My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me (50 page)

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Authors: KATE BERNHEIMER

BOOK: My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me
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Double digits, the scared guy said. The low double digits.
“If I thought they were in the double digits, I wouldn’t be here,” his buddy said.
“Yeah, well,” the scared guy said. “What about you?” he asked me. It took me a minute to realize it, since we were lying in the dark.
“What about me?” I said.
“You ever notice anything out here?” he asked. “Any evidence of recent rockfalls or slides? Changes in the gravel deltas at the feet of the glaciers?”
“I only get out here once a year, if that,” I told him. “It’s not a big destination for people.” I started going over in my head what I remembered, which was nothing.
“That’s ’cause they’re smart,” the scared guy said.
“That’s ’cause there’s nothing here,” his buddy answered.
“Well, there’s a reason for that,” the scared guy said. He told us he’d come across two censuses of the Tlingit tribes living in the bay from when the Russians owned the area. The populations had been listed as 241 in 1853 and 0 a year later.
“Good night,” his buddy told him.
“Good night,” the scared guy said.
“What was that? You feel that?” his buddy asked him.
“Aw, shut up,” the scared guy said.
 
What’s this thing about putting people to
use
? What’s that all about? What happened to just loving being
around
someone? Once I got Donald up off his butt and made him throw the baseball around with me, and asked that out loud. I only knew I’d done it when he said, “
I
don’t know.” Then he asked if we could quit now.
“Did you ever really think you’d find someone that you weren’t in some ways cynical about?” my wife asked the night we’d decided we were in love. I was flying for somebody else and we were lying under the wing of the Piper that we’d run up onto a beach. I’d been God’s lonely man for however many years—twelve in the orphanage, four in high school, four in college, a hundred after that—and she was someone that I wanted to pour myself down into. I was having trouble communicating how unusual that was.
That morning she’d watched me load a family I didn’t like into a twin-engine and I’d done this shoulder shake I do before something unpleasant. And she’d caught me, and her expression had given me a lift that carried me through the afternoon. That night back in my room she made a list of other things I did or thought, any one of which was proof she paid more attention than anyone else ever had. She held parts of me like she had never seen anything so beautiful. At three or four in the morning she used her arms to tent herself up over me and asked, “Don’t we have to sleep?” and then had answered her own question.
Around noon we woke up spooning, and when I held on when she tried to head to the bathroom, we slid down the sheets to the floor. She finally lost me by crawling on all fours to the bathroom door.
“Well, she’s as happy as
I’ve
ever seen her,” her father told me at the rehearsal dinner. Twenty-three people had been invited and twenty-one were her family and friends.
“It’s
so nice
to see her like this,” her mother told me at the same dinner.
When I toasted her, she teared up. When she toasted me, she said only, “I never thought I would feel like this,” and then sat down.
We honeymooned in San Francisco. Here’s what that was like for me: I still root for that city’s teams.
I’ve always been interested in the unprecedented. I just never got to experience it that often.
Her family is Juneau society, to the extent that such a thing exists. One brother’s the arts editor for the
Juneau Empire
; another works for Bauer & Gates Real Estate, selling half-million-dollar wilderness vacation homes to second-tier Hollywood stars. Another, go figure, is a lawyer. On holidays they give one another things like Arctic Cats. Happy Birthday: here’s a new 650 four-by-four. The real estate brother was 11-and-1 as a starter and team MVP for JDHS the year they won the state finals. The parents serve on every board there is. Their daughter when she turned sixteen was named Queen of the Spring Salmon Derby. She still has the tiara with the leaping sockeye.
They didn’t stand in the way of our romance. That’s what her dad told anyone who asked. Our wedding announcement said that the bride-elect was the daughter of Donald and Nila Bell and that she’d graduated from the University of Alaska summa cum laude and was a first-year account executive for Sitka Communications Systems. It said that the groom-elect was a meat cutter for the Super Bear supermarket. I’d done that before I’d gotten my pilot’s license, when I’d first gotten to town, and the guy doing the article had fucked up.
“You don’t think he could have
checked
something like that?” my wife wanted to know after she saw the paper. She was so upset on my behalf that I couldn’t really complain.
It’s not like I never had any advantages. I got a full ride, or nearly a full ride, at St. Mary’s in Moraga, near Oakland. I liked science and what math I took, though I never really, as one teacher put it, found myself while I was there. A friend offered me a summer job as one of his family’s set-net fishermen my junior year, and I liked it enough to go back. The friend’s family got me some supermarket work to tide me over in the winter, and it turned out that meat cutting paid more than boning fish. “What do you
want
to do?” a girl at the checkout asked me one day, like if she heard me bitch about it once more she was going to pull all her hair out, and that afternoon I signed up at Fly Alaska and Bigfoot Air, and I got my commercial and multiengine, and two years later had my float rating. I hooked on with a local outfit and the year after that bought the business, which meant a three-room hut with a stove, a van, the name, and the client list. Now I lease two 206s and two 172s on EDO 2130 floats, have two other pilots working under me, and get fourteen to fifteen hundred dollars a load for round-trip flights in the area. Want an Arctic Cat? I can buy one out of petty cash. At least in the high season.
 
“So are we not going to talk about this?” my wife asked last week after her parents had been over for dinner. We’d had crab and her dad had been in a funk for most of the night, who knew why. We’d said good night and handled the cleanup and now I was lunging around on my knees trying to cover my son in Nerf basketball. He always turned into Game Fanatic at bedtime. We’d hung a Nerf hoop over the inside of the back door to accommodate that need. He took advantage of my distraction to try and drive the baseline but I funneled him into the doorknob.
“I’m ready to talk,” I told her. “Let’s talk.”
She sat on one of the kitchen chairs with her hands together on her knees, willing to wait. Her hair wasn’t having the best day and it was bothering her. She kept slipping it back behind her ear.
“You can’t just stay around the basket,” Donald complained, trying to lure me out so he could blow by me. He was a little teary with frustration.
“I was going to talk to Daddy about having another baby,” she told him. His mind was pretty intensively elsewhere.
“Do you
want
a baby brother?” she asked.
“Not right now,” he said.
“If you’re not having fun, you shouldn’t play,” she told him.
That night in bed she was lying on her back with her hands behind her head. “I love you a lot,” she said, when I finally got under the covers next to her. “But sometimes you just make it so hard.”
“What do I do?” I asked her. This was one of the many times I could have told her. I could have even just told her I’d been thinking about making the initial appointment. “What do I do?” I asked again. I sounded mad but I wanted to know.
“What do you do,” she said, like I had just proven her point.
“I think about you all the time,” I said. “I feel like
you’re
losing interest in
me
.” Even saying that much was humiliating. The appointment at times like that seemed like a small but hard thing that I could hold on to.
She cleared her throat and pulled a hand from behind her head and wiped her eyes with it.
“I hate making you sad,” I told her.
“I hate being made sad,” she said.
It was only when she said things like that and I had to deal with it that I realized how much I depended on having made her happy. And how much all of that shook when she whacked at it.
Tell her
, I thought, with enough intensity that I thought she might’ve heard me.
“I don’t
want
another kid,” Donald called from his room. The panel doors in our bedrooms weren’t great, in terms of privacy.
“Go to sleep,” his mother called back.
We lay there waiting for him to go back to sleep.
Tell her you changed your mind
, I thought.
Tell her you want to make a kid, right now. Show her
. I had a hand on her thigh and she had her palm cupped over my crotch, as if that, at least, was on her side. “Shh,” she said, and reached her other hand to my forehead and smoothed away my hair.
 
Set-net fishermen mostly work for families that hold the fishing permits and leases, which are not easy to get. The families sell during the season to vendors who buy fish along the beach. The season runs from mid-June to late July. We fished at Coffee Point on Bristol Bay. Two people lived there: a three-hundred-pound white guy and his mail-order bride. The bride was from the Philippines and didn’t seem to know what had hit her. Nobody could pronounce her name. The town nearest the Point had a phone book that was a single mimeographed sheet with thirty-two names and numbers on it. The road signs were hand-painted, but it had a liquor store and a grocery store and a superhardened airstrip that looked capable of landing 747s, because the bigger companies had started figuring out how much money there was in shipping mass quantities of flash-frozen salmon.
We strung fifty-foot nets perpendicular to the shore just south of the King Salmon River, cork floats on top, lead weights on the bottom, and pickers like me rubber-rafted our way along the cork floats, hauling in a little net, freeing the salmon’s snagged gills, and filling the raft at our feet. When we had enough we paddled ashore and emptied the rafts and started all over again.
Everybody knew what they were doing but me. And in that water with that much protective gear, people drowned when things went wrong. Learning the ropes meant figuring out what the real fishermen wanted, and the real fishermen never said boo. It was like I was in the land of the deaf and dumb and a million messages were going by. Someone might squint at me, or give me a look, and I’d give him a look back, and finally someone else would say to me, “That’s too
tight
.” It was nice training on how you could get in the way even when your help was essential.
 
How could you
do
such a thing if you love her so much? I think to myself with some regularity, lying there in bed. Well, that’s the question, isn’t it? is usually my next thought. “What’s the day before Memorial Day circled for?” my wife asked a week ago, standing near our kitchen calendar. Memorial Day at that point stood two weeks off. The whole extended family would be showing up at Don and Nila’s for a cookout. I’d probably be a little hobbled when it came to the annual volleyball game.
“Should you even
have
kids? Should you even have a wife?” my wife asked, once, after our first real fight. I’d taken a charter all the way up to Dry Bay and had stayed a couple of extra nights and hadn’t called. I hadn’t even called in to the office. She’d been beside herself with worry and then with anger. I’d told her to call me back before I’d left, and then when she hadn’t, I’d been like, Okay, if you don’t want to talk, you don’t want to talk. I’d left my cell phone off.
That
I’m not supposed to do. The office even thought about calling Air-Sea Rescue.
“Bad move, Chief,” even Doris, our girl working the phones, told me when I got back.
 
“So I’m wondering if I should go back to work,” my wife tells me today. We’re eating something she whipped up in her new wok. It’s an off day—nothing scheduled until tomorrow, except some maintenance paperwork—and I was slow getting out of the house and she invited me to lunch. She was distracted during the rinsing-the-greens part, and every bite reminds me of a trip to the beach. She must notice the grit. She hates stuff like that more than I do.
“They still need someone to help out with the online accounts,” she says. She has an expression like every single thing today has gone wrong.
“Do you want to go back to work?” I ask her. “Do you miss it?”
“I don’t know if I
miss
it,” she says. She adds something in a lower voice that I can’t hear because of the crunch of the grit. She seems bothered that I don’t respond.
“I think it’s more, you know, if we’re not going to do the other thing,” she says. “Have the baby.” She keeps herself from looking away, as if she wants to make clear that I’m not the only one humiliated by talks like this.
I push some spinach around and she pushes some spinach around. “I feel like first we need to talk about us,” I finally tell her. I put my fork down and she puts her fork down.

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