The Croning (17 page)

(1980)

1.

D
on surfaced from a nightmare of drowning in the dark, and realized somebody had called his name from the far bank as he drifted the Yukon in his leaky old Zodiac raft.

He glanced around somewhat wildly—had he even heard another human voice? This was deep, dark wilderness, miles from the nearest native village, much less the summer cabins or suburbs of white men. He was also drunk off his ass. Seemed as if he’d been floating forever and anyway it was during the Luminous Period so all bets were off. Time was nebulous. Time glowed, trailed sparks.

He would not feel better on the return flight to Olympia. Looking down at the busted skulls of nameless ranges, his thoughts were lizard-thoughts. The DC-10 bucked and flexed while he peered through foggy glass at the interminable sweep of prehistoric America and pondered how it resembled the folds and cockles of a calcified brain. Black Hills Dakota was the legendary heart of the world. This, then, the utter north, could be the brain of the world. Forward arc of the Ring of Fire, Land of Ten Thousand Smokes.

For now, he flickered between the plane and the raft, future and present; between nursing a brandy over the black and white wasteland, and sprawling shit-faced at the bottom of a raft, gawking across the flat muddy expanse of river to a sheer bank and its fence of cottonwood trees.

The park service boys had warned him about restless natives back at Kyntak Landing. A Gold Rush mining outpost crumbled into a historical asterisk, Kyntak Landing was comprised of a Quonset hut, a handful of outbuildings and a radio tower in the foothills of the Brooks Range. Alaska had its share of these relics; graveyards of the Frontier spirit.

The rangers suggested in not too gentle terms Don was looking to get his head blown off. The veteran of the pair, the one who did the talking, said some of the locals held a grudge that went all the way back to the days of Seward. The man doubtless knew what he was talking about, he appeared at least a quarter native himself. He couldn’t grasp what possessed anyone to raft from the Yukon headwaters 1200 miles to the Canadian border if not for hunting or shooting nature photographs.

Don didn’t carry a rifle or a camera. Didn’t have much more than traveling clothes and a Navy sea bag jammed with C rations, a case of Wild Turkey and a genuine leather flask of rye straight from his pal Argyle Arden’s bathtub back in Olympia. He declined to mention the plastic baggie of peyote buttons tucked in his shirt pocket under the pack of Winston 100s. Another of Argyle’s essential survival kit items.
Don, my lad, if you wanna vision quest, here’s your ticket. As the kids said in our day, Happy trails, muthafuckah!
Neither did he inform them that he’d spent some months among the Yukon tribes, back when he was doing grad work, and knew a thing or two about the unpleasant side of Alaskan race relations firsthand.

Was he an experienced outdoorsman? He’d hiked canyons in New Mexico with a burro looking for copper veins; he’d gone camping in the Cascades a few weekends as a kid. He’d inherited several boxes of
Field and Stream
from his granddad. He knew how to use a John Wayne, so he figured his bases were covered.

Is it a dare, Mr. Miller? You out to prove something?

Don chuckled and promised them it wasn’t a dare, wasn’t a suicide ploy, nothing like that. Maybe a midlife crisis come five or six years early. He needed space, needed room to breathe, needed to sort some things out. A fellow couldn’t ask for much more space than the interior of the Land of the Midnight Sun.

The rangers grimly dusted their tall hats and left him to his own devices, promised to send word to the family if and when he disappeared.

Actually, it was a dare, at least in part. He was here because he made a list once—the Twelve Labors. Granddad had commanded him to write down a dozen things he wanted to accomplish before he died. The
Do or Die List
. Granddad had been keen on that sort of thing, did the very same himself, only instead of screwing Debbie Harry and navigating the Yukon it was making love to Louise Brooks and climbing Mount Everest. Granddad had gone after thirty-plus years of twilight decline; then he got the twenty-one gun salute, Old Glory folded into a sandwich wedge and presented to his dry-eyed daughter, the obligatory sendoff in the Daily O.

So here Don floated, on a sabbatical from his job as a managing consultant at Pacific Geo, as it were, assuming one could take a break from doing basically nothing and go on vacation, getting piss-drunk and living out number twelve on a list of childish feats of derring-do that only grew exponentially fanciful should he happen to survive the current enterprise. Trying to impress a dead man when he didn’t even believe in ghosts, trying to exorcise demons when God was the least of his manifold fears.

The first night out he beached on a gravel bar, made a bonfire from deadwood, and uncapped the Wild Turkey. He saved the good stuff, the genuine moonshine, for later. This was autumn in Alaska and the nights got bitter when the light finally gave up the ghost. He sat wrapped in an army blanket, slugging his booze and watching the stars burn coldly in the gulf.

His dreams were torments, full of fire and demons and reed music.

Next, there was a fuzzy period where he couldn’t sleep, couldn’t keep his eyelids fastened for more than a few seconds. Newtonian law was intermittently enforced, it faded in and out like a degrading radio signal. Euclidian geometry became elastic to say the least. He hallucinated natives in war bonnets stalking him from the bank. He hallucinated cottonwood logs were Nile crocs waiting for him to dip his grimy hand in the cold water. He hallucinated a spider dangled beneath the blurry white sun on a strand of razor wire. The wind whispered in an old baby’s voice even when the air was still as lead. The wind’s voice tickled and crooned in his bones, subsonic, subatomic.
The deepest cavern in the world is the human heart
.

The Luminous Period.

Luminous was
the
entertainment industry argot of the month, the watchword for that which was all style and no substance. Prose was luminous. Film was luminous. The river, grey as a quivering lung, was
luminous
grey. Don suspected his brain was grey too. He didn’t know if it was luminous; sure as hell felt like it quivered with every throb of the pulse in his temple.

Alongside stark weather and mosquitoes, a man can expect bad dreams, nightmares perhaps. He knew there was a season for everything. He admitted himself as being foolhardy, but Mother hadn’t whelped a fool, had she?

Certainly a man could expect bad dreams and even nightmares when he’d been swilling homemade rotgut hooch from a leather flask like the old boys in coonskin caps did it in the 1840s. A white man was letting himself in for danger floating down the Yukon River in a rubber raft, a leaky Zodiac; drinking dirty whiskey and sucking peyote buttons and it was no wonder he had dreams that weren’t exactly bedtime stories. When they fractured at the point of consciousness he would be hurled from the saddle, rouse to the slosh of bilge water, the omnipresent nothingness that permeated the atmosphere like white static.

Problem was, as the trip progressed he couldn’t always be certain when reality ended and dreams began, couldn’t be certain at any given moment whether or not he’d crossed that thin black line. Couldn’t stop drinking the firewater or eating the devil plants.

The motor dead as three o’clock and he wasn’t particularly concerned. He was sliding toward the sea; King Arthur sans horns, hounds, or the epic pyre. He wasn’t sure how to classify his condition. A midlife crisis? Too bad, so sad it hadn’t manifested as a yen for a Jaguar and a fling with a nubile secretary half his age.

He didn’t give a damn about fancy cars, or manly adventures, not even this one, really. As for nubile young women, well, as he’d muttered a time or two during his long marriage—
I didn’t go blind when I put on the ring, baby!
That said, Michelle was the only woman for him. God knew, he could barely handle her. The idea of an affair was laughable, exhausting, depressing, and knowing Michelle as he did, scary.

She’d inhabited his dreams the past two nights. A younger version of herself from college days that truly wasn’t much different on the surface from the woman of fifty. Michelle was possessed of an ageless charm reminiscent of great classical beauties such as Sophia Loren, Jacqueline Bisset, or Elizabeth Taylor. Her skin remained flawless and taut, her hair sleek and dark as the proverbial raven’s wing. For her, age burned from the inside. Gazing into her eyes, there was no mistaking her for a naïve girl. He wasn’t entirely sure that such a girl ever existed.

He’d met Michelle Mock in the spring of 1950. This was during their junior year at university. Don’s classmate and best friend Custer Bane was pursuing a coed majoring in sculpture and she’d invited him to a show in the Ballard neighborhood; a house near the water, currently rented by a professor named Louis Plimpton, a man Don would come to know quite well. At that juncture, he was just another faceless instructor Don had heard speak once and estimated as dry as the chalk he scratched on the board. Custer explained that Professor Plimpton was a scientist, but had eclectic sensibilities when it came to art and culture. Scuttlebutt was the prof dipped his toe into all kinds of exotic sensations.

In any event, Custer needed a wingman, and so Don rode across town in the fellow’s jalopy along with four other guys from school. Somebody passed around a bottle of vodka and the lot of them were toasted and singing bawdy roadhouse ditties when they piled from the car and descended on the wine and cheese event.

Don remembered the clapboard house being dark as a pit, illuminated by candles and a couple of paper lamps tinted red like a boardwalk brothel. Many of the windows were blocked with plywood; stars glinted through a hole in the roof. There was a cold hearth, some rickety furniture, and a natty couple entwined on the couch. A man in a dinner jacket slouched in a doorway. A glass of absinthe dangled from his left hand. He grinned and patted Don’s cheek, pointed him toward the bead curtain and a claustrophobia-inducing stairwell that led to the
real
party.

The basement was a labyrinth of subdivided cubbyholes and closets, exposed pipes and chipped cement; cobwebs and dust and lots of shadows, and an overwhelming smell of mildew. The guests, a mix of college kids and their off-campus pals and some creepy-types that gravitated to such spectacles, had gathered in a long, skinny L-shaped section to admire a handful of wax sculptures and oil and charcoal paintings that resembled lousy Picasso imitations. A flautist sat cross-legged on a mat and played. The air was heavy with smoke from the candles and cigarettes.

Professor Plimpton stood at the heart of the gathering next to a display of rusted bedsprings, wax drippings, and copper tubing with his arms clasped behind his back. A short, wiry man in a blue suit. He kept his gray hair tied in a pony tail. He ignored the trio of undergraduate supplicates arrayed before him and nodded at Don. His smile was quick and sharp; much sharper than the softness of his features or voice would indicate. “Young master Miller. Glad you could tear yourself away from the quarry.”

Don was exactly buzzed enough to second-guess his own recollection—they hadn’t met, had they? He grinned noncommittally at the professor and waved the way a man does from a speeding car, or from the deck of a boat to acquaintances on the shore.

“We meet again,” a beautiful girl in a mohair sweater said to Don, her breasts flattened against his shoulder as she leaned in to fix him with her dark, dark eyes. Those eyes belonged to a much older, more worldly soul than fresh-faced Michelle Mock, however precocious she might’ve been in stodgy 1950.

A magical moment, in a black way. It was as if they’d known each other forever. Don was neck deep in trouble before he even opened his mouth to stammer his name. She smiled and held his hand and said she already knew, they’d taken a philosophy class together. He didn’t believe it—surely he’d remember sitting in a room with this gorgeous woman, and she grinned in a sexy, feral manner and said maybe she’d worn glasses and a sweater.

“I blend in when I want to,” she said. “I’m the hidden figure in the grotesque of a tapestry. Look closely and I’m the one sitting in the background under a tree, naked, drinking from a horn.”

He still didn’t believe it. A sweater and schoolmarm glasses wouldn’t do much to obscure her erotic lushness. He nodded and went along with it, determined to get the real story at a more opportune time; say after she’d had a few drinks. This never occurred.

Three dates later they were in her apartment experimenting with Tantric sex, and a month after that they got engaged and eventually eloped for a civil ceremony in Eastern Washington. Professor Plimpton got wind of the news and wired Michelle, his favorite student, some cash, and directions to his farmhouse in Wenatchee so the couple had a honeymoon retreat. There were hills and trails for romantic hikes, a clear, cold lake, vineyards…

Amidst the confusion and excitement, it completely slipped Don’s mind that he meant to ask his bride to confess where and when she’d actually seen him before.

2.

Don had achieved quasi-sobriety when he bumped into the rotting docks of Ruby, an Athabascan village that had sunk deep into a curve of the mighty river. Fish wheels languidly churned the water, although the kings had long-since spawned; now the machines dredged for pinks and whitefish; dented Smokercraft skiffs bobbed at the end of slimy tethers and the air was ripe with cottonwood smoke and the stringent musk of curing chum salmon. The only modern buildings were the school and the armory—all else dated to the 1930s or further back in the dim prehistory of territorial conquest. Satellite dishes perched atop shingle roofs, incongruous and alien as deep sea flora.

People parted like smoke when he limped up the sodden dirt path of the cutback. The villagers observed him with flat-eyed stoicism he recalled too well from previous visits. They would, according to his experience of their traditions, suspect he was a demon, or demon-inhabited. Considering the volume of alcohol saturating his liver, that ancient gateway of spirits, of course they were at least somewhat correct. His skull whispered, whispered in the tongues of burning leaves, the corrosive drone of carcinogens metastasizing to membrane. The world enveloped him in shades of jaundice and bruises.