Alaskan Summer

For Jeff

I know one man who is dead now: Jeff, an electrician from Philly who wore overalls every day and carried wire cutters in his back pocket, a tall man who, he’d often told me, many women found handsome. It was alcohol that killed Jeff, though I never once saw him drink. 

The day Jeff saved Ron’s life—and mine—Ron had four heavy end-wrenches in his pocket. We were on the barge, and Ron went over the railing when the weight on the deck crane hit him in the face. The incoming tide drew Ron away from our hull while his boots and wrenches pulled him down, water moving fast in the late Alaskan sun. I went in after Ron, and it was Jeff’s big hands that held the far end of the line I swam with. Jeff hauled us in hand over hand, the wet line falling in a pile around his boots. That was before Jeff went over the edge, before they fired him.

Jeff was fired for driving the boom truck to the bar. His need for a drink too strong to resist, he’d taken the truck and its crane, able to pick equipment weighing two tons, and parked it alongside the pickups outside the bar, the boom of the crane barely out of place. That was the night we lost our electrician; he didn’t come to work the next day and I worked a double shift for him—through two risen suns. I saw him again maybe a week later, gaunt, his stomach a deep pocket, dark lines on his pale face.

He’d spent that week in the hotel, surrounded by empty bottles of vodka, not eating, his flannel shirt hanging looser every day. The blinds were drawn, and none of the sun from the long summer days this far north reached him. Felicity managed to see him and told me later, after feeding Jeff old rice from the galley and a beer to help him detox, that she’d seen our electrician, who days before worked in panels that quivered with four hundred and eighty volts, unable to reach his key in his own pocket. 

The factory was big and we were mobile; we carried essential tools in our pockets: knives, pliers, a flashlight, a well-thumbed and dear letter, a screwdriver, tape measure and pencil—and Jeff, of course—his wire cutters. Before we lost Jeff to God but maybe after we’d lost him to booze—it’s hard to say, I was helping him diagnose a control panel, cleaning old wires with rubbing alcohol, playing at being an electrician. There were bolts rusted tight on the panel face, and he asked me for the crescent wrench I always carry. When he reached for it, we were in an awkward place, his flannel shirt caught on a corner and he fell on his ass and ripped his shirt.

Still on the ground, Jeff put his big head back against the tin siding of the plant and laughed. Sitting in the dirt surrounded by wires and tools, big smile on his face, he pulled from his pocket a bag of tobacco, rolled two cigarettes, and we smoked them in the sun.

That was our electrician, Jeff. Big smile, big face, flannel in the sun and wire cutters in his back right pocket. 

Jeff, who died of alcohol poisoning, alone somewhere back east.