“Awfully cute,” Chris said.

The women were standing at the long counters in the wet slime and grease, their feet in rubber overshoes, their hands in rubber gloves, their bodies covered with rubber aprons. Their faces and heads, in contrast, were startlingly coquettish and modish. They wore earrings, their faces were carefully made up with rouge, lipstick, powder; their hair was dressed with a painstaking permanent. They did not glance at Christine or at her handsome guide, they did not once lift their eyes from the line that moved so relentlessly past them, they were on piece work, the line moved inexorably like the stream of life, there was no stopping it except by complete annihilation. The patchers deftly snatched the packed can as it twinkled by, their unerring eye had caught the grayish bit that was not toothsome enough for the top layer; with an incredibly swift gesture they substituted a more splendid bit of plump red salmon meat, they set the can back into the life stream as a mother smooths a child’s hair or twitches her skirt to rights before sending her off to school.

The men at the long tables caught the whole fish as it flowed through the machinery stream, flowed as endlessly and unhurriedly through the air and metal as though this were a salmon’s natural element. Steam hissed, iron clanked, knives chopped, metal thumped, water swished, cans clashed. No one spoke, no head was lifted, the relentless process had a nightmarish pursuing quality.

Now, through the clamor, Juan said, “Follow me. And watch it.” He pointed to the catwalk, crossing above complicated belts and pistons. Standing there she could view the entire pattern, the motions of the arms, the heads, the movements of the machinery, so orderly, so repetitious, so inevitable; a ballet of labor. Someone was coming toward her, she wondered nervously how he could pass on that narrow strip of footing. He stood beside her, a big-framed man, tired-looking, with the eyes of a seaman, clear and farseeing.

“Foreman!” Juan mouthed, through the clamor. Now the man leaned toward her and shouted in her ear. Something BERGSTROM! Bergstrom smelled of fish oil and salmon even more distinctly than this temple of salmon itself. It was as though his pores had absorbed the effluvium through the years, soaked it in like the spongy floor boards of the cannery, and now exuded it.

Bergstrom shouted “Thor Storm!” and nodded and smiled and pointed dockward to where the tender lay moored. His expression was unmistakably friendly and admiring. “First time in years!” he bellowed. “Thor don’t favor fish-trap country.”

Chris nodded and smiled in turn, she pointed toward the hive below the catwalk. As though she had pressed a button that activated a machine, numbers began to rumble forth. “… Alaska output … four million cases … only two million cases … six million cases …”

Chris shook her head. “People!” she yelled. “Those people. Are they Alaskans! Where are they from?”

But now Bergstrom had difficulty in hearing, he indicated his ears, politely but helplessly as he backed away. But Chris still had a shriek left in her lungs. “You hire them, don’t you? You’re the foreman.”