The Dogtown Pirates

Daniel Skarzynski

We get tourists through, and they joke from the back of my van, “Gee, this would be a great place to hide out during the apocalypse.” 

“No,” I say, maybe too quickly. “It’s too cold up here. Too dry. Hardly any fish in the rivers, hardly any moose in the hills. Not like down around Fairbanks—or even better, down around Anchorage. They got all kinds of moose down there. Moose on the roads, moose in the grocery stores—live ones. That’s why we can’t have automatic doors in Alaska. It’s like putting screen doors on a submarine. Moose down there are like gas. They expand to fill every available space. Up here, we could have automatic doors. Wouldn’t make a difference, except that the mosquitos might trigger them. No, you wouldn’t want to be up here during the apocalypse. If you didn’t starve, you’d freeze the first winter.”

“Oh,” they say, disappointed I’ve taken their joke so seriously. 

“And it’s really dark half the time, and the other half there’s mosquitos and bears and wandering lunatics and man—oh, man, I won’t get into it, but this would be a terrible place to be.”

Then I stop, glance up at the rearview, see if I’m laying it on too thick. 

“So you still want to come up here?” I ask to break the silence. 

“I guess it does sound pretty bad.”

“Terrible,” I say. “Tell your friends.”

Then I change the subject.

I avoid telling them that they’re right, and that’s speaking from experience. Or as close to experience as you can get when it comes to the end of the world, and there was a minute back there where we thought it might actually go this time. Even the truckers wore masks back then, believe it or not, until we realized only some people were going to die, and that settled everyone down. 

But before that, back when they called off the NBA season and closed down Las Vegas, back when half of Americans were worried they’d die and the other half were hoping they would, back when the streets were on fire and strains of antebellum ardor hung in the smoke, back then, in the tempest of panic, isolation, and grief—back then, we were playing wiffle ball on the big dirt lot between the RV hook-ups and the inn. We could usually put together teams of four or five, which kept us out of arguments about ghost runners. Sure, the mosquitos could get pretty bad sometimes, but as long as you kept moving in little circles, they didn’t swarm up on you too hard. The only time they’d really get you was on base. Wallace got out that way one time. In the middle of a long at-bat, I looked up to see his lanky, bearded frame stalking away from second. He never came back. Later, he said it fell under the mercy rule. 

In a regular summer, we never would have been able to get so many guys off work to play, but of course, it wasn’t a regular summer. A lot of days, not a single vehicle came through the truck stop. It was just us, a cluster of rusty trailers, and several million acres of open wilderness. 

But I don’t tell the tourists that, don’t want them getting any ideas the next time shit hits the fan. I don’t tell them about the mayor of Dogtown, or the Pirates, or the Spills, or the voyage to Bettles. Instead I say: 

“You know, a bear mauled a guy last summer—just right down the road forty miles. Chewed his face off. Oh, no, don’t worry. He survived. But the bear got his face.”

“I don’t have a lot of sympathy for that,” says Pat, puffing on his huge silver vape. He’s quitting cigarettes again, and we’re all sitting out in the sun beside the Big Tent, some of the guys drinking beers. The topic is quarantine and what it does to people. 

“You never have sympathy for anything,” Chuck says, but Pat just waves him off.

“Look, you want to talk about soul searching, spend a winter in Deadhorse after your girlfriend leaves you for some other guy. Oh, you have to wear a mask at the grocery store? I would have killed to go to a grocery store, just to see something different. I mean—”

Wallace laughs through his beard, seeing the joke ahead of Pat. “Right, right, that’s like a normal winter in Coldfoot. Fuck, I stare into my soul for months at a time. I get ten dollars an hour to do that shit. I’d do fine in quarantine. I already know I’m a worthless piece of shit.”

Everyone gets quiet for a moment, wondering why we do this to ourselves. 

“We should play some baseball,” says Ryan. 

And so we all order old mitts off eBay. 

Camp—that’s what we call the truck stop, the inn, the café, everything. It’s all the same outfit, a dilapidated island in the wilds, and here, the pandemic only exists in the café. That’s the outer edge of our bubble, the only place you might see a stranger, the only place anyone ever wears a mask. The chairs are all up, the lights are all off, and the host stand is fortified with a ring of tables, because some of the truckers have taken to leaning in, maskless, to prove a point. 

Fitz, our sixty-something morning host from New Jersey, is a man on his second life and doesn’t need the fortifications. He has long made a practice of playing offense with visitors, shouting his greeting of “How can I help you!” loudly enough to make customers really consider the question. Sometimes he succeeds in blowing them back out the door. So when one trucker he knew tried to lean in on him, Fitz told him, “You can do what you want, but I have diabetes, and if I’m dying, that last thing I’ll do is come fucking kill you.”

His trucker friend thought that was pretty good, and kept his distance afterward. 

One morning I come in to find Fitz, all six foot five of him, creeping around the café with a bandana over his mouth and a rolled-up bush mailer in his hand. Mosquitos have evidently gotten inside. I watch him creep along for a minute before he notices me. He stops, caught: bush mailer still aloft, bandana sitting snug under his glasses. Finally, he says in a stage whisper, “I’m the great white hunter,” and goes back to his business. 

When all you have to worry about is maybe the end of the world, it takes the edge off of life. Plans for the future kind of float away, leaving you with only plans for the present. Pretty soon all you care about is killing mosquitos in the café and playing pick-up wiffle ball next to the RV hook-ups. 

It was not lost on us that by some trick of fate, no women were working in camp that summer. This hit no one harder than Chuck, who had come up that spring on the tails of a failed engagement. 

Chuck, with his wavy brown hair and soft, puppy-dog eyes, is a man who thrives on company. Pat, his best friend since their decade-gone college days, is not so gregarious. He’s been our breakfast cook for ten years and wears his cynicism like a wooden leg. “Chuck doesn’t just chat. He gets into conversations. He loves going to bars just to talk to strangers. We’d go out for a drink and next thing I know he’s inviting some random dude from the bar back to smoke weed at our place, and then I’m stuck having to be around this person all night. And then—then, when the guy finally leaves, Chuck’ll say something like, ‘Man, that guy really rubbed me the wrong way.’ What the fuck, Charlie! Then why was he in our house!”

Chuck self-identifies as a barfly, says he knows the secret handshake. “It’s important to me to be able to walk into any bar, anywhere, and pick out a kindred spirit. I make sure to let them know I’m not just a tourist. You can’t say that, you know, you have to communicate it. But once you do, they treat you like you’re home.”

Chuck doesn’t babble. He asks questions, remembers your answers, pulls you in until you feel like you’ve known each other for years. Like a con man, maybe, except all he wants is to get to know you. He can’t help himself. That’s why he ends up talking to people he doesn’t really like for hours. To him, conversing is not a deliberate choice. “Your Good Buddy Chuck”—that’s what he calls himself. 

With women, this presents a problem. They come too naturally to him. Instead of bringing a stranger home to smoke a bowl, he’s six months into a relationship before he realizes—or she does—that it’s a mistake. But the next one comes too fast for him to contemplate the lesson, and the cycle goes on.

But that summer, after Chuck was jilted by the love of his life, there were no women in camp to distract him. Instead of washing away his sorrows in a string of fleeting romances, he was forced to stare into the abyss of his solitude and realize that he was turning thirty-five, and try as he might, did not have a wife or child. 

So he started thinking a lot about baseball.

There is a helicopter crew staying in camp, slinging loads to some copper prospect, and every few days Chuck and I go into their rooms to clean toilets, change sheets, and vacuum. The rooms are from the seventies, wood-paneled man-camp modules strung together into a single long hallway. One of the doors reads “Alyeska Office,” a holdover from the pipeline days. Now that room is full of old bedding, linens, and stacks of dusty Gideon Bibles. 

Chuck tells me, “A guy I went to school with went pro. He played for the Braves. I wonder about that sometimes.”

He leaves to the next room, to start on the bathroom. I finish up, putting tight hospital corners on the bed before sliding on the fitted quilt. The day is overcast, muggy, and the screen wears a fuzz of mosquitos. I close the sash before moving on.

Stepping into the next room, I find Chuck in the shower, masked against the chemical fumes of our yellow cleaner. He turns down his music as I walk in. It’s loud in the small shower, and he has something to say.

“I loved working with kids, man. That was a great job.”

“At the school?”

“At the school, coaching baseball. Me and Pat ran a daycare for a while. Made more sense at the time. This is back when he was on track to be a youth minister. You’ve seen his agape tattoo? He was going to settle down. I liked the school more because I got to be one-on-one with the kids, really get to know them. Mostly we’d just hang out. I was like a mentor.”

“So why’d you leave?”

“I didn’t want to go back to school. It seemed so expected of me, you know? That’s how it was with baseball. I was good, I was varsity. I hit ninety a few times. But everyone played baseball, you had to play baseball and fuck that, you know? But I wonder if I stuck with it. A guy from my team ended up on the Braves. Maybe I should have stuck with it.” He shrugs. “I could have kept my job if I wanted, but everyone else had degrees. I felt like they expected it.”

“Did they say that?”

“I could feel it.” 

“I have a degree and people still expect things. That’s just what some people do. Like my grandfather, he’s always telling me how much I could make. He’s not wrong. I studied geology—I could be on that helicopter crew instead of changing their sheets. But then what? Then you just need more. But my grandfather, he’s old school. His dad was a ditch digger off the boat. To him, a good job means good pay.”

Chuck’s scrubbing a stubborn bloodstain on the bathroom floor, and I’m not sure he’s listening. But then he stops and nods.

“Sometimes I wonder if it’s too late and I should just embrace it. Someone’s got to do it, right? That’s what keeps this whole system going.”

“Someone’s got to do what?”

Instead of replying, he stands up and points out the window. On the gravel RV lot, I see two figures approaching. One is carrying a yellow bat. 

“Let’s get a win today, huh?” Chuck says, peeling off his mask. “Pat throws pretty good junk. Keep an eye on him.”

Aside from Willie Marsh who we swapped back and forth, the rosters were set all summer long. I don’t know how it worked out the way it did—underlying natural law, I guess—because though we picked with schoolyard flip, the resulting division was ironclad. On one side you had the “home” team, perennial just-missers, captained by Your Good Buddy Chuck; we were the Dogtown Pirates. The Dogtown part of it had to do with Chuck living out in the old sled dog lot, and how we joked that that, amongst other things, made him the Chief of all Dogs, the Mayor of Dogtown. The Pirates were our mascot because we thought it was funny. 

Then you had our big-money rivals, the Alyeska Oil Spills, just the ’Spills to their fans. And while their corporate sponsorship was imagined, their talent was real, and they won so often that it verged on moral right. Plenty of times we had the lead, and we always had the optimism, but without fail, we’d collapse or they’d go on a tear, which would bring us to Chuck’s inevitable mantra of “We’ll get ’em next time.”

After the game that day, as we sit on the deck eating dinner and looking out over the empty truck lot, Ryan says, “We should challenge Bettles. I bet we could get Sean to fly us standby on one of the mail planes. How sick would that be? The Coldfoot-Bettles invitational?”

Outside, Ryan is a two-time high school dropout, but in Coldfoot he’s the boss. To him, that’s the bigger achievement. “Everyone graduates high school. Morons graduate high school. So what?” Not someone who’d been picked first in schoolyard games, Ryan’s spot in the lineup here is guaranteed; in Coldfoot, he’s not someone who gets picked last. 

But in that moment, teams are put aside. With the exception of an old Goldrush town a few miles north, Bettles is our nearest neighbor. Downriver along the Koyukuk about sixty miles, accessible only by plane or ice road, none of us have ever been there. The ballgame sounds fun, sure, but we’ve been marooned in camp for a long time by now—I haven’t been the 250 miles down to Fairbanks in almost a year—and the simple prospect of going inside a building we haven’t seen before is thrilling.

Ryan’s scheme is grandiose so he can’t reveal all the details with everyone around. Later on, he takes me aside. “We’re going to float down to Bettles and scout out the game. I’m thinking you, me, Chuck, Wallace. We’ll bring a bunch of beer, I’ll put together some meals, and we’ll take a few days to get down there. Probably toward the end of July. What do you think?”

I don’t hesitate at his proposal. Floating three days through the wilderness to come out at another speck of civilization, eating good along the way? 

“It’s like sailing to Tortuga,” I say. 

He gives me a blank stare, which can mean anything with him.

“Hey, I’m in.”

But the high times never last, do they? By the middle of July, we were getting tourists again, and by August, when a big pipeline crew booked with us for two months, we had to face the fact that societal collapse was not imminent. They were putting a heater on the pipeline, hoping to keep it running another fifty years. Thus the future reared its ugly head, and away went our plans for a squalid black-spruce palisade hung with human skulls and out-of-state plates. We’d been hoping to wear stained furs and do some honest-to-goodness killing, some cold-blooded murder, but instead, we had to go around wearing masks and chapping our hands with all the washing. Boy, were we disappointed.

The increased traffic also meant guys were back to work. Gone were one-ticket days in the kitchen and vacant rooms in the inn. Overnight, we were understaffed. 

“Let’s shoot for Friday,” someone would say.

Then Friday would come and go, finding shortstops cleaning, catchers cooking, and sluggers dishing. And the days kept rolling.

 “We just need one more game,” Chuck insisted. “I got it figured out.”

“How’s that?”

He gave a vague answer, something about WHIP and RAR and “the squeeze,” but confirmed, in the end, that with just one more game, we could finally take a win. 

Still, the days went by, and the game didn’t come. Talk of the Coldfoot-Bettles Invitational died away until I bit the bullet and asked Ryan. 

He shook his head. 

“But we’re still going to float down,” he said adamantly. “I’ve already made the plans. I can get away from camp for four days. We can do it in four.”

Things were so busy we even started adding dinner specials to take pressure off the line. I was back to driving tour vans. Annoyed with all the bickering retirees, I offered to cook a few nights. 

“I’ll call my grandfather. He makes some real good meatballs and braciola.”

He was thrilled with my question because he loved nothing more than to cook. It made him think of the old country, the house on Green Street, fig trees in the yard, his mother. 

“Just use top round,” he told me. “It’s cheaper.”

He had his own questions, the usual ones: “What are you doing up there? Do you have a girlfriend? Why don’t you get a job with your degree? Aren’t there mining jobs up there?”

“I’m getting paid,” I told him. “And I like what I’m doing.”

“Are you being careful?” I asked him.

“Marcia always makes me wear that thing. One of my friends has it. We go out for coffee sometimes.”

Later on, I saw Ryan. “Money doesn’t matter,” he said and ordered flank steak, basil, hot and sweet Italian sausages. 

It’s the day before the trip to Bettles, and I’m sitting on one of the rolling hills out behind camp. On the open tundra, the sun is shining, and I’m the only human in sight. “God’s Country,” Wallace calls these hills, and when you walk up there alone in the smoky otherworld of August, eating berries along the way, there’s no question as to why. 

I’d talked to my grandfather again that morning before I set out. He was short on breath and told me the hamburgers in the hospital tasted like shoe leather. I told him about my hike.

“You’re going up the mountains and I’m going down.”

“No,” I said, not sure what else to say. “You’ll be fine.”

Back in camp that evening, I break the news to Ryan.

“I don’t think I can come to Bettles. I have some family stuff.”

“You don’t have to tell me,” he says.

I shrug because I probably do. I tell him I want to be around where I can get phone calls. 

“I know it’s the only chance to go.”

“We’ll go again sometime,” he says.

“Yeah.”

Later on, I run into Chuck in the kitchen.

“I heard you can’t come. I’m sorry, buddy. We’ll miss having you along.”

“It’s all right,” I tell him. “It is what it is.”

A few days later they’re gone down the river, and I’m setting out to climb another mountain: one with a sharp peak behind a long ridge. As I walk the ridge toward it, I look at the clouds hanging on the dome, and they make it enormous.

I'm hiking so fast my legs stiffen to iron rods, but I can't turn back. I run out of mountain too soon, surprised when I scramble over a crag and find myself already at the top. The clouds have cleared, and atop the dome is a field of chipped golden schist, beaten flat by the Arctic sky. It is broken only by a sharp set of sheep tracks crossing from one side to the other, disappearing over the precipice beyond. I can hardly see ten miles in the smoke, and I sit down, unwrap the foil from my sandwich, and look at it. 

It's the first day in my life I don't have a grandfather, and I'm mad about it—and there’s something about eating that sandwich alone up in those last empty mountains that brings it all home. All summer I’d been a kid again, we all had, and suddenly everything is up to me. No one is going to ask what the hell I’m doing up here, when I’m going to get a real job, or when I’m going to come home. My parents are too gentle to ask those questions, but my grandfather never was. And now, I think about him as a young man coming back from Korea, starting a family, having kids, spending his days selling stuffy annuities and nights crooning Sinatra in a smoky club, trying to provide just a bit more than he’d received. He was about my age. 

But me, I don’t even have someone to share my sandwich with. My friends are all in Bettles, and my family is in another world. 

“He never even saw the ballfield,” Ryan tells me when they return. “He saw the bar, and we couldn’t get him to leave after that. There was some rich girl there waiting on a charter flight, and he talked to her the whole time. Me and Wallace walked all around town, but he wouldn’t budge.”

“I don’t like rich women like that,” Chuck confides separately. “They judge you if you don’t work in an office. But the float was perfect weather. You couldn’t have asked for better weather.”

“Where’s Ryan?” Chuck asks.

“He’s helping on the line. He should be out soon.” 

We’re out in the van lot, not at our usual field. We need to be close to the café because some of the guys are technically at work. I cooked the special that night—braciola, meatballs, and sausage, but by then it was all gone. It’s the last week of August, and hunters are starting to crop up. The café was packed at the dinner rush, and the next few weeks are booked solid. But through careful maneuvering and an alignment of the stars, we’ve managed to throw together one last game.

“I gotta get to bed soon if I’m going to make my shift,” says Pat, grinding out his cigarette. “Let’s just start. Ryan can join when he comes out.”

It’s my best day at the plate. I’ve never been a clutch player, always folding under the pressure, but that day I get on base every at-bat. Without Ryan, the Pirates have only three players, and I knock home a ghost version of myself more than once. 

It’s the seventh when Ryan finally comes out, the front of his shirt wet from dishing. He stops in the doorway, staring at us. It only takes a moment for him to realize what’s happened, and he stands there, a high school dropout who didn’t make the team. 

“Fuck you guys.”

“No, we got a spot for you, come on!”

“Fuck you guys,” he says again and goes back inside. 

“I told you we should have waited,” says Chuck.

Pat just shrugs.

We all feel pretty bad, but we’d done what we’d done, and that was that. The game must go on. Before we know it, it’s the bottom of the ninth, two outs, and the Pirates are down by one. We have a ghost on third, Chuck on second, Wallace on first. I’m up to bat. 

As I step up to the plate, I think for the first time that day about what a game I’m having. My best all season, probably the best of my life, and I think suddenly of my grandfather. He’d been a great athlete when he was alive, even up into his fifties, batting clean-up for the company softball team. That’s because he was the type of guy who never overthought things. 

He liked to say, “Lead, follow, or get the hell out of the way.”

They taught him that in the army.

So I step up to the plate with the abrupt knowledge that he’s guiding my bat that day. I realize I can’t fail. 

The first pitch Pat brings in way outside, but I see it hanging there, step in, and smack it—a line drive foul, clunking off one of our parked tour vans. The next pitch he gives me more of the same, even farther out. This time I let it sail by, past our strike zone lawn chair to bounce off the back wall of the café. The next one is fast and low and outside, but I can see it so well I chop it—another foul, but straighter, good for at least two runs if fair. 

I can’t miss—I just can’t. I know it, they all know it, and as I raise the yellow plastic bat to my shoulder, I can see the fear in their eyes. I step in so close I’m practically in the strike zone, grind my back foot into the dirt—and watch as Pat rolls a nasty junk pitch under my bent elbows and into the chair. 

By the time I look at that last strike, Chuck is already at my shoulder. 

“I knew he was going to do that. I’m sorry, buddy.”

“That’s how it goes,” I say, still looking at the ball.

The Pirates never did beat the ’Spills that summer. We ended the season at a perfect oh and twelve, but a perfect record’s a perfect record, and don’t let anyone tell you different. That’s Adam Smith talking, and you better believe he’s full of shit. After all, nobody can go twelve and oh without the oh. Behind every great man is at least a dozen dedicated losers. 

Three years later, Ryan’s gone off to cook at some dude ranch, but I’ve heard rumors he quit. Pat’s about to finish up nursing school—a real job, he swears—and Your Good Buddy Chuck still drifts through camp from time to time. 

“It kind of feels like home, coming back after a while.”

One of many, because he knows the secret handshake. 

Me, I’m still up here. I’m the Mayor of Dogtown now, and I’ve got fifteen huskies to answer to. I live out there with them, sleeping in a wall tent year-round because they respect it. If there’s a bear in camp, I sit out there daytime too, watching to make sure it doesn’t eat too many of them. But if the watch draws out for more than a few days, and I’m alone too long, close enough to hear the sounds of camp but unable to join in, I eventually find myself puzzled. 

The summer of the Pirates, we split off from the world, somehow fell out of step, and when I go back south to visit, I can see the changes that no one else seems to notice. I wonder and wonder, and sometimes I get close to an answer, but I might as well keep that to myself. I’m just a Pirate, and my opinion is worth about as much. 

THE END