Henrick Sitton's wife Lilla died in the winter of 1978 from pneumonia and fever, a combination of diseases that left her body hot and frail and light, almost transparent, like you could almost see the organs working hard to keep her alive, like you could watch the blood pulse feebly through her veins, like you could study the bowels as they squeezed every last bit of energy from the little food she could manage to hold down. The only part of her you couldn't just about see into was her head. When she finally died she took that last sealed box with her, with all her love and all her memories and all her hopes.

Just before she died in a cold and dark November night, she woke coughing and gasping for breath. Henrick lay beside her, motionless as a child hiding under the covers, listening to her irregular breathing, her soft and gentle gasps for air, the quiet liquid sound as she leaned over the edge of the bed and puked. He winced at the hot metal odor of blood. Tenderly he pulled her to him, feeling the dry scaly skin hanging loosely from her bones and realizing that was all that was left of his wife, a leather-shrouded skeleton. The speed of her deterioration left him in wonder. The day before she had been fine, a small fever, that's all.

"Lil," he said. "Honey, I think we need to get you to town. First thing in the morning. First plane, okay?" He figured the plane should be there about 7:00 a.m. or so, and they could fly to Ketchikan where real doctors cured real diseases.

She said, "Okay," but he could tell she didn't mean it, like the times she didn't mean "Okay" when he wanted her to go fishing with him. So he held her and lay awake listening to her breathing, trying to listen to her thoughts. She mumbled softly to him, and when she fell asleep he snaked himself out from under the covers and went to the bathroom for a towel. He wet it down and silently returned to the bedroom and cleaned up the cold red vomit. He paused a moment, gazed out the window. The northern lights waved to him with fog-like hands. Folks in southeast Alaska rarely see the lights; between the rain and the scarcity of the lights that far south, there isn't much opportunity. He momentarily imagined waking Lil up, telling her, "Baby, look outside, the aurora," and she would be well again, that the flu would have passed and she wouldn't need to go to town. He whistled a little jaunty tune at the lights, then turned away from the window.

He wiggled back into bed and felt her burning skin, so he stayed awake to guard over her, to make sure her tired breathing never stopped, and at 2:30 a.m. the heater kicked on and the deep rumbling noise pushed him slowly and unnoticeably to sleep.

The first thing he realized when he woke was that she was no longer hot. Good, he thought. The fever's broken. He began to cry even before he understood she wasn't breathing, and he pulled her still body close to him, and stroked her hair.

And nearly two years later in the fall of 1980, Henrick said, "Hold your pole like this." He tucked the cork butt of the pole under his arm and wrapped his hand around the fiberglass halfway between the reel and the bottom eye. "Then just kind of lift up like this and let the line drop again." He smoothly flipped the tip of the pole into the air and let it drop quickly back down to horizontal. The boat followed the shape of the ocean as small swells tilted it back and forth, back and forth.

The bow pointed into the swells, pointed out of the bay towards the strait. The waves passed under the bow and felt their way along the fiberglass hull and 24 feet later left the stern bobbing up and down. The cabin was deserted although lunch was still on the table; pilot bread, Spam, and cheese. A square box at the rear of the boat housed the engine and acted as another table with the bait spread out, a buffet of whole herring. The boat was midway in the quarter-mile wide mouth of the bay.

"Dad." Jennifer tapped her foot to a quick and impatient rhythm that was not the ocean's. "Can I have my pole back?"

"Hey, calm down, kid. You'll get your chance." He moved out of her way and let her take the pole from him. Her short dark hair reminded him how unlike her mother she was; tall and lanky, like a yellow cedar. Lil was shorter, petite, without the extra arm length that didn't know where to go. Jenny was all arms and legs sticking out of a blue summer dress.

"This is gonna be boring, isn't it?" she asked. Henrick glanced back at her quickly, considered throwing her overboard. Without willing it, the thought breezed through his mind: his daughter, splashing at the water while he trolled slowly out the mouth of the bay, all the way to Ketchikan, all the way south to Seattle. Just as suddenly he felt a flame of guilt, the burning touch of shame.

He said, "I can pick you up on the way back."

"I'm not gonna sit on the beach while you fish."

Smiling, he looked pointedly at the water. "Did I mention beach?" He laughed and pretended it was all a joke, and it was, really. Everything except a split-second of fantasy, and the ashy residue left from the guilt and shame. And when Jenny laughed and stuck out her tongue and made monster faces at him, he relaxed and listened to the water tapping at his boat. Oh mister boat this is the ocean will you let me in?

Not by the hair of my chinny-chin-chin.

He remembered a small bit from a show he'd just seen. Land shark, ma'am. He wondered if his boat would give in as easily as the woman in the skit. He sat down on the padded box covering the engine and stared forward into the empty cabin.

Jenny said, "Momma didn't like this, did she?" And when he said, "Hmm?" she explained, "She thought it was boring."

"Yep. She thought it was boring."

"I don't, Dad. I kind of like it."

"You've only been at it for five minutes. Nothing's boring after five minutes."

"Uh-huh," she said. "Hockey gets boring after one minute." She giggled and awkwardly jerked the pole up in an imitation of the jig he'd shown her.

"Hey, now, you get the tv most of the time. Hockey's the only thing I watch. Don't knock it." He wondered vaguely if they would get back in time to catch Hockey Night In Canada. The Leafs were playing someone. The Leafs were always playing someone.
He had lied, though; after hockey he watched The King of Kensington, and after that MASH, and after that The Beachcombers. Tonight would be no exception. He'd drink his beer and think about Lilla, and wish he could spend Friday night somewhere away from the television, someplace getting drunk and getting laid, someplace he could make a fool of himself.

So this is his Friday in imagination: drive to Craig and go to the Hill Bar and belly up to the bar like he were wearing shiny leather boots and a black ten-gallon hat and a red plaid button-up shirt with fake mother-of-pearl buttons and a white yoke instead of grease-stained Levi's and a hickory shirt with steel-toed cock boots. In imagination, a single-malt scotch. Or, better, two fingers of cognac, but nobody drinks cognac at a bar. So at the reality bar, Jack Daniels.

The bar smells of cigarette smoke and stale beer and the odor of rutting loggers. Inhale deeply, fill the lungs with the thick atmosphere of the place. Notice the faint trace of Charlie, or Chanel no. 5. Listen to the sounds blue-black like the air itself, the music with the fiddle and steel guitar overlaid slightly with the sound of fifty people carrying on fifty conversations. Ask a woman to dance, brunette, tall and skinny wearing a red blouse tucked into a black miniskirt, smooth pine-white legs like twin spar trees holding her up.

He imagines the scene, renders it sad as life itself, with spastic two-step dances on the floor, while underneath everyone moves a subtler, more desperate dance. The flow of the come-on, the ebb of the rejection; the eternal tide of loneliness.

Thinking of Lil gently burned the image to something less than ash. Always it ended like this, with the visions replaced by memories of his wife, but each time the visions came stronger and resisted more and more, and the memories continually grew weaker. Soon, Henrik hoped, Lil would cease to push herself at him. Then the only thing to remain between him and a wild night on the town would be Jennifer. She could take care of herself, he reasoned. He could leave her at home.

Jenny screeched wildly like a needle pulled across a record. He stood and took a step to her. The tip of her pole bowed slightly and wiggled up and down. She said, "I got something, I got something."

Henrick reached around her, encircled her lightly with his arms. "Here," he said. "Use your right arm to hold the pole." He placed the butt of the pole tightly under her armpit. Supporting the pole, he guided her hand under the shaft. "Here you go. This way you have some leverage against it."

The tugging at the line was light. Henrik figured she'd caught a sticky-back.

"Lift up on the pole like this, and let it down quickly to give you a little slack." The line went taut while he helped her lift the tip of the pole, then went limp when they dropped the tip. "Use your left hand to reel with while you have some slack."

Jenny pulled up at the line without reeling, then dropped the tip and reeled in the slack. "Just like this?" she asked.

"Just like that." Henrik stepped back and watched his daughter work the fish to the surface. When she pulled the swivel into view he said, "That's enough."

The sticky-back floated on the surface, stunned. It was short and squat and gray just like a sticky-back should be, and a long dimetrodon fin of spikes stuck out of its back. Its bladder stuck balloon-like from the mouth, along with the uneaten half of the herring Jenny used for bait. The hook poked through the tough ridge that passed for sticky-back lips. Henrik picked up the gaff, grabbed the line, placed the gaff under the hook and lifted the fish from the water until the hook was upside-down. He shook the gaff until the fish plopped into the water, still too stunned to dive.

"Want me to bait your hook?" he asked.

Jenny said, "I can fix it mine own self," and laughed at her childishness. "I watched you pretty closely," she added.

So Henrik watched her bait her hook, watched her pass the lead hook under the chin of the herring and out through the top of the head, watched her pass the trailing hook through the back half of the bait. "Not bad," he said. "Not bad at all." He helped her drop the line into the water and set the weight. "Keep your thumb on the spool as it goes down, or the backlash will snarl your line."

Henrick went forward and with one hand placed a slice of Spam on a huge round cracker of pilot bread. He realized he was still carrying the gaff, and he laughed at himself and wondered at his own inattentiveness. He set the gaff down and fixed his cracker and headed back.

The line hit bottom and Jenny flipped the ratchet switch, locking the reel to the handle; she gave three quick rotations of the handle to pull her bait just off the bottom, then went to jigging the pole up and down.

"Dad," Jenny said.

"What?"

"Do you miss Mom?"

He thought about lying; he thought about telling Jenny he only missed her occasionally, when he thought of her; he thought of telling Jenny she rarely crossed his mind anymore. Instead he said, "All the time, honey. Why?"

She sighed and pulled the tip of her pole up and dropped it back down. "I don't think of her a lot. I miss her sometimes, but not very often." She said, "I miss her most when it's time for bed. She used to tell me bedtime stories, remember?"

Henrik remembered how Lilla made up the most fantastic tales for bedtime. "The entire sky rained down rock candy," she might say, "and all the children ran outside and danced in the rain, scooping up sweets by the handful and stuffing their mouths until they looked like chipmunks." Here she would puff out her cheeks until she looked like Dizzie Gillespie and cross her eyes.

He said, "I remember."

"I miss that."

There was no silence; always the soft slurping of the ocean against the boat filled the stillness, always a seagull screamed the exuberance of flight. The sticky-back showed first signs of life; its tail flexed experimentally. It flopped a couple of times in the water, and Henrick watched as a bald eagle fell out of the sky and grasped the fish with rough talons and skimmed over the water to the rocky shore. The eagle pinned the fish to the ground with one yellow foot and pecked at its eyes.

Henrik tried to not think, tried to clear his mind and accept the world around him, but Lilla formed inside his skull, pulled his attention inward. He remembered her moaning in her sleep that last night, a hot leather-bound skeleton. She said, "Jenny, Jenny," and that was all he could make out. He remembered how the deep rumble of the furnace pulled his thoughts away and he remembered sleeping, and he remembered the cold, light body when he woke.

The eagle pulled strips of white stringy meat with a soft tearing sound from the gray back of the fish. If I could be anything, Henrik thought, I would be a sticky-back. He did not know why.

"Dad," Jenny called. "I'm getting nibbles." The tip of her pole tapped quickly up and down, up and down.

He said, "Reel up a couple of turns in case you're scraping bottom."

She pulled the pole up, straining against the bow that was forming. "Too late," she said. "I'm snagged. Come get it loose for me?"

Henrik sighed and accepted the pole from her, stepped to the side of the boat and pulled up. The line jerked back. "Honey, I don't think this is bottom."

"It's a fish?"

He nodded. "You want to reel it in? It's a big one."

"Yes. It's mine, Dad." She took the pole back, put pressure against it. She sucked her lower lip into her mouth, and Henrick grinned. "Dad, it's not a fish." She tapped her foot impatiently, not allowing him to make a fool of her.

Shrugging, he replied, "Suit yourself." She offered up the pole.

Working the line slowly, pulling up with a heavy, steady force and snapping the tip of the pole down, reeling in the slack, he gained about ten feet before the fish broke drag and headed for the bottom. With the zipping whir of the reel as the fish pulled line, Jenny's interest sparked.

"Oh. It is a fish."

"Of course," he said. "Halibut."

Lilla never enjoyed fishing. She'd gone with him once before they were married, and the whole time her foot tapped lightly to an escapist beat, her eyes flicked from object to object-- the moving ridged texture of the water; the seagulls; the brown seaweed, branching and bubbled. "It smells good out here," she said, and Henrick asked, "Are you going to fish?"

So many years ago.

Jenny said, "Is it a big one, Dad?"

"Yep." Probably almost eighty or a hundred pounds, he judged. "You did good." The tip of the pole, bowed almost to the water, pulled up only grudgingly, then snapped back down. Another three inches. That was the game; leverage the fish up a few inches, then take up the slack before it could. A slow game of many little steps.

The fish tugged against the line, then furiously dove. The drag slipped and the halibut gained six feet.

A very slow game, and a mechanical one.

Henrick let his thoughts cavort however they might, and this is where they took him: candlelight and soft music and a scallop fettucine and Beaujolais and companionship. Then they took him from the general to the specific, and the companion coalesced from the basic shape and feel of a woman into long and brown and tightly curled hair, and a bare white face the texture of polished wood, and a body slightly round and draped with loose clothing to hide the fact it was padded with a soft layer of fat. This woman he had seen once waiting for checkout in the supermarket in Ketchikan. He had stood behind her, and he watched her walk and stand and unload her basket with a conservation of effort that attracted him more than any physical beauty ever could. She smelled of musk in both reality and fantasy.

Pull up, snap down. Pull up, snap down.

"Is he almost up?" Jenny peered over the edge of the boat, following the line out about ten feet where it met the water.

"Jenny, I'm concentrating."

"I'm soorrryy." She sighed and shook her head and sat down next to the bait on the engine casing.

Henrick said, "No, he's only about halfway."

"This takes forever."

"C'mon, I've only been at it for five minutes. You want instant satisfaction?"

Jenny nodded and her lips split her chin from her face in a malicious grin. "You bet."

Henrick had wished he could follow the woman from the supermarket out to her car, but the memory of Lilla stood too freshly carved in his mind. He watched her pay, watched her pick up her two paper bags and move away, and he stared as she moved to the door while the clerk rang up his six-pack of Pepsi. He followed the woman's footsteps and was there when the bottom fell out of one of the bags. He heard her say, "Oh shit," and laugh as she bent to pick up the spilled cans. He saw her eyes were brown when she glanced up as he approached, and she smiled as he helped her pick up the cans. "Thanks," she said, and they put the cans in the back of her orange Datsun pickup, and she waved, got in her truck, and drove away.

When he lay in bed at night wishing Lilla were beside him again, plump and lukewarm and alive, he sometimes thought of this other nameless woman. Sometimes he imagined courting her and calling her by some mysterious and unknowable name. And he would need her for the briefest instant, and he enjoyed that feeling.

"Dad," Jennifer said, "I think I see him."

Henrick followed the line into the water. A white underbelly flashed briefly, and he knew the fish was his. "Get the gaff for me, will you?" He pulled up on the line, reeled in the slack as he snapped the pole down, and the halibut was a foot closer to the surface.

"I can't find it."

"Umm," he said, and was filled with the feeling he should know where the gaff was. "Check in the cabin. I think I left it in there."

The halibut floated just below the surface of the water. Jennifer opened and slammed cupboard doors in the cabin. Henrick was transfixed by the one eye facing him, the eye closest to the top of the halibut's head. The other eye stared out across the water at the eagle, which watched the struggle with mild interest. He wants this fish too, Henrick thought.

"Found it!" Jennifer held the gaff before her as she emerged from the cabin. "Here. It was under the table, and I didn't put it there."

"How long did I fight this monster?" Henrick asked, suddenly aware he was very tired and didn't recall a moment of the struggle.

She looked at her watch. "Bout half-an-hour."

Nodding at the rightness of the time, he took the gaff from her. "I need you to hold him here, just like I showed you, and I'll gaff him. Okay?"

"Cool."

He held the pole for her, and the fish remained motionless and heavy on the line. "Hold him tight, okay?"

She tucked the handle into her armpit and wrapped her arm under and around the pole. "Got it," she said, and he released the pole and bent over the edge of the boat.

The halibut flopped its body weakly as Henrick swung, and the gaff pierced the skin and struck the bony skull. The halibut jerked against the line and Jenny said, "Dad!"

With his free hand Henrick waved at his daughter and said, "Just hold him," without looking away from the fish. He slipped the hook from the skin and swung again and gaffed the eye, and the halibut heaved against him and ripped free from the gaff and dove, and Henrick heard Jennifer shriek once, loudly, and he did not hear the drag give, and then there was a splash and he saw the blue of his daughter's dress and one bare arm thrashing the water's surface, and then the arm disappeared.

In that instant Henrick thought of Lilla, and the aurora. He remembered imagining telling her, "Look, honey, the aurora," and remembered thinking if she only came and looked at them she would feel better. He thought of holding her thin body, his arms wrapped around skin as dry and warm as an ember. He remembered the gentle roar of the furnace and then oblivion.

Instead of the horror he thought he should feel, he had only the memory of horror. His eyelids dilated until his eyes were wide open, and he saw a thin white arm five feet underwater, and slowly receding.

His body held other memories, memories more primordial and instinctive. As he was realizing his lack of true fear, as he was questioning his own emotions, his body arced over the edge of the boat and he slipped into the icy water with his eyes held tightly open. The cold synchronized his mind with his body. He swam down, aiming for where he hoped Jennifer to be, where he remembered the white length of arm.

Something thin and taut brushed against his forearm, and he swept his arm instinctively around. He had undershot her-- he held on to the fishing line and followed it up, and there was the tip of the pole. He went down its length, and he felt Jenny's arm still wrapped around the shaft, and at his touch she shuddered gently while her free arm grabbed wildly at him.

Henrick tried to swim, to pull them up, but he wasn't moving, and he felt as if he were in a dream that sometimes haunted him, and in the dream he would run and run and never move. The halibut pulled down; millions of years of evolution suited the fish to water. He reached down to extract Jenny's arm from the pole. The flesh above her elbow wedged firmly between the pole and the reel.

Bubbles popped out of his nose. He wondered if he could keep his lungs from slipping open much longer; his throat clamped and relaxed spasmodically was he struggled to hold his air. He panicked and thought of Jenny, and hoped she hadn't given up and opened her mouth to breathe in the cold salty water.

Jenny's arm was still wedged against the reel. Henrick grabbed at the reel, tried to pull it off the pole, and his fingers brushed against the reel handle and the sprocket-like dial on the handle. With a burst of hope he twisted the dial, reducing the drag until the reel spun slackly against Jenny's arm. He pushed her to the surface like a maritime spider as the line played out behind him.

The boat was only a few yards away from where they surfaced and splashed around. Jenny was crying, and that was good; crying meant she was breathing. She choked on the waves as they broke over their heads, but Henrick was a strong swimmer, and he rolled her onto the swimboard before pulling himself out of the cold water. He stood and lifted her over the stern, then slipped over the edge and onto the warm engine cover, smashing the herring into a kind of paste.

Between sobs Jenny cried, "It hurts, it hurts, Daddy." Henrick eased himself to sitting and looked at Jenny's arm. The reel had stopped spinning, but the line had cut into her arm and the gash seeped blood. He slid beside her on the floor and lifted the line from her wound. He flicked the drag release and the reel spun backwards and her arm worked free. The first aid kit in the bow had a gauze bandage, and Henrick slathered some sludge from a tube onto it and wrapped it around Jenny's arm.

"There, honey," he said. "That should do it." The wound wasn't really very deep, and there wasn't much blood. Henrick pulled his daughter to him and held her and stroked her wet hair, and though she wasn't really crying now her shoulders twitched a couple of times as if she were sobbing. Her face faded from emotionless to relaxed while her eyes closed, and the shock overcame her.

Henrick held her limp body just as he had held Lil's.

Eventually he stopped shivering. He stood with his daughter held to his chest and he carried her to the bow where he buried her in dry wool blankets. When he was sure she wasn't about to wake up, he stepped back out to the deck.

After a few minutes the pole shifted and more line played out. Henrick gazed blankly at it a moment, then tilted his head with sudden insight. He went forward and kissed Jenny on the forehead and stroked her face a moment. She sighed quietly, hugged his arm.

Henrick left the cabin, grasped the pole and twisted the drag tight.