He didn’t set out to be this way, a man whose defining possession—if he had one, if possessions could define any man—was his truck, but it was where he felt at home. That is, it was the only place he breathed easy. He was in charge. Fiddling with the radio, rolling the windows up and down at will, wiping the oil stick with a paper towel just for show at gas stations because he knew there was enough, he was most secure when roaming. When he squeegeed bugs off the windshield, he liked to fight a crust thick enough to show he’d been somewhere.
When she still had enough confidence in their relationship to chastise him, his mother said it didn’t matter how far he went, she was with him and so was his past. “You can leave the reservation, but it will never leave you.”
No, that’s not what she said. She only ever referred to Neah Bay as “the village.” That’s what this place was to her, a village, and it scared him how his memory scrambled her words, shading them with his own prejudices, which maybe were not even his own.
He never thought he’d come back to Neah Bay, let alone live with his mother, but here he was, his truck idle at the curb he once hopped with his bike, practicing tricks until he got his driver’s license. In an ideal world, he would drive off once he’d cleaned out her hoard, an act he hoped would clear her mind so she could resume care of herself, never mind that she was cooking for them both. She likes to do it, he told himself. It keeps her busy, just like the sewing.
After they got back from the clinic, his mom asked for his mending, pointing at the jeans he was wearing. He obliged, stripping down to his boxers and socks, and went back into his duffel bag for the jacket whose pocket sagged from its hinges like an old neck. Sitting on the couch, conscious that his pecker could peek out of its peephole if he wasn’t careful, he watched her swollen wrists wave over his tattered clothes, needle pulling thread the way boats draw a wake, fingers diving for scraps she used to patch the holes in his jeans. While she’s distracted, he thought, talk to her. About Dad. About anything. Free yourself.
“Mom.”
“Mm-hmm?”
Her face hung forward, the wrinkles gathering at the lowest point of gravity, her jutted jaw. Needles emerged from her lips like spokes on a wheel.
No, not now.
“Would you like some coffee?”
“Mm-hmm!”
Defeated, yet again. Maybe Claudia would get them talking. As an outsider, she could ask questions that hurt and didn’t care if they did. He’d seen that in the transcripts she’d turned over, noticed her buzzard’s circle over certain weaknesses in his mother’s resolve to keep the conversation light, conversational. Claudia had a way of caressing a sore spot, worrying the wound until fresh words flowed. He didn’t know how to be alone with these people. His people, though he hadn’t even graduated as a Red Devil.
In Neah Bay, everything he did got reported back to command central, his mother, or, worse, the head of his family, which had been his father, kind of, before he died. Except he didn’t have the standing or the money to defend his status, so news of some slight offense by his son would travel from teller to teller, crimes multiplying and distorting along the way like a giant game of telephone. Peter reflected on his family wherever he went, operating against the expectations of other people, whose accusations—you haven’t received the teachings—ricocheted from mother to son.
If he had spoken then, he would have said she taught him to keep quiet, to dispose of unwanted things and not ask questions. She was right in front of him now, and he wanted to slap her into spitting out an apology. It would make him whole, he was sure of it. But there she was, needles in her mouth, having moved on to his jacket. His anger had no place to rest.
When Peter felt like this, first place he went was a bar. Before he came back home, he’d been having trouble breathing. At night, his chest contracted, condensing into a big ball of something about to explode. He skipped meals and smoked packs. He drank and he drank and he drank. He wasn’t alone. Misery saw to that. On the last day of his last job, the day he got fired, he welded zinc anodes to a piling and shivered in his suit, gut rotting from the night before, passed by rays with long spines and circled twice by a muddy bluntnose shark.
Kelp waved like hair in the current. The piling fluttered with brown curls. Tiptoeing along the sea floor, a giant Pacific octopus dragged its ruffled head along, disappearing into a shadowy reef. Up from that dark hole rose a form pale and fleshy, long and thick as a man, face wide, jaw swollen, mouth open, a corpse, it was a corpse coming at him, it was his dad swimming up to see him, what would he say to him, he dropped his stinger and electrodes to strangle, punch, defend himself, anything, but no, now the thing was upon him, beside him, past him, it was a wolf eel, one ugly motherfucker, but no ghost. And it was too late. He already crapped his suit, much to the delight of the control team, whose topside wisecracks led to a brawl in the boat, which didn’t go over well with management, and that was that.
Sure, he chose to drink a lot. Life gets that way. But he had his shit together. He was facing the right direction. It was fine. Better than fine. Drinking was more fun. That gets lost once a man’s ruined, like his dad. At one point, it was fun, before every night held a sick edge, that sense of doom forestalled by one more cigarette, one more shot, one more easy lay, one more time, just this once, stumble home, lights out, and then it was light out, and his head hurt like someone stepped on it, and getting coffee was a triumph of will.
Yeah, Peter knew that feeling. But that didn’t mean he was an alcoholic. He needed to ease off, and he had. Besides, a bar was just a pricey place to pick up women, and he had one in mind, close by. No husband in sight, and Claudia didn’t rock the body of someone who had kids. She looked like a woman who’d focused on herself all these years, not that he could blame her. He was the same way, but it’s different with men. He could always change his mind.
His truck breathed welcome and comfort as soon as he opened its door, inhaling deep, glad to be out of the house. You could just leave, he thought, leave her behind and take off, but he said it to satisfy himself, to feel the sick twist in his stomach as he buckled in and reached for a cigarette. Turning on the engine, deciding yet again not to go for good, made him feel like a man. He took care of his responsibilities.
The constant cloud cover of Neah Bay deadened the sky but brightened the colors below, the sun sneaking into surfaces till they shone, saturated. Christmas lights sagged across the porch of his neighbors down the way, the big colored bulbs casting pastel versions of themselves on the disintegrated siding. A pink plastic castle rose from the lush grass. Next to it, flattening into the uncut lawn, was its cardboard package, still bright with the image of a happy white girl hugging the castle. The cardboard edges and plastic crannies were fuzzed with emerald green. Around the castle spread a moor of broken Styrofoam.
Just beyond, a strip of young hemlocks separated that property from the next, a luxury here where housing developments were hard to get, where even families with money had to wait their turn, cousins piling up in spare rooms until a new piece of land cleared the council. But there, now that he was cruising closer, there at the edge of this small copse of woods, a tarp hung from ropes tied to the lower branches. One of the ropes had snapped—or was it cut?—and hung askew from one corner, revealing the rusted orange truck behind it, a 1977 Ford F250 with striped side panels in yellow and blue and red. Its engine block held a spray of blackberry brambles, a blue collar bouquet that grew all over the Olympic Peninsula, down into Oregon, up into B.C. and east to the Cascades, dimming to dust in the high alpine desert stretching leeward from the mountains. His father’s truck, right there, of course, because he had moved back to the nation that kept its past close as could be, closer, and why junk a car when you could push it to the edge of your lot.
Wherever he went, there they were, memories of his father, pulling Peter into his past until he was here, but not here, inhabiting the places they had been happy together, for time is a place, he was sure of
it, and his soul was stretched thin across it, near to breaking, an aching that was his only memory of love. He remembered sitting on the truck’s patterned blue upholstery, filling his dad’s coffee thermos with beer, careful to tip the bottle so foam wouldn’t spill, keeping his arms loose in their sockets so when his dad hit a rut both bottle and thermos would rise and fall, nice and easy like kelp in a wave.
His dad always bragged on him—“my main man, the only one I’ll let ride with me any day of the week”—when they got to where they were going, unless it was up a logging road to go feather picking, and they were alone. When they stepped from the truck he would palm Peter’s head like a basketball, and the feel of those fingers warm on his brow still lingered. Never take outsiders to your sacred spots, his dad told him. If tourists find where eagles leave blessings, that’ll be the end of them. But maybe Claudia would like to go with him, because he needed a friend, a companion, and he thought she would like it, might soften and take his hand when they got to the top of the mountain.
But not today. Ice melted in the cooler next to him. He swung off Diaht Hill, turning right at the clinic for the flat stretch of road running by Wa atch River, and heard his last six-pack swoosh from one side to the other. It sounded like hope, or at least a good time. A cigarette shook in his mouth. He could not catch its tip with his lighter. Not as he cleared the stand of mossy alders. Not as he passed the tsunami evacuation sign marking the turn up Bahokus Peak. Not as he drove by the quarry with its spray-painted terraces. Not as he turned left at the tribal headquarters, which he still thought of as the Air Force base, though it was decommissioned in the eighties. He needed someone to empty his mind into, and the urge of it compelled him forward. He hurtled toward her, and it didn’t matter if she was a jagged shoal or a brokedown old rock with seabirds on it. He let the wave take him, heart spread wide, waiting for the laceration of first contact.
Chapter Seven
THE PACIFIC FROTHED at the shore, its distant gray spreading into white foam and retreating, flattened by its own mass against the long curve of the horizon. The sea has neither mercy nor pity, Claudia thought, not recognizing her plagiarism for a full minute. Chekhov. Check off the boxes on your formal education and file it away; it does so little good out here in the world.
Snuggled into her sofa, she sipped her coffee and watched wind whip the ocean. Caffeine would kill her cravings. Claudia wallowed in her appetite’s sharpness, a reminder of her body and its needs. She ate her last banana yesterday, but she hadn’t made it back to the store, or even to Maggie’s house, gripped by a powerful sense of foreboding she did not quite understand. They’re just people, she told herself. They don’t hate you. That’s just how their faces are.
The door thundered under a hard double knock. She froze. Whoever it was knew she was here. She shouldn’t show distrust so early into her stay.
Peter filled the doorframe. There was barely any sky around him. She smiled. So did he.
“In the neighborhood?”
“Thought I’d see how you were settling in.” He shifted, big boots scuffling.
“I’ve been meaning to get out on the beach. Walk with me?”
“Yeah, sure. I’ve been cooped up.”
“I’ll get my things.”
They had talked on the porch, but once they passed through the narrow wooden gate to the beach, they stopped talking and just walked, shuffling and squeaking through the peaks and valleys of dune grasses, which were sparse and the kind of green that Claudia last saw on olive trees. The beach grew firmer, crunchy with bands of shells and littered here and there with heaps of kelp.
Elsewhere on the reservation, the driftwood seemed from another time, the fallen trunks taller than people, their rounded root systems tipped toward the sky, carving dark suns into the horizon. But here, where bonfires were a ritual of witness that involved beer and cigarettes, where tourists pocketed anything pretty with the sly acquisitiveness of raccoons, the driftwood was sparse, and so were the good shells.
Claudia had thrown out so much before she left Seattle, shedding her shells and pebbles with the practiced satisfaction of a dog shaking off a bath. Some of her beach glass had been gathered here. Peter kicked a can and scowled at the container ships off the coast. For all she knew, her trash boarded a ship on its way back to Asia, destined for a distant beach community and its own flocks of garbage pickers.
Peter cleared his throat and paused as he came between her path and the shore. The pale sun backed behind the clouds, snuffing out the shadows of his face, his black hair absorbing all the light, as black as anything around it, blacker.
Stop staring, she told herself, and smiled, bright, but he did not return it, and kept instead a steady gaze that said he had seen her hunger. She dropped her eyes to the tangled bull kelp at her feet, their slimy fronds twisted around a net at the wrack line, where breakers made their final sally before retreating, restless. A cloud of black flies floated around her ankles; her tennis shoes squished into a nest of smaller sea plants.
She stepped past the wreckage of the last high tide and onto the smooth, flat sand, and they kept on, not talking, their footprints erasing themselves with damp exhales from beneath, the closest she’d get to leave no trace, or walking on water.
The sea stood up and toppled over, dragging kelp and sand into itself before rising again and again, reaching for the shore. Its passage left a thick sheen on the crust of crushed shells, which rolled on their sides and sighed, sated.
Their shoulders brushed once, and again, as they walked, footsteps moving toward and away from each other in subtle waves that stretched long with the languid tempo of dune ridges.
Ruddy cliffs held back a cedar forest that spilled over, curving toward the sea atop a dark headland, tide pools bared to the sky. She kept her focus on that outcropping, trying not to watch Peter from the corners of her eyes as they drew nearer. His shadow at her periphery had taken over her full attention.
Grazing his hand, her entire body aligned to him like filings on a magnet. She looked without looking, hearing his weight change on the beach.
She was relieved when they came to the headland’s surf-addled rock, where the lava had cooled into pockets, trapping untold numbers of bubbles. Where air had been, life crept in—a profusion of glossy mussels and rough barnacles, orange and purple sea stars, lime and crimson anemones, and emerald plants she could not name.
Claudia crouched before the first pool, its stillness a pane of glass onto a world that did and did not pertain to her. A velvety red anemone swayed, stirred by some unseen force.
She pushed a finger into its cold home, slow and careful. The anemone tuned to her, its rubbery receptors waving in her direction, beckoning. They clung to her as she slipped her nail into the folds of its body, trying to be gentle. It held her, and she lingered, feeling how dear it was, this aggressive embrace, and how it was this creature’s weakness—and not the ferocity of its intent, nor the cunning of its perception—which made it dear. Her power inspired a rising tenderness. She tickled but poked no further, inclining her head so a sky mirror drew over the pool and she could regard herself being maternal.
Beside her shifting face she saw Peter. His eyes were on her. The air thickened into mist, blurring their reflection.
“Come again tomorrow,” he said, and left her there.
Chapter Eight
A MUG SAILED past their heads, scattering ash. Claudia hid behind him, peering at his mother, who emerged from the hall, screaming, “I told you not to smoke in the house!”
“Mom! We’ve been over this. No throwing!”
“No smoking in the house! Don’t change the subject!”
“Okay! We have a guest.”
“Who?”
“Claudia.”
“Never heard of her.”
“Stop poking around under my bed, Mom. Privacy. It’s a form of respect.”
“What would you know about respect? This is my home! I told you not to smoke inside, Sam!�
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“Mom, I am Peter. Sam was my father.”
“You’re worse than him!”
“Slow down, Mom. You’re getting ahead of yourself.”
“Ahead of you.” Her shout faded to a mumble. The veins on her hands flexed and bulged as she picked at the flowers on her apron.
Claudia whispered, “I can come back later.”
“No, it’s fine.” He kept between them, just in case. “Stay. Or go and don’t come back. You choose.”
She patted his shoulder. “I’ll take that coffee.”
He stooped to pick up the crumpled cigarette butts. He had caved and smoked in his room last night, thinking on things, wishing for a beer he wouldn’t let himself have. Drinking in this house didn’t feel right. Growing up with parents who drank made Peter sensitive to patterns. Maybe being a loner did that, too. Forgiving his folks could be as simple as recognizing they were dealing with problems they couldn’t share. Turns out the same held true for forgiving himself. Staying apart from the old hurt let it harden around his heart. He knew that now that he was back on the reservation, living with the mother he had tried to forget. Keeping a window open all night didn’t work any better now than when he was a teenager. “How about it, Mom? Shall we start this morning again?”
“Smoke on the porch.”
“Okay, I get it.” He touched two fingers to his brow in a mock salute. “Shall we serve our guest some coffee?”
His mom tsked at Claudia. “Coffee sours an empty stomach.”
“Oh, don’t worry about me. I’ve eaten.”
“You look like you need a decent meal.” His mom moved toward the stove. “Skinny.”
“Um, thank you?”
“That wasn’t a compliment.” He grabbed the mug. Cracked. “Sit down. We’ll feed you.”
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