The Salmon at the Cleaning Station

The fish was still slapping the deck when my uncle Larry bent down, took it by the tail with both hands, and swung it over the back of the boat.

It hit the water with a sound I can still hear. A flat, heavy smack. Then a flash of silver rolling sideways, and then nothing but green Lake Michigan and the white churn of the motor.

My daughter Bobbie was standing two feet away with the rod still in her hands. She was thirteen. She had fought that king salmon for eleven minutes, and her arms were shaking so hard the reel clicked.

Nobody said anything for a second. The captain, a big quiet man named Royce, had turned to reset the downrigger. He spun around at the splash with the clip still in his fingers.

“Larry,” he said. “What in the world did you just do?”

My uncle wiped his hands on his jeans. He did not look at Bobbie. He looked at the cooler where his son Zach’s fish lay on the ice, a fourteen pound king that had been the biggest fish on the boat since six that morning.

“Zach’s fish wins,” Larry said. “She’s got a lot of summers ahead of her. Leave it.”

That was all. He sat back down on the bench by the cabin and pulled his tan cap lower and watched the water like he was waiting on the next rod to go.

The morning before it

I should tell you how we got out there, because it matters for what came after.

My name is Birdie. I was forty-one that August, and I ran the meat counter at the grocery store in Ludington, the same store where I started bagging groceries at sixteen. I cut steaks and chops all week and filleted whatever the fishermen brought in on Saturdays.

My husband Rocky worked second shift at a parts plant up the road. That Saturday he was on mandatory overtime, the kind you do not turn down in a slow year, so it was just Bobbie and me going out with my mother’s side of the family.

The trip was my uncle Larry’s sixtieth birthday. He had booked it himself, a half day on Royce’s charter out of Ludington, leaving the dock at five thirty in the morning. Six people, which is the most a boat like that can carry.

There was Larry and his son Zach, who was fourteen. Larry and his second wife had adopted Zach as a baby, a black-haired little boy they flew halfway around the world to bring home.

There was Larry’s daughter Carmen from his first marriage, and her boy Roland, who was ten. And there was Bobbie and me. Larry had paid for the whole boat, which was not a small thing for a retired county road man.

He had also made a pot. That was Larry’s way. Fifty dollars a head for the biggest king of the day, and he paid the shares for all three kids himself. Three hundred dollars in a white bank envelope, tucked in the inside pocket of his jacket.

“Winner takes it,” he had said on the dock, holding it up. “No crying, no refunds. Grandpa Sawyer’s rules.”

Grandpa Sawyer was my grandfather and Larry’s father. He had fished this same water for fifty years out of a sixteen foot aluminum boat, and every one of us had grown up hearing about the kings he used to bring home in the seventies.

He was also the one who taught me to fillet a fish, standing at the cleaning station on the city dock when I was about Bobbie’s age. I had taught Bobbie the same way, with the same knife, a thin old fillet knife with a wooden handle gone dark from years of hands.

She had it in her backpack that morning. She would not let me carry it.