And She Was (20 page)

So he did. We rode straight over the Bridge-to-the-Other-Side, down the valley, and up the hillside in the dark. The feel of his body against my chest, the vibrating machine between my legs, all worked. When he pushed open the cabana door, I forgot the odd way Thad had been acting that evening, the tension between us. We did it without foreplay the first time and lots the second. We started on the living room floor and ended in our nest of a bed, where we stayed, until all the Ritz crackers were gone and I’d had one extravagant orgasm and two of the general variety. With him beside me in bed, I didn’t hear Liz puttering around the cabana or feel the guilt she’d stockpiled in the outhouse.

“So how you been doing here without me?” It was early morning and we were sitting on the deck, sipping cold coffee, wrapped up in our down comforter. Even in midsummer, the mornings were cold enough to take the steam off a mug within minutes.

“Okay.” I wondered if I wanted to tell him about Mary and her late-night visit, about the three old Aleut women hiking in the night. After my deflating bathroom wall excursion, it all seemed horrendously stupid. I sure didn’t want to tell him about Tom. “I’m making good money at the bar. Getting to know some people.”

“Yeah? Like who?”

“Well, like Les. We went to a beach party together day before yesterday.”

“I guess he’s safe.”

“You know, he has a crush on you.”

“Yeah, he tells me every time I see him.”

“I told him to back off before I kick his ass. That’s something I don’t get. How come no one gives him a hard time? I mean he’s so flaming, and he comes on to half the fishermen in the bar. You’d think he’d get the shit kicked out of him with regularity.”

Thad took a gulp of coffee and pulled the comforter around us tighter. “I guess it’s like Les is not just any fag. He’s our fag, so he’s okay.”

I watched his face as he spoke. “That’s kind of what Les said.”

Thad stared over the valley, swaying wildflowers and grasses in an easy wind. He took a last swig of coffee and set the mug on the gray planks. “So what do you think of going down to visit Steve and Holly when the season ends?”

I laughed. “Not on the top of my list.”

He didn’t look at me. I waited.

“What’s going on with us, Brandy?”

I knew what was coming, felt it like a sudden freeze in my gut. I dropped my hand to his thigh, sliding it upward, an instinctual reaction.

“Stop it.” He pushed my hand away. “All you ever want to do is screw. We need to talk.”

“Okay. Okay.” But I smiled—in that way.

Thad stood up. “What the fuck’s wrong with you?” he said, looking down at me. He turned away and went inside.

I sat out there for an hour, trying to figure out where I’d gone wrong, how I’d missed the signs. Thad wanted to love me. It seemed so clear now, but a few hours ago I would have laughed at the idea. All I knew was that I couldn’t fix this for him or for me. When I came inside he was just sitting on the couch. I sat beside him. “I guess I didn’t know you felt that way,” I said.

He turned to me. “Why did you think I asked you to come out here? Why did you think I got this place all set up? What did you think I wanted, just something to fuck when I came into town?”

His face was so raw and open. His curls, lying against smooth skin
like a child’s, set off the maleness of his body, the sweep of his shoulders and the arches of his biceps. I wanted to cradle him in my arms and cry for him. I wanted to protect him from me.

“I don’t know what I thought.” It was the only truth I could offer. “I guess that it didn’t matter that much to you.”

“It does.”

“Can we just leave it for now? Can we just enjoy each other for the next few days? Okay?”

When he turned to look at me finally, I knew he was about to lie and I knew I wanted him to. “Yeah,” he said. “Okay.”

For the next three days, I pretended. I reveled in the old Thad, the one I thought I’d known. I reveled in knowing who to be and how to feel. He borrowed a bigger bike from a friend, and we followed the valley road back until it became a trail and swung behind the mountains and around others. We watched swathes of lupine bending together in the wind. I picked a bouquet and forgot it inside a pillbox where we made love. We lay naked on a flat rock at the top of a hill overlooking the sea. We found the wreck of an old ship below the cliffs, and poked our heads into the wheelhouse, and ate lunch on the rotting deck. We got drunk together at the Elbow Room and walked along the beach afterward. He bought us matching
SPAWN TILL YOU DIE
T-shirts at the airport gift shop. Black, with a white skull and crossbones, bordered by sharp-nosed salmon, these Ray Troll T-shirts were all the rage.
SPAWN TILL YOU DIE
was the most popular, but
HUMPIES FROM HELL
, with its colorful bared-teeth fish, was all over the place too. I slipped mine on and almost felt like I belonged here. Thad skimmed my box of books and kept trying to start Aleutian history conversations. I kept changing the subject. I wanted to just be me again, the comfortable, fearless me I felt in his company. The me that wasn’t obsessed with old Aleut women and their dismal history, the me that wasn’t alone and scared shitless. I had to separate those two me’s by keeping Thad out of it.

All too soon and not soon enough it was over. Steve tracked us down at the cabana. The boat was leaving that night. I saw Thad off under a half moon on the long dock.

I stood for a long time on the oil-soaked planks that reached out over the water, letting the wind beat at my face. He hadn’t asked if I’d miss him this time. I hadn’t had to lie.

I turned my back to the wind and headed back to land. It was Thursday night, and the Elbow Room would be crowded with drunks and money.

APRIL 1904

T
he United States had purchased Alaska from Russia for $7.2 million in 1867. And while most of Alaska remained lightly populated and unexplored by its new owner, Dutch in 1904 was a surprisingly cosmopolitan town. The spring headquarters for the Bering whaling fleet and a supply stop for gold stampeders headed to the Klondike and Nome, Dutch overflowed with bars, dance halls, and men. Jack London is thought to have stayed in one of the town’s fancy hotels and to have dreamed up the novel
The Sea Wolf
before its grand fireplace. Dutch was a wild town of fast talk, wicked schemes, daring last chances.

To this town came the remnants of remote villages, ravaged by disease and starvation. Many Aleuts had been well educated under Russian rule, speaking both Aleut and Russian. Now their languages were outlawed and their schools closing. Although Russian Orthodoxy would remain the dominant religion, Christian missionaries came to take up the slack. A Methodist school and orphanage, the Jesse Lee Home, had opened in 1890 and endeavored to educate and shelter orphaned girls. But the home’s directors believed Aleut orphans were better off being adopted by white families than by their Aleut relatives, and many were shipped outside the islands. The Aleuts finally would petition against the home in 1910, charging that children were often adopted over the protests of close family.

With otter, seal, and seal lion populations dwindling, new people
streaming through, and a new nation to which they owed allegiance, the Aleuts were confounded by yet more changes. Two hundred years before, they had been Unangan; sixty years before they had been Russians; now they were Americans.

To fall in love. To fall. Love. Fenia believed in it. She believed in it when she spread her thighs and closed her eyes. She believed even more fiercely when the man’s breaths came quick and her body rocked with his thrusting. She believed when she smiled, pulled down her dress, and folded his money into her palm.

With each new man, and they were usually new, she’d watch him closely. She smiled at him shyly. She loved each one. Sometimes she walked to the harbor and watched the boats coming in. Whom would she find to love on each of these? She most loved the Revenue Service men, with their government checks and their heroic stories. She loved the adventure tourists with their sketched maps and chests of liquor. She loved the gold seekers with their eager walk and new wool coats. She would wait. She was young. She pulled the scarf from her head, letting her pink ribbons lift back with her long dark hair, and her full skirt flattened against her legs.

A red-bearded man approached across the jutting pier. “Are you waiting for someone?”

She looked up at his blue eyes, eager and sure. “Maybe for you.”

He smiled and took her hand. She led him through the narrow streets of Dutch: past the grand hotel, where white women chatted on the porch, past the gambling houses, and bars. She led him up the gray wood stairs to her tiny room. She didn’t speak but cast quick glances at his face. Red hair. She liked that.

He unbuttoned his pants. She untied her pantaloons. She lay back on her bed. He moved on top of her.

“Never had an Aleut,” he said, pushing into her.

She smiled and closed her eyes.

When he couldn’t pay, saying he was sorry he’d spent everything he had on his grub stake, she touched the stiff red hairs on his arm and reassured him. She knew he wished he could.

“When you come back from Nome, you can pay me then,” she said.

“In pure gold.” He kissed her lips and waved as he stepped onto the landing, still buttoning his pants.

“I love you,” she whispered as he left. And she did.

Fenia washed herself and stepped into her pantaloons, drawing the string tight around her waist. She looped the ends into a bow and straightened her ribbons.

“Fenia,” came a whisper, followed by a soft knock.

“Come in.”

A thin woman cracked the door and slid through.

“It’s started again.”

Fenia concentrated on swinging her arms in two perfectly even arcs as she followed Olga down the creaking corridor and into another identical room. On the bed lay the body of a woman, naked. Throat slit.

Fenia knew her well. Sophia had been one of the first girls at the Jesse Lee home to befriend Fenia when she arrived shortly after her mother’s death. Sophia had taught her how to survive, showing her in secret how to make the Russian letters and, in public, how to fold her napkin in her lap. Together they had practiced flirting with the white strangers, and later, Sophia had taught her how to take their money.

Arranging her skirt as she sat tenderly on the blood-soaked bed, Fenia stroked the dark hair, loosening the strands sticking in blood. She pulled each one, reverently, until hair lay in rays on the pillow. Fenia gazed up at the Holy Mother icon Sophia had hung over her bed. The Mother’s hand lifted toward the viewer, offering herself. Fenia pulled a cover over Sophia’s body and began to sing.

Looking at her you would have thought her intimacy with the dead body strange. She never cried, never closed her eyes. She touched the body as if it were alive, as if Sophia could feel the hands on her face and hear the song. You would have known something was wrong with Fenia. It showed.

Olga couldn’t watch this time. It had been only a year since the last spring influx of stampeders, when the girls started dying. That time, two had been beaten to death before Olga, Fenia, and Katherine had found and killed him. Would men like this come every spring, Olga wondered, waiting for news the Bering ice pack had broken, waiting to board their flimsy boats and continue the adventure?

She went to the window and gazed at the street a floor below. A
group of men in woolen trousers and woolen vests, their coats draped over arms or shoulders, went arm in arm toward the point. They sang something sad as they went. Two women, white and dressed in full pale blue skirts, almost matching, bent to talk to each other as they walked. Olga saw them cross the hard-packed dirt street when they neared the singing men. Still the men watched. But these were white women, and the men kept their thoughts and bodies to their own side of the street. For her, she knew, they would have crossed over. They knew Aleut women were less fuss when it came to chastity, monogamy. It was easy to be a whore. But Olga did not find it easy to be a killer. She didn’t think she could continue without losing herself. And she knew Fenia was already lost.

“We better do it now,” Olga said, watching the singing men disappear behind a hotel. “There’s little sense in waiting for more to die.”

Fenia picked up Sophia’s limp hand, cradling it to her breast as her quiet love song gave way to a sweet high moan. “Yes,” she said. “He loves the blood. She is prettier with it on.” Fenia remembered Sophia’s dreams of marrying a whaling captain and traveling to California, where she heard the sun shone every day. Sophia had told Fenia about waters warm enough to swim in and houses with windows as wide as her arms stretched. Fenia closed her eyes and let the images come; she danced in a yellow gown across polished floors, holding the rough hand of a man she loved. She waited patiently for another to pull out a chair at the candlelit dining room at the hotel. She unbuttoned the shirt of another, slowly tracing her fingers over revelations of chest, abdomen. Then she danced again, head tilted back, eyes closed as his strong arm held her.

She smiled, opening her eyes and finding Olga in the dim room. “She must have loved him,” she said.

Olga nodded, still looking out the window to keep from having to look at Fenia. “I’ll ask around.”

It wasn’t hard to find a killer here. Not if you knew the town, who’s who and what’s what. The whaling fleet, scores of makeshift boats, and barges wintered at Dutch, bringing their tired, sickened crews. Steamers from Seattle and San Francisco stopped to pasture hungry
horses and restock supplies. They disgorged streams of eager, hopeful men bent on the gold in Nome and the Klondike. Hungry men they were, waiting to move north, waiting for news the Bering ice pack had broken up. The town, only a few years before an enclave of Aleuts and Creoles—speaking Russian, drinking Russian tea, draping Russian scarves about their heads—ran white with outsiders. Wood-frame hotels, bars, dance halls, a giant whale-rendering plant spread over the sand and ryegrass. Dirt paths gave way to mud roads then to planked boardwalks. The world was steaming into Dutch Harbor.

Fenia was picking lupine above town when Olga found her that evening. The purple spires, reaching to her thighs, rippled across the hillside in a light wind, reminding Fenia of hands passing along piano keys.

“I found who he was,” Olga said. “He’s at one of the taverns.”

Fenia pressed her face into the flowers. “Won’t these be pretty on my dresser?” She inhaled and closed her eyes.

Olga nodded. “I’ll get Katherine.”

“Yes, I’ll pick a bouquet for Katherine too.”

Olga touched Fenia’s cheek, and she tilted her head into the touch. “It will be okay,” Olga said. “We’ll take care of you.”

Fenia smiled. “I know.”

Fenia watched Olga hike back down the hill and smiled to think of what the night would bring.

Katherine wasn’t a whore. She had married a Creole, half-Russian, half-Aleut. A middle manager in the fish-packing plant. She supplemented the family’s seasonal income by making baskets, which sold to the whites who visited. Already Aleut baskets were gaining fame because of the fineness of the Aleutian grasses and the skill of women like Katherine.

The three women walked, first on the sand, then taking a faint trail into the hills. They were silent until they reached the backside of the first hill. Except Fenia, who hummed softly as she walked behind the others.

“Are you sure you found the right man?” Katherine asked.

Olga nodded.

“I suppose it would be wrong to wait to see if he does it again. See if he’s the right one.”

Olga nodded. “It would be wrong.”

Katherine glanced back at Fenia. “She is getting worse.”

“I know.”

“I worry sometimes that she’ll start doing it without us.”

Olga walked without speaking for a time. “We will take care of her.”

The three women returned to the cave and carved out their power from the dead bodies. They were not frightened. They were the daughters of daughters of daughters, and the power had rooted with each generation. As before, Fenia stood within longer. She filled her lungs with the warm dryness until her mind reeled into the pink-spotted darkness of too much air.

“And these are the generations of Fenia.” She touched each body, whispering the words she’d been taught never to forget. “Aya begot Aggixia who begot Agripina. Agripina lived sixty-three years. These are the daughters of Agripina, Emily and Mary. Of these daughters, only Emily was marked. And Emily’s time was sixty-five years and saw much hardship and the vanishing of her mother’s village. Emily begot two daughters who lived, Rita and Patricia. And Patricia was marked and begot daughters, but only Fenia survived.”

Fenia finished the recital as she completed the circle of bodies. At the last man, black with age, she touched his stretched and screaming lips. “It’s good to remind you of the living,” she said.

Born simple and happy, perhaps Fenia would have remained a slow, pretty girl if it had not been for the weight of her place, revealed to her when she was only thirteen. Her mother, dying of tuberculosis, told Fenia the story before she was ready. Sometimes only those least able are willing to carry such a burden.

Fenia could remember only through a mist the first time she had loved a man through death. Her mother had explained, and she had obeyed, not just her mother’s voice, spoken with the voices of her ancestors, but her own voice and vision, which saw more clearly when it killed. Fenia knew her mind was not whole, but when she killed, she felt it growing, almost large enough to understand. With sweet duty, she had held the body of the last man as he died. She felt his weight in
her arms now and smiled with the memory. Only the gentle waves of time had carried him from her. And she missed him. Now, she would get him back, for a while.

The maternal ancestors of Olga and Katherine had likewise drawn a circle of duty around their daughters. Katherine’s and Olga’s mothers had moved them to Dutch as the sea otters vanished and starvation and disease cast whole villages to the wind. The girls grew up with looming whalers stalking the harbor, white men hurrying, the rustle of fine dresses in their ears. And they grew up knowing their duty was to kill. They weren’t girls anymore and had learned to be somber, to turn their faces from blood. Katherine and Olga would not have chosen Fenia as a comrade in this duty. It was the way she loved doing it that unsettled them, and the permission her elation gave them to grow flush with excitement, with purpose when they killed. When they watched Fenia, saliva pooled thick in their mouths, defined their swallows. And they found it hard to deny the power and how good it felt.

Fenia found him still at Blokes. She fanned her hair and ribbons across her shoulders and stepped up to him. He turned to see her young face smiling shyly.

“Can I get you a drink?”

She sipped at the shot of whiskey he handed her. She slid her hand down to take his. “Come with me,” she whispered.

They walked hand in hand along the dark beach. Fenia leaned against him now and then, thinking of his wind-sheltering body. Each time she looked up at him, her chest grew heavy. She loved his long legs and rough hands. He stopped to press her against himself and feel her small breasts. She sighed and felt the warmth of her desire spreading into her arms and legs. When they rounded the soft mounds of grass mingling with the beach, Fenia stepped away from him.

She heard him think how beautiful she looks here in the sand with starlight at her back. The short wooden oar rocked his head forward. Olga swung again before he could turn, and he went down. Fenia cocked her head to the left and watched him fall, watched Olga raise the oar again and again until stillness. Fenia knelt beside him. Her hands smoothed his blood-smeared hair and stroked his cheeks.