He held up items—a crusty garden glove, a button blanket, stained potholders, strings of olive shells—and studied her face for an aftermath. He did this for days and into the nights, clearing a wide path, stacking bags along the wall, beating down dread, heartbeat swift and erratic, breath hurried. “We’ll go through these bags later. What do you think, Mom?” Did she nod? Her eyes became alert, as though her mind bobbed along the surface of things, but her mouth remained below, thick with jostling silence. He stumbled, sweaty, through the trailer, trying to sever his mind’s recurrent return to buoys lolling in the Pacific.
He burst onto the porch, drawing air like a dying fish, and nearly tripped over a bucket of geoduck clams tucked next to the door. He was hungry. His mother must be hungry, too. He hadn’t taken care of anyone, not even himself, for years. It stunned him how ill-prepared he was to be needed.
Squatting, he lit a cigarette and studied the clams by the glow of his lighter. Covered by clear water, they probed the strange surrounding stillness with slick taupe siphons.
Rimmed with dirt and dead flies, the windows still opened. Fresh air flooded the trailer. The stink clung to his clothes and the carpet. He got down on all fours, sniffing. His dad always checked the registers. Peter pulled the couch to one side and smelled the grate. He almost passed out. Bingo.
Before he foraged for whatever died below the trailer, he thought twice and locked the screen door. He would hear her this time.
Dropping his head into the damp dirt, he cast his flashlight around the trailer’s underbelly, pushing into the darkness, testing deep slumps in the fabric with a push, hoping to find what his dad called the “dead skunk bounce.” He’d begged to hold the flashlight as his father prodded and cursed, ash falling onto his cheek, cracking jokes. “This underbelly has more saggy udders than a dairy farm. No, wait! Than a bar in Forks!” Peter laughed out loud, remembering.
“What’s so funny under there?”
He froze, hearing old man wheezy grumbles. A faded, stained pant knee lowered into the grass, followed by tremulous hands. Dave’s face appeared sideways. “How’s it hanging, Peter?”
“Hey, Dave.”
“You know your mom could apply for a new trailer.” Dave settled in, hands folded on his knee.
“Really?” Peter flipped onto his elbows and pulled his bandana down.
“Yeah.” Dave brightened. “I don’t know why she won’t, what with all the history in there.”
Peter’s silence was a vast sucking mudflat.
“Just making conversation, son.”
“I’m busy.”
“I can see that.” Dave wobbled and smacked the trailer to steady himself.
“Wait!” Peter army crawled into the light. “I know I haven’t been around. We had our reasons. But I’m here now. I don’t want to find out my mom’s wandered off secondhand.”
“Beans told you I was bringing her back, didn’t he? He’s my grandson—my blood. That’s not secondhand.”
“I’m here to help.”
“Might need more help than you can give.” Gripping the vinyl for support, Dave bore down and plunked his foot into the grass, snorting a bit. “Push it away all you like. That stuff comes back.”
“I’ll handle my own business.”
“We’ll get you straightened out.” Dave threw his words over his shoulder. “You can come watch me work. If you keep your mouth shut.”
Peter cut a hole in the undercarriage, loosing a flurry of rodent flakes. Another. It was like a crypt down here.
“If you’re going to lock me in my own home, better make sure there’s not a hole in the front door,” his mom shouted. “I might climb out.”
“Look who’s talkin’.” He folded his mouth down, containing his happiness out of habit.
“Look who’s talking back. Haven’t changed a bit.”
Surrounded by small piles of rotted squirrel, he grinned, the bandana hugging his cheeks.
His mother’s fingers traced the ridged clamshell, tracking the geoduck’s age in calcium Braille. Its tough neck slumped, exposed.
“I’m misplacing things, I know that.” She slid a thin blade around the siphon, slipping the severed flesh into a bowl, and lifted the shell with both hands before letting it fall into the bucket with a hollow clatter. “Even words. Sometimes I can’t find them for a long while.” She smoothed hair from her forehead, lodging shards of shell in the strands, and searched out his eyes. “But you can’t misplace love. Even if the self that’s talking forgets, I am inside. I know you. I love you.”
Her hands, small and balled up like a child’s, barely encircled his waist when he hugged her, not thinking for once. His chin rested on her head; the mist of frizz that hung around her crown tickled his cheeks. In one breath, she smelled like a powdery old woman; in the next, she smelled like the sea.
“Look what I’ve done.” She pulled back, cataracts glinting. “You’re covered in clam!” She dabbed his shirt. The wrinkles around her mouth tensed.
“It’s going to be alright.”
“I know, son. I know. But then it won’t be.”
“I’ll take care of you.” There. The words escaped without his say so. The unsayable had been said.
“But who will take care of you?”
“Let me worry about that.” His fingers curled around her arms. “Make the fritters. I’ll get started on the windows.”
The shells splayed open like wings. She held them over the bucket.
Roberta opened the door with a quick knock, the kind of knock that isn’t meant to warn whoever lives inside. Peter was caught wearing boxers to a reunion he’d been daydreaming about for years. He tried to rearrange his expression from “What the fuck?” to “Welcome!” but the strange pulling of his cheeks told him his face landed on a grimace. He stood, solemn, as three kids blew past him to crowd around his mother, who let them stir the batter.
“You’re quite a sight.” Laughter had worn grooves into Roberta’s cheeks, intensifying her angles. Her cheekbones had risen and rounded. They nudged up next to her eyes, opening a fan of wrinkles toward her temples.
“It’s good to see you.”
“No hug?” She held her hands out, right arm drooping with an enormous slouchy purse.
“Let me get some pants on.”
Peter hustled down the hallway, glad he’d been able to resist his first and near fatal impulse to scream and cross his hands over his chest like a goddamned girl. He stepped twice into the wrong leg of his grimy jeans. He could hear Roberta call his mother “Auntie”—she started that when their mothers made them stop dating, and it pained him to hear it again. Those were her children. Were they all by Randall?
Roberta had her arm around his mother, who was smiling and saying, “Now just look at these kids. Can you believe it?”
“They’re beautiful, Roberta. How old?”
“Sarah’s five, Layla’s seven, and John is twelve. Kids, this is your Uncle Peter.”
Two high voices said hello.
His mind scrambled on Roberta’s nearness. White wires threaded the shiny black curtain that hung around her shoulders. What she must think of him. Left his mother to rot. Roberta would have seen it happen in real time, the slow creep of trash like moss on a log.
The boy stared him down. She cleared her throat. “You’ve cleaned up.”
“Not done yet.”
“She wouldn’t let anyone else do it, you know.” She squeezed his mother’s shoulders. “Waiting for him, eh?”
The oil in the pan hissed and spat.
“Still don’t talk much.” Roberta kicked his foot.
“Don’t know what to say.”
“You can’t be eating. You’re skinny.”
“Is that Indian for in shape?” Peter flexed a bicep, like he did in high school, when she would clutch his arm with small fingers.
“Don’t talk to my mom like that,” John said.
“Relax, buddy, he’s joking.” She palmed her son’s h
ead. “We’re old friends. Family.”
“I’ve never seen him before.”
“That means you should be extra nice to him, not the other way around. Our great-grandfathers were brothers.”
His mother spooned golden clam fritters from the oil, soaking the paper towel and the plate beneath it. “Who wants one?”
John grabbed two and walked out. “I’ll be at Dave’s!”
Roberta blew on a fritter. “He’s testy lately.”
“I was a punk at that age. If you remember.”
“For you, son?”
His mouth blistered. He tried not to make a big deal of it, but his cheeks puffed out like a blowfish. Roberta smiled into her hand.
“I’ve still got it, don’t I?” Maggie tested a fritter with the back of her forefinger. “Too hot, Sarah. Wait a minute. You don’t want to end up like him.”
“I’m fine. Let me at another one. I’ll show it what’s what.”
“The rest of this batch goes to the girls.” Tiny hands made quick work of what was left. “Stay for dinner, Roberta?”
“Well, I thought I’d pop by and clean those clams, but you beat me to it. I have to make dinner for Randall.”
“Invite him over!” His mother spooned more batter into the pan. The oil attacked from all sides, bubbling and frothing.
Peter was sick to his stomach. A cop, in this trailer. Chill out, he told himself. Roberta would have kept up her visits to her uncle. Dave was right next door. Randall had been coming here for years. He’d seen the piles, the stains. It was an old kitchen, an old story no one was thinking about but Peter—and maybe Dave, who acted like he felt bad, real bad, after Peter’s dad went missing. They always threatened to net smelt after a night out. Dave said he thought Sam was joking. “You know, catching tail.” After the accident, as his mom took to calling it when search parties found the skiff, Peter avoided hangdog eyes; some people were glad to fade away. Not Roberta. Peter took off before he weakened enough to tell her what happened. He was glad she couldn’t see who he was inside. And then she got over him and married Randall, who was fair game because his mother was Yakama, far from the family tree.
“You brought the clams?”
“We dug ’em up this morning.”
“Thank you.” Peter always felt a slight sense of vertigo when he was about to do something he’d regret. He tried to keep himself from saying what he was about to say but couldn’t, even as his pulse quickened and the nausea started. “Leaving them in still water kills them faster.”
“Oh, yeah?” Roberta tucked her hair behind her ears. “Figures. My grampa used to wrap them in an old shirt. The girls wanted to make them feel at home.”
“When they’re in a closed environment like that, they asphyxiate.”
Layla piped up. “What does that mean?”
“They suffocate.”
She looked puzzled. He tried again. “Like drowning.”
She grinned, sure she had him. “They can’t drown! They live in water!”
“Um, it means they run out of oxygen. They use up what’s in the water.” I should listen when I have that feeling, he thought. Why don’t I listen?
His mother snatched up the spatula, dragging the greasy paper towel with it. Fritter crumbs formed a constellation across the linoleum. He stared at the stained plaid, saw his shirtless dad sprawled in jeans, bleeding out. He blinked and blinked again, started counting, clinging to the numbers.
“Mom!” She was stooping below the counter. He pulled her up and used the paper towel to wipe up the crispy bits, fighting his revulsion at the warm wetness against his palm, fighting the sound of sopping up swirls, fighting and wiping harder to hide the shake in his hands.
Someone tapped his shoulder. Roberta’s childhood face stared at him from between Layla’s braided pigtails. “I think you got it, Uncle Peter.”
A semicircle of women stood above him. He stopped. “Got carried away.” He smeared his palms on his jeans. “So. Fritters for dinner?”
The girls gathered close to their mother. She clasped a braid from each. “They’re tired. It’s been a long day. Maybe tomorrow.”
Peter tried to think of what to say, mourning their forgotten hug. “We’ve got company coming. A lady from out of town.”
“Anyone I know?”
“I doubt it.”
After they packed up and left, he scuffled to his room and dove back into the musty palm of his bed. Sleep called to him, a siren swaying in the dark. Tomorrow, we’ll work it out, he thought. That woman will turn up, get them talking about old times. Maybe he could take her out later, somewhere off the rez.
He hadn’t looked in on his mom for hours. Padding down the hall, he flattened his ear against her door and held still. Was that her breathing?
“Stop snooping, you big snoop!”
“Sorry! Just checking.”
“Good night! Keep going!”
Chapter Five
CLAUDIA GLANCED AT the transcript in the passenger seat, trying to quiet her anxiety at presenting this truncated testimonial to its source. She would not be the first outsider to lie to a Makah. Elizabeth Colson, a Radcliffe-educated anthropologist who examined the extent to which Makahs had assimilated American culture in the early part of the last century, was frank in her admission of deceit. She claimed to be gathering stories about the past, all the while studying tribal members in real time.
It was Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle at work—the mere act of observation can change the observed. But Colson expressed no shame about misleading the very people she asked to reveal themselves. Perhaps sensing her duplicity—arriving, as she did, shortly after the attacks on Pearl Harbor—some Makahs called her “Spy Lady.” Quarrels broke out among those who learned of what she’d been told. It was said that no one still living could know enough to speak for the record, and those who did were frauds and braggarts trying to advantage their own kin.
Claudia really should have wrapped up the research last summer, but in retrospect, the data she had gathered felt like fragments. Rubble. She needed to do a deep dive into one family. Makahs would talk about anything as long as she didn’t ask too soon or too directly, but they felt safest sharing gossip, so that’s where she started. Anyone who wanted to hear the good stuff had to listen to the rest first. It was shocking what they revealed if she sat on couches or took someone to the clinic, small favors not meant to be repaid except by the continued tolerance of her presence.
Peter’s thick forearms popped into her mind, surprising her. She’d have to watch it around that one. The road began its ascent up Diaht Hill. Kept gardens and wild ones flashed past, lined with woodpiles, fronted by clean cars and their derelict cousins. A few bushes were strewn with ropes of lights and tinsel that wilted beneath new rain.
No one was outside, allowing her to ogle each trailer. Some of their occupants barely earned enough to get by. Others had millions riding on fishing equipment and licenses. Few reservations could claim such material wealth without the benefit of casinos, which too often generate more debt than cash, but geographic isolation helped the Makah Tribe, to some extent, as did a well-earned reputation for ferocity. The Spaniards first tried to take possession of Makah land in 1775. Driven away by constant skirmishes, they left little but the Ozette potato from Peru, whose knobby fingerlings sprouted throughout the reservation. Dark tales accompanied their departure—despoiled Makah women, dead men, an abandoned fort and a river said to be poisoned by glass bottles left by the failed conquerors. The story went that the bottles disgorged their contents when the rains came. Smallpox broke out. Or so Colson was told.
Sources gathered by the historian Joshua Reid show that white traders spread lies about diseased bottles that could be uncorked, if the natives didn’t turn over more furs. In the multinational race to claim the lush northwest, the English, French, Spanish and Russians bickered with each other and traded blue beads, wool blankets and bad weapons to the natives until there was nothing left of the
sea otter rookeries but thick pelts in China. Enterprising as any trader they met, Makah chiefs grew so wealthy they burned oil until the rafters were black, funding legendary potlatches and with them, a great flourishing of carving, singing and dancing.
Travelling aboard ships that stopped wherever they could profit, smallpox slaughtered without regard to rank, rending centuries of cultural knowledge and leaving a bewildered grief. People scrubbed the scabs with salt water and sand. Corpses everywhere. Babies nursed on dead mothers, and after, few knew who the motherless children were.
Peter’s black truck, a Toyota Tacoma with fancy off-road tires, was parked in front of a trailer that looked tired, like the rest of them, a bleary door below a plywood porch. Something had burned a black moon into the lawn.
Makahs never showed up without gifts for their hosts. Claudia was tempted to turn around and come back when she had a present and maybe a plan. She slung her purse over her shoulder and got out, cradling the transcript and a digital recorder. The transcript acted as an oblique reminder that Maggie had long ago given permission to record their interviews, the way journalists imply interviews are on the record by asking subjects to spell their names. What if Peter refused? Claudia paused. The rain spat on her back. She would ask Peter for permission but hedge her bets. She switched on the recorder and dropped it into her purse just as he opened the screen door.
P: You’re earlier than I expected.
C: Hi, Peter! Sorry about that. Should I come back later?
P: No, no. That’s fine. Come on in. Coffee?
C: That would be wonderful!
P: Cream or sugar?
C: No. Thank you.
P: Nice to see some restraint in a woman. Mom just stepped into the shower. She’ll be out in a bit. Let’s go to the kitchen.
C: Okay. Great.
Steps, coughing, police scanner crackling . . .
P: Have a seat.
Chair scraping, coffee pouring.
Subduction Page 5