And She Was (11 page)

He had to get in one more lick. Part of me wanted to let him have it. I had the grades because that had been the one thing we shared, because I’d loved it and been good at it and knew, even then, that if I were smart enough and studious enough I could save him, prove to him that I wasn’t her. I had the grades because I longed for that moment when he would ignore her and turn to me and my neat little row of A’s. The thing was I could never be sure if it was for him or for me, or if it was the same thing anyway.

I remembered her standing at the door in a short dress with sleeves that ruffled over her hands. She must have been about thirty-three or -four, old enough to have honed this script. Dad and I are at the kitchen table, going over my report card. He’s opened the special notebook he keeps to record my school achievements. She watches Dad and me for a minute. “It’s sick, Henry,” she says. “You know that? She should be going out with friends her age, having fun. She’s too pretty to stay locked up studying.”

“She’s fourteen,” Dad says, his tone flat.

“I’m so fuckin’ sick of this, I can’t stand to watch it.” She smells of Chantilly and Kools as she pulls the door shut behind her.

I watch him watch her leave and watch him watch the door another minute, expecting the improbable. When he turns back to me, I waited for the smile, for his eyes to really see me. He picks up the stiff blue card, nodding seriously.

“You’re gonna do anything you want with those kind of marks,” he says. “You’re gonna conquer the world, baby,” he says and squeezes my shoulder.

The notebook is a sacred totem on the table between us. He clicks it open and tucks the report card into a protective cover, adding to the growing pages of certificates, achievements, and winning essays.

He gives me two bucks. “Go get yourself an ice cream or something.” The swell of pride is an invincible bubble around me. Not pride in the grades so much as in knowing I’d taken him from my mother. And even then I must have sensed that I was giving something to him too, that as long as I was studious and skipping grades now and again, he could pour his hopes into a mold of my future and forget his.

I get back with my triple dip. Dad has the Wild Turkey on the table now. He talks about my “promising” future. I present my attention tied up with a bow and absorb. He talks about his days at U of W.

I get up to pee and come back to see Dad passed out draped over the table. His arm has knocked the Wild Turkey over, and the brown liquid spreads over the pages of the notebook, pooling on the vinyl protectors. At the top edges, where the vinyl opens, the booze has softened and stained the report. I watch the stain creep deeper inside, the paper soaking up the liquid like thirsty dirt.

It is the last entry in the notebook, the last report card that will ever make it home, the last time I will care.

“Why don’t I take you out for a drink?” Dad was smiling now, with a few bites of egg and dry toast in his stomach. “There’s a place just down the road.”

Maybe it’s wrong to drink with a drunk. Enabling and all that crap. But I wasn’t here to rescue him; I knew that now. And he wasn’t going
to rescue me; I knew that too. He was just a man who had failed in so many ways. And I was just his daughter who could be his drinking buddy if he wanted. We had time for that at least.

“Sure,” I said, and suddenly I understood why I was here—simply to be with him in this dirty, dying place.

Cowboy, Dad, and I drove to the Last Chance Saloon as the sun set. Cowboy was all big head, blocking my view. When I turned into the parking lot, he fell forward, conking his wide forehead on the dash. I left the window rolled halfway down and followed Dad up the gray wood steps into the bar.

We ordered rum and Cokes. He settled into his stool, boots looping the low rung, elbows poised on the bar. This was his domain. I had never been out with him before. I had seen him after the drinking was done, stumbling home, passing out. I can’t explain how weird it was sitting at a bar with my father, knowing I was going to watch him get dead drunk.

Nothing happened to turn him into a drunk. Nothing happened. He had always drunk some, everyone did. But nothing kept happening. He kept driving a truck, coming home to a woman who was just going out. I could not have marked a day or year when so much nothing had happened that he let go. I’m sure he couldn’t either. He slid and kept sliding. He never made a decision to drink more; he never made a decision to become a drunk, or a decision to become a bum. It was all in what didn’t happen, or get said, or done. Just like proving a negative, looking back at nothing to see where it went wrong is impossible. What can you go back and fix? Nothing.

After the first drink, Dad came alive in a sense. He lost that beaten, subservient air. He talked about the plans he had. He’d met this guy who inherited a little printing business. But this guy wanted more than business card print runs and mailing labels. This guy was brilliant, wanted to start an alternative press, something to give a voice to provocative ideas. This guy liked what my dad had to say about Gorbachev and Russia’s technological slide. He kept asking Dad to get something written up so they could get it out there, shake up the discussion. Dad had been jotting down some thoughts. He’d been picking up books at the library. Thought he’d have enough for an essay or two pretty quick.

When he got up to use the john, I looked around the room. It was filling up now. Six other men had bellied up to the bar. A group of three women, all in jeans, had grabbed a table. Several booths along the wall were crammed with couples or foursomes. I caught the eye of a man down the bar. He smiled and raised his glass. I returned the smile, instinctively. He was too old, too fat, too average, and seemed to be sitting more on his backbone than his ass. I scanned the counter behind the bar and saw the half-full jar of AA sobriety medallions, a sign hanging around its throat,
FIRST DRINK FREE FOR YOUR FIRST YEAR COIN
.

Dad returned, and my concentration narrowed to his face. Drink four was straight rum, a double. And he turned. I felt it coming in the silence that preceded it. He looked at me, eyes beginning to glisten. “You’re a good daughter.” He nodded as if tamping that notion into his brain for keeps. “I know I haven’t been the father you should have had. I didn’t make enough of myself. I didn’t deserve you or your mother. But that’s all gonna change. Soon as I get these books going, I’m going to need a researcher. Someone who really knows her way in the library. Probably have to send you to Washington, do some specialized research. Things are breaking loose in Russia. Ripe for a guy who understood the Russian mind-set, the people. Gonna shock some folks. You don’t believe me, do you? Well, I will. I know I don’t always do what I say. But this is for real. Six months, a year, I’ll have that first book done. I’ll get you working for me. Good place to start. We’ll make sure you finish up that degree. Probably need to at least get your master’s. You’re going to do something in this world. Not like me. You got advantages. You got a brain, and you’re young. Still young enough. You got the world by the tail, hon. Once I get this line of books going, I’m gonna make sure you get back in school. You can count on that. I know you don’t have a good reason to believe me. But it’s true.

“What have you been doing for work lately? No? You can do better. Yeah, much better. You always were good in school. And you got the looks. You got your mother’s looks. She was a beautiful woman. She taught you a thing or two, huh? You’ll do better. You got plenty of time yet. What are you now, twenty-eight? Thirty-one! Well, you don’t look it. You got to get yourself married, have some kids before long. Lot easier to find a good man when you’re young. I know I wasn’t the best father. But I did the best I could. Leaving was the best I could do. Better
for you. Your mom could find a better man that way. And she did, didn’t she? Whole string of better men.”

He was crying now. “I know I wasn’t the best father. You turned out okay though. You sure did. You’re going to make something of yourself. Not like your old dad. They say I’m not going to make it too much longer. You know, I sure am glad you came out here. Sure am.”

“Come on, Dad. We better go.”

He hadn’t tipped the bartender all night. I put a five on the bar and followed him out to the parking lot. Cowboy sprang up when our feet crunched on the gravel. On the road, we passed a package store, and Dad called out for me to stop. I did a U-turn and pulled close to the doors in the empty parking lot. The lights at Party Time shot up into a dark, starry sky. “Just got to get a little something,” Dad said. He was back with a brown paper sack, twisted around a bottle.

We pulled into Ever-New’s parking lot. I asked Dad where his car was parked. He motioned toward the back. “Do you want me to help you?” He shook his head. Cowboy leaped from the passenger side, following Dad. I backed up. I saw Dad twisting the cap off the hidden bottle, Cowboy slam dancing at his side. I watched him for a minute. It was still him I wanted to please, even the way he was now. Even though at fourteen I’d turned my back on him and his hopes—and his hopes for me.

I got out of the car, left it running. Because I knew it was starting—that kind of crying that betrays you, because you want to just be angry and the sadness keeps leaking out, tainting the purity. I was pissed that he was dying, and I could see it in the way he walked, not shuffling, not stumbling, but so functionally getting to where he needed to be, no effort to waste. I was angry because I guess after all these years I still somehow believed that he held the secret password, that he had within him a word and a look that could resurrect the person I’d started out as.

“Dad!” I shouted as he disappeared behind the building. “Dad.” And I ran, through the dusty parking lot and around the corner of the building. He had stopped there in the building’s denser dark. Cowboy’s ears pricked at me as he stood by Dad’s side. “Dad,” I said again, more quietly in the sudden gloom.

“You need something?”

I took a step forward, tried to think of something to say that was short enough to cover the tightness in my throat and the fluttery shakiness.

“No, not really.”

“Night.”

He walked away from me, and I let him. I let him, again.

“Coward.” I whispered it—just to hear myself was enough. I guess it was that moment, watching him walk into the shadows of piled, rusting junk cars, that I really gave up. If he did have the password, he wasn’t talking. And I was the fool.

I felt more alone at that moment than I ever had. Shit, was this really all up to me? I walked back to the Fiat. It was all I had. A red Fiat, a few bags of clothes, a couple notebooks. It didn’t look like much. It didn’t look like enough.

I found a room for eighteen dollars and unloaded my stuff from the backseat. I showered off all the sweat, turned on the ceiling fan, and lay on the orange-flowered spread until early morning.

I was in a strange motel room, in a strange town. I was burning through men faster than Yolanda could change expressions. And I had no idea where I was going next, what I was going to do, or who I was going to do it with. I was thirty-one, the daughter of a bum and a slut, saddled with a liquor name.

I stayed two more days. I left with a cardboard box full of Mary Kay makeup, a dozen promises from Dad to write, and a crust of dog slobber on my forearms and neck. Cowboy had whined at me after the awkward good-byes. He stayed by Dad’s leg as I walked away but kept standing, then sitting, looking at me intently and whining. The superstitious part of me wondered if he was trying to tell me something. Looking back, I know he was. That he’d take care of Dad the best he could. That he’d be my emissary when the time came. That we’d meet again.

I drove west until I hit I-5, then south. I kept the car at eighty, the radio blasting, slept at a rest stop. I knew speed couldn’t wipe out the feelings that seeped under the deadness, that first harmless trickle before the breach. But it blurred the cracks. You have to be alert at eighty and keep a good part of your mind on driving. Still, thoughts about Dad nagged. I wondered about the imprint left by happy childhoods. I
imagined who I’d be if mine had been different. I couldn’t get a clear picture. I was helpless in my connection to the past. I wiped four tears from the tip of my nose and decided to forget Dad. I’d remember the dog instead, his ugly head on Dad’s thigh, protective, proprietary.

The car died in L.A., or rather a section of L.A. called Santa Anita. I got out. A monolith of a racetrack, big and old, swelled up from across the road. It would have a bar, and it would need a cocktail waitress.

Thad showed up two weeks later. He’d been hanging out with fishing buddies in San Diego between seasons. A silver Camaro on a used car lot had caught his eye, and he’d decided to drive the coast all the way north. He walked into a shady offtrack bar called Trader Santeros, where I’d discovered they served free mini-chimichangas. For the price of a margarita, I could stuff myself. He was cute, thirty-three, and willing. I was really the only attractive woman in the place, so naturally we hit it off. I could tell right away he was safe. He didn’t talk about the future, or goals. Or the past. He liked to start drinking early in the day and couldn’t keep his hands off me. He was the kind of man I needed—just like me. A few days later, my bare feet were sticking out the window of his Camaro as we cruised I-5 north.

Two months later I found myself alone in this cabana overlooking a strange world of ocean and ryegrass and wind and memories.

JULY 18, 1986

W
hen I showed up for work on Thursday, Marge had a letter for me. I’d finally written to Dad, mostly about this odd place I’d landed. I sent a map along with the letter, circling Unalaska Island, to give him an idea of just how close to the edge of nothing I was. I sketched the basics of how I got here and asked about Cowboy.

Yolanda wrote back. Dad was hanging in there, still scheming. She made sure he took his pills. Cowboy had grown into his paws. The weather was hot enough to kill a crow. She’d included a compact of Mary Kay eye shadow in a trio of lavender, mauve, and pink. The teensy mirror had cracked, in the mail I assumed. I read while sipping my prework drink then folded the letter into my pocket. I handed the eye shadow to Marge.

The Elbow Room felt more cramped than ever. A boatload of Russian fishermen was in town, and they seemed to have turned up the energy a notch for everyone.

In the first hour alone, someone rang the bell hanging over the bar three times, which meant I had to hustle around to supply free drinks to everyone. My wrists were cramping up under the weight of the loaded tray.

The first fight broke out before midnight. I was setting drinks down
at a table in the back when I got rammed from behind so hard I fell forward across the table, knocking drinks over with my chest. I turned to see two guys shoving at each other. The one who’d knocked me over pushed the other guy against the wall and started whaling on him.

“Fight!” I yelled.

The lights came up, and Marge rammed her way through the crowd, holding a rubberized bat in her right hand. She planted her feet and swung. The bat connected with the man’s upper arm. By the time he turned toward her, she held the bat like she was waiting a pitch.

“Take it outside before I decide to aim.”

Something about a burly, oldish woman with piled-up hair and blue eye shadow holding a bat takes the fight right out of most men. I’d see it again and again. Marge was a grandmother with combat training and meaty shoulders.

Several guys shoved the bruiser toward the door.

“You too,” Marge said, pointing her bat at the guy who’d been up against the wall. “Out.”

A group of about fifteen men followed the combatants. Moments later I heard the shouts that signaled the fight had resumed in the parking lot.

“You just going to let them go at it out there?” I asked Marge. “Aren’t you going to call the police?”

She looked at me blankly and shrugged. “Police station’s across the channel. The boys will make sure no one gets hurt too bad.”

“But don’t you think…”

Marge stepped toward me. “We like to take care of things ourselves. Keeps everyone happy. Got that?”

In the years that have past since by brief stay in Dutch, I’ve often wondered why bars tend to use big, burly guys as bouncers. I think a woman, who looks like someone’s grandmother but knows how to swing a bat, is far more effective. It’s hard to hit your grandma.

Within three minutes the lights were back down, the music blaring. Oh, outside two guys were beating the shit out of each other, but here in the circle of flowing booze, all was well.

Taking it outside is not a new bar management technique. It started about the time bars started. As with most of low culture, we can thank ancient Rome. While people have been drinking communally since the
first guy tasted some rotting fruit, stumbled back to the village, and persuaded his buddies to come along, Rome turned it into a business. After all, you can’t have people having so much fun and losing so much inhibition without a payoff.

I’m something of an accidental expert in the debaucher of ancient Rome. It was 1981; I was twenty-six, had dropped out of college for the second time but still lived with a college guy. After six years in the University of Washington’s history doctoral program, Ned had finally produced a mess of notes that were somehow supposed to morph into a dissertation. He believed a few shots of Bushmills gave him better insight, but usually passed that fleeting window so fast he didn’t have time for more than shuffling his notes around. At night, I worked at an underground punk bar, the kind that flashes black lights and serves drinks in plastic cups. But during the day I found myself in our basement apartment with nothing to do but watch
Donahue
and
General Hospital
. In desperation, I started reading Ned’s notes during commercials. Pretty soon, not even Luke and Laura’s battles could distract me. For some reason the Res Romana just grabbed me. The ferocity with which those people believed in Rome, in the idea of Rome, felt so large, so encompassing. When I read, I almost believed with them. I almost believed in causes, and purposes, and meaning. It was the almost that kept me going. At first it was just Ned’s notes. But then I had to check his sources and read a few more. I ended up writing the whole damn thing. Ned’s title, “Roman Roots of Social Degradation” became “Conquest of Sin: Roman Organization of Drinking, Prostitution, and Debauchery.” I never knew if Ned’s dissertation passed in defense or if he even used it. I left the morning I finished the manuscript. I placed it on the kitchen table and left with two suitcases, a box of tapes, a whole lot of knowledge about Rome’s seamy side, and a smattering of a dead language from a dead empire.

I’m not sure if it was a preemptive retreat, knowing he’d kick me out once he understood that my gift had stripped him of his illusions, or if I just sensed I’d used up the best of Ned. Or maybe I’d scared myself. Those few months had brought my two sides into sharp contrast. They begged the question I’d pushed aside for years. Was I like my mother? My father? Or something else entirely?

Basically, Rome had two kinds of drinking dens. The bar was just
that, a big, usually marble, counter that opened onto the sidewalk. Patrons simply pulled up a stool for refreshment during their errands. The tavern, on the other hand, had a door and separate rooms for eating, drinking, and, of course, fucking. Because Rome hadn’t invented neon or etched glass, they decorated with murals instructing patrons in bar protocol. One painting excavated in Pompeii shows two gamblers arguing over who won a game. The owner pushes them toward the door, and a caption announces, “Go on outside to do your fighting.”

Those bars in ancient Rome must have felt much like bars today. The high-flying and the sullen sitting side by side, feeding whatever inklings lurk inside, afraid to come out in dry spells. And, if any of those lurking inklings do come out, they must go outside. If they don’t go peacefully, Marge will hit them with a baseball bat.

About three minutes after Marge ousted the men, I peeked outside. I’d always assumed that a mob of men surrounding a fight were there to egg it on, see blood. I’m sure that’s part of it, but that’s not what I saw. Several men peeled the winner off the loser. Two other men helped the loser into a cab. The rest filed back into the bar. I held the door open for them, my assumptions rearranged.

The rest of the night I worked with a drink-soaked shirt. A screwdriver had stained my shirt orange across the tits, which made for an evening of delightful commentary. The bell rang at least six more times, and my wrists creaked each time I straightened them after emptying my tray. When the HiTide babes showed up, their heels slipping in the muddy goo of the floor, I was relieved to know it was almost over.

Just before closing, I made my way to the table in the Blue Room to see a girl from one of the canneries stripping while she danced on the table surrounded by cheering men. I could see Little Liz ducking and craning from her bar stool, trying to get a peek through the bodies.

“Hey,” I shouted. “Hey. Get her off there.”

One of the guys stepped in front of me when I tried to grab the woman’s wrist.

“Just a little fun,” he yelled into my ear. “Here.” He yanked a Baggie of weed from his pocket and threw it on my tray.

I looked at the pot, shrugged, and left her there, down to her panties.
She was a chunky redhead with run-together freckles and would probably remember this swarm of adulation for the rest of her life. Liz laughed at me through her missing teeth as I left the Blue Room to its vices.

Bellie had been guffawing most of the night with a table of fishermen in the back as usual. I’d come to understand that, in the purest of ways, Bellie was as much an Elbow employee as me. She was just more of an independent contractor. In general the guys she hooked up with were nice, smelly sometimes, and a bit vulgar, but not vicious. I guessed she liked their company almost as much as their coke.

I was standing at the door at closing time, trying to collect as many glasses as I could while Marge pushed the stragglers out. Two tall fishermen, held together on each side by Bellie’s short arms, lurched as one through the door.

Bellie leaned across a midriff. “Come over to my place tomorrow.”

One of the guys bent to whisper in her ear, and she covered her mouth to laugh. “Not too early,” she shouted over her shoulder as the threesome made for a truck in the parking lot.

“Maybe I can’t just pop over anytime you want,” I shouted back. “Maybe I have plans.”

“Yeah, right,” she yelled from a truck window as the driver cranked over the engine.

By the time the bar cleared I needed my shot of schnapps more than usual. While Les poured, I scrounged in the storeroom for something to prop up the wobbly table’s pedestal. I found a block of wood and crawled across ridges of drying mud to wedge it into place.

I checked the bathroom and thanked God Liz had made it out under her own power.

I got to Bellie’s sometime after noon. She had become my only friend. It wasn’t my fault. I don’t really make friends. Bellie just assumed our friendship, and I went along. We did have some things in common: at twenty-eight, she was close to my age, and we both worked in the Elbow Room serving men. Beyond that I didn’t see any reason for our friendship. We did coke together when she had it. She worked the Elbow Room most nights and would tell me to stop by if she’d scored. I
came to realize she was what we called a coke whore. And she wasn’t the only one. The HiTide fake blondes were too, or so I was told, and chose to believe.

Coke whores are a bit different from your street walks and call girls. They retain control of their relations a tad longer because their men are never quite sure how the gift exchange goes down. Such relations can appear like a date, or at least a party, for a while.

Bellie had acquired two new things since last night, a truck and an eight-ball of coke. She was in fine form, really flouncing around her place, playing tapes, dancing, cleaning her fridge. And talking fast. Apparently she was taking me somewhere. One of her cohorts had left a truck in her care while he fished.

She laid out and snorted a couple lines in between scrubbing the vegetable bins.

“Maybe we’ll find something. Maybe not. You never know. You’ve never seen the pillboxes or the middens. I made a lunch.”

She continued chatting while she packed the truck. Last, but most important, she tossed in a small mirror and her doubled-Baggied stash of coke. Ten minutes later we were cutting off the main road, following an even rougher road along the northern coast. She drove fast, still talking. I don’t know how to impress on you how odd it is for an Aleut woman to chatter. I believe it can only be done under the influence of an amphetamine. Aleuts aren’t gabby folks. In fact, if there were any people who could keep a secret for a long time, it would be Aleuts. Even when they do talk, it’s a circuitous language. Oh, they may be speaking English, but it’s different enough to be called foreign. Rarely are they talking about what the sparse nouns and verbs would make you think. It’s all about nuance and pattern and timing. And the meaning is buried. You have to listen and dig and likely as not, you’ll misunderstand. Coke, however, made Bellie speak plain English, if a sped-up version.

As I look back now, I think Bellie was really two people—the coked-up fun gal with lots to say, and the other Bellie, the one I had only a few glimpses of until the end. With a few lines up her nose, Bellie was like a barrel rolling right toward you. You got the sense something with momentum was on the way. You almost felt relieved when it didn’t crush you, when it stopped and said something. Bellie was always
funny, sometimes wise. She could laugh until the curls unwound from her hair. And she was adventurous. At least that was Bellie on coke.

The unpowdered Bellie was quiet, stoic, sad. I rarely saw her this way, something I now think she was careful to engineer.

“…eight thousand years. That’s what they say. It’s actually a lot longer. To the beginning of time, if you believe the stories. Which I don’t. But it is longer. And that land bridge stuff is shit. We didn’t walk over from Siberia. Shit, would you walk if you had a kayak?”

We hit a Buick-size hole in the road going forty, which jarred Bellie out of her history spasm. She slammed on the brakes, stretching her leg from the hip and slipping so far down the seat she could barely see. “Shit, I think we passed it.” She grabbed the shifter with both hands and shoved it into reverse. The rear tires bumped back into the enormous hole, tipping the cab so I had to grab the suicide handle to keep from landing in her lap. She slammed into first, and the truck’s rear wheels hurled rocks behind us as we lurched over the lip of the hole again.

“There it is.” Bellie pointed inland at a faint two-tire track heading up between hills. A creek flowed in one of the ruts. She turned the wheel hard and floored the gas to make it over the line of rocks that edged the road. I had to hold on tight with one hand while grabbing stuff spilling from side to side and front to back in the cab. The CB mike, bolted to the ceiling, came loose and whacked me in the eye. Bellie kept talking and driving fast. If the truck stopped, it probably wouldn’t be able to get going again, and there was no way to turn around. About half a mile up, the track curved inland behind a hill for a stretch then climbed again toward the coast. Dark open holes edged by the rusty arches of metal supports sank into the hillsides—old underground military installations, tunnel entrances. Half-fallen wooden structures, concrete rubble, the ghosts of telegraph poles. Unalaska was littered with the evidence, with the history of what it had seen and been. We stopped about five yards from the edge of a cliff that fell away to the sea.