Sigh, Alaska: a short story novel

Howard Baker

The ocean spray felt like pellets of ice piercing Howard's face as the commercial fisher Delilah churned under his feet. The sky was littered with puffy white clouds that burned into the reflection of the water before being shredded by wake. He was having the time of his life. After a long, cold winter in Anchorage at the Northern Lights Hostel, Howard baker was finally living his bliss.

Looking back, he couldn't believe how long a road it had become, how it almost didn't happen at all. When he left for Alaska the summer before, he had forty bucks in his pocket and a plan that looked a whole lot like that "deadly crab" show on the cable TV. Howard didn't know a lot of things back then. He didn't know how hard the winter would be on him. He didn't know if his relationship of four years would survive the separation. He certainly didn't know all of the tests potential employees for the commercial fishers went through, and he didn't know why that nasty cough he caught shortly after arriving at the hostel didn't go away.

Howard met Ashley at a house party their senior year of high school. If you asked her about it, it was a scene straight out of the 1960's Bronx, the crowd split down the middle like Moses split the Red Sea, the lights changed and everything that wasn't each other blinked out of existence. Howard would raise his eyebrows and say, "She turned her head and the light bounced off her tits just right. It was magical. I was hooked."

The night of graduation, Ashley nervously pulled Howard aside before the party her parents were throwing her and told him she was pregnant. His first instinct was to run. Howard's second instinct was to propose. Instead, he did neither, and in his first act of adulthood, asked Ashley what she thought was the right course.

Three years later they had a beautiful son, dirty blond hair like his father, and big green eyes he inherited from his mother. Howard Mathieson Baker Jr. had dimples that deepened with his baby belly laughs and was the delight of both his parents... when he wasn't being a complete terror, of course.

The one bedroom apartment Ashley and Howard rented was getting smaller every day, and Howard knew the kind of jobs he could get in Omaha, Nebraska weren't going to be the kind that could support his family long term. However, he heard from a friend, who knew a guy that spent a summer working the fishing boats outside someplace called Soldotna, Alaska. That guy made in three months what it took any other regular Joe a whole year -or more- to earn.

Howard did not like to think it was rash decision he made, but once the tale was told, it dug deep until he thought it was the only answer. Spend a summer in Alaska and get his family a decent home. If he earned as much as that one guy did, he'd have enough to put a down payment on a house, buy that ring Ashley had been bugging him about, and maybe even a little aside so Jr. didn't have to skip out on college like his old man did.

Just like that, Howard found himself in Alaska, at the Northern Lights Hostel, convinced it would be as easy to land that job as walking up to a captain and asking, "When can I start?" He was quick to find out that the fishing season was nearly over by August, and would not start again until March the next year. Maybe he could find a couple of weeks in a cannery, but the big commercial boats were about to pull up to shore for the winter.

Defeated, Howard grasped at straws. Ashley expected him to be on a boat as soon as he stepped off the plane. It was a hard sell to leave her alone with their child to make a better life for them all. He promised to send home half of his paychecks every other week. Howard did the only thing he could do: he found the closest pizza joint and started throwing dough, just as he did back in Omaha.

He had no idea how hard it would be, being away from his family. He certainly did not picture being a parent at such a young age, but children he learned, have a way of growing on you. When he left home, he could never imagine not being a father.