Fiction

Katrina Carrasco, Rough Trade (MCD), 384 pp. Hardback, $28.00.

In Rough Trade, Ben Collins, an Oregonian newspaper reporter for the Portland Sentinel, part of the William Randolph Hearst syndicate, travels up to Tacoma to investigate opium trafficking. It’s 1888, and the growing port city is tough and loose, a world of possibilities for enterprising young men. Going undercover, Ben reinvents himself as Benjamin Velasquez, an itinerant laborer. Having left his wife and children behind in Portland, he cruises the saloons in Tacoma and picks up a male lover—one who happens to belong to a ring of criminals transferring “tar” (opium) from the shipyard to the railyard.

A page-turner that keeps its fists up and swinging.

Ben—as Velasquez—must contend with Jack Camp, whose team of smuggling stevedores he sets out to join. The clean-shaven Camp is short, smart, and violent, an imposing presence on the wharves, feared and respected by all the other dockworkers. Camp is also an act—a performance by Alma Rosales, a Mexican American former officer of the law who has also reinvented herself in the Pacific Northwest. Alma was trained at the “Women’s Bureau for Pinkerton Detectives” in Chicago, but when the Pinkertons shut down the office, she took her professional skills and refashioned them for a life of crime. “William Pinkerton and his brother didn’t have a lick of sense when they disbanded the Women’s Bureau. They trained a group of women to know what makes a perfect criminal, a perfect crime, and then kicked all those women off the payroll and into the street.” Now Alma is helping to run the busiest cell of an opium smuggling ring.

The dynamic between Alma and Ben makes for an exciting story. Will Ben discover the proof he needs that Alma is smuggling “tar” through the port? Will Alma discover Ben’s real identity? Will the long arm of the law finally dismantle the profitable opium trade in Tacoma? Rough Trade is a sequel to Carrasco’s debut novel, The Best Bad Things (2022), which also featured Alma Rosales, but it’s a sequel that can pleasurably be read on its own.

The plot of Rough Trade hinges upon such criminal investigations, but what animates the characters and provides much of the book’s momentum are same-sex attractions. Nearly every character has what today’s readers might call a queer dimension; the novel clearly works against modern heteronormativity. Ben falls in love with Adriel, a young stevedore. Alma is torn between Delphine, her socially elite partner in crime, and Bess, an old flame from her Pinkerton days who mysteriously blows into town.

The effect can come across as a bit gimmicky: it’s the LGBTQ Wild West. (The book cover calls it a “genre- and gender-blurring novel.”) But Carrasco’s approach is ultimately much more thoughtful than that. Her focus isn’t merely on sexual desire but on the physicality of the bodies of her characters. No one ever suspects that Jack Camp is a woman with a tight binding cloth wrapped around her chest, and her disguise is ultimately more liberating than restricting: “Despite all the ways it grips and hides her, it lets her move freely, too.”

When Ben first tries to pass himself off as a dockworker, he gets caught almost immediately—not because he fumbles the details of his story but because he doesn’t have the body of a longshoreman. A sailor simply points to Ben’s fingers, clearly not those of a manual laborer, and Ben realizes he needs more than the right words. “In the real world, he’s learning, fictions can’t be merely a thing of the mind. The body tells a story. His body—the soft hands, the pale skin of his face, bleached to its milky whitest by the Portland gloom and days spent holed up in the newsroom—speaks for him.” This notion—that the body tells a story—leads to a much more visceral, corporal set of characters than one might expect.

Alma Rosales is a terrific character that stays with the reader long after the book is closed. But for all the different identities on display here, the most compelling may be that of Tacoma itself, still a part of the Washington Territory. The 1888 setting catches the burgeoning city at a turning point, having just become the western terminus for the Northern Pacific Railroad’s new transcontinental line. The rickety wharves of Old Tacoma have just been joined to the railway station of New Tacoma, two miles away, and the metropolitan synthesis has created a formidable zone of development. In the decade of the 1880s, the population exploded from just over 1,000 to a whopping 36,000. Carrasco targets this moment of transformation. “So much of Tacoma still feels small-town bad,” she writes. “It’s not San Francisco.” The action in the novel almost never travels inland, remaining instead firmly on the waterfront, in a world of “stevedores and roustabouts.”

It rains a lot there. (Still does.) The weather necessitates coats and caps and generally drives people inside, into the smoky bars and backrooms. In the dim light, anything can happen—and anyone can become anybody. “Liquor flows and bowls of opium dribble smoke. The lamps are kept low. Skirts and trousers don’t necessarily signify. It’s wonderfully confusing.” Late-1880s Tacoma is a rough and tumble town, where everyone who can read sticks to the Police Gazette. Bending the rules is the norm here, and Alma is completely at home. “She and her boys can get up to all sorts of no good in Old Tacoma.”

The setting provides a lot of fun, though occasionally Carrasco’s dialogue features a missed note when the speakers suddenly adopt contemporary idioms. “It’s been a minute since we spent some time,” Alma says to Delphine at one point. But overall, the story is fast paced and exciting, a page-turner that keeps its fists up and swinging.