And She Was (28 page)

SEPTEMBER 6, 1986

U
nalaska hadn’t even made the National Marine Fisheries list of top U.S. fishing ports a decade before, but now it was number one. Crabbing, halibut, bottom fishing brought billions of dollars and thousands of people. With no landfill, sewer system, or extra housing, the town staggered under the onslaught.

Congress had at first denied Aleuts eligibility in the statewide Native Lands Claims suit because of their high percentage of Russian blood. But the Aleuts protested and eventually won. The fully chartered Aleut Corporation was awarded 38.2 million acres and about $12 million in congressional settlements to find and rebuild a future. Suddenly there was a new pride in being Aleut.

Although by the mid-1980s only 10 percent of the population was Aleut, this remnant had begun to reclaim its past. They had taken control of their lands, reached back into memories for pieces of their culture. Old women taught the young to form grasses into famously delicate baskets. Those who could still speak their language taught those who knew only English. The old ways were taught by modern means, in night classes at the public school. Money for an Aleutian museum was gathered, repairs for the church planned. An Aleut renaissance had begun.

Liz shook her head when Les placed the usual rum-and-Coke in front of her. “Only Coke,” she said, staring at the drink. He poured it out and refilled the glass with straight soda. She pushed her lower back forward, hardening her resolve with her posture. She sipped. Too sweet, without the rum.

She watched the berdache work, his face still telling the story she had heard of the beating. She had been told of how berdache lived before the Russians came. Sometimes a baby boy was born, especially pretty and showing feminine ways. These boys were not trained as men, but to skin hides, sew, prepare meals. Trained to be wives. Liz watched him washing glasses in the sink with efficient twisting wrists. She cackled behind the cloud of her smoke.

“What are you laughing at?” Les glanced up, his earring catching light.

“You will make a fine wife someday.”

Les grinned and turned to take an order. Liz watched him reach for a bottle of rum, her eyes an eagle’s talon on the glass. She turned her head. She was not here to drink.

Not this time. Liz had a job to do. She waited for Blondie to show.

She feared for the white girl, who had no way of knowing what she was messing with. Liz thought of the first time she’d entered the cave, touched the Dry Ones. She swallowed, eyes darting to the glass rows behind the bar. If she’d known how they would curse her, layer her future in guilt and degradation, would she still have touched, have eaten? It was a question Liz had never been able to answer.

Blondie came in just behind a group of outsiders, her hair pulled into a pony’s tail. Liz felt it immediately. Like a birth cord, unsevered and pulled tight, their connection stretched across the bar. She yanked, and Blondie’s eyes jerked to hers then fell away.

The ache from her center, the point of attachment, bled into her. Drowned her resolve. She signaled for a rum and Coke with a nod. This would be the last, she told herself as Les slid the drink before her. She set the glass down between sips. Slow. She focused on what she’d been sent to do.

“She’s been to the cave,” Anna had said that afternoon when they met with Ida and Bellie at the bookstore. “She came in to ask for books on the Dry Ones. I sent her away.”

“What could she know?” Bellie said. “She’s been to the caves. So?”

“She knows Nicholas is dead; she knows we wanted him dead,” Ida said. “If she’s not suspicious, she is as dumb as she looks.”

“She’s not dumb,” Bellie said.

Ida nodded. “We agree.”

Liz scanned the walls. Anna had moved her favorite sketch, but Liz found it on the wall behind the counter. She pulled in the image again, the young woman, striped with black marks, studded with bone, the sharp cut of her bangs high on her forehead, those eyes, hard and lost, the secret in her half-smile. Liz imagined her as the first, this woman-girl, looking past whoever sketched her. She believed she could see the memory of the first act in those eyes, see the lingering taste of the fat in the way the girl held her mouth, so tight, yet drifting at the edges with a hint of sweetness. Two hundred fifty years, and no one had known but them.

Liz had watched the blond woman from the start. She’d seen the bead lying flat on her white skin. She’d seen her eyes change. Now when Blondie helped her to a cab at night, Liz sensed knowledge in her hands. They all thought she was too drunk to feel anything, know anything. But she did.

Liz turned away from the picture, back to Ida and Anna.

“She can’t stay,” Ida said. “What is suspicion will grow. She doesn’t belong here.”

“She doesn’t know where she belongs,” Liz replied.

Bellie pushed herself from the wall she’d been leaning against, and Liz smiled, remembering her own first months after being told. The excitement, the hope, the fears all tossing about inside. She could feel the same fresh power and confusion in the girl.

“Then we have to tell her,” Bellie said.

“What is it you want to tell her, girl?” Ida’s words came flying with spittle, stinging. “What would you have her know?”

“We have to tell her something,” Bellie shot back. “She’s got to have a reason to stay away from the caves. Go back where she belongs.”

Liz felt the snarl of loyalties in Bellie. She admired the girl, foolish as she was. Few people would have dared oppose Ida.

Liz watched Ida’s thoughts pulling upon one another. Ida shook her head. “You have become too friendly with her. What did I tell you about this?” Ida stared Bellie down. “Sure, tell her about all the others. Do you keep count? Five. Six. Then the others on the boat for me. Ten, for me.”

Auburn hair. Curled on the floor at Liz’s feet in the candle’s dancing shadow. The image, remembered, absorbed the room. Even after all the others, this was the death her guilt had woven itself through until it became the warp that shaped everything else. If she could just warn Blondie away from this destruction, she could redeem some small part of herself. The sacrifice that brings reprieve. “We have to tell her enough, enough to warn her what will happen if she uses the Dry Ones.”

“Nothing happens,” Anna said. “There is no curse. You are just a drunk.” Anna spoke with the venom of denial. Liz could have told her what she saw, that the curse had claimed Anna in a different way. She’d been cut in half. The part that had gone away to college and returned, hoping to teach the white people who her people had been, their skill, tenderness, courage, and how they had been destroyed with guns, disease, rape, contempt. The other part despising these same people whose ancestors had changed everything and despising herself for mingling with them, for desiring them. Her hate clung to the room, and even the curious outsiders often felt it when they stopped by for a book or a basket. But Liz didn’t say any of this. Anna’s two halves joined at a fresh scab, and Liz did not want to expose her wounds.

She wanted a drink.

“I want her off the island,” Anna said. “I don’t care how.”

Liz watched Ida’s face, so different from the face she had known as a child. That face had been trustworthy, flexible. This face was dangerous, immutable. Even after all these years, she still made the difficult decisions. Ida gazed out the window facing the bay. A weeping fog swirled, wind driven like curls over the water.

When she turned back around, Liz saw the decision in her face. “You will watch her tonight. See how far she has gone. From this we
will know how much to tell her.” Ida’s wrinkled face tightened like a cat’s cradle stretched between fingers. “Then we will make sure she leaves.”

Liz nodded, already feeling the comfort of her stool and a full glass under her hand.

“Don’t drink. This will not be easy.” At Ida’s last words, the imagined glass broke in her hand.

“And if she won’t go?” Anna asked.

“She will,” Bellie said.

“And if you are wrong?”

No one answered.

It did not matter now. Liz drank another and another. The eyes with which she watched Blondie grew heavy, twisting her vision. Already, the white girl didn’t laugh as much, didn’t brag through her body the way she had. And Liz felt the eyes watching her. She had taken the fat.

Liz was as sure of this as of anything.

She shoved the bathroom door open. She slid the metal tube from the toilet paper holder and wrote. Just one word:
Beware.

When she came to, the smell of piss made her smile with the comfort of routine.

“Liz, time to go.” She heard Blondie’s voice and felt her bend near. She opened her eyes as Blondie trapped her hands before lifting her sagging body. Liz felt the cord, shortened now with their nearness, and held it tight with her mind. Just one thought, that’s all she needed. She pulled the cord to stop the spinning in her head.

“You been somewhere you don’t belong, Blondie.” Then the cord went slack as the bathroom swirled again. Dizzy. She felt the laugh rising, not wanting it to, but it came and choked with the vomit that followed. The hands that lifted and guided her outside were tender in some way Liz could feel through the pain.

It was this tenderness that perverted her vision. She touched the white girl’s auburn hair. “Forgive me?”

SEPTEMBER 7, 1986

I
’d been riding the old war roads back into the hills, not expecting or looking for anything. My hands were so pink and scoured from the wind, I stopped into the Elbow Room before riding back home.

Something was off.

A crowd of men pressed to the bar, their conversation thick and fast.

“Shhhhh!” Marge is one of the few people who can shout this phoneme. “It’s on.”

She turned up the volume on the radio.

“The Coast Guard has issued a tsunami warning for the following islands: Attu, Adak, Atka, Umnak, Unalaska, Akutan, Unimak, and along Bristol Bay. An eight-point-five quake struck the north Kamchatka Peninsula at four
P.M.
The wave, believed to be traveling at up to four hundred knots per hour, could reach Attu by five
P.M.
, Adak by five-thirty
P.M.
, Unalaska by six
P.M.
, and the mainland by seven
P.M.
All residents of communities on the north and west sides of the Aleutians and Bristol Bay must move to high ground immediately until the Coast Guard issues an expiration. Again all communities including Atka, Nikolski, Unalaska, Akutan, False Pass—”

Marge twisted off the radio.

We had just under two hours. Immediately the room was buzzing.
Carl headed for the door without a word. Two guys left together talking about getting to the boat. Marge ordered someone to stop by her house and pick up something. She yelled at another guy to stop by the store. A man was counting out something on his fingers. Another left to find his wife and son, who were out clam digging.

I would have started to panic, but none of the hubbub felt like the first waves of hysteria. I tried to catch Marge’s eye to ask her what was going on, but she’d picked up the phone and started giving orders. I caught only bits and pieces. “Get someone to drive over to…. Find out who’s got…. Call Leslie and see if…. Fuck, who had the…last time….”

I decided to sit back and finish my whiskey sour and try to pick up what I could. Two of the dogs, which had followed their owners into the bar, started to fight. They went at each other the husky way, darting in, dancing back, then coming together in a snarl, intent on getting at each other’s throats. When they got too loud, someone kicked one in the ribs. The dog yelped and slunk to the corner while the other dog stalked about, every inch the victor.

I visited the head just to see if Ida had gotten around to cleaning up Liz’s last message. It was still there. Suddenly that single word—
Beware
—took on greater significance. Had Liz know about the tsunami? Had she been warning someone? Me? The way she’d looked at me last night and what she’d said. Forgive me. I stroked my fingertips over her words. And I felt that same flood of tenderness toward her I had last night. I did not want these feelings, and I could not forgive her.

I should have gone with Tom. That’s what I kept thinking, feeling. I didn’t have to be here, deserted, facing a tidal wave, powerless. I could be on a wholly different kind of beach, tucked into a wholly different kind of life. Instead of here, caressing graffiti in a shabby bathroom, in a feral bar, on an unsheltered island.

I washed my hands, more to slough off those feelings of regret than to rid myself of Elbow Room toilet germs, and headed back to my bar stool.

Marge hung up the phone and opened the back door. Two pickups had backed up to it, and as soon as the door swung open, three guys began loading the bar’s cases of liquor and beer. I looked out the big window. Several boats had untied from the docks and were headed full steam out of the bay.

About twenty minutes after the warning, the Elbow Room was empty. Marge was counting out the till.

“What’s going on?”

Marge looked at me like I’d asked her what color panties she had on. She lit a cigarette. “Tsunami party,” she said and stuffed the money into a cash box. “You haven’t been here for one yet, have ya?”

I shook my head.

“You’re in for some fun.” She flicked off the lights. “Come on. You can follow me up.”

We walked outside, and she locked the back door.

“We get these every so often, and used to be everybody got shit scared, ran around, talking shit.” Marge climbed in her truck and leaned out the window. “So ’bout ten years ago, someone up on Tsunami Hill, ’course it wasn’t called that before, decides, ‘Fuck it. Let’s make a party.’ So everyone heads up the hill, brings whatever’s in the freezer. We cook a shitload of stuff, clean out the bar’s storeroom, and watch for the wave.”

I started my bike and followed Marge, who was following a gray van. We crossed the channel and turned off to the left up a gentle hill. The incline under my wheels felt good, safe. Until I realized that this hill was
the
hill, Tsunami Hill. Now Unalaska has hills and mountains, and a lot of them have roads right up to the tops, thanks to the military. But this was the barest of hills. A mound really.

Three houses sat atop. Trucks and vans had filled all the driveways and were lining up along the road. Several dogs barked back and forth between truck beds. Marge threaded through and pulled right up on the tufts of wild grass that served as lawn. I parked behind her. She slammed the door, yelling at a woman walking by as she got out, “Where’s the boys with the bar load?”

The woman pointed toward a group of people standing over a just-smoking fire pit. I’d say there were probably fifty people milling about, some busy with food or firewood. And more were coming every minute. I ran straight to the edge of the mound overlooking the bay. It was steep here, sliced into cliff eons ago when the ocean had been braver. I peered over the side. We must have been all of six stories up. The water lay a quarter mile away. On the other side, I could see the airport runway, which ran between the water and a cliff. The
ocean here was farther away, maybe half a mile, but still only sixty feet lower.

Did the radio report mention how big the wave might be? I tried to remember everything I knew about tsunamis. How high did they get? Can you see them coming? What happens when they hit shore? After several minutes of brain wracking, I realized I knew nothing more than that a tsunami was a big wave.

“Hey.” Bellie walked toward me on those boots with the wayward heel. She had a beer in one hand and a joint in the other. She handed me the joint.

I took two long tokes. That’s when I noticed the absence of wind. The smoke I exhaled just clouded around my face. I stepped to the side to evade it.

“This doesn’t seem like the best place to have a tsunami party,” I said, handing the joint back to her.

“Why not?”

“Well, look,” I said, gesturing at the beach not far below. “It’s got to be one of the lowest hills in town.”

She looked at me funny. “You can see way out both bays. You can see the wave coming for like two miles. If it comes, it won’t get more than twenty feet high.”

“How do you know?”

She shrugged.

“So this whole find-high-ground stuff is about getting a good view of the destruction.”

She shrugged.

I looked around. Half the island was up here. Sure it was the hanging-out-in-bars, who-the-fuck-cares crowd. But some of them had reached middle age alive. I decided to try not to worry.

“Follow me.” Bellie started toward the trucks lining the road. We stopped at a gray, newish truck with a
HIGHLINER, INC
. sign painted on the side panels. Bellie opened the passenger door and we squeezed in. She pulled out a Ziploc of powder from the glove compartment, then rummaged around for a tape. She found a new Talking Heads and shoved it into the player. A mirror materialized, and Bellie had four lines laid out in a minute. We snorted two lines each.

I leaned back in the seat, closed my eyes, and listened to David
Byrne sing. Bellie and I joined him in the chorus, singing about a moving world and the woman floating above it, the woman who was.

We both knew scattered phrases of the rest and sang along until the end. Bellie shut off the player. “Know what that song’s about?”

I shook my head.

“A dead girl. That’s what they never say, ‘And she was—dead.’”

I thought about this for a minute, replaying various lines and decided it could be true. This was not a song I wanted playing through my head. Now I couldn’t get it out.

“Why the fuck are you playing me a song about dead girls? Right now, of all times.”

Bellie turned her whole body toward me on the seat. “I just want you to think more. Think about what you’re doing here.”

Her fingers were fiddling with her birthmark again, and I suddenly realized that that scared the shit out of me more than the approaching tidal wave.

A van eked its way between the truck and the line of vehicles on the other side of the road. Mary was driving. She waved. I saw Ida, Anna, and Mary’s sister along with several kids, noses pressed to the glass, inside.

Bellie waved her Baggie of coke in front of me. “You want to take some?”

“I want to know what the fuck you’re talking about,” I said, rummaging through my purse for the silver vial I’d found but not yet used.

She took it. “Nice.”

“I found it on the floor at the bar.”

Bellie filled it half full. One can’t be too generous, even with some temporary guy’s coke. “We’ll talk about it later, okay. I need a drink.”

I stuffed the vial in my pocket and followed Bellie over to the fire. It was huge now, bonfire size, the smoke rising straight into a light gray sky.

“What time is it?” a woman asked.

“Going on five.”

A rowdy whoop erupted, followed by a chant. “One hour to go. One hour to go.”

Someone asked if anyone had heard from the weather station at Attu. The wave would have passed by there already.

“I heard the Attu weather station wasn’t responding.”

It got quiet for a moment.

“You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about,” another man said.

“No wind,” a woman said, and everyone turned to feel for moving air. “It’s not good,” she added.

Just then I heard the tires of a truck skittering rocks and stopping in a spray of gravel. The driver parked dead center in the narrow road, blocking everyone. The four HiTide babes nearly fell out the doors. They headed for the fire, doing that tiptoeing walk that drunken women in heeled boots, holding drinks, have to master.

Honey reached the group first. “Hey,” she yelled. “What’s goin’ on?”

Jill and the other two came up beside her. One yelled something about “party” and “fuckin’.” The others hollered in agreement.

The arrival of the fake blondes set me on edge even more. That song kept playing in my head—flickering the image of a dead girl “joining the world of missing persons.” I pictured the scene if a big wave did obliterate Tsunami Hill. They’d find the bodies all rolled together at the base, bottles of beer wedged under an arm here, an angled neck there. I’d end up heaped with Honey, Jill, and the others, tossed in with the fake blondes in death. My gray face would be pressed into Honey’s gray-green neck, our hair having spun together in the pools of water left behind. And no one would know the difference. The vision’s clarity, layered with death colors and smells, startled me. I decided to try to keep space between us to lower the odds.

I headed toward one of the three houses, from which people kept coming and going, stopping by the stack of booze boxes to fill a paper cup with tequila.

Inside several women were buzzing around the kitchen. Little Liz sat heavy on a stuffed rocking chair in the living room, drinking from a Rainier can. Seeing her there froze me for a moment. I could still feel her hand stroking my hair and hear her broken voice asking for forgiveness. I shivered. They were all three here. I hadn’t seen them together since the funeral. The memory of the cave stuck in my head like wet hands on frozen steel, an attachment that would only be broken by peeling skin.

Her eyes tracked me as I walked by. I pretended to focus on not
spilling any tequila. Les was cutting potatoes at the kitchen island. I set my cup on the counter across from him and leaned against it.

“You made it,” he said.

“I followed Marge.”

“So what do you think?” He grinned and threw a handful of potato quarters in a pot.

“I think this is the absolute worst place to wait for a tidal wave on the whole island.”

“The view is great.”

“So I’ve heard.”

He laughed.

“What happens to the boats that are out?”

“Nothing. Usually they don’t even feel it. Wave isn’t dangerous until it hits shallow water. The ferry was supposed to come in tonight. It’ll wait out in the open.” Les stopped cutting. “You worried about our pretty boy? He’s probably already in Seattle by now. Mighty white of you, cutting him loose for me, by the way.”

“He cut me loose.”

Les looked at me. “Hey.” He knocked me sideways with a hip shot. “Men come and go. Couple of veterans like us know that.”

I nodded.

Les picked up my cup and downed the rest of the tequila. “Refill.”

I rolled my eyes and went back outside to the liquor stack. I brought two cups back, set one down for Les, and headed to the cliff side again. As I passed Liz, I thought I heard her whisper something, but when I turned she was gazing at her beer can.

The air was heavy in its stillness. The sun was sinking, the land cooling faster than the water, and still no wind. I shivered and stared out at the bay. Only half an hour to go.

I stayed there alone, my hair hanging straight in the calm. About fifteen minutes later, people started coming over. By ten to six, everyone was standing along the edge of the hill, gazing toward the mouth of the bay. In every hand was a beer or a cup. Most of the other hands held cigarettes or joints.

Something ominous gathered in my chest, and I fumbled a cigarette out with shaky fingers. I sucked in big gobs of nicotine, but the thing wouldn’t stop. It grew until I could feel it in my mouth. The people lin
ing the hill looked like Indians in those western movies, suddenly appearing at the rims of canyons, all rigid and ordered. We waited.