Cold Storage
William Aiken

THE COLD STORAGE

“The many men so beautiful…”

We ran to the windows whenever the girls passed by.
Blonde and jeaned and untouchable, “Ponytail” lived
in one of the gray shacks under the braided steel cables
that stretched to the fishing tower out in the bay.

We mastered her walk but never learned her name.
Shad, alewife, sea robin, sculpin—this is what we knew,
and how to hoist 300 lb. barrels of whiting
so it wouldn’t rain fish on the tourists below.

In our hazardous, carefree lives, concrete floors
were slick with cod scales and squid slime, open
elevator shafts dropped four pure arctic storeys
to where it was 20 below on a summer’s day.

Conveyor belts whined from hopper to scaler to grinder,
making visitors hold their ears and grit their teeth.
We packed fish “whole” or “ground” for cat and mink food.
Oh, how we hated the phone calls up from the office

Making the foreman yell GRIND! The beautiful fish
came out orange. Haddock, mackerel, bluefish-—
they all turned orange, the color of sundown
and early mornings as we drove past kitchen windows.

We were on our knees to beauty and doffed
our caps to flowered skirts that ventured to our door,
measuring ourselves against a flurry of hopes:
“Tonight might be the night,” we’d say.

We were frozen in some permanence of youth,
men who were named for their mothers—Joey-Liza, Charlie-
Teresa—or with names oddly diminutized—
Ralphie, Brucie, Nealie—virgins, drunks, stutterers

With one eye, one tooth, one dream, who never thought
it strange to be going to work in July dressed for January.
We’d be “down below” in the freezers putting boxes of fish
on the brine pipes, or “warming up” at the windows, watching for girls.

Sometimes at 5 a.m. I’d open the six-inch-thick
freezer doors and walk to where the bay lapped
phosphorescent on the beach and the sails would be white towards
Provincetown. There was nothing so soft as those mornings.

One afternoon we were packing squid, separating “summer”
from “bone,” and the four storeys of our building suddenly
shook—an earthquake? artillery practice gone wrong?
Wide-eyed we ran to the windows and saw a plane

On its back in the water. We rushed down to the beach
in our boots. A woman was crawling towards the shore,
a stunned boy drunkenly walking. Cruising the coastline,
the sun in their eyes, they had hit our braided cables.

The bodies of two men draped from the cockpit, one
with his head split open by the propeller, the water
turning orange around him, the other raspily breathing.
We held his head out of the water until the breathing

Stopped, then let it go.
And stood there in our caps and boots not knowing how to be,
totally baffled by this change in the day.
When those who understood arrived, we trooped

Back to finish packing the bone and the summer squid.
The cables that weren’t marked on the charts
had fallen on Ponytail’s shack,
and she had to move to another shack up the hill.

We never learned her name,
or the names of those who were flying. Still, there was nothing
so soft as standing at the wrackline in the morning,
and at no time in my life have I felt the future so wide.

26 Pages
$9
isbn 1-882983-75-0