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Under the Endangered Species Act, the federal government is required not to allow any species to advance from “endangered” to “extinct” if it can help it. One obvious way to ensure the blue paddle snout's survival would be to tear down the obstacles to its natural migration, whose turbines shred any fish forced to pass through them like a coleslaw chopper. But because local farmers need the irrigation and business needs the cheap electricity (and politicians need the votes of both), the dams stand, as immovable as a fish-faced Rushmore.

Instead, the Army Corps of Engineers has created a multibillion-dollar industry whereupon each irrational act is countered by another more insane gambit—an infinite Möbius strip of ultimately pointless activity. They've spent half a billion dollars on a labyrinth of pipelines, sluices, and tunnels to divert populations of juvenile sturgeon and other fish species to be loaded onto barges and trucks—even at one time, airplanes—to travel safely downriver. Then they've spent millions building “fish ladders” that allow fish to struggle at heart-attack pace back up over the dam, and even utilized cannons to propel them one at a time at speeds upward of twenty-two miles per hour.

All of which fuck with the natural homing instinct essential to the survival of the species, programmed as they are to return in adulthood to the rivers they came from to spawn. It would be like meeting someone in a bar and excusing yourself to go to the bathroom, only to be kidnapped and whisked three hundred miles away and dumped in the ocean and left to find your way back. You'd arrive well past closing time after all the good fish eggs had been fertilized.

Another half a billion dollars was spent in an effort to increase the population by building fish hatcheries to produce large numbers of sturgeon that will eventually find their way back to the river—where they'll likely be killed by the dam. And since hatchery fish are fed by workers scattering food on the surface of their pools, while sturgeon are naturally bottom-feeders, baby sturgeon grow up expecting food to be on the surface so upon their release, they head not to the bottom but to the surface, where they are easy prey for the Caspian tern, a diving fish predator
not
indigenous to the region, having been trucked in to create a bird refuge (cost: $200 million)—by the same Army Corps of Engineers who, recognizing their error as they watched ten thousand tern scoop helpless endangered baby sturgeon from the river, attempted to remedy the mistake by relocating the tern (cost: $600 million), only to be stopped by the Audubon Society and a court order.

So, the federal government employs a system of eight different federal agencies as well as local government, private consultants, university fish scientists, biologists, bureaucrats, administrators, and workers at a cost of billions of dollars—not to save the fish
but to save the dam
. And to employ this particularly unemployable one-armed fish counter, unless I can talk them out of it.

I'm trained by the nice people at the federally funded Ick Ick project along with five other locals prepared to join fish counters already in the field. Among them is a man a full head shorter than I am; upon seeing him standing just through the doorway I assume there's a step
down
into the room, and in acting accordingly I land hard, and I stumble into him as if trying to navigate with one leg for a change.

“Sorry!” I collect myself, extending my only hand in greeting. “I'm Aaron. Here to count fish. Although I can count to five better than ten.”

“Percy” is his only reply as he slips his tiny hand into mine, accompanied by a fixed stare.

It's an intense gaze everyone here seems to share. They all stare completely unabashed at anyone in their fields of vision, like babies unaware of anything but the facial recognition for which they are primally programmed as a survival lure. When I spot an average-looking woman with the exception of nose and tits in equal prominence, she too catches me staring and seems to think nothing of it, staring back, our eyes locked like a pair of horseshoe magnets.

With no further exchange forthcoming from Percy, I extricate myself and manage to approach her without colliding. As impressed as I am by her imposing breasts, I'm equally fascinated by that nose, pronounced and beakish in a way that renders the rest of her quite ordinary face extraordinary. Eventually discomforted by our optical intimacy, I'm the one who finally looks away, and therefore probably considered the socially inept oddball here.

“Do you like fish?” she asks.

“I admit, up until now I never thought of them as more than seafood,” I confess, and if that bothers her she doesn't show it. “You?”

“I'm concerned about the mass extinction of a species,” she states flatly, and then, as if mimicking me, adds, “You?”

“I needed a job, and there's not a lot I can do.”

Her name is Lilith and like everyone I've met at Ick Ick so far, she seems undeterred by my condition. In fact, no one seems to notice my missing arm/hand unit at all—not in the same way others choose to ignore it as a means of avoidance but by being genuinely and completely indifferent to it. I assume working in scientific research puts one in contact with a variety of oddball personalities; if they can overlook the overbites and thick glasses, poor hygiene and rumpled clothes, shrill voices and personality tics bordering on Asperger's in evidence everywhere at the orientation, what's one arm more or less?

I try to redeem my intentions somewhat to Lilith, mostly by overusing the word “fascinating” in expressing my feelings on extinction, dams, nature, conservation, and especially the fish we hope to save, although I know nothing about them yet. It's enough fake sincerity to earn me a seat alongside her in our next training session.

As our primary instruction over any kind of science or methodology is straightforward recognition, this should be easy since the species we're primarily counting, the blue paddle-snout sturgeon, is one ugly motherfucking fish. First of all and most obvious:
it has a snout shaped like a paddle
. It also has no teeth, an extendable mouth(!), and tactile “whiskers” for locating food. About a foot long, spiky cartilage runs the length of its spine, ending in a dorsal fin at the tail, and four pectoral fins actually help it mimic walking along the bottom of rivers or lakes. Described as “primitive” and “dinosaur-like,”
Acipenser pseudoboscis
is in fact considered virtually unchanged from the Cretaceous period seventy million years ago, when things were genetically designed to be as ugly as possible so as not to be mistaken for food.

Blue paddle snout can also live
for a century,
but it seems unlikely any alive today will do so since 85 percent of sturgeon populations are at risk of becoming extinct, more than any other species in the world. But aside from this federally funded boondoggle on the Wabash, no one really cares because they're significantly less adorable than pandas or lemurs or baby gorillas, an observation that when shared with Lilith earns a toothy grin, revealing yet another area of prominence to her odd physicality. She's like a strange painting of a beautiful woman, or a beautiful painting of a strange one, and I find myself oddly attracted to her.

*   *   *

After a week in a classroom setting in preparation for the fieldwork of fish counting, I'm not sure I've learned much, distracted as I am by the effects of different strains of medical marijuana coupled with Vicodin. Yet somehow this minor accomplishment has inspired disproportionate enthusiasm from Mom and Dad, as if I'm the kid with the head injury who after many unsuccessful attempts finally managed to fit the round peg in the round hole.

Worse, with Mom joining us for Friday night dinner, this achievement of gainful, one-armed employment has prompted Steve to pontificate on his own nearly two-week vacation from “work.” He holds forth on the subject as if it is the thing that dogs him, a constant gravitational pull that exerts its influence solely to prevent him from soaring as high as he could, despite a chronic lack of ambition coupled with a need for furtive afternoon naps. (Steve liked to brag that he spent most afternoons asleep in his PG&E truck behind mirrored glasses with the newspaper unfolded across his steering wheel. Why being caught reading the paper in his truck while he was supposed to be working might have been preferable to being caught sleeping on the job eluded me. I also couldn't help but think that perhaps this was why newspapers were going out of business, because the kind of people who read them, or pretend to, were guys like Steve.)

Despite a sedative cocktail of beer, Vicodin, and a fat bud of Herb Your Enthusiasm
,
Steve's smirking chatter makes me fidgety, and unfortunately I can still hear him when he turns his attention to Dad. “See, back in the day, you only had to compete with other white guys to get ahead. It was easier to get a job, to keep a job, to move up.”

“It's also easier,” I observe unnecessarily, “if you don't require a nap in the middle of the day.”

“No, I'm serious,” he announces with great seriousness. “It's simple math. I have to compete against women, blacks, Mexicans—if you took everyone out of the job market except white guys, that's millions of people … there'd be a lot less of us competing for the same number of jobs.”

“So, it was better when women stayed in the kitchen,” Mom wishes to clarify, “and ‘Negroes' picked cotton—”

“And Mexicans were in Mexico,” I add.

Jackie is silently mortified.

“I'm just saying that, like, in the sixties, when there were only white guys in the job market, you didn't have to fight off a million more guys, women, blacks, Chinese—”

“Yes, the ‘Chinamen' have greatly reduced your chance for success in the modern world,” I suggest.

“Aaron,” Jackie snaps, two syllables that mean
shut up.

And Steve glares at me in a way that reminds me of a mean dog I should not provoke. Then, he does something scarier. “Ask him,” Steve jerks his thumb at Dad and then waits, as if he'd just punched an elevator button.

Dad weighs Steve with a long, tired stare before declaring, “He's right.”

Steve leans back and beams like he's being fellated by the world's most desirable woman. I'm so stunned by Dad's response that the dullness of pills, pot, and pilsner seems to drain through my extremities and I am suddenly sober.

“You can't be serious.”

Dad shrugs simply. “Back in the late sixties and seventies, was there a smaller pool of people competing for work? Yes. When I got to be middle management, were there women, blacks…”—he pauses for effect—“
Chinese
in line for the same job? No. He's right. About the numbers. The pool is bigger now. Was it better then? No. And would this idiot”—Dad indicates Steve with his glass and the musical tinkling of ice cubes—“be successful in any time, in any workforce, under any circumstances? Of course not.”

“Hey, fuck you, old man!”

It happens before I know it—a flash of motion, blood rushing, a gasp of breath, ears on fire, my nub of a shoulder tucking reflexively to protect my chin, my good arm lashing out and Steve hitting the floor, his hand stanching blood from his broken nose.

 

THINGS YOU CAN STILL DO WITH ONE ARM

Punch your stupid fucking brother-in-law in the face

 

BRAWNY

I am a fucking caveman, a gloriously bestial, unthinking creature of instinct; a one-armed caveman, but nonetheless capable of primal acts of violence to defend my bloodline and vanquish a foe who believed himself superior to me but instead limped back to his cave, bloody and defeated and further emasculated by his female. He will no longer share the warmth of our fire or the meat from our kill, nor will we suffer his chest-beating grunts of boastful supremacy. Having beaten him in combat I can claim his female, but she's my sister, and that might be cool among cavemen but let's face it, that's disgusting.

And so Steve is gone, his exile extended from attic to Arcadia, and days later, Jackie's own plans for returning home are vague. But I remain exhilarated by the encounter between my good fist and Steve's surprisingly pliant nose.

(I think the hardest part for Steve—besides the ruined cartilage—was that
no one
came to his defense or expressed the slightest objection to his impromptu bludgeoning. I think Dad, for all his talk of niceness, may only have felt a twinge of embarrassment to have been at the center of the conflict; and certainly Mom's Zen cannot even fathom an act of violence, although she never flinched except [I could swear] to stifle a tiny grin. Even Jackie's considerable fury—eyes bulging, snot spewing, spit flying, she looked nothing like her tattoo anymore—was directed entirely at Steve; and her shrieking hatred of him in that moment, so primal that any animals in earshot would have been incited to devour each other, made me grateful I had somehow avoided my merited share of her wrath.)

The flush of conquest lingered and I resolved to incorporate that same exhilaration of the physical into my routine, hoping to duplicate the experience without habitually punching someone senseless. I wouldn't say I've gotten fat since the accident, but “doughy” is a good word. I've also noticed a recurring heat rash in the crease of flesh under my chest grown floppy, a sweat-trapping fold where once there was only the meeting of muscle tissue, however unimpressive. To be generous, I'm about fifteen pounds overweight, and whenever I'd felt the slightest twinge of guilt I didn't have to look very far to spot the morbidly obese man on the street and rationalize,
Really,
I
need to lose weight?

But now I've started running (I still had two good legs after all), doing core work (my torso still intact), pumping dumbbells with my good arm (Jackie's pink hand weights, only five pounds each but both of them lashed together with duct tape provided formidable resistance to my dormant muscles). I drew the line at one-armed push-ups—harder than they look, and when your arm gives out, the only thing between your teeth and the floor is your face. The one workout that proved completely impossible for me was skipping rope like a boxer, and what I regret most is the part where you whip the rope super fast in the final seconds just before your trainer yells, “Time!” I imagine few things feel more exhilarating than that, like being shot out of a cannon or your first full-on open-mouth kiss.