And She Was (26 page)

Within an hour they slid into the next cove. They rowed until they’d traveled half its length, then turned to shore. When the boat bumped the rocky bottom, Irene jumped out and pulled the bow onshore. They waited.

An hour passed before they heard the first steps and quiet voices. The shapes of five men moved across the beach. One of them smoked, and the women followed the glow of his cigarette as it marked the group’s journey to the water’s edge.

“The boat.” Fenia pointed to the mouth of the cove.

Ida heard the engine and let her eyes rest there until the darker shape of the boat formed. A small tug, no more than forty feet long, moved slowly toward the beach. When it was only a hundred feet offshore, Ida heard the grinding anchor chain. The men onshore had launched their skiff, which Ida guessed they had hidden along the tree line.

Irene pushed the boat silently backward, lifting herself in as it slid into deep water. Ida rowed smoothly, keeping her hands level. Although the idling engine, the wind, and the water easily masked her oars, she didn’t want to bang the boat’s sides. Loud low noises would echo across the cove. Ida slowed. The men were unloading from the bow, which pointed toward the shore on an ebbing tide. She waited until the men’s skiff was loaded for its first trip.

When it was halfway to shore, the women eased up to the tug’s stern, where step rungs led from the waterline over the rail. Irene slipped a line over a cleat. She placed one foot on the ladder and lifted her weight slowly from the skiff to the boat. She climbed two steps until her head cleared the rail. A dark, deserted deck stretched in front of her. She swung her body over and dropped to the deck. Ida followed.

The women waited, listening to the voices coming from the port side of the bow. Three men, talking low. Ida crawled forward toward the cabin. She eased the door open a crack and listened again. The men remained outside, waiting for the skiff to unload and return. Ida crawled over the doorway lip and scanned the floorboards in front of her. Irene crawled beside her and pointed. Ida saw the handle. They crept toward it.

The hinged engine hatch creaked when Ida lifted it. She froze. Nothing. She hung a leg over the side, feeling for the ladder, found it, and descended seven rungs to the engine room floor. Irene closed the hatch above them.

The engine’s staccato roared through the room, pressing out every other sound but the hard slaps of waves against the hull. In the dark, the smell of oil and grime lay like a hand across Ida’s nose. Irene reached for the flashlight in her pocket. She scanned the compartment quickly. The women didn’t know how long they had but hoped the men would need at least three trips to unload the liquor shipment with their small skiff. The first trip had taken fifteen minutes. They had at most thirty more to finish the job.

“Here,” Irene whispered. She found the seawater cooling through-hull fitting along the starboard hull. She stepped over a pump and located the shut-off valve. Irene ran her light along the attached hose that disappeared behind a crate before running into the diesel engine. The pump sucked water from the ocean to cool the engine. Ida and Irene moved toward the crate. Ida slid it aside while Irene pulled a hacksaw from under her coat. She sat on her heels and lined the blade up with the hose. It took only a minute to saw halfway through the rubber. The water would gush into the engine room while the engine grew hotter.

Ida slid the crate back in place, and the women turned to hunt for the bilge pumps, which pumped engine room water back into the sea.
They traced the lines, pinpointed three places, obscured by food supplies in one spot, and spare engine parts in the others. Again Irene sliced.

As they finished, they heard the bump of the skiff against the bow. The second trip.

“Hey! Watch it,” someone shouted. A splash.

“Dammit. You’re paying for that.”

Ida and Irene climbed out of the engine room.

“Not paying for anything we don’t get.”

“By God you will or you won’t get nothing else.”

Irene crawled back to the cabin door. Ida heard the skiff push off as she gingerly closed the engine hatch.

“Let’s get off,” one of the men said. “Roger, pull the anchor.”

Ida didn’t crawl; she ran for the cabin door. She followed Irene to the stern and nearly stepped on her fingers descending the ladder back to the skiff. Ida heard the men dragging the anchor chain up over the bow as she slipped her line off the stern cleat.

The rush of water spun the skiff backward as the engine was thrown into reverse. Ida plunged the oars into the water and worked her shoulders back and forth. The boat had turned to open ocean by the time they reached shore.

Ida shook as she swiveled the oars into the skiff. Her legs rattled like reeds. The women clamored out and watched the dark shape leave the bay.

The news did not take long to reach them. It came at lunch that afternoon. A boat had gone down not more than twenty miles from the island. The crew radioed for help. But they’d waited too long. By the time rescue boats reached the last known location, the radio had gone silent. None of the three crew members were found.

Ida knelt under her precious icons often in the next weeks. She thought about what those last hours on the boat would have been like. The skipper feels the boat grow heavy. Feels how its bow refuses to rise over each wave. He tells the engineer to check below. The engineer finds water, maybe knee-high, sloshing with the rolling boat. He turns on the bilge pumps. But water flows through pierced lines to flood new
sections. He searches for the leak, plunging his arms into the icy water again and again. Maybe he finds it. But not in time. The engine cuts off when the water tops its intake. Maybe the boat sinks then, or maybe the crew can’t keep the bow into the waves, and the boat wallows helpless in the troughs until it rolls and never rights. It sinks slowly at first, then all at once.

At times images come to Ida through a new and unfamiliar awareness. The crew knows, in those last moments before they hit the icy water, that someone has cut the lines. Why? they scream. And in the water, as their legs grow too numb, their brains too slow to hold thoughts or images, they remember only the feel of a child’s arms tight around them, a small face pressed into their neck, the smile of a woman they love.

Ida wondered if these are their final dying memories, or if something darker comes last. She searched the Virgin’s face, looking for an answer.

When the liquor was gone a week later, she began to believe they’d done the right thing. There would be fewer deaths now. Wouldn’t there?

She wasn’t sure if Fenia had been right about the new awareness given them by the dead-man’s fat. The familiar part of herself thought not. But sometimes she did know things she shouldn’t. And people looked at her differently. Mr. Walton wouldn’t meet her gaze when she complained about the overflowing toilet or the iron-colored water. He didn’t argue with her or remind her how grateful she should be that the government was protecting her from the Japs.

Fenia died in the spring. She came down with the flu, then pneumonia. The morning of her death, she called Ida and Irene to her.

“I will tell your mothers of this beautiful thing you have done when I see them. And in time, you will tell your daughters.”

Irene nodded.

“You must find Anna after the war. You must tell her. Make sure she comes back to the island and watches with you.”

Ida took Fenia’s hand, slight as a bird’s wing. Fenia’s only daughter had gone off to college just the year before. Ida knew that Anna had been desperate to escape her mother, that her dreams of Seattle and
college were nothing more than the most comfortable way to untangle herself from her mother’s delusions. She would have done the same.

“I will find her and tell her,” Ida said, imagining that day when she would sit Anna down and give her the missing pieces of her mother’s mind. For the first time in all her years of knowing Fenia, Ida loved her. Slivered tears came, one at a time. Ida saw both Fenia’s madness and her heroism at that moment. She did not know which scared her more. “We will watch. Always.”

Fenia held a long breath, then exhaled. “I want you to take my body home with you. I want to lie in the cave with the Dry Ones, with your mothers.”

Fenia is confused, Ida thought. She spoke her next words slowly. “My mother was buried in the cemetery. You know that, Fenia. You were there.”

Fenia smiled. “She never wanted to stay there. Too dark underground. Patricia and I took her. And I took Patricia.”

Irene gasped.

Ida remembered all the afternoons she’d sat by her mother’s headstone, talking to an empty grave. She saw the blackened corpse Fenia would soon become. She imagined loading it on the boat. She imagined laying it down like a sleeping child in the dark warmth next to her mother and Patricia. Three mummies, in a cave she had not yet seen, waiting and watching.

AUGUST 21, 1986

T
had came back. I didn’t meet him at the dock because I didn’t expect him.

I’d been cleaning rat shit out of the kitchen and thinking. About the Aleuts. About conquest.

There are those who will wish to think of these Aleuts as pure of heart and deed, living in pristine nature, at one, and all that. We have that tendency, those of us from recent conquering cultures. After a few generations the guilt sets in, and we nurse that guilt, making our once-and-former enemies into phantoms of some imagined time when humans were innocents.

None of this is true. People have been nasty to one another from the get-go, and those cultures that lost the conquest game did not lose because they were any less bloodthirsty than the winners, but because they hadn’t figured out how to make a spear, or a bow, or a sword, or a musket, or a Gatling gun, or a bomb. The victims are only victimizers without the equipment for the job.

The Aleuts had been fighting other Aleuts, taking slaves, who could be killed at the whim of the
toion
. They’d gathered hundreds of warriors together for stealth raids on the Koniag of the mainland, taking supplies, women, lives. These peaceful people were set upon by the Russians, many of whom were themselves recently conquered. Most
of them had been scattered bands of Siberians up until 1639, when the Russians pushed to the east and called the land they’d taken Russia. These Siberians were still getting the feel for this new nationality of theirs when they fell upon the Aleuts. “Ah-ha,” they may have said, “here’s a new people who are even more savagely backward than we were before those Russians got to us.”

And so it goes.

Those Russians who took Siberia were the descendants of a people who had been, in turn, conquered by the Mongol hordes in the thirteenth century, many of whom had conquered western China, only to become Chinese despite their victory. Rome conquered the Germanic tribes, only to be undone by their descendants. The British fell under Roman conquest, learned well, and emerged hundreds of years later to conquer India, parts of Africa and North America, half of which got rebellious and set off to conquer the land to the west, including the pieces of Alaska the Russians had not subdued.

And so it goes. The circling winds of history and all that. What I didn’t get then and understand oh so well now, is that this same cycle circles for individuals too. That all you have to do to turn a victim into a victimizer is give her a baseball bat.

And so it goes. The circling winds of my history and all that.

I had a cigarette in my mouth and Madonna on and was crawling along the wall trying to see where the rats were getting in when I heard bootsteps on the porch. I stood, shook out my legs, and opened the inner door just as he entered the outer one.

“It’s you,” I said.

“It’s me.”

The sun was low behind him, and I was struck again by how handsome he was. I felt overwhelmed by his sudden presence—both rescued and doomed. “I hadn’t heard you were coming in.”

“I know. I wanted to surprise you.”

He followed me into the cabana and set his duffel by the door. “You look different,” he said.

I let my hair down from its ponytail. “I wasn’t expecting you.” I moved into his arms and felt the solid quality of him. I could smell the fish and the work and the water. His hand followed my arm as it rose to his neck and stopped me before I could pull myself up for a kiss.

“I’ve been thinking a lot while we were out. I’ve been thinking about what happened last time. I figured some stuff out.”

I saw it in his eyes. The look that says, I’ve planned this, studied this, I will be heard, I will make myself understood. I did what any girl would do. I crossed my arms, grasped the bottom of my T-shirt, and slid it up and over my head. I walked backward, dropping my pants and undies, and scrambled up the ladder. “Come on up,” I called, “and tell me all about it.” He was there before I finished the sentence.

We fumbled in the low dark space while he lit one of the candles. I thought I could waylay his intentions by simply stretching out there on the comforter. I was naked in candlelight with a man who hadn’t seen a woman in two weeks; it should have been a breeze.

His hand began to trace circles around my breasts, slow and deliberate. “I’ve been thinking while we were out,” he said again. “You know I’ve never really had my own place. Not since I’ve been fishing anyway. I’ve been thinking we should look for a place to buy, a real house. You know?”

I laughed. “You’ve been bunking with Steve too long. That’s what I think.”

I needed him to laugh with me; he didn’t even chuckle.

“Maybe, but Brandy, I want to have things. I want a house, maybe some land; I want a family, kids, regular things. I’ve been thinking about it. We could buy something near Seattle or even here. Do you like it here? I don’t care where really.”

His fingers stopped. He seemed to have forgotten his hand lying there between my tits. He wasn’t really seeing me; he was seeing his fantasy. I slithered under him so he could feel me against his chest. “Let’s talk about it later,” I said and gripped his ass against me.

We were in the midst of a long tonguey kind of kiss, our hands between each other’s legs, and I was so ready, when he pulled back and propped himself on his side with his elbow. “I saw this place last year a couple hours north of Seattle. It looked like it had been built in the trees. I mean right up in them. Like a tree house. I was thinking about what happened between us last time. I think you’ve never really had someplace you could count on. Your own place, something we could make into our own home. And I think you haven’t had someone you
could count on.” He brushed a lock of hair away from my mouth, his eyes on mine.

I was finding it hard to breathe. I didn’t want to hear shit like this. Something clunked in my chest and sent slivers toward my nose, which got all tingly. “Shit, Thad, can’t you shut up for a minute and fuck me.”

“Not until you tell me your dreams. We never talk about the future. I think that’s what we need, to see a future, you know? Besides, we have all night.” He was getting giddy now, flush with faith in his diagnosis and treatment plan. “Tell me, what kind of house is your dream house. Not that we could get that right away. But I got about thirty grand saved up. Enough for a down payment on something. Steve says his place wasn’t much more down than that.” He kissed my abdomen. “Tell me, where do you dream of living?”

In the awkward silence he looked at my face and saw the tears running down to the pillow. I could feel him staring down at me while I stared up at the ceiling, tears soaking up each side of my pillow.

“What? What did I say?”

I pushed his hands away from my face and sat up. “What do you think? Do I look like the kind of girl who carries a fuckin’ picture of her dream house in her purse?”

“I’m pushing, aren’t I.” He turned my face to his. “If that’s what it takes, more time, I can wait. I love you. I don’t care where we live.”

“You don’t care?” His capitulation snapped something in me. Couldn’t he see how weak it made him look? To be the one who gave up the power? I could see the weakness on his face, and all of a sudden I hated him for it. “You’re just going to tag along with me. Yes, Brandy. Sure, Brandy. I love you, Brandy.” I was screaming at him now, and he just sat there, mute. “You spineless prick.”

I think I threw something at him—maybe it was an ashtray. He turned his shoulder into it. “How the fuck do you think it feels when I’m lying here naked and all you want to do is go the fuck on about some tree house? Fuck. Don’t you have a fuckin’ clue?”

I sat there in the bed, crying hard now, my body betraying me, shaking with it, breathing ragged. Tears had smeared up everything. I could feel him a couple of feet away; I could feel the weight of his growing awareness and then the judgment.

“You don’t love me, do you?” His voice was so calm, so unaffected. He’d already decided. “You never even wanted to get to know me. I was just some guy.” He watched my crying ease and listened to my breathing steady.

“Why did you have to go and ruin it?” I whispered the words. And as I did, I knew that even now I could salvage it. I knew that I could nestle against him and tell him lies—that I did love him but was afraid of the strength of it, that I’d never been with a man like him. These were lies I’d used before with no remorse. Or I could tell him the truth. That I was scared shitless. That in Thad’s love I saw my father’s helplessness and in myself my mother’s cruelty. It would have worked; he would have been willing to work through this with me, take the risk for me. But even then I knew there was a different kind of sickness in that. In asking him to take responsibility for all my crap. And maybe I could see that having a partner in whatever change was growing in me would too easily dilute it, and that I’d never know what could have been. So I was silent. Everything was changing, and as much as I wanted it back, I wanted what came next even more.

“I didn’t ruin it, Brandy. I hope you figure that out someday.”

As he climbed down the ladder, I wanted to tell him that I already knew. And that because I knew I’d only continue to screw things up, I was letting him go now, before it got worse for him, and because there were no guarantees it would get better. But all that would have sounded too noble for what I had done.

I listened to him packing, just a few clothes and little things. I heard him scratching a pen against paper. I heard the door open. “Do you need anything?” he asked, and I could hear the measured effort in his words. “I can get you a plane ticket out. Or pay Darlene up for another couple months.”

“No, I’m fine.”

His chivalry in defeat washed great slabs of tears down my cheeks. And I was afraid. Afraid that if I opened my mouth again it would only be to beg him to stay.

He opened the door. “This isn’t what I wanted,” he said. He left the door open, and I felt a reckless wind blow through, shifting for something to pry loose.

I gave him five minutes, then climbed down to look for the note. I couldn’t find it. Maybe there wasn’t one.

And so began the first night of my life that I was alone by choice. I cried through all of it. When I awoke, something felt different. As I drank my morning coffee on the deck, I knew what it was. I wasn’t crumbling anymore. I had grown older, and my skin had worn to a patina of sadness. And the weird thing was, it felt overdue. It felt like I should have been feeling it for a long time now.