And She Was (2 page)

“Thad’s not bad. Just get in on the ferry?”

“Yeah.”

Bellie reached for the straw and did her lines. “You won’t like it here.”

“How do you know?” I smudged my ring finger through the blurry residue.

“I can tell.” She laughed, covering her mouth, and started a pot of coffee.

I didn’t know what to say to that. And it pissed me off. So I laid out two more lines to buy some time. I’ve never really liked coke. But I
liked doing it. The feel of razor against glass, the chopping and sliding and the perfect lines drawn together. At least in the company I kept, snorting coke was communal and ritual, the prelude to seemingly meaningful conversation, secrets revealed.

“The thing is,” Bellie said above the sputtering Mr. Coffee, “it’s not the kind of place you should come to by accident. And you,” she said, eyes taking in everything from my boots to my hair, “look like an accident.”

I sipped at the coffee she offered in a goose-spotted cup, wondering if she was right. Is this what I’d been feeling before the ferry docked? The disgrace of coming so far from everything by accident. I looked up at her, raised my eyebrows, and smiled. “Fuck you.”

She snickered again, behind her jeweled hand, and sat down to snort her line. I watched her. The left hand, the one not holding the straw, moved to her forehead, fingers moving over the line between hair and skin. And I saw the mark. A birthmark white as the cocaine, bright as a spotlight against her brown skin, peeking through that curtain of black hair.

At 7
A.M.
I was heading back down Bellie’s rocky road toward the HiTide. The coke was wearing off, leaving that edgy, needy stain behind. Not that I wanted more blow. I wanted something necessary to do. I looked toward the ocean: 800 miles to Anchorage, 1,100 to Seattle, 2,000 to Russia. I kept thinking about the words scrawled on ancient maps to warn sailors when they neared the boundaries of the known world—Beyond here be monsters. Bellie was right; I’d missed the warning, floated across and landed on terra incognita.

Of course, I was used to missing the warning signs. I’m blond. I miss things. I neglect things. I ignore things.

When I say I’m blond, I mean that I’m really blond, that the color is real and that it’s very blond. The color of loose women and trailer trash. It’s the kind of hair that demands a sleazy respect. I didn’t realize how much I’d let my hair control me, define me, until I came to Dutch Harbor. Until I met them. The Aleutians were made for people with black hair. Straight, shiny black. They were a dark background that revealed my image slowly, then all at once, like staring at a Magic
Eye poster. And when I got it, when the squiggles shifted into form, it wasn’t pretty.

“I could show you the Elbow Room,” Thad said two hours later while we shoved eggs Benedict into our mouths at the HiTide dining room.

“Sure.”

“You’re going to love it here.” Thad’s grin was all boyish yet tinged with sexual promise. I swept my hair away from my face and grinned back. Thad had that kind of infectious smile. He lived in a sunny world. It made sense and treated him well. This is not to say he was Pollyannaish, just that the place he occupied liked having him around and never tossed up anything too ugly. He was the kind of man people wanted to please. He handed out nicknames that stuck and were accepted with secretive pride. It felt good to be among his circle. You sensed that by sticking close, he’d draw you along even if neither of you knew where you were headed.

Thad laid down a ten-dollar tip for our twenty-dollar meal and followed me out the door. I felt his eyes on my ass. I have a great ass. I was wearing another pair of tight jeans, stone-washed to a nice marbled pattern with little front pockets stitched in arrows pointing toward my crotch.

Thad had borrowed the boat’s truck for the first few days of my arrival. We climbed from the gravel parking lot into the new ’85 Dodge. The windshield had only one neat, thumb-size nick.

I’d barely swung both legs in, when Thad’s hand followed the arrows. His fingers tightened around my pubis bone, and I arched toward his hand and ran my fingers across my tits.

“Damn, I missed you,” he said, switching hands to slide his Ray-Bans on, then turn the ignition.

We drove past beaches littered with rusty metal, old wood, slabs of shoved-over concrete, and across the short Bridge-to-the-Other-Side. Dutch Harbor is really two towns, on two islands. Dutch, on Amaknak Island, is the harbor town, with the big boats, the docks, the canneries, the HiTide. A tiny channel of Captain’s Bay separates this small island from the large one—Unalaska, where the second half of town lies and is formally called, of course, Unalaska. This is the old town with the
longtime residents, the church, and the Elbow Room. Thad pulled up and parked beside a battered blue building, nearly flush with the beach at high tide. Around the bar stood the village center, a series of similarly battered frame houses, all small, most with additions of one sort or another projecting from them. Dirt paths scattered across the stiff grass laced with buttercups, a map of who visited who and how often. And many of them led straight to the Elbow Room.

I’d heard a lot about the Elbow Room in the last few months. Simplified, it was a bar. But, as is often the case in small towns, the bar is the community center, the concert hall, the therapist’s office, the job service. But the Elbow Room wasn’t just an any-town bar, or maybe it was the best and worst of all the any-town bars roughed up, scrunched down, and stuffed into a vintage World War II shack.

I’d heard about the brawls, the knife fights, the drunks freezing in snowbanks steps from the door. I was expecting more. But at 2
P.M.
on a weekday, the Elbow Room felt safe and familiar. The essentials were all there—the bar topped with some variation of Formica, backed by a dazzle of mirror-backed booze bottles; red vinyl booths pushed against paneled walls in the back and along the dance floor; a tiny room in the corner with a booth that overlooked the bay; a plywood platform in the corner of the dance floor; and bathrooms squared off across the long axis. Two classic barroom icons decorated the place. The spread of photos tacked on the wall flanking the bar, chronicling patrons’ stages of inebriation. And the lady painting—this one a black-haired beauty stretched among apricot chiffon on some kind of settee. The bar, like the town, seemed timeless. Only by flipping through the jukebox could you find yourself on the time line—the Eagles, Billy Idol, Fleetwood Mac, AC/DC. Notably missing were Madonna, Duran Duran, Cyndi Lauper.

“Hey, Thad. What do you want?” The woman behind the bar leaned toward us.

“Two beers.”

She pulled the tap and knocked two glasses down.

“What’s going on?” Thad said. We scootched up onto bar stools.

“Not much.”

“This is my girlfriend, Brandy. Marge.”

I smiled at the woman. She was in her fifties, burly, and well made
up with gray-white hair piled and pinned a good four inches above her head. Dangling gold earrings, heavy lipstick, eye shadow. “I’ve heard a lot about this place,” I said.

“Worst bar in the country.
Playboy
wrote us up as the roughest anywhere.” I’d hear the boast regularly in the following months. Whenever newcomers struck up conversations at the Elbow Room, they were sure to hear just how illustrious a place they had wandered into. Hallowed ground. A few times I would even meet someone who had dropped in because they’d heard the stories and wanted to see for themselves. Actually, I would later read, the Elbow Room was never labeled the worst bar in the country. Just the “most despicable.” Of course, it didn’t look too tough that afternoon. There were four of us—me, Thad, Marge, and a hulking, bearded man two stools down.

Marge followed my gaze. “It’s different at night,” she said, going on the defense. “You’ll see.”

You may not be familiar with the kind of places where rough bars are considered attractions. Where the best place to be, the only place, is the worst place. But I understood. There isn’t much danger in most of our lives, and some of us feel its absence like a kick to the stomach. People seek edges—mountains, thrill rides, painful men. The Elbow Room on some nights had that edge.

“I had to take a gun away from an asshole just two nights ago,” Marge added, on the offense now.

“Who?” Thad asked.

“Some drunk Russian. Off one of the boats.”

“You keep his gun?”

“No, he came back for it the next morning. Nice guy really. He gave me a box of them god-awful Russian cigarettes. I gave them to Carl.”

“Shit.” It was more of a grunt than a word, coming from the hulk down the bar. “Weren’t cigarettes. Cardboard around strings of tobacco.” Carl slid a flat rectangular box down to me.

I slipped the pack open and pulled out a poorly wrapped gray cigarette. The paper end crackled when I lit it. Thad introduced me to Carl while I inhaled a ball of unfiltered tobacco. They were bad, ragged on the throat. Carl was ragged, too. No, that’s too strong. He was unkempt. Carl was six foot three and well fed. The kind of man with hard fat, like retired football players. He wore a dusty blanket
poncho, giving him something of a Mexican bandito look. And he had all the hair possible. Curly brown hair on top, full beard, furry arms. A long scar trailed, just visible behind his beard, from his ear to his collar. I liked him.

“You got any more of those
baidarkas
?” Thad asked him.

Carl waved his hand toward Marge. “Gave ’em to her.”

Marge lifted a jar filled with dark floating globs and set it on the bar. I peered through the dim pickling juice. “Try one,” Marge said. She fished out forks and stabbed inside the jar until she speared one of the slippery shellfish.

“What are they?”

“Baidarkas,”
Marge said, handing me the loaded fork. “That’s Russian for
kayak,
which they’re supposed to look like.”

I pride myself on being someone who can eat anything. So I did. They tasted, of course, like anything pickled does—like pickles. Texture is what counts, and these resembled really tough, large shrimp. Nothing you could just pass through your mouth and swallow. You had to chew these guys—and chew, and chew.

We sat with our beers and pickled kayaks for the next two hours. Thad and Carl talked about people I didn’t know and boats I’d never seen.

Thad and I were used to sitting in bars together. We both came easy to bar-stool intimacy. Having a boyfriend who is equally matched when it comes to mingling is essential for spending long afternoons at the bar. One time we settled into a Sea Galley bar, I think it was Medford. We were waiting for a money wire to move on north. We waited from late morning ’til probably 6
P.M.
I got adventurous and traded my Bloody Marys for T&Ts then mai tais. We struck up a conversation with a businessman away from home. Named Jay Jay, I think. “What I wouldn’t give to be doing what you two are doing,” he said, slouching over a melting vodka on the rocks. “No one giving you orders, no place you have to be.” He ordered us another round. I liked seeing Thad and myself through Jay Jay’s eyes. We were wild and pretty, Bob Dylan free. Staying poolside in cheap motels, drinking in dim bars all afternoon, and heading north in a silver Camaro. An entirely wonderful thing, to swap drink tabs with someone who looks at you with envy. Gifts of perception offered freely and often. I borrowed Jay Jay’s image
of me, believing it, reveling in it, holding on to its residue until I coaxed a replacement from someone new. Moving from gift to gift. Empty hands outstretched.

At the Elbow Room with Carl and Marge, Thad had already seduced the denizens. I didn’t have the part I liked to play. I’d plopped myself into a town filled with people as free as me. I felt like a warm-up band—eclipsed. There was a certain nostalgia to the feeling. It was the same one I’d had those first few years going out to bars with my mom, after Dad left.

She favored lakeside marinas and golf course watering holes, anyplace that had the aura of a step up, of better quality men. Although quality, of course, was relative. Those first couple of years, before I’d learned, before I’d watched and measured her gestures and clothing and words, she was everything. She’d walk into a place, a den of men, and instantly the mood would change. A woman had arrived. A real woman, with a dress on and perfume and sprayed hair and that certain assurance of curves and heat. She worked hard at her game, never coming on too strong, waiting for them. I’d sit beside her, about as noticed as the purse she hung over her chair, and watch. We always had a new one interested within a few minutes. I could feel the jockeying that went on behind us. The rush of attention, followed by the hush of calculation as some ancient hierarchy was established. And one would approach, a sortie, as the others watched. Drinks would be bought. A story told. And sometimes a new man with his own boat or his own family and only a few stolen weekends. Sometimes he’d move in. Sometimes he’d stay a few months.

I had watched and I had learned. I was probably better than her by the time I hit seventeen. But this was different. This was no golf course watering hole, no marina lounge. This was a bar.

Here there were the locals like Marge and Carl, but fully half the people in town at any moment had come just for the money, the novelty, the escape. I was just another girlfriend, following another fisherman, following another trail of money.

“I’ve got to visit the head,” I told Thad, trying out the fishing lingo. He smiled widely, his eyes twinkly with four Rainiers.

I slid off the stool and took six paces to the women’s bathroom. It was a tiny thing—one sink, two stalls. I picked the far one and pulled
down my jeans. It takes a long time to pee when you’re drinking, like your kidneys are processing as it comes. I waited and surveyed the stall walls. As usual there was plenty to see.

I’ve collected bathroom wall writing ever since visiting a bathroom in Florence, Oregon. Someone had written in ballpoint “The problem with this fucking world is apathy.”

Someone else had scratched an arrow pointing at the word
apathy
and scrawled “What’s that?”