Yellowfin sole are shitty little fish, once they're dead, anyway, and their heads are sliced off and their guts sucked out and there are a few tons of them greasing up the decks. There’s a toxin in their stink, a histamine that gets into the throat and lungs and makes it hard to breathe, made Kenny Smith gag and go all wobbly. He’d be belowdecks on the Alaska Ranger, in the tally room near the bow counting cases of yellowfin going into the freezers, and his chest would wheeze and he’d get so dizzy he’d worry he might pass out, just crumple into the fish slime and seawater pooling at his feet. If he didn’t keep swallowing Comtrex, he’d probably puke all day, too.

Kenny had a shitty job on a shitty boat, shitty being the way Kenny tends to organize the world, into things that are shitty and aren’t shitty. He was one of forty-seven captain and crew on the Ranger, a 200-foot tub that sailed out of Dutch Harbor, trawling for pollack and rock sole and mackerel and yellowfin. She was built in 1972, with a flat bottom designed for the warm, calm waters of the Gulf of Mexico, then retrofitted into a head-and-gut trawler and bought cheap at auction in the ’90s by the Fishing Company of Alaska. She had a new factory, where the fish were processed, but the rest of her was old and decrepit, with seals painted over so many times that the doors wouldn’t latch tight and a rusty shell that had been patched and rewelded over the years. That flat bottom gave her an unnatural, unnerving roll in the big swells of the Bering Sea, but she could stuff well over a million pounds of fish in her holds before she’d have to off-load at Dutch.

Kenny, like almost everyone else on the Ranger, worked twelve-hour shifts, ticking off how much of which kind of fish were gutted and frozen, and he did that for a week or ten days or twelve, until the holds were filled with 33,000 cases. He had thirty minutes to eat lunch and maybe catch a smoke if he ate fast enough, and six hours between shifts to shower and sleep and get warm. If the factory line slowed, he was supposed to bitch at everyone to move their asses, but Kenny wasn’t much for hollering, and besides, everyone got paid by the case—four cents per, for yellowfin—so no one needed much prodding. He stood in water up to his ankles because the sumps in the bow were busted, and his feet would ache until they went numb or he poured hot water on his boots; and when he was done counting cases and had to run the tally sheet up to the wheelhouse, the air outside would sting his lungs, take his breath away. Kenny doesn’t like the cold, and he was cold all season. The fishmaster, a Japanese national named Satoshi Konno, had had the Ranger up in the ice fields since late January, banging through the floes until he found a hole big enough to set net. It made an awful racket, big sheets of ice scraping against the hull, the whole boat shuddering and lurching when she hit them. Knocked Kenny off his feet a couple of times.

But Kenny was proud of his shitty job because it was the first one he’d ever had, unless he counted delivering the Tri-City Herald back in Pasco, a little city on the high plains of Washington State. He was 21 when he started fishing, in the summer of 2007, a high school dropout with a petty record who’d inked himself up with homemade tattoos. He’s got a skull on his right forearm and outlaw on his left and, inside his wrist, the initials of his son, who was born when Kenny was 17 and died three months later from SIDS. On his right shoulder, a friend stabbed emortal, which was Kenny’s chosen gangsta name, and below that, something that looks like a cartoon turkey. “It’s supposed to be a pot leaf,” Kenny says, “but my friend’s an idiot.”