The Alaskan Laundry by Brendan Jones Read Free Book Online

her a routine: three rounds jumping rope, three rounds shadowboxing in the mirror. Followed by pad work. He’d swing at her and she’d weave out of the way. “Good. Now watch the eyes. That’s the secret to it all.”
    She’d do a few rounds on the speed bag before hitting the showers, which meant going back to Wolf Street because there were no showers for women at the gym.
    Just after her seventeenth birthday, Tara went back into the ring with a senior, an experienced featherweight boy who weighed less than she did but had a long reach.
    â€œJust move around,” Gypo told them both. “Keep it light.”
    This time when the bell rang, she focused on his eyes, how they narrowed before he shifted to the left and jabbed. The next time it happened she stepped to the side, put out her own jab, and felt the pressure of his forehead on the end of her glove. From the corner of her eye she saw Gypo nod.
    â€œThirteen fellas,” Gypo said the next day when she came into the gym. “Atlantic City, and a couple over there at the Purple Horizon on Broad Street. That’s how many I knocked out with the left hook. You got the jab down. Now it’s time we make you dangerous. Go get wrapped up.”
    That day he demonstrated how to twist from the waist, guard her right cheek, keeping the elbow high as she corkscrewed back around with the left hook. Do it well, he told her, and you could get people three times—once when they were standing, once after their legs gave out, and once more just before they hit the canvas.
    Huffing, trying to catch her breath as she stood in the middle of the dimly lit warehouse, she unwrapped her hands, dipped a rag into the bucket, and began to drag it across the shelves, exhausted, just wanting to be left alone.
    Â 
    Mica flecks in the sidewalk sparkled in the lowering sun as Tara and Newt picked their way along the rocks of the harbor breakwater. At the end was a concrete pad with a steel tower built on top, affixed with red triangles and a blinking red light.
    He snapped open a beer and handed it to her. The tide was out, and the buttery, low-angled sun lit up the rocks beyond the beach. “Doesn’t get better than this, eh?” he said, leaning against a pillar, touching the bottom of his can to the rim of hers. She breathed deep, holding the moist air in her chest. The sea breeze cleared the musty air of the warehouse from her lungs.
    â€œYou’re lookin’ sadder than a midget with a yo-yo. What’s picking at you?”
    Before she could hold it back a smile broke over her lips. “There it is,” Newt chided. “The zombie has a sense of humor after all.”
    She let the grin stay on her face. “You got me.”
    â€œShare a little secret with you,” he said, lighting a cigarette, then squinting out into the distance, picking a fleck of tobacco from his lips. “I got this true love named Plume. Little headache from Kentucky with honky-tonk eyes. My eventual future goal is to buy a boat for the two of us. Have her move on up here with me.”
    When he spoke he jabbed the cigarette at Tara as if she might not believe him, his taut face turning serious. “Let you in on something else. Each one of us here on this island, we got this one little thing holding us back from everything we ever wanted. And it’s our job—and it ain’t no small thing—to find our channel marker.” He pointed at the red light over his head, working on a slow blink. “Something to aim for. But look at me goin’ all Baptist minister on you.”
    Now that she was out of Philly, and away from her father, she couldn’t think of what might be holding her back—or pushing her forward, for that matter.
    â€œMe, I had my eye on this one boat, an old tug, tied up way out at the end of the docks,” Newt said. “Gal from San Francisco had her. Has her, actually.”
    â€œI know that