And She Was (23 page)

“What did you do?” I asked her. “When the Russians came, what did you do?”

Her eyes and her lips shifted for a moment. She looked more sure, more pleading, more beautiful, more dangerous. We stared at each
other, exchanging nothing but questions. Until I lost and looked away. “Insane,” I muttered, walking back to my books. “Maybe insane.”

I’m not much for respecting indigenous religions. Most of them just seem too weird. But I have to admit, as I removed my finger from the book and placed it on the table, this made some sense. The bodies of the dead are a link to whatever lies beyond. There’s power there, perhaps power to remake fate. But shit, you’ve got to watch your back once you’ve messed with it.

As the sky darkened, I became aware of the light on at Mary’s. I definitely needed company. Alone, my head filled with mummies and more mummies, which was better than the flaking, but not by much. I grabbed the bottle of Baileys and walked to her place. Mary was sitting on her porch too, letting the evening melt into night without acknowledging the change.

“You want company?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Does it come with the Baileys?”

“Yes.” I sat next to her and filled her empty teacup to the top.

We didn’t speak for a long time. Initiating a conversation with a recent widow doesn’t come easy. Do you bring up the death right away? Do you try to make her laugh with something else altogether? I didn’t know, so I did the best I could and kept my mouth shut.

We watched the first stars peeking through the growing cloud cover. Then we watched the fog roll in. It crept up the hillside, surrounding us in its rich moist blanket. The lights in the valley disappeared along with the stars. I’d drunk enough Baileys now so the horror of the caves, and that feeling that something had followed me back, eased up. Also I’d smoked some weed when I got home, and that had helped. I refilled my mug and lit a cigarette. Mary reached for the pack as I was tucking it back in my pocket. I lit one for her, and she handed the pack back. I set it on the porch boards between us and laid the lighter on top.

“Funeral’s tomorrow.” She exhaled smoke, which mixed and swirled with the fog until it became part of it. “Everyone’s saying I’m lucky he’s dead. Maybe I am.” The fog created a room around us that echoed strangely with her words.

“Social Services says I can get the kids back soon. They’re flying them out from Sitka for a visit next week.”

“Can’t wait to meet them.” I’d never been good with kids. They were
too whiny, too needy. “I could watch them for you now and then,” I said. I pictured having them over, bringing their Legos and building something tall and awkward. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad.

Mary smiled. “They’re good kids. They’ll miss him though.” She paused. “They loved him.”

I looked away from her, hiding the pity.

But she saw it. “I did love him. I just wanted…”

Her voice trailed off. It’s not something you can explain. The cords that bind people are so much more twisted and knotted than we know. I thought about Thad. I didn’t like thinking about him anymore, knowing he wasn’t who I’d thought he was, knowing he could love me. Could I keep pretending nothing had changed? And was it fair to keep my life wound with his while I did? Hearing Mary talk of her love for Nicholas, a man whose love could never be wholesome, unearthed in me the knowledge of just how far away I was from anybody, good or bad. I’d managed to make it to age thirty-one without loving anybody. Or anything for that matter. I would not be crushed by unreturned love like my father; I would not confuse excitement and comfort for love like my mother. Unlike them, unlike Mary, I was safe.

The fog eased itself around and between Mary and me.

“What do you think happened to him?” I desperately wanted to know, but actually asking was weird. I probably wouldn’t have if it hadn’t been for all the Baileys and the strange intimacy created by the fog.

“I think he got killed.” She stabbed out her cigarette on the porch and tossed it into the fog.

“Someone murdered him?”

“Maybe not someone, maybe something.”

“What are you talking about?”

Mary pulled another cigarette from my pack. She took a deep drag and exhaled. She stared out into the gray. “Do you ever think that pieces of the people who came before stick to a place, to the rocks and wind and water? That a place can kill?” She didn’t elaborate.

Finally I asked, “You think rocks and water murdered him?”

Mary shrugged. “Oh, I think they may have had help. But, yes. I think they were behind it.”

Suddenly the weed and the liquor were working against me. The way the fog had cut us off, removing us from everyday logic and per
ception and creating a gray void where things were just more, well, possible. Even weird notions of rocks that directed murder and caves that held bodies offering their power to the living. It was a seductive place; it wanted me to stay, maybe go in a tad deeper. Answers, it whispered. Knowledge.

You know how it is. We back away because we know ignorance is better, far better. And, frankly, we don’t believe any of it. Don’t want to.

Normally, it’s easy. Unless you’re sitting by a fire with velvet blackness too close at your back, or you’re all alone at home feeling a wind shake the walls, or you’re quarantined in an Aleutian fog and you’ve had too much to drink. I got vulnerable. I’m not sure if I couldn’t step back then or that the part of me that didn’t want to had opened its eyes.

Anyway, that’s how it was. The dangerous, daring, let’s-just-see part of me moved further in, not a bold leap, but a tentative step, and another. The real world had stretched thin, and I could see the forms of what lurks beneath. I sat in it for a time. I knew Mary was there. Suffering thins the world too. I can’t say there were revelations. No ahhh, so that’s what’s going on. Just a sense that there is something else. Something of the lives of all the people who had come before—my Aleut Mona Lisa, the young Liz, the bodies in the cave—had been shed here and lay waiting within the gray ocean, dark mountains, and fog. Something deep and gray and moving with intention. That’s all I got from letting myself stay.

I felt the wind lift my hair first. It swirled down from the hilltop and into the fog. Within minutes it drove the dense blanket down into the valley and out to sea.

I stood up. “I better go. See you tomorrow.”

Mary didn’t move. She stared at the retreating bank of fog. I left the Baileys, nearly gone, and the cigarettes, half gone, and climbed back through the brush against the wind.

AUGUST 14, 1986

I
t wasn’t just the booze I’d left behind that ravaged Mary’s face late the next morning. I’d come to the graveyard ceremony because everyone else was going. And, well, I still had that odd sense of responsibility for her. Marge had even closed the Elbow Room, although it would be wide open for the wake that followed.

I tucked myself behind the crowd but had to jockey with two men and a group of teens for the back row. I wasn’t the only one who didn’t want to feel like part of this rite. We were all standing. Just a wind-blown group, our clothing snapping against our bodies, cluttered on a forlorn hillside of scratchy grass and the sentinels of weathered crosses.

Mary wore a long black skirt and brown jacket. She didn’t look up once during the words chanted by the Russian Orthodox priest. Someone had attempted to put makeup on her face. Two stark lines of blush flared across her cheeks. A dab of lipstick dotted the middle of her lower lip.

Standing in the back, I could look around at the crowd. I saw all the locals I knew and many I didn’t. Bellie was there, her eyes fastened on her boots. Beside her was a Little Liz I almost didn’t recognize in a tan polyester suit with a satin-faced jacket over it. She stood between Ida and Anna. Seeing the three women together again, the
women who had led me to the cave and the bodies, scared me, made me want to run.

Ida must have felt my eyes on her, even from across the crowd. She looked up slowly, sliding her eyes into mine. The distance between us squeezed together, like the ground separating us had folded and we were suddenly face-to-face. We weren’t, of course, but I could see her eyes narrow, then open wide. The universal expression of suspicion resolving into certainty.

My breath stalled, sputtered, and became a conscious effort. All that breath control reminded me of my lungs. I dug out a cigarette. As I exhaled the first drag, I risked another look at the three women. Liz and Anna were staring too, a puncture-wound of a stare. I dragged my eyes away, but not before I saw the creepy smile stretch Ida’s face.

They knew. They knew I’d followed them, been to the cave. The thought flared bright against the inside of my skull, then faded back to reality. There was no way they could know.

The priest, rather youngish and handsome I thought, nodded at a woman I recognized as Mary’s sister. She pulled Mary forward and directed her hand to release the anemones she clutched. They fell silently on the coffin. I could see points of blood on Mary’s palm where she’d driven her nails into her skin.

Four men looped ropes around the painted plywood coffin, which thudded against the sides of the hole as they lowered it. I looked behind me at the vista Nicholas would have, if I believed in such things. The cemetery straddled the curve of a hill that commanded views of the town, of the bay studded with rocks thrown from cliffs. It filtered the wind over a collection of ornate wooden crosses, two-tiered in the Orthodox style. At the foot of each cross, the unique footbar tilted toward the land and sky, a reminder that Christ had twisted the bar in his agony. Higher up, the grayed, leaning wood of older crosses stood like protectors of the fresher graves below. No one mowed. No one sold plots. Relatives did not come to find solace in manicured shrubs and weedless lawn. This cemetery existed only for the dead.

When the casket settled against the rocky muscle of the hill, the priest nodded to Mary’s sister again. Mary was supposed to toss the first handful of dirt over the body that had been her husband. She re
fused to move. When her sister took her elbow to lead her forward, Mary jerked away.

She muttered something I couldn’t hear and covered her face with her hands. Those who had heard Mary’s words whispered them to people who hadn’t. By the time the words passed back to me, the lack of action had grown uncomfortable.

One of the teenage boys leaned toward me. “She said ‘The kids should be here.’” As he spoke, I saw Ida moving from the middle of the crowd. She came alongside the grave and peered down.

The priest seemed relieved someone was following the script. He nodded to Ida.

She shot him a quick grin then kicked a splatter of dirt into the burial hole. She turned without looking up and moved back through the crowd.

The priest scanned the faces in the first row, as if checking for any notice of this break with tradition before announcing the wake would follow at the Elbow Room.

If anybody took offense to Ida’s way of sending Nicholas underground, nobody let on. I watched Bellie take Ida’s arm as they descended the graveyard path, followed by Little Liz and Anna. They moved as one through the grass. The strength, near grace, in Liz’s steps contrasted so with the way I usually saw her, passed out, pissed on. This was the Liz of my cabana, sober, purposeful, and confusing the hell out of me. Liz turned once, finding me instantly in back of the crowd with her eyes. I stopped midstride, fastened. Then she let me go, turning back to the path.

When the trail gave way to relatively flat road, I watched Bellie lean in to Ida, say something, and release her arm. She stepped to the side of the road and waited for me to catch up.

“Gimme a cigarette,” she said, falling into step with me. She lit up and slid the half-pack into her own pocket.

“What went on up there?” I asked. “What was that old hag doing?”

“Ida? She’s my great-grandma.” Bellie held her cigarette up and examined it. “Guess she wasn’t that sorry about Nicholas.”

Shit, I thought. I have to be more careful. Never know who’s related to who on this island. We walked in silence for a minute or two before I found a safer question.

“Tell me about Liz. How did she get like she is?”

Bellie tossed her cigarette to the side of the road and reached for another in her pocket. She generously offered me one. “From what I heard, Ida and Liz used to run this women’s group from the church. A long time ago before the fishing started big. They took care of people, found homes for the kids with wasted parents. That kind of thing. Then something went wrong. Bunch of the kids got taken, and the social worker died. Liz just fell apart, started drinking. She never stopped.”

Bellie hadn’t looked at me during this explanation. But now she did. She stopped in the road, letting the last stragglers pass us. “Liz isn’t who you think she is,” Bellie said. “Remember that.” Then she started walking again, and I let her go.

I didn’t go to the wake. I’d attended the funeral out of some warped duty I felt for Mary, but I couldn’t see sitting around with a bunch of people, drinking and telling stories about a man I didn’t know and didn’t want to know. Mary had a gaggle of relatives waving tissues, holding her elbow, and ushering her through. And I needed to think.

I went home and read my outhouse door again. It seemed clear. Liz had blown up the social worker. I closed the lid on the hole and sat there, trying to imagine what had happened back then. I did understand Liz better. She had every reason to souse herself with booze. She couldn’t stand herself.

Les was back at work within a week of the attack with only faded bruises and a fragile quality to his movements. Life at the bar got normal—maybe even extranormal. Like we had to put a wallop of effort into everyday gestures and words to tug normalcy back from exile. Marge told Les to “shut the fuck up” even more than usual to make up for the fact that she really didn’t want to say it at all. Les flirted fiendishly, his way of showing an indomitable spirit, I suppose. I wore my hair down and put on lots of makeup. We were all working so hard to get back. Even Carl tried.

He invited us all to what he was calling a “Fuck-the-Elbow-Room Party” at his converted bus. Carl lived in the old full-size school bus. It had run when he’d driven it to a nice stretch of rock-strewn sand be
side the ocean. But he’d seen no reason to move on, and slowly the tires flattened, the rims rusted and settled into the sand. Carl’s bus hadn’t moved in years.

Being one of those recluses who likes people but only at arm’s length, Carl did not throw parties. That he had invited me, Marge, Les, and Bellie, saying she was the hardest-working employee at the bar, was so out of character that people had been whispering about it for days. As the designated Sunday afternoon drew near, Marge, Les, Bellie, and I all felt this gathering sense of excitement.

Saturday afternoon before the big day, I stopped by the Elbow Room before returning the rental truck I’d used to stock the cabana. I lifted myself onto a stool; Marge set a whiskey sour in front of me. The place felt odd. No Carl.

“Where’s Carl?”

“Left early. Says he’s got housework to do.”

I raised my eyebrows, and Marge shrugged.

“What’s with the poncho?” I asked. “Why’s he always got that poncho on?”

Marge leaned against the back bar and crossed her legs. “Showing off his Spic heritage, I guess.”

“Carl’s Hispanic?”

“Shit,” she said, crossing her arms, “call ’im a Mexican or a Spic. But you call him a Hispanic and he won’t even grunt at you for a week.”

I drained my whiskey sour and slid off the stool.

“One more thing,” Marge yelled as I opened the door, “you’ll wanna eat before.”

Sunday afternoon Marge, Les, Bellie, and I all crammed into the cab of Marge’s truck and splashed through last night’s puddles. We swung around the church, the eagle atop the onion dome, presiding over the well-dressed crowd, mostly Aleuts, pouring out. We passed the boat businesses and the docks out Captain’s Bay south of town and kept going. Marge pulled off onto a gravel beach that had been abandoned by the water years ago and drove right up to a long yellow bus.

Carl appeared at the open door with a denim apron tied over the top of his poncho and hanging to his knees. “Beer’s in there.” He nodded
toward a cooler. He turned and heaved himself back up the two steps into the bus.

Les rummaged in the cooler and threw beers at each of us. I stepped into the bus with a sense of wonder. Inside it was very unbus-like. A big foam bed piled with sleeping bags stretched across the back. The middle section had been converted into a genuine living area with two small couches lining the sides and a potbellied stove at the center. The fire blazed through the open firebox door, sweating up the windows and fogging up the view of the beach and ocean. Kitchen and gear filled the front. The windows had been covered over with miscellaneous shelving on which sat dishes, large jars, an assortment of fuel, camp candles, a radio. A small counter complete with tiny sink and a two-burner propane stove lay tucked underneath. On the other side, cabinets and a half-size fridge lined up alongside fishing gear, poles, nets, tackle boxes, buckets.

Carl stood over the stove, flipping something.

“What’re you making?” I asked.

“Alodiks.”

“Which are?”

“Russian fry bread. Sit down.”

When all of us had found a spot by the stove, Carl brought over a plate piled with light brown
alodiks
. We each took one and alternated munching the rounds of crunchy, greasy bread and gulping beer. The bread was actually wonderful, but every few bites you could taste that the grease had gone off a bit. The beer was cold and felt good near the toasty fire.

Although it was only mid-August, the temperature had dropped. A uniform of gray had taken the sky, and the wind held an edge. Summer was closing up shop, and I had mixed feelings about winter. If summer required long pants and a jacket on the best days, what would winter demand?

Carl didn’t sit with us. He banged around in the kitchen.

“You got this fixed up real nice,” Marge yelled.

Carl harrumphed.

Bellie looked like she needed some blow. Les stared out the windows.

Carl returned with a pot of coffee, five mugs, and a bottle of whiskey. He passed out the mugs, filled them half coffee, half whiskey.

“Fuck the Elbow Room,” he said, raising his mug.

We all followed in a chorus. “Fuck the Elbow Room.”

Whiskey and coffee is not my idea of a good drink. But apparently we were supposed to drink it like a shot because Carl began refills almost immediately. I quickly downed mine, stuffed more bread in my mouth, and held up my mug.

“Fuck the Elbow Room,” Carl said again when the second round was poured.

We repeated the toast again. This happened three times within five minutes. I started to wonder if something had snapped in Carl. He didn’t say anything else. Just pour, “Fuck the Elbow Room,” drink. Pour, “Fuck the Elbow Room,” drink. It was the oddest ceremony I’d participated in. Apparently Marge could only take so much.

“What’s your fuckin’ problem with the Elbow Room?” She stood up, placing her fists on her hips.

“Nothing,” Carl said. “Just fuck it.”

“I don’t see you saying that when you’re sitting there half the day.” Marge was getting riled up and suddenly the party was in danger of going sour.

Carl looked her right in the eye. “Fuck the Elbow Room.”

Marge shook her head and rolled her eyes. “Shit,” she said, sitting back down.

I’m not sure what this exchange was about. Carl was making a point, and I don’t know if anyone got it or even tried that hard. I’d had a beer and three whiskey coffees in fifteen minutes, so none of it seemed that important. Just odd.

Lusta broke the threatening mood. Carl brought a Baggie of grayish brown stuff and passed it to Les first. Les opened the bag and stuck his nose in.

“Shit,” he said, “that’s rank.” He grimaced and turned away, passing the bag on to Bellie.

Bellie reached in and broke off a small dried piece and placed it on her tongue. She handed the bag to me.

“What is it?”

“Decayed seal flipper,” Les said.

“Just don’t smell it. Put it right in your mouth,” Bellie advised.

So, of course, I stuck my nose in the bag. I nearly vomited.

They all laughed at me. “Plug your nose,” Marge said.

As I’ve said before, I hate the idea of having some weird food right in front of me and not trying it. I figured people had been eating the stuff for eons, so it wasn’t going to do permanent damage. I plugged my nose and fumbled a small piece from the bag. Even plugged, the nose can still get a sense of what’s in the mouth. It tasted dry and salty, crisp as a communion wafer, but it definitely smelled inedible. I swallowed quickly.