The Ancestor

by Lee Matthew Goldberg

  “At the oil refinery? I thought there were no openings.”

  “Smitty’s boat. Cleaning fish.”

  “Well,” is all Lorinda has to say about that.

  “It’s a job,” Callie says. “I admire him for putting his ego aside.”

  “He still moody as fuck?”

  “Lorinda! No, he…he’s actually been better this week.”

  “I’m teasing. I’d kill for a man like Travis. At least he’s home with you and not out chasing all kinds of poontang.”

  Lorinda ashes the cig against the door, then swings it open and stomps inside. Callie stays, enjoying her solitary moment, one of the few she ever gets. When she was younger as an only child, she sought company every chance she had. Now she finds herself longing for stillness, of a day without anyone to talk to, nestled up in her own head with the delight of letting her thoughts roam. They float to the land of what ifs, since she can travel anywhere. Maybe she never left L.A., still went to castings, still tried to make it. She was talented. She knew it, but so was every girl in their twenties. She’d played Emily in her high school production of Our Town and her acting teacher said she had potential.

  She scored a line in an indie movie after graduating, skipped college, but never landed an agent or another role. Did some modeling and always felt like she was slumming. Rejec-tions became nuisances. That’s what the Cali sun started to represent, a spotlight of failure. So she drifts back to the here and now, blinking to a cascade of flurries. Docked in her white world. Oceans away from who she used to be.

  She inhales one final drag. Inside she tends to Tuck and Jesse’s table. Tuck does all the talking. Egg sandwiches with ham and American cheese for both, monster coffees heavy on the caffeine. She smiles and jokes and flips her hair, keeping Jesse in her gaze.

  He’s younger, barely more than a teen, lean muscles and shy eyes. In a flash, she’s

  mounted him, no idea where that mindfuck came from. She and Travis haven’t made love in a while. He was acting too glum when bedtime rolled around, too wiped from work this week. Tonight, she’ll seduce him, even if his fingernails still smell of fish guts.

  “Orders coming up, boys,” she says, giving them a show as she bounces over to the kitchen. A little spice sprinkled in an otherwise bland Thursday. No harm, no foul.

  “Owoooo,” she howls at a low hum, picturing Eli prancing around Miss Evelyn’s as a wolf.

  She can be one too.

  11

  A surprise for Travis, that’s what he’s been promised. First Callie orders a bath once they put Eli down. Not just a shower, a full scrub. The ocean heavy in his pores, body over-loaded with salt, fish guts etched in fingerprints. He hasn’t taken a bath in ages, the last time probably with her pre-Eli. When they lived more impulsively. When routine hadn’t gotten in the way of lust. The soap bar finds every last bit of grime. He’s gentle with the scars along his chest from when he was a little boy and a stray cat on their property scratched him up good. He had gone to pet the cat, not realizing it was protecting its baby kitten, a tiny wet nub of fur.

  When he finishes, he wraps a towel around his waist and finds Callie in lingerie on the bed striking a pose like a mermaid rising from the sea.

  They don’t speak, words only killing the mood. Any distance between them eradicated by exploring tongues, contorted positions. But they never look at each other, pleasure overriding a true connection. He lies in a pool of their sweat wanting to vocalize his fears as well as his yearnings. She’s his best friend and also his greatest mystery. He knows that’s what they have most in common—she can say the same.

  She rests in the crook of her arm, hair cascading over her throat. When she miscarried after having Eli, she didn’t want to be touched. But they waded through that, or at least he thought. He’d mourned the idea of the child, but she dealt with the physical loss, the awful draining. He gave her the space she required, let her be the one to circle back. And she did, just like now. But was she ever really present, or does she tag a duplicate in their bed while she escapes into her mind? Traveling beyond their little Alaskan lives. It kills him to imagine her tanning on a California beach. Would she have been happier if they never met?

  “I love you, Cal,” he says, but not all words have meanings. His are empty sounds, hanging in the air anticipating the same response. And so, she does. She always will. He knows she loves him more than she’s loved anyone else, save Eli. But sometimes love just ain’t enough. He’s heard her singing that song before. He’s sung it himself like a hymn.

  He turns the lamp off, and they both shiver from the soaked sheets.

  A warmer day on the Cutthroat. Travis holds onto the good from last night, discards the bad. Callie had made an effort and he didn’t pull away. That’s a start. Tonight’s another chance to link. Smitty boasting a tall tale of the biggest salmon he’s ever caught, size of a big kid. Net wouldn’t cut it so he had to reel that sucker in. Both fighting for their lives, since the fish might’ve been strong enough to yank Smitty overboard, send him into the pounding waves. And then a divine intervention—hand of God taking his side—the salmon not standing a chance. Wouldn’t eat that fish once it was caught for anything. After photo ops, he keeps it mounted on a wall, a reminder of touching greatness.

  “We only get a few of those in life,” Smitty says, leaving black oil stains on his sandwich but eating it without regard.

  “Few of what?” Travis asks, gnawing at a caribou bone.

  “When we leave our bodies and watch wonder unfold. Those moments we go back to, again and again when we need them the most. When times get tough.”

  “Yeah,” Travis says, trying to think of his own. Wedding day. Eli’s birth. But everyone has those similar moments. Doesn’t he have any that are unique? “Yeah,” he keeps saying. Figuring that if he agrees, Smitty will let it go faster.

  He gnaws on the bone until no flesh remains.

  Beers afterwards at Elson’s. The sun hasn’t set yet as they inch closer to spring, in breakup season now. Tuck and Jesse already at the bar, only suds left in their steins. They speak of the day’s catches, the successes and failures. Discuss purse seines and cork lines, lead weights and which boats are best. Which fish are already seeming bountiful this year and which may be endangered. Grayson moseys up like he’s stepped out of some Western, laying his holster on the counter.

  “Keep ’em comin’ tonight, Elson,” Grayson says, his eyelids twitching. “Worked a double.”

  “And what were the people in Laner up to today?” Tuck asks, signaling Elson for another.

  “Hiker got lost in Burr woods, damn near lost a toe from frostbite. Speeder on Route 78. Moose sighting on Main.”

  “No shit?” Jesse asks, face-palming.

  “I said, sighting. Turns out it was Old Charlie wasted off homemade hooch, no actual moose.”

  “I cut him off around two in the afternoon,” Elson says.

  “You know it’s worse cutting him off,” Grayson says.

  “I ain’t gonna be responsible for alcohol poisoning,” Elson says, spitting into a glass and signaling the end of that conversation.

  A few beers later, the men are all toasty. Leaning on each other and singing whatever song’s on the juke. Grayson veers between exuberant and hateful, alcohol often bringing out the best and worst of his personality. He picks at Jesse’s virgin-like ways. Tuck’s spare tire. Smitty’s hobo beard. Everyone but Elson, his beer supplier.

  “I think you’ve had enough, buddy,” Travis says, when Grayson tries to order. Travis eyes Elson, and Elson agrees with a blink.

  “I’m the law,” Grayson thunders.

  “Yes, yes we know this,” Travis says. “And you have the biggest dick of us all.”

  “Want me to prove it?” Grayson says, starting to unzip.

  “No, no, no,” Travis says. “That’s all you need, man, is for someone to video it. Don’t give Stu any ammunition.”

  “Your dad’s a cock,” Grayson says.
/>   “Now I know you don’t mean that. You love him like he was your own father.”

  “Yup, I do,” Grayson slurs. “Oh shit— her.”

  “What?”

  “Her!”

  A wavering finger points toward a young woman at the end of the bar alone on a stool.

  Long black hair down to her waist. Elegant neck with a jutted chin, hazelnut eyes, tanned and exotic skin.

  “What did you tell her?” Grayson shouts. Before Travis can restrain him, Grayson bounds toward the woman’s stool. She responds by pivoting in place. He grabs her elbow and she yanks it back.

  “I don’t want to be involved,” she says, baring teeth.

  “Too late. Lorinda said she talked to you.”

  “I don’t tell lies.”

  “What happens in that house should stay in that house,” Grayson says, his face angry red. “She broke up with me.”

  “It’s not my problem!”

  She grabs her denim purse, leaves ten bucks on the bar, and swivels out of his grasp.

  “Watch your friend better,” she tells Travis, as she whisks past. The door swings open wildly and she’s gone into the night.

  “Fucking bitch,” Grayson slurs.

  “What’s this about?” Travis asks.

  “You get him out of here,” Elson yells.

  “C’mon, c’mon, buddy,” Travis says. He pays their tab and drags Grayson to the door.

  He’s afraid of encountering the woman once they get outside, but she’s smart enough to vanish. He knows of this house where she works. Run by a madam named Raye, full of roaming girls. He’s driven by before to big band music pumping from the windows, a relic of another time. Raye liking her place to be steeped in the past. Cell phones required to be left at the door. At least from what he’s heard.

  “Car’s over there,” Grayson says, sticking his chin into the wind.

  “Sorry, buddy, but neither of us are capable of driving. Walk’ll be good.”

  They head through the woods, Grayson’s house about a half mile from Travis’s. Band of moon lighting their way. Crackle of ice and snow melting. Trees unfreezing and breathing again.

  “I loved her,” Grayson says, falling back on his ass and struggling to get up like a turtle on its back.

  “You don’t know what love is,” Travis tells him.

  “Enlighten me.”

  “You wouldn’t have gone to a house like that if you loved her.”

  “Why do sex and love always have to be intertwined?”

  Travis bursts out laughing, never hearing his friend speak so poetically before.

  “I mean, I can love Lorinda, right? But I can get pleasure from another. Why is that not okay?”

  “It just isn’t.”

  “C’mon, you ain’t never thought of another woman other than Callie? You’re no saint.”

  “I’ve never strayed.”

  “You never would?”

  The question lingers, the woods preventing it from escaping. The answer being no, but could that question ever be answered honestly? Circumstances change, opportunities arise, love fluctuates.

  “Let’s get you home, bud,” Travis says, pulling Grayson to his feet.

  “You’re my bud, Trav. My one true bud. This world is better because of you.”

  “All right now.”

  “There should be multiple yous,” Grayson says, outlined by the moonlight, a blue phantasm. “So you can help solve all of our problems. So you can help solve all the world’s problems.”

  “Are you done?”

  Grayson gives a definitive nod.

  “Yes, yes I am, sweet Trav. Sweet Trav aplenty.”

  12

  Routine grows tiresome, or maybe Wyatt’s just reached a type of exhaustion he’s unable to return from. Awake with dawn, no shades covering the windows to block the intrusive sun. A picture of California and the boy tucked in a groove on the kitchen counter, the first thing he’ll spy upon opening his eye. By having their photo so close, Adalaide and Little Joe should permeate his dreams. But his dreams have been a void, motionless and lacking any substance. Stomach growls once he has the energy to stand. Limping to Elson’s Pub to rifle through the trash before it’s picked up. A mish-mash of food, unable to discern what he’s eating. Only that it’s cold and doesn’t nourish.

  He’s wanted to trek to the Barlows’ house, but the journey through the woods has become an impossible task. He’s too weary to attempt. A common beggar now, vacillating down Main Street from store to store, cracked palms out in supplication while heads turn away. Back to the abandoned goods store for a nap that lasts until dark. The night streaming in primed to destroy any progress, encasing him back in a frigid jar.

  After a few rounds of this torture, he’s zapped with a tiny bolt of extra energy one morning. Elson’s trash also supplies better food than before, not only scraps but almost a full leftover meal he consumes with fury. Wavering between heading to the Barlows’ and trying to scrounge for change, he opts for the money. A warm meal more beneficial than all else. This is his mission. And he accepts.

  Not many folks are out and it’s colder than last week. The wind whipping. Green leaves hiding behind layers of silt snow. Shivering outside of the pub, hoping for a drunk soul to take pity. All of them with booze on their minds and nothing else.

  And then he sees a woman leaving Elson’s. She’s tottering from side to side. Long hair like a curtain swept over her left shoulder with a viscous thickness. Neither a smile nor a frown, emotionally indifferent, already battered by the day. Injun look to her, not that he minds. The idea of distancing himself from Adalaide for a moment of reprieve.

  She wears a multi-patterned coat, hexagonal shapes interspersed with what appears to be wind sails, hallucinatory. She can tell he’s watching, averts her lips a millimeter into more of a smile.

  “You seem cold,” she says, crouching down until she’s at his level.

  Cold is all I know, he wants to tell her. But he phrases it with more levity: “I’m an ice man.”

  “Well, Mr. Ice Man. I can help you get warm.”

  She maneuvers the curtain of hair to her other shoulder, combs it with her fingers like it’s a loom.

  “You’re beautiful.”

  His teeth chatter, limbs trembling beyond control.

  “Come with me,” she says, this brilliant buoy that’s found him adrift. She hoists him to his feet, catching his large body in her woolen arms. “I know a place that can make you toasty again.”

  An old Victorian house, paint chipped and crumbling facade. The interior full of scented wax, sharp perfumes. Shutters closed as if the world doesn’t exist outside. Nearly brings him to tears, this newfound cocoon. There’s a cobwebbed bar by the entrance, liquor bottles tinted with dust. A blond woman smokes from a cigarette holder, the vapors clouding her face. His paramour leads him upstairs, each step a whining creek, a dimly lit hallway and a room at the end with yellow light pouring from the doorjamb.

  Smell of sweet sweat when they arrive. A bed sagging in the corner, sheets in disarray.

  A heater spits steam. He runs his cracked hands over the mist, hot air shooting through his bloodstream, a great melting occurring. She strikes a match, touches it to the wick of a candle. A woodsmoke aroma torches the room.

  “It’s a hundred for whatever you want, Ice Man.”

  “This is a brothel?”

  She cackles into her fist. “Best in Laner, possibly in all of Alaska.”

  “I have no…” He takes a deep breath that robs all of his energy. “I have no money.”

  Now her lips slant downwards, a serious frown developing. “Should’ve known you were homeless and not just a drunk drifter.” She blows out the candles in disgust. Hazelnut eyes filled with ire. “Out,” she says, with her thumb directed at the door.

  The ground swells. He finds standing laborious, longing to lie in her messy sheets and turn off his mind. Digging through his pockets, he procures the last golden nugget he own
s.

  “It’s real,” he pleads.

  She hops over, disbelieving. Once she holds it in her hands, her face tells a different story.

  “Gotta be worth more than what you usually charge,” he says.

  The door had been left open but now she closes it. She pockets the gold, thrusts a fingernail between his eyes.

  “I’m only doing this because it’s a slow day and you’re so pitiful.”

  She wrenches off her coat like it’s a chore. A shirt gets tossed in a pile next. Stands before him without a bra, nipples dark and large as stones.

  “No, no, I…” Struggles to formulate his thoughts. “Can we simply lie in bed together?”

  She scrunches her face. “No nookie?”

  He crawls on hands and knees to her bed, folds himself inside, the sheets like clouds.

  A pillow cradling his head after not being supported for over a century. Stiff neck doesn’t even begin to describe the pain.

  She shrugs, eternally bored. Lying beside him while the heater whistles a dirge. He pets her never-ending mane of hair.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Aylen.”

  “Is that your real name?”

  She studies her nails, more enraptured with them. “Only one I’ve been given.”

  “Wyatt Barlow here.”

  “You’re certainly strange, Wyatt Barlow.”

  “I’m sure I’ve been called worse.”

  “Is that a challenge?”

  “I’m not from here,” he says, looking out of the window as if it could guide him to his past.

  “Where from?”

  “A different time.”

  She cackles again, a bird-like toot through her nostrils. “Is that so? And what time was that?”

  “Long before you or your father or your father’s father or even his father was born.”

  “My father was a dick and I’m sure his father’s father was the same. Lots of drunks.

  Walked out on me when I could barely crawl. You sure you don’t want to touch me a little? Lot more fun than yapping.”

  “I…like talking to you. I haven’t really had company in a long time.”