The Drowning Machine

Chapter One: Nine Days

The mud at Tallow Bay smelled like a low-tide graveyard, and Meredith Salter breathed it in gratefully, because it smelled like every summer of her childhood.

She had the kayaks laid out on the flats with their hatches open like split mussels, and she was doing what she always did before a trip: loading, unloading, loading again. Dry bags in order of when she'd need them. Tide tables in a laminated sleeve clipped to the deck line with a carabiner she'd bought specifically for that job. The satellite messenger in its own bag, orange, marked with tape so she could find it by feel in the dark.

"You're doing it again," Tyler said.

"Doing what."

"The thing where you pack, then you look at it, then you take it all out."

"It's called weight distribution."

"It's called anxiety." He was sitting on an overturned crab pot at the top of the beach, drinking gas-station coffee out of a paper cup, and he looked, she thought, better than he had in a year. Still too thin. But his eyes were his own again, not those flat coins they'd been at the funeral. Eleven months sober. She kept the number in her head like a tide table entry, something to check against.

"How much did you actually bring?" she said.

"You told me sixty pounds."

"How much did you bring."

Tyler drank his coffee. "Sixty-ish."

Meredith walked down to the second kayak, a scuffed green fiberglass boat that had belonged to their father, and looked into the stern hatch. She lifted out a rifle in a nylon sleeve.

"Bears," Tyler said.

"You've never shot a rifle in your life."

"That's not true. Wally took me out to the dump when I was fourteen."

"He took you to the dump to shoot at cans, and you cried because he yelled at you about the safety." She weighed the rifle in one hand. It was cheap, a bolt gun with a scratched synthetic stock, the kind of thing that sat in a pawn shop window for two years. "Fine. Bears. It goes in my boat, under the deck bag, where it stays dry."

"It's mine."

"It's going in my boat."

He let it go, which surprised her a little. He held up his hands and said, "Captain," and there was only about half the acid in it that there could have been.

They were half siblings, which mattered to nobody but them. Same father: Wally Salter, thirty years a hand-troller and then a power-troller out of Tallow Bay, a man who had owned four boats and never a house. Different mothers. Meredith's mother had left when she was six and had died in Anchorage eleven years later, a stranger with her face. Tyler's mother, Jeanette, was still alive in Ketchikan and sent Meredith a card every Christmas that said nothing at all in handwriting so careful it hurt to look at.

Meredith was thirty-one. Tyler was twenty-four. Between them was a gap you could put a whole childhood in, and they had, more or less.

She went back to her own kayak and knelt at the forward hatch and lifted out the coffee can.

It was a three-pound can, red plastic lid, the brand Wally had bought his whole life because it was on sale in the eighties and he never revisited a decision. She had taped the lid down with three wraps of electrical tape. Inside was about six pounds of their father, which was less than she had expected and had bothered her more than she'd told anyone.

"You want to carry him?" she said.

Tyler looked at the can for a long moment. "You've got the better hatch."

"That's a yes or a no."

"That's a no." He stood up and crushed the cup and put it in his jacket pocket instead of the sand, which was one of the small new things about him. "You've been carrying him for three years. Don't stop on my account."

And there it was, the first hook of the trip, in under an hour.

Meredith set the can back in the bow, wedged it between two dry bags so it couldn't shift, and closed the hatch.

"Nine days," she said. "Ninety miles up, ninety back. We've got a weather window through Thursday and then it goes to garbage, which is fine, because by Thursday we'll be north of Wolf Head and we can hole up. Tomorrow we hit Skookum Gorge at slack, eleven-forty in the morning. Miss that and we sit for six hours."

"You've told me about the Gorge four times."

"I'll tell you a fifth. You want the short version or the long one."

"I want," Tyler said, "to go paddle a boat."

The last thing Meredith did before they launched was walk up to the truck and check the note under the wiper, addressed to Dell Krachek at the harbor office: our launch, our route, our expected return, the date they'd call it a problem. Dell was seventy and drank, but he was reliable about paper. She'd also sent the same information to her satellite messenger's contact list, which was three people: Dell, a nurse she used to date, and Tyler's mother.

She had been a commercial diver for six seasons, hull work and salvage out of Sitka and Prince Rupert, until a bad ascent off a barge in Clarence Strait put a bubble in her spinal cord and left her with a left leg that went numb when she was tired and a permanent no on the dive medical. She had learned two things from that. One was that she loved the water anyway, which she considered a character flaw. The other was that whatever redundancy you had planned, you needed one more.

The tide was making. They floated the boats off the mud at ten past nine, and Tallow Bay slid behind them: the harbor with its forty-one slips, the cannery with the roof caved in on the north end, the seaplane float, the store, the school, the eleven hundred people who called it town, the mountains behind it standing up green and wet and abrupt.

Meredith's paddle found its rhythm in the first ten strokes. Her body remembered. That was the good part.

Behind her, Tyler said, "Hey. Meredith."

"Yeah."

"Thanks for letting me come."

She didn't turn around, because she didn't want him to see her face do whatever it was doing. "He asked for both of us," she said. "It's not a favor."

"It's a little bit a favor."

"Paddle," she said.

They made eighteen miles that first day, which was more than she'd budgeted, and camped on a gravel spit where a creek came down. Meredith hung the food in a tree and set up the tent while Tyler built a fire out of driftwood so wet it steamed for twenty minutes before it caught. Ravens argued in the spruce. The mountains went pink, then gray, then black. A humpback breathed somewhere out in the channel, three times, and then didn't.

Before she slept she took out the chart — paper, in a case, because she was her father's daughter — and looked at the ninety miles ahead of them, and at the place where the coastline gave up and went blank, a bay with no name at the foot of Blue Mouth Glacier.

Her father had called it Ruth's Cove. Not on the chart. Not on any chart. Just in the margin of his own, in pencil, thirty-one years old and gone soft as ash: *Ruth's Cove, 9/14, mtn goat on the west face, water good.*

Ruth had been her mother's name.

Meredith folded the chart along its old creases and put it away.