Humpies
by Mattox Roesch

Go-Boy asked a girl to marry him. He had just told me this when his dad freaked out.

It was five in the morning. We were in Go-Boy’s room and I was sitting on his dresser, sideways. My feet dangled over a missing patch of fake wood grain, torn back like a bed sheet, exposing particleboard. I was telling him we needed to get to work because we were late, but he wasn’t hearing anything. Dude was on his bed. His eyes were wound up like yo-yos ready to drop.

He was telling me about this girl, that he was showing her how to use his boat the night before. He told her the throttle gets stuck sometimes. Then they drove out to the mouth of the river. He told me he shut the engine down and explained that the fuel pump doesn’t always work right, and that you have to pump it by hand. She hopped in the driver’s seat. It just felt right, he said. Right then. Before she started the motor. So he asked her.

I was sitting on that dresser as he told me all of this, not believing my ears. Go-Boy was really excited and I wondered if he’d ever had a girlfriend at all. Then we heard his dad in the living room. He was screaming so loud it sounded like someone was cutting metal out there. Go-Boy almost didn’t even react though, like it wasn’t weird, and that’s when I wanted to leave. But he got up and I followed him down the hall, walking on the little floor rugs with knotted string tassels, into the living room.

Go-Boy had been telling me how this girl said no. He was bummed at first. She didn’t even think he was serious, but he was. They were floating out there in the water in a small aluminum fishing boat, around midnight. Daylight was about to drop behind the north end of the ocean, adding that eeriness of a sunset that nobody would see. It was probably graveyard quiet, the occasional slurping sound of a wave hitting the boat. Then she said she didn’t know him very well. She said she was only nineteen, and that they had just started dating. But Go said it felt right, that’s why he asked her.

And then we heard that cutting metal scream and I followed him into the living room. Then we saw his dad put Go’s three-year-old brother in a coma.

~

That was the day the humpies came-early that morning, before I went to Go’s place. There were thousands of them. Even more. They were in the river, jumping and splashing like it was raining size-nineteen Chuck Taylors. I was at the shore, sitting in my flatboat, waiting for Go. We were supposed to work, to motor upriver to the fish tower. But the tide went out that morning and my boat wasn’t back anchored, so it got beached. I tried pushing it alone but the damn thing was heavy.

Down the shoreline, old guys were standing around in rubber boots, drinking coffee from silver cups and talking and watching these fish jump. They walked along the mossy gravel shore, along with the seagulls and the random fish guts where the water had been a couple feet deep not too long ago.

"Lots," some guy said to me, smiling, dropping waders and buckets into his boat.

I just nodded, because this shit meant headaches for us up at the tower. It was tough enough counting these salmon from twenty-five feet in the air. It was tougher to know which kind was which. And now it would be a nightmare. It was like babysitting the entire river, keeping tabs on which ones swam up stream and which ones swam down.

This guy asked if I needed help with my boat, but I said no.

"It’s like ’94," he said, firing up the motor and grinding away.

That’s when I gave in and headed for Go’s house. I normally wouldn’t have gone there. His sister, Kiana, had just chewed my ass a few days earlier and her boyfriend was threatening to kick my face in. But I thought at five in the morning nobody would be awake. I’d nudge Go and we’d be on our way.

~

We didn’t work that day. We didn’t radio the tower to let them know what was happening. We didn’t call our bosses at IRA or Fish and Game. We didn’t do anything. I left Go’s place and went home and back to sleep.

When a cop showed up at our house later that morning, Mom was red in the face. She probably knew the guy from when she grew up here. I was laying in bed, studio headphones blocking out all noise except the music in my ears. She came into the room, said something, but I couldn’t hear.

"What?"

"Why are the cops asking for you?"

I shrugged.

Her black hair was pulled back and messy and her freshly plucked eyebrows looked like little rolled cigarettes. I wasn’t sure if she was embarrassed that the cops were looking for her son, or if she was embarrassed to be caught looking so disassembled.