“That peanut butter stain looks like cat vomit,” said Livy.
Cheyenne put her leg up on the counter and turned on the other sink. She poured a few palmfuls of water over the peanut butter until the whole leg was soaked. She went for paper towels but there weren’t any so she wrung out the cuff and gave up.
Livy washed her jeans and the green shirt in the sink and rolled them tight.
“Here’s your card,” said Cheyenne, handing it over.
Livy put it in her wallet and took out a twenty. “Go get the oil with this so we can have change for tolls,” she said.
Cheyenne rolled her eyes and took the bill.
“Take my bag,” Cheyenne told Livy.
Sitting in the car waiting, Livy realized the trip was a financial disaster but also a lesson. Her sister was her sister.
Cheyenne came out of the restaurant side of the building and crossed the parking lot. Her dark, shaggy hair had an orange luster from the neon of the illuminated food court. Her blue shirt looked gray. The ketchup looked like blood. The wet leg of her black pants clung to her calf, wrapping at the hem, exposing her sockless ankle. In one hand, a gallon of water, in the other, a Hershey bar the size of her head. Still with no oil.
Livy started the car. Her sister was the most resourceful person she’d ever known. She had charm. And she must have at least one friend in the area somewhere, Jackson if no one else.
Cheyenne stopped to roll up the wet pant leg.
Livy freed the emergency break and put the car in drive. Cheyenne froze and they met eye to eye for a full second. Then Livy took her foot off the brake and floored it.
Cheyenne had twenty dollars and the world’s largest chocolate bar. She’d be fine.
BOOK 2—THE LAY
All the money gone I could not find it (find it)
Booze was left I poured into a glass (glass! glass! glass!)
The bitch I saw in flip-flops must a took it (took it)
And paid her passage with her…high-interest credit card!
—Melody repurposed for autoharp by smokers on the porch at Neighborsbane
18 New Archangel
SITKA HARBOR faces the Gulf of Alaska with the Tongass at its back, a forest thick as whale fat and dense as sea otter fur. You want to get to another place? Go around, says the Tongass. Swim. Build a boat. I don’t care.
During the reign of Tsar Paul, tall ships came to Alaska, under the guise of Russia’s first joint-stock venture, the Russian-American Company. Hunting their way up the Aleutian Islands, they left behind a trail of small wooden churches on bony subarctic hillsides. Martyrs in egg tempura and gold leaf brushed onto wood panels. Archangels, like Michael. Saints, like Nicholas, the intercessor of sailors. But in this new place, new saints were also born as heaven made room. Saint Herman, who held back a Kodiak tidal wave. Saint Jacob, who established the parish in Atka to watch over two thousand miles of grassland and minister to the souls of killer whales.
Carving the waters along the coast, the Russian-American Company sailed into what would someday be Sitka, which was under the watch of a large Tlingit fort. High on an outcrop, cliffs on three sides, the fort presided over the salt water below as it had for a thousand years. Fearing the Tlingit, the company staked the ground a few miles down the coast with colonial confidence. After all, Lewis and Clark had reached the confluence of the Columbia.
Aleksandr Baranov, a former glass merchant from the backwoods of Siberia who wore chain mail to work, even on the advent of gaslight, now a corporate executive charged by the company with the care and feeding of the Russian aristocracy’s venture capital, chased the glossy pelts of otter into the Tongass. Baranov, a product of rampant speculation and the hiding-behind-the-drapes-soon-to-be-assassinated, middle-aged Tsar Paul, valiantly slaughtered forth.
He christened their outpost Redoubt St. Archangel Michael. In the shade of the vast cedar and hemlock forest, on land sculpted by glaciers and pockmarked, they were unafraid.
Yet the Tlingit kicked the Russians out. Gunalchéesh! because the Tlingit were children of Raven and Eagle. But Baranov returned with more ships. Moving back across the gulf, he passed the Kenai and Chugach mountains and the breathtaking Yaas’éit’aa Shaa, which the Russians called Mount Saint Elias—Elias, also known as Elijah: Elijah, whose speech is a burning lamp, Elijah, who was secretly fed by ravens. By hugging the coast and sailing through Tlingit land, Baranov was confident his brigs and schooners, cannon, and foreign faces would terrify. With every nautical mile he displayed his gunship plumage and gasconade of company vessels, adorned with Aleuts. But perhaps he was mistaken. Perhaps he was not the center of the story so much as a subplot. And perhaps his fleet was not terrifying so much as fascinating, rare. Rare like pods of killer whales in an urban harbor, or alien and beautiful like clear footage of dry rivers on Mars. Something new in the world.
The Tlingit now held the Russian redoubt. With young saplings they had fortified it against cannon from the sea. Baranov fired over and over on the fort, but the iron balls bounced off the angled green wood and rolled into dugouts where they were captured and reclaimed by the Tlingit at night.
The Battle of Sitka lasted six days. In the end, Baranov strode ashore. Wounded, he waited for a surrender that never came. The Tlingit had disappeared into the woods, victorious. The Tlingit win was not without cost, though. The Kiks.Ádi houses taking part in the battle were the Steel House, the Clay House, the House on the Point, the Strong House, the Herring House, the House Inside the Fort, and some of these houses have doors that have not opened for a long time. Because while the birth of Raven and Eagle is beyond memory, clans and houses are more fragile. They are born of the experience of the People and when a maternal line breaks, like ghosts, their stories walk into the woods. This is also true.
Coming ashore, looking at the ruins of his settlement, it was clear to Baranov that the Archangel Michael had abandoned them. To whom should they look for shelter then? Already they imagined a time of starting over. Lie to me about where I come from. Count from now. Wash me clean of history.
* * *
—
Livy was done with caring about where she might have come from. A sea and a sky, a ship and a real star to steer by—she needed nothing else.
She had arrived in Sitka in late July with $82 in her pocket and a job. She’d gotten it through a deckhand she’d fished with two years earlier, a Tlingit from Sitka named Michael. Michael’s uncle had suddenly come into a boat, the Jani Lane, and they needed someone to help fish. All you have to do is get here, he said.
After her debacle with Cheyenne, Livy had returned a day late and her boss had fired her. He hoped she understood. A window was probably opening for her right now, he said. Her landlord had given her notice and she had two weeks to pay rent or entangle herself in an eviction and lose a reference. She called the credit card company to see if she could do a balance transfer, but since she had recently run up a bigger bill, they’d cut her credit line to half of what she currently owed and raised her interest to 29.9 percent. They also hoped she understood.
With no other options, she sold what she could of Cheyenne’s things and moved onto Kirsten’s couch. She hadn’t lived with her mother since she had gotten her first full-time job at seventeen. The sense of failure was excruciating. Then Michael’s offer came, but she needed $1,000 for gear and a plane ticket. Kirsten didn’t have any money. Neither did Essex, not until he started boot camp. The idea that she had work but couldn’t get to it was worse than anything.
“Maybe call Cheyenne?” said Essex.
Her sister, as predicted, had ended up on Jackson’s couch while he was away for the summer. Livy didn’t want to know how that conversation went. She and Cheyenne had still not spoken.
Livy would have totally spiraled if Kirsten had not gone to the coven for help. Like most feminist collectives, the coven was
entirely made up of poor people but they usually had their methods. With everyone running so lean, Kirsten doubted they could help but had to try. Living with Livy was unbearable.
“Please, give me money,” Kirsten begged the other women. “It’s like having some angry laid-off steelworker on the couch yelling at the radio and whining about honest work. I can’t take it.”
Her desperation set gears in motion. As long as Kirsten could get the money back to them by winter solstice, nothing bad would happen.
In the airport, a one-way ticket to Alaska in hand, Livy was again herself. She hit the Starbucks and poured their entire decanter of half-and-half and all their sugar into her canteen. Because fuck me if I’m going to pay for a teabag I can get free on the plane. The young woman behind the counter saw but didn’t care. Why should she? Slave, servant, associate, technician, team member. Do you want to try our Iced Whipped Strawberry Bouffant Bliss Blowjob today?
Livy preferred an elemental boss. Her first captain had screamed in her ear, “The sea doesn’t care about you!” Which was great and fair because it meant the sea didn’t care about him either.
Once in the air she drank three cups of free orange juice, and ate two packages of free pretzels and pocketed two more.
They were almost overheaded due to low fog coming into Juneau and forced to fly to Anchorage. Ten minutes after they landed, the fog rolled in lower and thicker and it was clear no plane was getting out. Livy was cutting it close already. She needed to get to the docks. She spent the last of her money on a ferry leaving that night. A baggage handler offered her a ride to the ferry terminal in a rust-eaten station wagon that smelled like wet dog and Febreze. Livy was in no position to turn it down.
“Watch the floor,” she said as Livy got in, “you can put your foot through.”
Cigarette smoke filled the car. Streaming by outside in the dark were decrepit ranch houses and somewhere, deeper back through the trees, a still and glacial lake. The road would end and there would be nothing but the Tongass. Black wolves denned in roots that wound around granite boulders studded with garnets calling to their gumboot and herring roe cousins. Fog rose into the forest canopy, warp the branches, weft the cloud. Hemlock, spruce. Cedar grown taller than two hundred and fifty feet. In her half-awake moments, she saw the trees as they were, Chilkat dancers caught mid-spin, umber spines, slope-shouldered, they gathered like chiefs along the shore. In headdress crowns of reed shivs, piercing the day into the starlight, they danced at a potlatch that began long ago.
They came to the terminal. The woman cranked the emergency brake and idled.
“There’s a box of Cheese Nips in the back I keep for my grandbaby. You can take those.”
As Livy picked the half-empty box off the floor, the woman pulled a worn plastic baggie out of her purse.
“Here’s some weed if you get stoned. It’s mostly shake but you might be able to sell it.” The woman held the bag to the light and wrinkled her nose. “Maybe. It’d be a hard sell. It’s pretty much only seeds. I’d try a teenager.”
She laughed like she’d been punched in the gut and dropped the bag into Livy’s lap. Her laugh turned into a coughing fit. Once she caught her breath and wiped the tears out of her eyes she patted Livy’s leg.
“That’s bad, isn’t it? Sometimes it’s just that way. Easy to forget how low things can go. Always good to have something to sell. Especially something that’s not attached.” She cracked up again. “Am I right? I’m right. You know what I mean, I know you do.”
* * *
—
On the solarium deck of the ferry, Livy went to the rails as they pulled out into the channel. The soft burnt yellow light of the heat lamps behind blacked out her night vision and she saw only shapes. Soon they would be coming down the back of the Great Island Home of Bears. On the other side, the city, an amalgamation of pull tabs, salmon bakes, folk rock, and totem poles. Down past that was Sheep Creek. And past that, the old Juneau mine where runnels of rainwater carved deltas no bigger than handprints beneath the moss-covered piles of broken tailings and drained onto the beach. Livy knew that beach. She had crawled around its derelict boats. They were all over Alaska. Abandoned where storms had left them or shipwrecked elsewhere and brought up by the tide. Dead seiners and skiffs, trollers, their power blocks and pots scavenged, spools and splintered pallets, lines unlaid and spliced with seaweed. Even processors with food still on their galley shelves, Miracle Whip labels not peeling but blanched, a white dust over everything. Long-liners. Gillnetters. Capsized or sunk to the portholes with holds full of barnacles and engine rooms full of sand, keel sides cracked in two and driven down into spit or bar, now a shelter for tide pools and kelp. Sometimes strange jellyfish washed across in a rare tide and illuminated the sand like gumdrop deck prisms. Orange, purple, red, they pulsed and beat and dried in the air amid rotting nets and bleached orange buoys tangled and strewn among the rocks.
Once, a Japanese tanker cut from its moorings by a great tsunami had appeared on the horizon, its engines quiet. No sailors, no captain, a ghost in the shipping lanes without running lights, it vanished in the dark. Livy never saw it herself, but she’d heard fishermen argue over it. Tow the damn thing in! There’s got to be a killing to be made in copper and salvage oil. Oh just leave it alone and forget about it. How many dead satellites are floating around in space anyway? The Coast Guard blasted it with a heavy barrage of 25 millimeter shells but it didn’t go down. Rasputin, Franco-Methuselah, it came on with flames licking from every socket, great fountains of black smoke billowing from its decks, listing now and riddled by cannon fire. They shelled it again with heavier shot. This time it did sink. It fell more than a thousand feet. Step handsomely around the snow crab. Run your hands over the rusted rails. Hold your breath and count starfish. Anyone who can’t face this should stay home. But what had the ship done? It was only courseless. Drifting. Mindless of its effect, it was nothing but a lost child returning to the arms of its true mother, the graveyard coast.
19 The Miracle of Aunt Jennie
IT WAS EARLY in the afternoon when Livy got to Sitka Harbor. The sun was burning through the fog and steam rose off the docks and lines. Crabbers and trollers, purse seiners and vintage skiffs, liveaboards with polished wood trim and tarps battened with pristine twine all bobbed in their slips.
She found the Jani Lane out on the tidal grid awaiting repair, half out of the water and listing. She stood before it like she’d come upon a corpse. A thirty-six-foot wooden gillnetter with old lines, the Jani Lane’s nets were tangled and her hull was stained with algae. The wood that should have made her collectible was rotting and the deck was covered in trash bags.
“Livy!”
She saw Michael jogging up with his arms full of duct tape and pancake mix.
“I thought I wasn’t going to make it,” she said.
“If you got here this afternoon you’d have missed us. Here.”
He handed her a family-size box of Bisquick.
“What’s the deal with this boat?” she asked.
“My uncle got her in the settlement. Isn’t she awesome?”
Livy looked at the duct tape weatherizing the windows of the gillnetter.
“We didn’t want to put money into her until we had the permits,” said Michael.
“I thought we were seining.”
“Well there was a seiner but it turned out to be in pretty bad shape,” said Michael. “Besides,” he clapped his hands, “who wants to be some mindless jerk seining for pinks and dogs when we can go totally old school in a boat like this. Get some reds, some coho. That’s the best part. We’re going to Bristol Bay.”
“The season there is half over.”
Michael shrugged.
Livy looked at him. She examined the small freckles dotting his broad cheekbones. She looked at the creaseless skin between his eyebrows. He was like Essex and about
his age. She knew if she stared at him long enough he would smile. If she stared longer, he would stop. She shook her head and looked away.
“You got to trust me,” he said, “this whole trip was meant to be. Written in the record books before we were born.”
“I don’t want to hear about how something is meant to be just because it’s happening.”
But she couldn’t complain because the haphazard work ethic that led to the Jani Lane leaving this late in the season had also led to her having a job.
A man appeared on the deck of the boat. Shirtless and pasty white with a brilliant aura of red shoulder hair, he took a quick look around, reached back and yanked the rubber band from his frizzy pigtail and threw it in the water.
“Boat’s fucked. Another day,” he said.
He spat over the side and went back below. Michael set the box of duct tape down.
“Is that your uncle?” asked Livy.
“Maybe we should get out of here for a bit.”
They went to a liquor store that served food. A gray rectangle with photos of bearded men next to full holds or halibut the size of teenagers. Michael paid for the beer.
“Does your uncle know anything about fishing?” she asked.
“It’s been a while, that’s why I’m here. Want to see my new tattoo?”
He pulled his shirt up and twisted. On his ribs was the jackal-headed god Anubis.
“What’s wrong with you? Don’t you know how many hippies in the Lower Forty-Eight would kill to be native? Cover yourself with killer whales and eagles. Lord it over them. They deserve it.”
Michael pulled his shirt down. “I like the idea you can weigh a heart.” He fiddled with a pull tab. “Last year was the worst since my mom died. Getting tattooed was the highlight. I was so low. But the darkness was just part of the magic.”
The Great Offshore Grounds Page 10