And She Was (24 page)

I’m not going to try to describe it. But you’ll get the idea from how it’s made, as Marge explained. “They take a bunch of seal flippers, dry them out, salt them up, then bury them along with fish heads and God-knows-what in a barrel. Next spring, they dig ’em out, nice and decayed and tasting like shit.”

Not shit, I decided. Much worse.

A wind rattled the bus windows, and I jumped. Dark gray clouds had slipped under the light gray. Something tin and unsecured lifted and flew past the window. Les turned in his seat and raised up to his knees to look out.

“Shit,” he said. “It’s getting bad.”

A tarp blew off and swirled down the beach. Carl stuck another piece of lusta in his mouth and turned for the door. When he opened it, the wind blasted through and lifted loose papers and a plastic plate. I could hear him banging around outside, tying stuff down, weighting tarps. The bus shook again, and the rain started. Not just rain, but rain thrown down at angles that pelted the bus windows, washing the view, which had grown dark as night.

Marge looked out the window. “Carl’s a wanted man, you know.”

“Wanted for what?” I asked.

“Murder is what I heard, down in Mexico or somewhere. That’s why he came way out here. Figures the law won’t come looking this far out.”

“No, he’s not running from the cops,” Les said, shifting to recross his legs. “The Hell’s Angels put a contract out on him back in the seventies.”

“Well, I guess he’s running from something anyway,” Marge said. “Heard he was a Vietnam vet too. Got messed up.”

The door slid open, and we fell silent as Carl came back in, wet and loaded with driftwood. He lit a kerosene lantern and hung it on a hook
in the kitchen, then filled up the woodstove. He extricated a gray folding chair from the pile of junk on the driver’s seat and crashed it open by the couches. It squeaked as he sagged wetly into it. He dripped. Four reserved puddles formed underneath him.

This was not to be a short burst of a storm that plays out and leaves you to yourself again. This was going to last.

“Did I roll up the truck windows?” Marge asked.

Les shrugged. “Who cares.”

Marge shot him an irritated look.

Bellie shifted several times.

Carl kept dripping.

I wasn’t sure what to do. “Pass the whiskey,” I said. I poured and passed to Bellie. She filled her mug, and the bottle made the rounds.

“Looks like the police gave up on them boys that jumped Les,” Marge said, breaking the long silence. “Said they couldn’t get no one to say who was involved.”

I glanced at Carl. He grunted.

Another silence.

“I know,” Les said. “Let’s tell ghost stories.”

“Shit, Les, I don’t know any fuckin’ ghost stories,” Marge said.

“I’ll start,” he said.

Les told of the Otter People. Somewhere in Southeast lay an island, uncharted, shrouded in mist. When a group of adventurous prospectors stopped there to look around, they were chased by naked creatures with the heads of otters and the bodies of men. Only one made it back to tell the story.

It was a good story, and Les had good timing. He looked around at his audience. “Creepy, huh?”

“That ain’t nothing,” Marge said, apparently inspired. “My sister bought this place on Vashon ten years ago. She’s there maybe a week when she starts hearing these funny noises.” Marge continued her sister’s tale until it ended with a new house, a dead cat, and a lingering mystery.

“I found a dead guy.” Carl’s tale began, then paused for a swig of whiskey. “I was just out there getting some
baidarkas
when I see something floating in with the tide. I waded out some. It was a dead guy. Been dead a long time.”

Carl fell silent. It had been the longest string of words I’d heard from him.

“That’s it?” Marge asked. “Who was he? What happened?”

“Don’t know. Face wasn’t all there.”

“Well, what did the police say? When was this?”

“Ten, eleven years ago. Police didn’t say nothing. Never knew about it.”

“What? You just left him there?” Les asked.

“He didn’t seem to mind. Went out with the tide. Never saw ’im again.”

“Fuck, Carl,” Les said. “You are messed up.”

Carl grunted.

“I’ve got a story.” Bellie had been strangely quiet. I knew she didn’t have any coke, and that without it she wasn’t much of a talker. But even taking cokelessness into account, she’d been withdrawn. She hadn’t curled her hair, and it hung in straight slabs over each cheek. She looked so much more deliberate, more native.

“It’s an old story. My grandmother told me when I was little.” The glow from the stove lit half of Bellie’s face a warm orange. The flames reflected in her smooth, dark hair. The bus rattled steadily, with occasional stomach-flipping gusts sending it into a shake. Bellie stared into the fire. I watched her fingers move to the birthmark unconsciously. If you hadn’t known about the mark, you would have assumed she had a headache, the way her fingers pressed and smoothed, pressed and smoothed.

“There once was a girl who was born with something living and cold in her body.” Bellie’s words and cadence were not her own. This was not my Bellie. She spoke with someone else’s voice. “People of the village turned away from her even when she smiled. A time came when the people were starving because the Outside Men, living inland, stole food from caches in the night. The thing in the girl grew colder and more alive. She told the village that she would travel into the mountains and take back the food. The people laughed at her, saying, if men stronger than you do not return, how will you do so? She replied, ‘I will not be controlled by other than my own hand.’

“The girl went to the caves and took pieces of dead-man’s fat, dripping with juice. This was forbidden, for a woman’s power was not
meant to become ensnared with the darkness of the Dry Ones. But still she grew warmer with pleasure as she smeared the grease on the soles of her feet and the palms of her hands and placed it in her mouth. And with the taste in her mouth, she knew what she must do. She saw the good in it; she saw the evil. And she chose.”

All at once, something like iron fell in my stomach. I felt like I was back in the cave, reaching out to touch what I thought were roots but were actually the limbs of long-dead bodies. I must have gasped, because everyone but Bellie looked at me suddenly. When I didn’t say anything, they turned back to Bellie.

“She walked until she saw a giant man go to a creek and drink it dry. She watched him beat a drum until he yawned. He put down his drum and stretched out on his back. She threw a stone at him. When he didn’t move, she took a rock and pounded into his beating heart. Having killed him, she stretched out his intestines and walked away.

“She reached a village and entered a house filled with people. In the evening, someone came to the hatch asking, ‘You do not have a guest, do you?’ Another person replied, ‘We do have a guest.’

“The first voice said the girl should come to his home to sleep with his son. The man asked the girl if she had seen his brother, a giant man who beat a drum. The girl knew she was to be killed but followed the man to his son’s bed anyway. After she and the son had made the bed wet, she lay awake. Hearing someone outside ask if the girl was still in the bed, she lay the sleeping son in her place. Then, using a man’s voice, said, ‘Yes, she is still here.’

“The man, having come into the sleeping place, struck with a knife and cut off the son’s head and sucked the blood. Then the girl told the man he had killed his own son.

“The girl ran back to the house she had first entered. She woke the people sleeping there, and together they made a pit at the foot of the ladder, covering it with grass and piled stones. At daybreak, the man who had killed his son appeared at the hatchway and asked, ‘You don’t have a guest?’

“The people answered, ‘We do have a guest.’ The man put his foot on the ladder. The girl noticed his anklet made of the skin of a big seal with pieces added. When he entered, he got stuck by his shoulders, and the girl raised her bow and shot him behind the arm. He dropped
into the pit. All the people of the house threw stones at him while the girl shot and killed him.

“Although the girl had become loose in the mind after killing, the people thanked her and loaded her with many things from neck to feet and sent her out, saying, ‘In your own hands you hold your fate tight.’

“Thus the girl returned to her village, having killed those who were killing her people, and gone where many did not return from. Her wisdom grew until it touched God’s hair, hanging down the sky. This girl never died but passed from woman to woman through the generations, killing when needed. She is out there now, in caves, behind hills, in tidal pools, watching for danger, it is said.”

We were all silent after Bellie’s story. Something about the battering wind and rain, the crackling stove, drove the story deeper than an old Aleut tale passed down and remembered by a good-natured party girl. I glanced out the streaked windows, almost expecting to see a slim, dark girl darting through the storm. The bead, which I’d restrung, seemed heavy around my neck.

Bellie broke her gaze from the fire and looked at me for the first time since beginning the legend. She leaned toward me, cupping her hands around my ear. “That body he found,” she whispered, “she did it. She’s always watching you.”

Her breath stroked at my ear, and I shivered and shifted away from her.

Les broke the weird feel in the bus. “Shit, those old stories are so lame. Every one of them is about someone killing someone because someone’s freaked out about something.”

“Yeah?” Marge lit a cigarette. “Well, someone’s killing people. Since I been here, four unexplained deaths.”

“Oh, come on,” Les said. “You got the big bad ocean, man-eating gear, not to mention drink-till-you-fall-down drunks. Surprised more people aren’t dropping like flies.”

“What’s the deal with the caves and the dead-man’s fat?” I’d been dying to get their take on it but didn’t want to appear eager.

“The mummies,” Marge said.

“Mummies?”

“Yeah. The Aleuts used to dry out the really good whale hunters and stack ’em in caves. Some fool wants to hunt whales or take a danger
ous trip or kill his big brother, goes up and takes a piece of the body and eats it. Supposed to give him good luck.” Marge crushed out her cigarette and lit another.

“They got some scientists out here off and on checking them out. They’ve only found a few of the caves. Say there’s probably dozens more. The bodies are preserved like in Egypt ’cause of the way the Aleuts did it, and the caves are some kind of vents with hot dry air. They got some of them mummies in the Smithsonian.”

“So people go up to the caves, get a chunk of mummy to bring them luck?”

“Power,” Bellie whispered. “The power a person has in life stays in his body if it’s treated right. It stays, waiting for someone living to come and eat from it.”

“Bet it tastes like fucking lusta,” Les said.

That night, after driving back through the tail of the storm, I could still taste the decayed seal flipper on my tongue—old, salty. Maybe it was those little belches of resurrected lusta that kept Bellie’s story nagging at me, eating at me, as I lay in bed. The Outside Man ate his own son’s blood. The Aleut girl ate from the bodies of once-glorious whale hunters.

I couldn’t help thinking about the taste. I mean, how does a mummified hunter taste? Blood, I knew. We all know blood—old metal, salt. I climbed down from the loft to brush my teeth again. But another lusta belch hit me before I’d retucked the covers around me.

What is it about the eating? Even our very own Eve eats the apple, the ovaries of a tree. The Aleut girl eats for power. Eve eats for knowledge. Knowledge and power—the two loop back on each other as parts of the same whole. I lit a cigarette, hoping the warm raw smoke would cover the lusta belches.

What does power taste like? What is the taste of knowledge? Of good or evil? Like lusta, dry and rank? Or is it sweet?

The nub of my smoked-out cigarette burned my index finger when it hit me—I already knew. That was the point of the story. The taste of power and of knowledge is the only taste we know. We are born and we die with it. It’s the taste of a suffering world the Buddhist tries to
escape when he meditates. It’s the taste of Sartre’s existential angst. It’s the taste of a dilemma, of responsibility, of culpability. A curse and a gift. It’s the taste Eve knew when she opened her eyes and fell.

I knew what the old women had done. They’d gone to take dead-man’s fat. Which, unless they were just crazy, or maybe because they were plain crazy, meant they had been planning something that required power. The time frame between their visit to the cave and Nicholas’s death did not escape me.

I kicked the covers off, suddenly hot, and rolled a joint. I held the smoke deep in my lungs and let it out in a low cloud. What would it be like to care about something or someone enough to eat from a mummy? To decide to take a life? Who was really taking advantage of Eve’s gift, the one God didn’t take back, the power to know good and evil and direct yourself to whichever you chose?

I, for one, hadn’t even been paying attention, let alone choosing anything. I did choose one thing that night under my comforter with the lingering taste of decayed flipper in my mouth—I chose to be wary. I’d accidentally fucked with something that shouldn’t be fucked with. And somehow, those old women knew.

JULY 1942

M
ost history books about World War II say that American soil was never occupied by enemy forces. It is only the more obscure books that detail the battles of Attu and Kiska, the bombing of Dutch Harbor. Thousands of American and Japanese soldiers died in the cold, wind, and fog of Aleutian battlefields. At a time when bombers couldn’t make it across the Pacific without refueling, both American and Japanese commanders saw the strategic value of the Chain, only 650 miles from Japanese military bases. The Americans built bases, airfields, submarine stations. The Japanese planned their attack.

Although officials had debated evacuating the two thousand or so Aleut citizens along the Chain, so close to the enemy, not a single Aleut had been removed. For the forty-two people on the westernmost island of Attu this indecision meant years in a Japanese prisoner of war camp when enemy soldiers captured and occupied the island. Half died. For the people at Dutch Harbor, it meant watching the bombs fall.

On June 3 and 4, Japanese Zeros strafed the new military bases, killing forty-three soldiers. In the next few weeks, as fears of an invasion mounted, officials scoured the islands lining Alaska’s panhandle, looking for places to stow the Aleuts for the duration of the war.

The new homes they found—abandoned canneries and gold mining camps in Southeast Alaska—brought death for many. The water, sewers,

and food were bad. Disease rampaged. When the war ended three years later, only half of the Aleuts returned to their island villages, burned and vandalized by soldiers.

Ida noticed the trees first. Patches of late-afternoon sun burrowed through their branches, slicing the ground of Etolin Island into misshapen patterns of light and dark. She had seen pictures of these giant plants, but she’d never expected how they would make her feel. They cut her off into a small patch of space, separated from whatever lay beyond, filling her with a dread that would never leave.

Ida wondered what her mother would have thought. Her mother had spoken once of how strange the above-ground houses looked to her when she first moved to Dutch Harbor as a girl, how they seemed to mock the hills. Ida looked at the long, two-story cannery that rose like a red cliff before the green forests. It’s better that Katherine died on Unalaska, Ida decided.

She stood on the dock with 121 others, all contemplating their new home. Etolin Island was the most remote of the evacuation camps, forty-five miles by boat to Wrangell, a tiny town itself. They had been the least isolated of the Aleutian Aleuts; now they were virtually quarantined—a situation state and military officials thought wise for Unalaska Aleuts, who were known to drink too much and cause problems.

“Get your stuff from the boat and follow me,” yelled one of the Indian Service officials. “Come on. Come on.”

Ida followed a line of people, catching their bags as others threw them off. She and her husband had been allowed six, what they and their eldest child could carry. With only a day’s notice, Ida had packed and unpacked several times. When she realized that the parkas and clothing alone would fill all their allotted duffels, Ida unpacked, called the children in, and dressed them in layers, topped off with the thick coats despite the July warmth. She told each of the children to select one toy. Five-year-old Dora had picked a sealskin doll. Three-year-old Joseph chose a carved wooden boat. And Ivan, twelve, picked two books. Ida left her Samovar, her sewing machine, her best cooking pots and knives. She packed only a few needles and thread, dried salmon,
and tea, which she placed in her grandmother’s basket. Marcus and the other men who owned their own fishing boats dragged them on to shore, ferreting out what they hoped would be safe stowage spots in the high grasses near the beach. In those few hours before the officials herded them onto the waiting boat, Ida and Marcus joined others at the church, boxing icons and candlesticks, carefully storing them in the attic. Ida wrapped among her clothing a few of the icons she loved best, one of the Virgin holding the tiny, manlike Christ.

She and Marcus trudged up the beach toward the long building, herding their three gawking children before them. Ida turned to look for her other charge.

“Fenia,” Ida yelled, seeing her mother’s friend was not following. When Fenia didn’t turn but remained looking over the ocean, Ida sighed. She did not want this responsibility. Even as a girl, Ida saw that something was wrong with Fenia. She hadn’t approved of her mother’s friendship with this woman. At times, after they had been together, Ida watched her mother staring into the mountains, even after a cold wind swept everyone else inside.

Ida stepped out of the line and set her bags down. Her husband touched her arm. “I’ll get her,” he said.

Ida picked up her bags and continued on with the children. She glanced back to see Marcus standing alongside Fenia, staring out at the ocean that had left them here.

When Ida stepped inside the building, her sense of dread sucked down like a barnacle on rock. She had heard the white officials talking, saying the “duration village” would need repairs, but she had suspected nothing like this. The entire place smelled musty, and rat droppings formed into layers dried black. White mold crusted the floorboards. She could see the green of the forest behind cracks around the high windows. All through the building, drafts rushed about hurrying to find a way out again.

This would be their home. For how long, Ida didn’t know. The war could be over in a few months or linger for years.

Ida watched Fenia rise in the darkness and push aside the hanging blanket, separating the family sleeping area from the next.

“Where are you going?”

“Shhh. Sleep again,” Fenia whispered and left.

Probably she should stop the old woman. It wasn’t safe creeping around in the dark. Loose boards, tree roots. The camp was still falling apart, even after six months of hard work. And there were the drunks.

On Unalaska, their numbers had grown as Fort Mears had grown. The first construction workers had arrived three years before. She’d watched from across Illiuliuk Bay as they tore through the rock and sand of Amaknak Island and lifted buildings from the lumber that came on steamships. Then the rumors that the government would designate Unalaska a naval reserve and order martial law. Ida joined in the campaign to incorporate the village into a town, hoping this would give them some control of their future if the fort kept growing. The soldiers arrived, and squabbles over land, leadership, supplies, grew more intense. Unalaska had become a military town, with flowing money and overflowing liquor. The religious leaders were manipulating land deals, while some Aleut girls were trading themselves for soldiers’ money. And everywhere people were drinking. Ida had believed this was a short-term problem. That the war would end soon, the fort would close, the soldiers would go home. Liquor shipments would return to their slow trickle. She had never imagined that it was her family, her people, who would be sent away and that the booze would follow them.

Ida listened to her children’s deep breathing, wrapped her leg over Marcus’s hips, and lay awake.

When the first sounds of morning broke, Ida rose with relief. She dressed and hurried to the mess hall. Several women were already there, building fires in the cooking stoves. Ida nodded to her friend, Irene, who was poking kindling into a firebox. Irene was the daughter of her mother’s other inseparable friend, and the two girls had grown up as close as sisters.

Irene’s daughter, Lizzy, sat at one of the long tables, hunched over her scraps of paper. The camp’s only schoolteacher had fled after only two months on the island, and now they were awaiting the promised arrival of a new one. In the meantime, the children ran wild in the kitchen or bunkrooms or along the beach. Except Lizzy. Ida watched her dark head bobbing in rhythm with her pen, watched her little feet tangle first in the table’s leg, then in the chair supports, then return to
the floor only to start the cycle over. Lizzy had always been quiet, but in the last few months, Ida had watched her friend’s daughter grow even more shy. And as her mouth slowed her pencil became faster. She scribbled now with such intensity, the lead biting into paper.

“What are you writing, little one?” Ida touched the girl’s head and looked over her shoulders at the scavenged pieces of paper she always seemed to be scratching upon. She could see gouges ripped through the paper along with slashes of words, thick and close set.

Lizzy looked up. “Just what I do, what I see,” she said.

“You write about your writing? This is all I see you doing.” Ida chuckled. “Come, help me fill the water pots at the pump, then you’ll have something to write about.”

Lizzy folded and tucked the papers into her pocket without a word and followed Ida to the rack of pots.

Ida disliked cooking with other women. She took pride in her custom-mixed teas and the butter-gold flake of her fish pie crust. Now she had to simply pitch in with whatever the supply boats brought every couple months, mostly canned vegetables, macaroni, potatoes, and more macaroni.

Ida handed two pots to the girl and took two for herself. She heard the tin clinking together in Lizzy’s hand as she swung the back door open and held the pots to her side so she could see the two narrow steps that descended to the boardwalk. Lying below the last stair was a young man, clearly passed out. Ida ushered Lizzy around him then nudged him with her foot.

“Get up.” She didn’t expect him to but wanted to feel the quality of his body with her foot to make sure he was alive at least.

He moaned and hunched his shoulder. It wasn’t the first time Ida had stepped over a drunk during her early morning routine. For the first couple of months, the unanimous sobriety had seemed strange. No liquor was supplied at the camp. The officials saw to that. When Indian Service or state officials dropped by to check on the Duration Village, Ida often heard them talking to Mr. Walton, the white camp director, about disgustingly drunk Aleuts, about inferior tolerances, childlike need. But liquor found them. Before the third month, the first bottle arrived. At first the officials made a big to-do. Questioning, lecturing on the importance of a dry camp. But these were short
timers. They had given up after a bunch of useless words proved truly useless. It came in waves. One day the drunks were grumpy but sober. The next day bottles would appear all over camp. Some people suspected the government officials were sneaking it in with the boxes of macaroni, making a little extra to compensate for their dismal assignment of keeping tabs on the evacuation camps scattering Southeast Alaska. Others suspected private bootleggers. But with miles of intricate coastline, finding them and stopping them would have been beyond the scope of the tired, underzealous officials.

Irene was presiding over a blazing stove when they returned, and Lizzy ran to her mother’s side. Ida set the two full pots on the woodstove then helped Lizzy lift hers.

Irene kissed the top of her daughter’s head. “Good, you got her to do some work for once.”

Ida smiled.

“Eli didn’t come back last night.” Irene poured a sack of oats into the boiling pot.

Ida watched the eight-year-old girl quickly look away. She wasn’t like other children. She listened too intently to adult conversation, understood too much. Ida had to remember to speak carefully around her.

“Lizzy,” Ida said, “you’ve carried two pots of water. Now you have something to write about.” She nodded toward the tables.

Ida kept her eyes on the pot as the little girl moved away. She knew Irene was worried but that she would speak in her own time. Irene’s husband was a drunk. One of the worst. During those two dry months, he had become a different man. Ida heard them making love behind their blanket walls. She watched Eli join the other men to build new cabins to relieve the overcrowded bunkhouse. She saw him wrap his arms around Lizzy and heard the girl’s shy laughter.

“He’s like when he was young,” Irene had said one afternoon. “I could love him again if he stays like this.”

But it didn’t last. When the booze showed up, Eli was the first to find it. Saying he’d found a job working at Wrangell, he’d disappear for days.

“He’s probably found a job mending nets or hauling logs,” Irene said.

“Probably,” Ida replied.

Ida spent the day washing. The camp had no laundry room, so one day a week the women turned the kitchen into an assembly line. They
started after breakfast, filling tubs with water. Ida hung the blankets closest to the stoves. With only one per person, they had to be dry by night or run the risk of a cold or worse. The old and the young were falling sick with pneumonia, flu, and tuberculosis. An infant and an old man had already died.

Fenia appeared just before lunch. Ida had forgotten to worry about her during all the work. Fenia picked up a child’s coat and hung it near a stove.

“Are you going to want to know where I’ve been?”

Ida turned back to the pile of wet clothes. “I’m not keeping track of you.”

“Maybe you should be.” Fenia smiled. She was old but had a girlish way about her. Ida knew Fenia was slow, but sometimes it was more than that. Fenia seemed to live in a world Ida couldn’t see. Even now as she stretched wet clothes over lines, she sometimes twirled or walked on tiptoe. Ida found her frivolity in the face of so much work tedious.

“Since you want to tell me, go ahead.”

Fenia leaned in close, wrinkles darting into the thin lines of her old lips. “I know where the liquor comes from.”

Ida turned, a woolen skirt dripping against her pant leg.

Fenia pretended to be busy picking another damp item from the pile. Ida sighed. Fenia knew she’d gotten her attention and would now make her work for it.

“What are you saying?”

“Last night,” Fenia said, her voice sweet as a girl’s, “I saw a boat with no lights come in. I saw a boat leave, whispers and dark. People waited on the beach.”

Ida’s disgust with Fenia did not stop her from believing. Fenia’s mind was untrustworthy, but she had special talents. Like knowing what others were thinking about doing and what they had done. She pulled Fenia out the back door.