San Francisco Noir 2: The Classics by Peter Maravelis

Author:Peter Maravelis
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: ebook, book
ISBN: 9781933354651
Publisher: akashic books
Published: 2009-02-02T05:00:00+00:00

THE KING BUTCHER OF BRISTOL BAY

BY OSCAR PEñARANDA

Manilatown

(Originally published in 2004)

Who knows?

Some say he escaped from a jail in California. The “captain,” a small, weather-beaten, battered, mousy old man, said that the guy was wanted by the law somewhere. That was one thing about the cannery community and life in general in the small villages along the Naknek River in Bristol Bay, Alaska: Talk traveled fast. He may have looked like a man who was running away from something, yet to others he looked more like one gathering resources to get back to something. But who was going to ask? For the man in question was the King Butcher himself, the man who handled the biggest blade in the cannery.

From the outside window, two young onlookers disappeared in the flash that the glint the sun and blade had made when Kip Benito, the King Butcher, slashed the big king salmon’s guts, the conveyer belt still moving, cleaning the enormous fish with one swift, smooth stroke upward; and then, after flipping it over, a downward stroke to scrape and cut the rest of the clinging entrails. And he would tap the fish and the table each time he completed a fish, as people from all around the cannery, including the two young spectators, would shove each other, edging to get a better look at Kip working his magic with the terrifyingly beautiful King Butcher knife.

The foreman now walked past the docks outside, framed by that same window that held the onlookers. “That,” he told the two boys, for they were college students, “you won’t find in the books. Guaranteed,” he said. “Heh, heh. Guaranteed.”

* * *

At dusk sometimes, a veil of mist lingers in the twilight over the city. Coming home from the Golden Gate Fields racetracks in the winds of March, a loser in many more ways than just playing the horses, driving over the Bay Bridge, Kip Benito, an American citizen for two years now, mused over that delicate gauze curtain clinging over the jagged gray skyline of San Francisco. On the hills behind and beyond, a penciled, wispy line of cloud pointed at rows of houses and buildings baring their teeth. Windows goldened in the fading twilight, streaks of pink and magenta glowing in the darkening sky.

He was on his way to Blanco’s to down a few beers and bullshit a bit with Rudy the bartender. He was worried about Nena’s pregnancy and their planned elopement this Saturday. He was going to borrow money from Rudy. A lot of money.

He was down two thousand: He had lost his cousin Mando’s fifteen hundred dollars that he needed for Nena’s “going away” money, for she was starting to show.

But he couldn’t lose, he had said to himself. He couldn’t lose. Hard-luck stories he only liked in books, not in real life. He’d lost so many times before. “Just this once, God, let me win,” he pleaded in Cebuano. “And after this, you can let loose on me as much as you want.

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