the bed of my truck and the wooden box in which campers placed their money was splintered like it had been hit by lightning.

 

A few miles out of the Glacier Park entrance and the road turned into a series of descending switchbacks. I came around one of the bends and a bear cub sprinted along next to the truck.  It was twenty yards or so off the road and kept pace for a while before it bounded back into the scrub brush.  The cub wasn’t more than a squat shadow, and it moved not like a lumbering full-grown grizzly but like something sleek and wild.  I’d seen bears in the park, hundreds of yards away by the treeline, doing bear things like sniffing each other and picking at bushes, but they hadn’t seemed real to me.  I could imagine how one might smell bad or drool, but not how it might think or feel, or how its heart pumped blood to its brain just like mine.

I looked over my shoulder at the area where I thought the bear had disappeared into a pocket of charred forest, but it was gone and was soon just a shadow in my mind, its quickness the only clear memory.  And soon the forest blurred too and gave way to a wheat-colored plain where distant thunderheads made the sky look immense.  The clouds reflected the light of the late day sun so it was weirdly slanted, almost autumnal. The soft quality warmed my face, but the pain in my stomach was heavy like an undigested meal, and I couldn’t shake the thoughts I’d had all afternoon; Matt was just an old story now, the details of his life a little less vivid every time I remembered them.

The wind blew through the cab of the truck.  There was just the white noise of it and the hum of the engine as the miles ticked away. I felt sorry for myself and damn lonely and slapped my leg to make the feeling go away. That was the only way I knew how to fight self-pity.

I turned on the radio and searched for a signal until I found a baseball game on AM.  The announcers sounded far off and weird, like they were speaking through a fan.  The game was coming in all the way from Seattle, floating over the mountain range like some kind of tired magic. I took a joint from my shirt pocket and lit it with the cigarette lighter in the truck. The smoke was rich in my nostrils and my face grew hot and numb at the same time.

“Two out in the seventh…Mariners ahead…Comes to the plate…Strike two at the knees…No hits for the Rangers here in the seventh…”

A no-hitter. I finished the joint and rolled up the window. I needed distraction, and a guy working on a no-hitter was a small but decent enough thing to happen on a Thursday afternoon.

“Fister still pitching strong here in the seventh.  He’s been masterful so far, painting the outer half with sinkers and using the four-seamer when he needs to.  The only base runner coming on a Figgins error in the fourth.”

Fister and Figgins.  I laughed and felt a little better, buzzed and tired, but less outside myself, less like my arteries had been scraped out and filled with sand.

“Fister, gets the sign, comes ready, goes in to his motion…Strike three!
Got em’ with the slider.  And we’ll head to the top of the eighth, Mariners up three to nothing.  You’re listening to the Mariners Radio Network.”

“Baseball On The Radio. That would be a good band name.” Matt had been driving the truck on the way to Canyon De Chelly.  It was my freshmen year in college, and he was in remission for the first time and finishing up school at UNM.  We’d even had a class together that semester. “It’d be a good name because it’s the only sport that works better on the radio than on TV,” he’d said.

It had been early fall but still summer hot, and Matt drove eighty-five along I-40 all the way from his apartment like he could beat the coming heat of the day.

A stone, kicked off the edge of the trail by withered Navajo mules that left steaming piles of green shit every twenty yards, had fallen down and hit me square on the elbow only a couple miles into the canyon. It had hurt like hell and opened up a small gash that bled until my arm stiffened.  Matt had stood there and shook his head as I cursed, refusing to go on. “You’re fine, Mike,” he’d said. “It’s too hot to stop. Keep moving.”

His eyes had looked unfamiliar and different than I ever remember them looking, and I had wanted him to get hurt – trip, or bend an ankle, or worse – cruel and juvenile things because I was in pain and he didn’t give a damn. The hike and the heat had been even more intense after that and brought a grimness to the afternoon that silenced us.

I had been dazed as we neared the bottom and had stared at the walls of the canyon that sealed us off from the world above and seemed to ripple in the heat like the folds in a girl’s skirt. When we finally reached our camp, I’d still been angry at him.  We’d started to set up our tent next to a small creek, and the sound of the water running over stones cooled my brain. Without saying anything Matt had thrown his pack at me and I’d chased him into the water.  I tackled him and then he jumped up like a mad man, splashing me.  We ran around in the shallow stream of earth colored water, hearing our cries echo all around us.  Not for any particular reason, but just because I think we knew we’d beaten something back.  Just because sometimes I guess it makes you feel good and not so lonesome to yell out, like you might just be able to stand things a little longer if only you can make the world hear your voice and count you as one of its living.

 

I turned up the radio and felt the din of the crowd.  There was a buzz that only sports crowds get, that feeling of expecting, and the cab of the truck was filled with its energy. Maybe I’d drive just a little farther, at least until the game ended.  There was an Indian reservation, the interstate just beyond, and I stared out the window and thought about a hot meal, a shower, a hotel bed at the end of the night. It had been a long time since I had spent a night somewhere other than my tent or truck.

And then it was there. A deer with a good-sized rack I didn’t see it until it was in my lane.  The truck shuddered with the impact.  I swerved over the right shoulder into a ditch, and the truck bounced so hard I hit my head on the roof.  I punched down hard on the brakes and the steering wheel slammed into my sternum.  The impact knocked the air out of me and for a time all the light went out of the world.

When I came to, my brain was sludgy and my head ached so bad my teeth hurt.  My mouth tasted like blood, and I spit into my hands and rubbed them on my jeans.

My truck was totaled. I’d hit a deer.  It was probably dead.

But then the truck was still running.  I must have put it in park at some point.  So there was that.  I undid my seatbelt and looked over the front half of the truck.  Somehow it looked normal. “Okay, okay, it’s okay,” I said, my breathing more labored than normal.  I rubbed my stomach; it was starting to feel like one big bruise.  I scanned the rest of the truck for damage.  The mirror.  Where was the driver’s side mirror? It was sheared clean off, and for the first time I saw the driver’s side window was streaked with scratch marks and syrupy blood.  I’d had the window down all afternoon until I’d turned on the game.  I had a vision of the rack through the window and what it would have done to my face and took a moment to thank God and Doug Fister.

Up the ditch to the shoulder, there were shards of glass all over the asphalt that crunched loudly under my boots.  The mirror mount was on the other side of the highway, weirdly bent and not worth trying to jury rig to the side.  I looked westward into the sun, and it took my eyes a few moments to focus.  There was no sign of the deer in the road.  It was awful and creepy all at once, and I walked along the shoulder until I was convinced I was far beyond the accident. But then came a slow, quiet whine like someone letting the air out of the balloon.

Following the fence line back toward the truck I came upon it, partially hidden in a clump of rabbit brush, the kind whose yellow flowers sprinkled the rolling plain for miles up to the base of the mountains.  The deer was lying on its side, bleeding from the nose and mouth. A hind leg twisted and broken. The neck was slender and white but taut and powerful enough to hold up a rack that looked like two pearly limbs of an ash tree. I kneeled down and reached out slowly and put my hand on his side.  The deer opened his blood streaked eyes and stared out blankly, breathing slowly but steadily.  The hair on the body was coarse, grayish brown, and I petted him for a while. The sun was going down and the wind came down off the mountains whistling through the stems of the rabbit brush and raising goose flesh on my neck.  The deer looked like he’d die at any moment and I imagined animals picking at the meat of his belly, his guts stringy and steaming in the moonlight.  But he didn’t die.  He gasped for breath, kicking out his front legs every so often.  He tried to rise a few times but fell back after each until finally he just lay there, the air slowly leaking out.

The sound was terrible, and I wanted to take something sharp and long and put it deep in my ear canal until I punctured the drum and the world whirred to a silence. Along the fence line there were a few rocks about the size of the deer’s head. Was it worse to leave it here to die alone or to finish things myself?

I walked back to the truck and turned off the engine.  The silence was heavy, and I looked up and down the highway.  There were no cars, only the heat of the engine ticking away.  I lit a cigarette and leaned against the truck, massaging my left temple with my free hand. I went back to the duffel bag in the back seat and pulled out the .32, the bullets loose and gleaming beside it.  I’d bought the gun at a Wal-Mart in Kalispell a few days after the bikers in Oregon had woken me up.  The clerk took my New Mexico permit without a word.  I hadn’t fired a gun since Dad took me to the range years ago and bullets were like an afterthought.  The clerk had to explain to me which ones I needed to buy and how to load the gun. Water, Batteries, Peanut Butter, Bullets. They rattled around in the box and as I loaded the small shopping basket with supplies.

Later that afternoon, I’d shot some bottles off a stump way down an access road along a county highway.  I’d popped the shots off slowly at first, afraid of the recoil but then opened up and blasted away until I was nearly out of bullets. Therapeutic.  That’s what the TV show doctors would call it. My adrenaline rushed and I was far away from everything but the hot feel of the gun and the sound of exploding glass.

But now here were the last few bullets in my hand – cool small hard things, and there was no good feeling, just dread. I loaded the clip; my hands shook, and I racked the slide slowly.  “It’ll be dead when you get back. It wasn’t your fault, and it’ll be dead when you get back.”

 

The blood had stopped flowing and was starting to dry under its mouth, but the deer was still letting out long bleats.  The breeze came up again and it was like all the warmth had been blown out of the air. I aimed the gun at the deer’s head, pulled back the hammer, then stopped.  “Not in the head.” But where?

I settled on aiming through the shoulder blades, anything better than splashing its brains on the dirt and the sturdy limbs of its rack. I closed my eyes for a moment, opened them, took a breath, and pulled the trigger. A tremor went through the deer’s body, then mine.  The bleats were over, and it was quiet and still: like any other dead thing along a highway. The deer’s eyes stayed open looking out into forever, and I stood there for a time staring at it.  “Sorry,” I said.  “Sorry.”

 

I started back to my truck, and as I neared it a car came into sight from the opposite direction.  It was a station wagon with two people inside.  It was loud, a bad muffler maybe, and I shoved the gun into the waistband of my jeans and the car slowed.  The driver rolled down the window, and I could see it was a man, late twenties maybe with his mouth opened like he was getting ready to say something, like he just wanted to talk to see if things were okay.  But then I could see there was a woman in the passenger’s seat, with strawberry blonde hair highlighted by the last strains of the sunlight over the ridgeline and she said something to the man and they argued for a second.  And I could see her face clearly now – big fearful eyes.

 

The man sped back up and went on down the road. They looked through the back windshield, and I stared after them until they went over the horizon.  And then for the first time I looked down at my shirtfront and saw there was blood on it – the deer’s or my own, or maybe both, I wasn’t really sure. But there was a lot of it, splattered and red and bad looking, and the woman’s face made sense. I was standing there like I’d been in some kind of knife fight. Maybe they thought I was crazy, ready to hop in my truck, chase them down like it was some sort of bad horror movie.

 

Bloated and heavy with the sound of the deer I tried to go on like things were normal, but I was terrified of hitting something else.  The radio was on just loud enough to know it was there but not loud enough to hear what had happened to Doug Fister.  The cab smelled bad. Dried blood, a metallic sourness mixed with old smoke, mud. A couple cars passed as I neared Browning. Everyone who saw my truck knew something bad had happened.  They were calling ahead to the cops to come pick me up; I was sure of it.  But mostly they sped past, just dark outlines of people, staring ahead.

I drove deeper into the reservation, shaken and guilt-ridden, with no side view mirror, wondering what I’d do if I came upon someone going so slow that I’d be forced to pass.