Correcting the Landscape (9 page)

“Well, not lately.”

“What?”

“I asked her if Cathy had been missing for a while.”

“And?”

“She looked really, well, stricken. And she said, ‘I guess so.'”

So Cathy had moved out, as Gayle wanted her to do.

“I felt terrible,” said Noreen. “I meant it to be an innocent question, like to fill in the blanks.”

“They were close, I think,” I said, “but Cathy was an adult, it wasn't Gayle's job to babysit her. What is the cause of death?”

“I'm quoting the trooper here—a likely drowning, not determined yet. ‘I guess so…' What do you think she meant, Gus?”

“She meant she hadn't seen her cousin lately, that's all. First things first. Come on, we've got to get this paper downtown.”

I went into my office and shut the door and took several deep breaths, realizing that I was profoundly testy. Irritated. All right, disturbed. One thing I could do well was pull many strings at once, I thought, but the afternoon which I had outlined for myself, to which I had committed myself, was now fractured. Something pulled at me, like a wire inside me had come loose, important connections were threatened. This demanded attention. And I couldn't give it. I had things to do.

You coldhearted son of a bitch, I thought.

This is almost an everyday, or every-spring, occurrence in
Fairbanks. People shouldn't mix drinking and waterside activities. Or not. This is an everyday occurrence, or it isn't. It depends on what I decide right now: how do we treat this?

Calling it everyday dismisses the life of the unknown woman, dismisses the crime or preventable accident. Preventable, I thought, or inevitable, given this kid's way of life. Which is it?

And Noreen's going to have a take on this, she's going to sink her teeth in it and start to worry and shake this story for all it's worth. What is the story?

Noreen came into the office with her paragraph. I took the paper from her and scanned it. The bare facts and a quote from the state trooper.

“Let's go with it,” I said.

She sat down with a sigh.

“What's next?” she said.

“We put the paper to bed. We take a breath and do it all over again.”

“What's going to happen, Gus, will everyone in town go about their business and accept this as something that just happened again, one more time. One more life that's overlooked and slips away?”

What we pay attention to—I know that dilemma, too, Noreen.

“Are you asking me if we're going to follow up on this?” I said. “We have to wait and see, don't we? I don't know. I'm not sure how much we can take on.”

“A picture and caption this week, then nothing?”

“You move too fast. People have the right to expect narrative, not opinion, in the news pages. There have to be facts.”

Noreen gazed at me without speaking, as if she heard me. I stumbled on. “Who was this woman, how did she die, a clean story without opinion—all right, maybe we can do that.”

“A clean, complete story.”

“Well, yeah, of course. Look around, though. Do you see a staff of investigative reporters? I see a bunch of columnists with personal axes to grind and you and me and an illegal Irish immigrant, and oh yes, a journalism student who now has to deal with a death in the family. Don't set your sights so high. Talk to the police, if you want. Go ahead and follow it up, you're free to do that, but I don't know how.”

“Gus,” called Felix. “Any changes?” He had pasted Noreen's copy in place and laid out a ten-point black line around the whole thing. He was ready to box up the dummies.

“We're ready to go,” I said.

“If there's anything more I can do,” said Felix. “If Gayle can't come in for a while…”

“Thanks, Felix,” I said. “You have a good weekend.”

The way he trotted out with his bicycle I thought he just might do that. The tragedy had not taken the life out of his face.

I drove downtown pulled apart by the crossed desires inside me—I wanted to deliver the paper, I wanted to hustle some ads, I wanted to get to Gayle's house and do something for her.

I parked at the big daily, where the
Mercury
was printed, and carried my box of dummies in the rear door. In the past few weeks, since my payments had become habitually overdue, I'd been slipping in and slipping out; I didn't hang around and glad-hand, I didn't feel like their best customer anymore. I wanted to drop off these pasteups and escape, avoiding the orange-overalled pressmen. Too late; the foreman caught sight of me. He blocked the hallway and said, “Gus, my man.” Then he crooked his finger at me. “C'mere, I want to show you something.” He stood back at the door of his office and waved me in, a bulky guy in stained coveralls, earphones around his massive neck. Hard to find shirt collars to fit this guy. Big, inky fingers.

“How's it going?” I said.

“I've been told you're having trouble meeting the bill for twenty-four pages.”

“Once or twice, but that's how it goes. Bet you've seen worse.”

“It may be time to cut down the number of pages, Gus. We think that twenty or even sixteen pages would look real good on you,” he said. He laid out several sheets and started to show me his plan. I whistled in some air and puffed it out.

“Going to be a newsletter pretty soon,” I said.

“Oh, we're not there yet. You'd probably find this a more workable proposition for you all.”

I was suffocating. Breathe in, blow out.
I won't be kept inside any building I don't want to be in
. This guy was a lifer, you could tell by his comfort in this windowless room. In his small black eyes I could see the diminished soul of a prison trusty.

“Something to think about, all right. I can think about it, right?”

“Gus, you can think all day long and all night, too. We can accommodate you, down to sixteen pages. Now you give me a call, say Monday, and let me know what you decide. How many pages you'll be bringing in next week.”

“Okeydoke,” I said. I was going to argue with a convicted felon?

A newsletter, for Pete's sake, that's what we'd end up with at this rate.
Traynor's Tattler
, covering the most inflammatory topics of the day: domestic partners wanting benefits, creationism, wolf control, just let myself go on all these gyrating topics, why not? Why the hell not?

I drove slowly over the Cushman Street Bridge, scene of this afternoon's tragic discovery. Because a newspaper is the community, I thought, and a newsletter isn't. A newspaper's more or less the creation of the community, and if folks buy it then it flies.
And if they don't make it part of their lives, from writing those letters to lining the cat tray, then it doesn't fly and that's it. There's something about us all living together in one spot that comes down to being a creative effort. I wanted to be part of that. I was not a goddamn columnist. Not me; I was a goddamn publisher.

But the conversation has to be reciprocal.

Was it possible that we might not make it?

I pulled over just across the bridge and looked back at that riprap, the rough-cut rock where Cathy's body had landed. Bare legs, a Husky Lounge windbreaker. Sheets and pans of rough ice still rode the surface of the river, along with the inevitable jetsam of breakup—a few uprooted sweepers here and there, whole trees following eroded riverbank into the water. A cold and rough ride for Cathy. In my imagination I saw her body there, and the ugliness of the scene went through me. I think I understood something for the first time. The exposure of her body for all the world to see, naked and abandoned, as if she had no people to care for her.

Like Walter Stonington—it was going to look that way to some people, and it was not the truth. Her kin, her tribe, did exist, did want to gather up that kid's battered body and honor it. Her family mourned her, and shit, we ought to, also—we're her family. I mean we're in the outer ring of her family, yes, but we're in the circles around her.

The First Family statue rose above the scene, faceless within their wind-ruffled parkas. Two-point-five bronze children.

Can we trust one another to love one another, my husband my son my brother
. Another of Felix's poems. A few ravens flapped down into the parking lot across the street. They stalked around it on their big brown talon-feet, like hunters in unlaced boots. Trashy, precious spring day in Fairbanks. Lucky those of us still living to observe it.

Shelley Suliman, my God, stepped from a car in that same parking lot, on her way to the Visitors Bureau, carrying an armload of mailing tubes. More public relations posters. Oh no. I remembered suddenly a poster I had seen shortly after the
Exxon Valdez
oil spill: a poster from the Seafood Marketers, maybe. A white fillet of halibut on a white plate. The purity and whiteness of Alaskan seafood: we have halibut and it is white. Unsullied, snowy halibut. Lies are often white.

She was going to come at me with more ideas and bubbly talk. Cars coming by on my right. I slid down in my seat, bent toward the passenger's seat, rummaged at nothing so that if Shelley looked over, she'd see the back of my head. A very busy man, Gus Traynor. No time to chat. The extra issues she had demanded saved us last quarter, but I still didn't want to talk to her this afternoon. I hit the turn signal and put the truck in gear.

L
ATE THE NEXT MORNING, I HEADED FOR
that duplex in South Fairbanks where I had once encountered Gayle and her roommate. It felt right to visit her, even without a phone call first. It was the proper thing to do, and there was something else, a sense that in this sad time was a chance for me. I should have been disappointed in myself, morally speaking, to take advantage of a woman's grief to get close to her—but love isn't like that. You aren't disappointed in yourself when love is around. Christ's sake, is this love? It can't be. But what do you call it then?

I thought of Felix grinning in the small, muddy yard behind the
Mercury
, as he climbed on his bicycle to follow Bruce Fields. Love's way too grand a word, but it still could have been in the mix at that moment. The look on his face. Things I wouldn't have guessed about you, Felix.

I headed down South Cushman trying to remember the number of Gayle's cross street, and my sternum hurt with eagerness. Okay, the Southside Community Center, and then her house should be off to the south by about one and a half blocks and
there it was. A few trucks and cars out front. The front door ajar, as though people were coming and going.

I parked a few doors down. As I walked toward the house I suddenly felt empty-handed: shouldn't I be bringing something to eat or drink? Cold cuts, or flowers? But if I back out now I won't come back. Stay with the impulse.

The front door was open and the inside door, as well; I could see through the arctic entryway into the living room.

“Hello,” I called, knocking vigorously over the sound of a country music ballad. On what I assumed to be a new couch sat an elderly Native gentleman in cowboy boots, which he was tapping to the music. Jack, Gayle's son, lay near him on the couch, knees up, his raised hands folding and unfolding a Jacob's ladder. It nearly hit him in the face as it fell. That seemed to be the main point of his game—how to come as near as possible to hitting himself in the face. The old man gave me a pleasant smile and nodded. In his fingers he pinched a cigarette.

Lucerne, Gayle's roommate, came out of another room. She wore a faded brick-red sweatshirt and black jeans, and her long nails, too, were brick red today.

“Hello, Lucerne. We met not long ago, at Cleanup Day. You loaned me some work gloves.”

“I remember you. Come in. This here is Mr. Hudson Carew, Gayle's grandfather. Mr. Carew, this is Gayle's boss, Mr. Traynor.”

“Don't get up,” I murmured, but he crossed the room to shake my hand.

“My great-grandson, Jack.” He gestured toward the boy, who sat up and looked polite. “Isn't he a big fellow.” He was, all right, he outweighed the old man.

“Gayle isn't expecting me,” I began.

“She'll be glad to see you,” Lucerne said. “They just run up to the store. You sit down, Mr. Traynor.”

“Please call me Gus, if you don't mind.”

“I don't mind.”

She leaned against the door frame, a tall and powerful but weary human being. The humor, the sense of irony that shaped every word out of her mouth on Southside Cleanup Day, was reined in this afternoon. Mr. Carew returned to his concentration on the music. He sat down near the cassette player, gazed into space, and tapped his boot heels on the carpet. Lucerne gave him a look that was mild and forbearing, perhaps, but a look, nonetheless. She knew him fairly well, that was clear. The boy remained sitting up.

“We got some food in the kitchen, Gus, you care for something?”

“Thank you, no, Lucerne. I don't want to bother anyone, okay?” I tried to send her the message that she was to let me know if I was out of place; she smiled.

“People coming and going,” she said. “Poor little Cathy.”

“You must have known her fairly well,” I said, awkwardly. I sat down on a straight chair across the room from the grandfather.

“Sure. Back when she was a kid in Allakaket, not just here in Fairbanks. One more wild little thing, cutting up until I'd come around—then she'd get quiet as a mouse. Be so good. I wish they hadn't tried to be good in front of me.” She folded her arms and leaned into the doorjamb. “I could of helped. I know what it's like. But maybe they didn't know what to make of me, the Southern Lady, they called me. We stayed strangers for the longest time, when in fact, we had a lot in common. I should of understood this. I see it now.”

“You made a home for yourself there, I see that,” I said.

“I had it comfortable. A room to myself, better in lots of ways for me than Mobile. They respected me. Kids like Cathy, though—girls like Cathy—they had very little. No privacy at all. Not much chance to build a life of her own, that little girl.”

We sat quietly for a moment. I smiled at Jack. The wailing voice from the cassette player came to a stop. Then a new song began with another scratchy wail. The grandfather stood up and handed me the cassette case.

“That's me,” he said. “My younger days.”

The cassette featured a dozen fiddlers from the World Famous Athabaskan Fiddling Festival in Whitehorse, Yukon Territory. He left the box with me and sat back down, absorbed in the song.

Lucerne watched him a moment, then said to me, “He's going to play at Cathy's potlatch. He's still making some mighty pretty music but he won't be for long, keep smokin' those cigarettes. Going to ruin your voice, Mr. Hudson Carew.”

“You are correct on that, Lady,” he said. “I go three years without a smoke then I get hooked again. But I stayed away from the worst of it. Jack, you gonna stay away from it too. You got to find the joy in life, Jack, if you want to stay away from the bottle. You got joy in your life, Lady?”

“You know I do, Mr. Carew. There's good times along with the bad.”

In the silence between us the old recording carried on: “Pretend we've never met,” the youthful Mr. Carew crooned mournfully. Lucerne looked up at a sound from the entryway. Gayle and two other women entered with Safeway bags. When she looked at me her face remained fixed, without a welcoming expression. It was alarming to me. She greeted her family, scolded her grandfather for smoking, carried her bags into another room.

I sat with the grandfather and the grandson while a few more cousins and friends trooped through the room. In my indecision I didn't move, except to glance at Jack now and then, her son. What makes a twelve-year-old boy tick? I couldn't remember. Endless repetitive games, perhaps, with the ante going up bit by
bit every time. Chess and poker and petty shoplifting for higher and higher stakes, I vaguely recalled.

I should leave. Was that fixed look a kiss-off or just the casual glance of someone with much on her mind? Gus, stay where you are. Maybe the look was saying that.

Can I help? That's what I'll say. Gayle, how can I help you?

She looked through the door then, and this time, she gave me a smile and a wave.

“Come on,” she called.

I followed her into the kitchen and discovered it filling up with people, setting out dishes, taking aluminum foil off bowls and pans. Maybe only two or three people but it seemed crowded. A pot simmered on the stove with a smell of chili.

“Gayle, how can I, is there some way…” I began.

“You want to eat something, Gus? There's a little moose stew, it isn't bad.”

“I don't feel hungry, Gayle. How are you?”

“Awful.” She took a deep breath, then expelled it with pursed lips and puffed cheeks. “Jack, you hungry?” Her son had appeared between us and suddenly her arms were around him. He pressed himself into her. She spoke tenderly to him and chuckled at something he said.

“The doughnuts are for everyone,” she murmured, and turning to the counter, emptied a big white bag of frosted doughnuts onto a plate. The boy studied them for a minute, chose one, and waited for her okay before he took a bite.

“I've been listening to Mr. Carew's singing,” I said.

“Well thank God for music and for singing. Cathy one time wanted to play the flute. But not lately. She quit that. She ran out of things to do.”

“What was she like?” I said.

She looked around at the people in the kitchen, then stuck her head into the dining room.

“Everybody eat!” she called out, and pulled gently on my sleeve with thumb and finger, as if to move me away. I followed her out of the kitchen, out the back door into the yard.

“It's nice of you to come by. I wonder if you ended up using the story?”

“Yes, and your photo. That was above and beyond the call of duty.”

Tears welled up in her eyes, and I shoved my fists into my pockets and stood close to her. Her lips became a bitter, unbroken seam. She was imagining her cousin's death, and in my sympathy for Gayle, I felt the shock of it, that cold, dark water. The way it filled your clothes with silt and pulled you down. I remembered, then, that bodies were usually found unclothed or partially clothed—clothes ripped off in that terrible journey. Maybe Cathy had been stripped naked by the river itself, by her own drowning. Maybe she had not been assaulted before her death. But I didn't say anything.

Gayle wiped her face.

“So,” she said.

“What do you think happened?”

“I have no idea.”

We looked out over the patch of backyard. Cathy, she said, was one of those kids with no real drive inside but such a sweetheart, when things were going good. “Like a, oh God, a hollow chocolate animal you get at Easter time,” she said. “No strength, easy to hurt. As a kid Cathy was strong all right, physically strong. An athlete, almost, and she loved people around her, she liked being part of a team. Then she got addicted and she didn't have anything to trade for drugs but her little body. These past few years, she
lost all her strength. She was—she was quiet about personal things. She never had ambitions to begin with. She needed an education, that's all.”

Tears covered Gayle's transfixed face, her skin stressed and pinched like an animal's in pain.

“It's like her gifts, her particular gift, was refused.”

“Her gift, Gayle?”

“Her gentleness. She had this way of being available to other people. It could have been so nice. Cathy was a sweet, mild girl. She never would have had the personality to stand out from the crowd. But if she'd had an education—that's all I can think about!” She shook her head and looked away; at that moment she looked so angry, I was frightened.

“There was value in her life!”

“I know,” I said.

“It was this man she hung out with, a fellow from Whitehorse. I could kill him, I'd kill him right now. But Cathy gave up making good decisions a long time ago. A long time before she even met him.”

“This man from Whitehorse, her boyfriend?”

“You call it that.”

She looked like she wanted to spit.
You call it that
—not a boyfriend but a dealer? A pimp?

“Mean guy. Real tough.” She took a deep breath. “Oh I'm talking too much, Gus! I can't talk easily about this most of the time. Can't talk at all sometimes, around some of my own family. I tell you, I must be about the most unsettled person you would ever want to meet.”

“Yeah?”

“Sometimes I believe in home, know what home is, exactly where I'm at home. Sometimes I love the village! Other times, I'm not at home anywhere. I want to stay away from there and never
go back, it's a matter of survival. I don't want to be loyal anymore, to anybody.”

I took this unexpected confidence of hers so warmly, so tenderly, so happily into my heart that I couldn't look at her for a minute. I wanted to stay on the subject of Gayle Kenneally and her restless spirit, but when I looked at her again, her wide mouth was pulled down, into deep grim creases. She stared across the yard, at the vacant lot beyond. The line of her jaw trembled. She looked forty years old—she looked her age. The blue tattoo lines on her chin were matched by small, dark wrinkles of sorrow above her upper lip. I put a hand on her forearm.

“You've been through a lot,” I said.

“I wish we knew exactly what happened to Cathy. The circumstances, all of them, are so overwhelming, it's hard to find the thread of it.”

“If there is anything I can do,” I said, “I'll do it.”

She smiled.

“We'll be going back to the village for a week or so, Jack and me,” she said. “Maybe ten days, maybe a little longer.”

“Take all the time you want.” I brushed a few slow mosquitoes away from us, the big, drowsy mosquitoes of early spring, easy targets. “Take the time you want.” I wanted to say more, but what? Well, talk was my business. It wasn't much, come to think of it. But keeping the discussion alive—keeping the lights on—sometimes that's all you can do and that's good.

“And we'll be thinking about you,” I added, which was a cowardly lie:
I'd
be thinking about her. I didn't want to speak for anyone else.

Other people were spilling out onto the back porch, friends and family. I did have a bowl of moose chili after all, and when I left the house Grandpa Carew was playing his fiddle in the living room. He played slow, and in the slowness you could hear the
notes waver, tremble, like a kite beginning to fail. He made it over every phrase, he reached every conclusion, but the fragility of the music was almost unbearable. Except that he laughed, and other people provided a beat, tapping their heels on the floor. A teenage boy was beating a mixture of Crisco, frozen berries, and sugar in a coffee can. It sounds grim, but I know from having tried it before, it's a sweet, intense reminder of home. Even though I've never been to the village, their home.

 

IT DOESN'T LET UP, IN THIS BUSINESS. AFTER I LEFT GAYLE'S I
drove up College Road to the
Mercury
office in a dreamy state, all suffused with tender and interesting feelings, with a strong sense that life was highly worthwhile and at the same time, fleeting, precious, a gift. I pulled into the parking lot of Creamer's Dairy, an old farm, its wet fields now taken over by migrating cranes, geese, ducks, and swans. The appearance every spring of these huge, gallant birds, their takeoffs and landings, the thousands of mating pairs in the barley field, cranes dancing, peregrines circling like flying aces on the lookout for unprotected duck breast, drew crowds of sightseers. It was a springtime ritual to ogle the birds, and I was in the mood for living in the moment. Turns out the spectacle was mostly over, most of the birds were on their way farther north, but there were plenty of stragglers. Swans and Canada geese floated in the ponds, and a few cranes stuck up here and there like lone question marks. Like coat hangers. Vertical notes in a display of winged bodies.