Subduction
Page 1
Advance Praise for Subduction
“Kristen Millares Young’s Subduction is the powerful debut novel from a writer that comes to us fully formed. This book is as unforgettable as it is timely, a story that keeps us riveted from beginning to end, written with abundant grace and lyric intensity. Beautiful, smart, and urgent. Read this book now.”
—ROBERT LOPEZ, author of Good People and All Back Full
“In this commanding novel, Kristen Millares Young captures the brutality of an anthropological gaze upon a Makah community. Her complex, exquisitely shaped characters embody the calamity of intrusion and the beauty of resilience.”
—ELISSA WASHUTA, author of My Body is a Book of Rules
“Kristen Millares Young’s Subduction is a taut, atmospheric tale that gave me what I hope for in a novel: characters that I can care about with stakes that really matter. This is an enormously impressive debut. I’ll eagerly await more from this writer.”
—STEVE YARBROUGH, PEN/Faulkner Award Finalist
“‘Love is a kind of home,’ Kristen Millares Young writes in Subduction. But in the world of this beautifully written novel, home is also a place of secrets, murder, and loss. A tale of taking and giving, resistance and surrender, Subduction raises troubling, provocative questions about our struggle to belong.”
—SAMUEL LIGON, author of Miller Cane, Wonderland
“Subduction will give you a sense of life lived in the most remote corner of the lower 48, the Makah reservation in Washington State. The ever-changing Pacific Ocean, the emerald forests, the geoduck clams, and the scruffy sea-scoured dwellings are merely the foundation of Kristen Millares Young’s suspenseful, atmospheric first novel. The characters leap off the page and into your heart. I wanted to swallow the story whole, and I was happy to know it would take time to savor it. An auspicious debut!”
—PATRICIA HENLEY, National Book Award Finalist
“Set in the Pacific Northwest, Subduction is a lyrical forest of storytelling rooted in indigenous voices and invaded by those who would steal the tongues and hearts of the ones they love while bartering and betraying the idea of belonging to a land, a birthright, and a family. When you read Kristen Millares Young’s words, you understand how it is we can steal, can betray, can love.”
—SHAWN WONG, author of Homebase and American Knees
“Subduction introduces a welcome new voice in Kristen Millares Young, here telling a taut, fraught story of two people who meet and engage in circumstances that surprise. Both have lived but are seeking to live yet more fully, even as they’re beset by their pasts. Whether the way to such realization is with the other is a core part of this vividly written story. Set on Makah Nation land, part of Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, Subduction is a searching exploration of historic legacies in the present day. The result: a book of reckoning, full-heartedly told.”
—RICK SIMONSON, Elliott Bay Book Company
SUBDUCTION
a novel
Kristen Millares Young
Subduction
Copyright © 2020 by Kristen Millares Young
All Rights Reserved
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of both the publisher and the copyright owner.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Book design by Sandra Moore
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Millares Young, Kristen, 1981- author.
Title: Subduction : a novel / Kristen Millares Young.
Description: First edition. | Pasadena, CA : Red Hen Press, [2020]
Identifiers: LCCN 2019041298 (print) | LCCN 2019041299 (ebook) | ISBN 9781597098922 (paperback) | ISBN 9781597098946 (ebook)
Classification: LCC PS3613.I532276 S83 2020 (print) | LCC PS3613. I532276 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019041298
The National Endowment for the Arts, the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, the Ahmanson Foundation, the Dwight Stuart Youth Fund, the Max Factor Family Foundation, the Pasadena Tournament of Roses Foundation, the Pasadena Arts & Culture Commission and the City of Pasadena Cultural Affairs Division, the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, the Audrey & Sydney Irmas Charitable Foundation, the Kinder Morgan Foundation, the Meta & George Rosenberg Foundation, the Allergan Foundation, the Riordan Foundation, Amazon Literary Partnership, and the Mara W. Breech Foundation partially support Red Hen Press.
First Edition
Published by Red Hen Press
www.redhen.org
For Brian
In the one hand,
you are holding the mirror.
On the other hand,
you are the mask.
Put on the mask and look in the mirror.
—Wilson Duff
For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have.
The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.
—James Baldwin
SUBDUCTION
CONTENTS
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Acknowledgments
Biographical Note
Chapter One
THE SHORE PULLED away. Froth churned from its feet to hers. The engines hummed through her bones.
From the aft deck, Claudia looked back toward the city they made home. She searched the skyline for places they had been happy—the top of the Space Needle, a waterfront park, the Ferris wheel—until her westward passage split the horizon into expanses of gray demarcated into sea and sky by hue alone.
Puget Sound opened in fathoms below the ferry.
Claudia left town without saying her goodbyes. Seattle was a small world. Movers must have swarmed her house to clear out Andrew’s belongings in the space of one morning. The neighbors would have seen.
What had they seen? She couldn’t bring herself to ask whether her sister had been on site to supervise, and Claudia hid her phone in case someone felt like sending unsolicited glimpses of Maria deciding what to take, practicing wifeliness. Slipping Andrew a kiss for courage as the first box was packed. Claudia pictured Maria’s thick curls, her narrow shoulders, her rounded hips. Birthing hips.
The broadcaster’s voice echoed through the loudspeakers, cautioning passengers about unknown items and suspicious activity.
It was cowardly of Andrew not to deliver the news in person. Worse still, Maria. Did they think she would handle it poorly? That she was dangerous?
Listen
ing to the roar of the props, Claudia saw what her fate might have been—her body lying in the bathtub, blue and bloated. Afloat. Her stomach twisted. It was more than she could take—or forgive. They knew what they were doing, she thought. Yet they think I deserve it.
Gulls swept the boat’s wake. She was surprised by how close they came, how she could see feathers tracing their sinuous curves. How they were suddenly beautiful—not the splattering scavengers they had been, but flight itself.
Right now, everyone I know is stuck at a desk, and then there’s me, Claudia thought, on my way back into the field. As a child in Mexico, she wanted to go somewhere—any-where—away. She had always studied people. She never envisioned herself as an anthropologist, preferring something more dashing, like explorer. But here she was, en route to the Makah reservation at Neah Bay, an old whaling village on the northwest tip of the lower 48. Indian Country.
Last year, she noticed Andrew timing her periods, his prick vanishing ten days after she first bled. Which was almost funny because lately, she found herself wanting to be careless, to chance it.
Folding up her body on her side of the bed, ovulating alone whenever she could manage it, she had made it through her thirties unscathed. That was when they were still trying.
And now, she thought, I’m old. I’d have a baby with Down’s, if I could have one at all.
I just wanted something from myself. Still do. Something bigger for myself. Bigger than myself, bigger than all of this. I don’t know how to get it without wanting it. Why couldn’t he understand?
Besides, what kind of man fucks his wife’s sister? Claudia tilted her head to consider the inverse. What kind of wife would allow her husband to become so close to her sister that he could fall for her, fall inside of her, fill her up?
Only a conniving bitch would wrap her legs around her brother-in-law. Maria’s legs were curvy. Great gams, Andrew once said. In horror of excess flesh, Claudia carved herself to gristle. Maria’s thighs bloomed. Claudia imagined they would shake in sweaty reverberation during sex, a shuddering and prayerful response to the call of loin striking flank, so unlike the flat slap of muscle her own lovemaking had become.
Last month, when her fingers crept between buttons to his curly nest, his hand rose to still her wayward progress. She left her arm on top of him, trying to act natural, like this was cuddling. They pretended to sleep.
It took ten minutes to amass the strength to roll onto her back and concede. It was terrible to be uneasy in her own bed. She hadn’t felt that way since college. But this time, it was her husband, and having had his love and lost it made her physically ill, a malaise so invasive it was as though she were at altitude, her body shutting down extremities, fingertips first.
She signed the papers to be done with it. He wanted out.
A giant gull hovered much higher than the others, dark against the sky, a trick of light diffusing its outstretched wings into comets. Claudia followed as its silhouette moved forward, too quick for a bird, her steps taking her into the warm fluorescence of the cafeteria, where people sat chatting over beer and chicken strips. She hurried westward, peering through fogged windows, passing rows of vinyl booths and plastic chairs before she rushed onto the foredeck and into the full force of the ferry’s crossing.
Claudia clutched her billowing jacket and studied the cirrus clouds, searching their soft underbellies, muscles locked against the cold. She could not find the gull.
Her gaze dropped to an oblong head bobbing in a trough, nodding and dipping, a sleek presence that seemed sentient. The Sound foamed and fell back on itself amidst a charcoal tangle of currents. Squinting, she rose on tiptoe to check the next swell and sighted a line trailing behind it. Bull kelp.
The Olympic Mountains loomed. Her mind was awash in pearl and jade. The ferry neared Bainbridge Island, the first leg of a 160 mile journey that would take her west, along peninsulas carved by retreating glaciers and bridges built by enterprising men, until finally, she reached land’s end and its people——who had claimed their place among gulls and rock for millennia. She was merely passing through this world. Or above one, in any case, riding the back of an inland sea where fish were fighting and fucking and occasionally being carried off by nets, their minds naked with terror.
A merciless place, acidified by the dank exhales of engines. Though sea creatures shepherd their young in good faith, their only end is death, as it is here and everywhere on earth. Those that remain will end in mud, picked over by crabs.
Years ago, she drove around the Olympic Peninsula with Andrew, searching for adventure on summer weekends. Now the mantle of winter softened its range of crags. If she looked hard enough, Claudia could see ripples in the snow-fields, the glaciers getting close and large.
She saw herself with Andrew, climbing a narrow saddle between creaking icefalls. Remembered the weakness and dread she felt while they reached the peak, bound by rope, carabiners clinking as they kicked steps into white crust. Wind screamed over ridges. Her rigging howled and whistled.
Andrew leaned into the gale, angling into its clutches. Her body aped his steadfast decision to keep going, but her spirit scurried down mountain, where trees bowed under snow crisscrossed with the tunnels of animals. They, too, had changed colors to avoid predation.
And now, to whom was she tied?
Claudia gripped the green railing, still wet from the last rain. A crow flew by, holding one small claw with the other. This too shall pass, she told herself, unconvinced.
She looked toward the water, and there it was again—the black head. A seal. It pivoted toward her. She heard its breaths in slight puffs that pushed aside the engine drone until a hush drowned all other sound and stilled her thoughts. A strange watchfulness intensified.
The sea opened and closed around the seal, swallowing its head. The ferry grew louder, the voices of other people tuning in on deck like an oldtime radio.
Shivering, she hugged herself.
The wooded shores of Bainbridge Island took shape along the sharpening coastline. Kelp twisted along dark beaches whose upper reaches sprouted mansions. Their banks of windows glittered, cold and steely as the early photos of homesteaders with severely parted hair and thin mouths.
It had all once been forest, right down to the water, the largest stumps serving as dance floors, fiddlers sawing sweet melodies as wood was shipped to whoever could pay, the roving bands of loggers more devastating than termites, than locusts, than anything that had come before.
Executives and their fleece-trimmed families lived there now, the latest in an oncoming wave of people.
It was close to Christmas. Claudia always had Andrew spend the holidays at Mt. Baker with her family. “You like my sister,” she replied when he broached the idea of other plans. “And you know what Thomas expects.” Andrew cozied up to her father’s aura of wealth. Thomas was mostly stocks and properties now, not all in on timber as he once was. “The good old days,” as he liked to say, “when no one gave a shit about owls.”
It was better to be with Makahs for the holidays. She wanted to sit with other people’s families, let their happiness buoy her, but she didn’t know if she could take it, being near children.
Most Makahs would want to be with their kids, cooking and wrapping presents and bullshitting in front of the TV, not talking to an anthropologist about animal spirits and songs. She could knock on Maggie’s door, though it seemed rude to show up, unannounced, at the home of a woman who lived alone. Or maybe she didn’t want to put in the time, no different than the outsiders who first arrived wanting the goods quick and easy as they could be had.
Even the good ones were suspect. Like James Swan, who lived among the Makah Tribe in the mid 1800s. Who was an amateur ethnologist, customs inspector and Indian agent. Who taught schoolchildren and was respected enough that a Makah family took his name. Who considered his life a failure because he never struck it rich, and what else was being a pioneer about. Who transcribed their stories of cannibalism and g
rave robbing, of cooking marrow from baby arm bones to make grease and power, of strapping other families’ dead to their backs when they swam creeks to purify themselves, anything to be a better whaler. Who ransacked the graves of Makah chiefs for skulls he sent east to the Smithsonian, a violation of respect and sanctity so great the institute was later compelled to return them.
These flawed forebears cleared the path for those who came much later. By the 1970s, hikers had stumbled across a handful of longhouses buried in the wild beach at Ozette, an old Makah village south of Neah Bay. It was the find of a lifetime, cured in salt water, hidden from prying eyes and hands. A professor and archaeologist named Doc Daugherty worked with Makahs to excavate, catalogue and display thousands upon thousands of artifacts. There were bows and hooks and shanks, bowls and whetstones, looms and paddles and nets, posts and beams and planks, shafts and shell blades for arrows and harpoons, and weapons of iron set adrift from the Orient in a time when junks still plied the seas. Cedar bark baskets survived, wetly, their weave holding the hair of their makers.
It had been hundreds of years since a landslide swallowed the longhouses during an earthquake big enough to send a tsunami to Japan. Nowadays, a whale saddle studded with otter teeth was a big hit during classroom visits to the Makah museum. A nettle fiber net housed there helped swing the Supreme Court in favor of Native fishing rights, proving the existence of that technology before first contact with white people, who came to take everything they could see, everything they could carry, everything for themselves, or for sale.
Daugherty was different. He was decent. The Makah tribe held onto its stuff. Claudia was coasting in a dead predecessor’s wake. She knew that. There were still some great men. She just hadn’t met one.
And then there were Andrew’s meds, the pills she found guilty for their faltering sex life, insisting that drugs were unnecessary.