Cheyenne saw a picture of a toddler taped to the register.
“She yours?”
“Three next Monday,” said the girl.
The girl tucked a piece of frosted hair into a bobby pin. She was just the type Jackson’s friends liked. They would have said she was great. Great like a kitschy oil painting. Great like a sixty-foot statue of Paul Bunyan. Cheyenne spooned peanut butter into her chocolate shake when it came. She had more in common with this girl than she had with the people she’d spent the last six years around.
In the parking lot she went over the letters again, but all she saw was someone devastatingly young. Justine described the other novices scathingly…They barely laugh and I have to admit, there’s a lot more bowing and counting than I expected. I’m starting to wonder if this is about liberation at all. It seems more like watering yourself down and pretending to be Japanese. Yesterday in Zazen I wanted to yell, “You know the Japanese are famous for vibrators too.” They could use a clit tickler here. I love how you aren’t threatened by me. And in another letter…I was thinking about what you said about the importance of holding your head up. I do. Forgive me but rolling over isn’t something to celebrate…and…I’m tired of what people think. If freedom was an animal, the first fucking thing they would do is stun it, throw it in a cage, and take pictures with a caption reading “Wild.” The letters came from Vermont, India, California…I like the idea that you can drop whoever you were and be something new. But I have to ask myself, if I am not who I was, was I ever really that? Right. And if every social circle Cheyenne had ever drifted through ended up at the same party, they would have all left.
* * *
—
After the Great Prairie Monastery in Montana, Justine had gone to a monastery in California. Then she was in Los Angeles, which was burning…In the street everything was shattering and everyone was shouting. The cops beat a man right on the corner I was standing on. A window got smashed behind me. People poured through like a dam that broke. They flooded into the store and grabbed everything. They took some high-ticket things, but mostly took whatever—cheap toaster ovens when they probably had better ones at home, black-and-white TVs that you could find left on the street, pencils, staple guns—that’s when I saw. It wasn’t contraband. They were totems. A semitruck was stopped at a light and they moved there. Later I heard they took the man out of the truck and that, too, made sense. She related what she saw to things she’d read in the Upanishad and to her own destiny…You talked about greatness and I do sense a greatness in myself but I don’t know what kind. I feel like there’s something I’m about to find or figure out, like I’m on the edge of some kind of understanding. One thing I can say, I’ve learned more in my first week here than in my entire time at the monastery. Like about the Jains, states of enlightenment. WTF?? Nobody ever talked about them (!!), not at Tassajara or Great Prairie. That’s what I want. I want to see through all of this and be free for real.
* * *
—
Yes. Free for real.
34 The Well
THE ELIANA’S CAPTAIN was a physically unimpressive man with a forgettable face and a voice that faded into background noise. Livy had to turn her ear toward his mouth to catch his words. They were finding crab steadily. But whatever came over the rail, pots empty or crawling with king crab, his face remained illegible. She wondered at first if he’d had a stroke or some palsy but saw no evidence of paralysis, only something unfinished, an expression akin to memory loss, not so much grasping after the past as releasing the idea that it mattered. As she watched more closely how he interacted, with her, with Michael, with the four other deckhands, she began to read his quiet expressions. It was like a code that she earned her way into, and as she got better, his respect grew. She saw it in the barest shift of his mouth, his esteem for her uncomplaining nature.
From the outset the experience was different. Livy had never worked in such seas. Soon they would be plunged into shamanic darkness. Morning would come later and later as the light left. The lengthening night was already affecting her more than she’d expected.
Although the brutality of the job was legend, she preferred living at sea out of sight of land. She spent every waking hour grinding cod and pushing pots. She loved how it required everything. How her mind didn’t wander. How her body preached. She cut bait when she couldn’t feel her hands or arms and sorted crab when she could barely open her eyes in the freezing spray. She knocked ice off the rail with a sledgehammer and almost went over twice in her first week. The darker the days got, the deeper the troughs, the blacker the rolling waves, the more the Eliana was sheeted with ice—and what do you do when there’s more work than can be done? They almost never slept.
Once, when they were following the crab out into the abyss, Livy saw an island lit up on the horizon. It looked like a spaceship landing on the water but turned out to be a drilling platform.
“They’re all over,” said the captain, who had come up behind her.
“I’ve never heard anything about them.”
“What happens out here is invisible,” he said.
The idea of something so massive going totally unseen made Livy light-headed. A whale to the side of the boat slapped the water with its tail and dived. Sir Walter Raleigh took shape beside her. He raised his hands in the air in a gesture of delight. Their heads are full of money and land! Then his face fell and he dropped his hands. Not a whale, only history. He clicked his tongue, disappeared. Waves rippled out from where the whale had not sounded. On the surface, a rainbow slick of oil undulating on the water.
* * *
—
The early test wells in the 1970s had come up with little and the amount of oil they found wasn’t worth the cost to get it out. But that was a different time. Rarity. The last drop worth more than all the drops before. Looking at the drilling platform, Livy became nervous in a way she couldn’t explain. She felt the sweep of a world more powerful than she would ever be. No matter what anyone said, if there was money to be made, people like her would always go—down into the ocean, out into space, into the middle of the Bering Sea.
The size of the rig was beyond anything she’d seen before. She had a sense of vertigo, or maybe it was more like looking out the window on a fast train when you know you’re going forward but it feels like slipping slowly backward. As they approached, she could see the name. PRAJNA Deepwater. PRAJNA. Deep wisdom. Fed by the breath of the universe. Vital life force. What asshole names their drilling company PRAJNA?
An alarm bell rang, marking a shift change. White floodlights bombed the decks all at once with a new and sterile day. The blaring, buzzing sounds louder than any Livy had ever heard. She covered her ears. The searing whiteness of the industrial lights made her shade her eyes, but still she saw workers filing in lines up onto the rig’s deck. It was an eternal factory without night. Heat from the center of the earth vented through the rig and billowed to the sky.
“I still can’t believe they built it,” she said.
“You can do anything you want here and nobody will care,” said the captain.
Then he walked away. Someone yelled at her to get the ice off the rails. She picked up the sledgehammer.
* * *
—
Alone in a bunk for a rare nap, Livy closed her eyes and the world went black. She slept more heavily than she ever had in her life. Even her dreams had no shape, only moving shadows blending into other shadows.
She woke up with someone on top of her. She thought it was Michael crawling in to sleep, but it was the captain. He put his hand over her mouth and leaned his weight on his forearm. His elbow dug into her shoulder just below the rotator cuff and cut her circulation off. With his other hand, he reached down and grabbed hold of her base layer and yanked them down. Michael came down the ladder and stopped. She couldn’t call out because the captain’s hand was over her mouth but he saw what was
happening. Their eyes met. Terror flickered on his face and he turned and ran back up the ladder. The captain started pushing up inside her, jamming her neck against the back of the bunk. A minute later he came, whimpering. A bell rang and he rolled off.
“We better get up there,” he said. He zipped his pants and went above decks.
She was in two positions in time. Three minutes before was one time. Now was another. The whole thing was gross, marginally painful, and quicker than a sneezing fit. How could it be anything at all? She found a kitchen rag to wipe herself off and threw it in the trash. Snapping herself into her foul-weather gear, she went up and two crew guys were waiting to come down. Passing them, she couldn’t look them in the eye.
On deck she was sent to the rail. Get that ice off! She felt like she’d stepped into a painting of a boat and was not on the boat herself. She went to work on the ice, then hooking bait to the pots. All her life she’d been told what to do in this situation, but none of it applied here. Why couldn’t she just get raped in a parking lot like everyone else? Lowering a string of crab pots into the sea, she had a clarity beyond any she’d known. She could see the crystal structure of snow. She saw the size of herself and the size of the sea.
That night in the galley the captain treated her as he had the day before. She looked straight at him. Michael brought her a bowl of chili. But Michael she could not look at.
Something important happened.
Nothing important happened?
She crushed a couple of saltines over the chili.
This changes lives?
This is no more than a bad day.
The captain was concerned about the temperature. The temperature was dropping and the captain worried the crab might freeze.
She hadn’t bitten his hand when it was over her mouth.
“Eat if you’re eating,” he said.
The danger is falling off the boat.
The danger is staying on the boat.
She went to the head and shut the door. She made herself cry the way someone who’s swallowed a bunch of pills makes themselves throw up, because it’s the responsible thing to do. A few shallow tears was all she got. The rape had lasted longer. She gave up. His opinion of her, her reflection in the captain’s face. All that tantalizing withholding, the way he held the ring over her head, for his respect for her fortitude, his appreciation for her skills. She felt sick. Now that made a tear roll! She laughed, brash and ugly. Never trust a woman who cries when she’s angry.
She was near the rail when she saw the captain heading in her direction. He was thirty feet away but froze. At the last moment, she stepped back to let him pass as a heavy wave broke and she lost her footing. He grabbed her upper arm but she couldn’t tell whether he was pushing or pulling. She reached for the rail. He jerked her upright.
“You’ll go right in if you fall here,” he said.
She searched his shapeless face. She had no idea what he was telling her.
She needed to get to land. But they were days from going in.
* * *
—
The temperature dropped and the seas grew bigger. They lowered a second string of pots. A deckhand near Livy tossed the shot and a length of rope snaked through the blackness. Livy watched transfixed until the last buoy bobbed past. Michael came over.
“Stay away from me.”
“Let me help.”
“I can deal with what he did. What you did was awful.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t know what happened. I froze. I don’t know why.”
His words were too close. He didn’t get to have those same feelings. She pushed him aside.
“I have other problems.”
But he didn’t get it. It never entered his mind.
She had a hundred and twenty hours to find a morning-after pill. Seventy-two were gone.
* * *
—
Livy had to get off the boat and find a plan B. She’d slept what hours she was allotted only in the presence of two or more crew, and never when the captain was in the cabin, but she couldn’t come down from the state of paranoia and was starting to see trails. An aura over the crab in the hold, a sparkle over the deck. Sometimes she saw Raleigh on the bridge but he had nothing to say to her.
Fifty-four hours.
She was at the rail when word went around. Crab was freezing in the hold. A few had exploded. They went full steam for the processing plant on the island of Akutan to transfer what crab they could before they lost it all.
Forty-eight hours.
35 Akutan
LIVY SAW THE ISLAND’S LIGHTS emerge from the dark. She had to get off the boat. It was animal, not logical. The second the captain stepped off to do paperwork, she had to be gone. They docked. He walked toward the bright lights. She bolted. Leaving behind her hard-weather gear, her seabag, and all her work hours, the only money she had in the world, her only chance at coming home with something. She left the Eliana with nothing but what she was wearing.
Akutan. With its sharp slopes of mineral-rich vegetation, its hyperactive stratovolcano, its wide caldera and lava flows pouring forth new shorelines on the Bering Sea. With its deep and natural harbor, it is where the Unangan people settled and, later, where venture capitalists saw a whaling station. Despite new sources of fuel, the whale processing plant processed bowheads and humpbacks, though mostly for dog food, before being abandoned. Oral histories collected in the great anthropological boom of the 1930s capture the memory of locals who were children at the time, brought to the station on field trips. They spoke of the smell and trying not to slip in the whale grease and blood on the docks. One girl described seeing the giant head of a sperm whale with a hole cut in the top where buckets lowered in and came back up again and again filled with milky oil. Years later, a new processing plant was built on the edge of the Unangan village. This time the company made its own harbor, blasting into the volcanic rock and ice, dynamiting, taking a half-circle bite out of the mountain. Now, at water’s edge, the processing plant: a cannery for a thousand workers with everything needed to work in the perpetual dusk of summer and the perpetual night of winter.
Once ashore she had no idea how to get off the island. She was halfway out on the Aleutian chain. There were no ferries or planes and the fishing boats weren’t going anywhere except back out to fish. Walking toward the village she asked a cannery worker how people left when they had to. Hovercraft, helicopter, he said, but not in this weather. She counted back the days. Her chance of getting pregnant was high.
There was a clinic at the plant but there was no way in hell she was going there so she went to the one in the village where a very nice Unangan woman told her they were out of morning-after pills but could order them. The woman called the clinic at the plant. Same story. She tried Unalaska. No luck.
“A few days,” the woman said.
“I don’t a have a few days,” said Livy.
“You’ll have to go to Anchorage when the weather clears.”
Outside the clinic, Livy was at a loss. She walked through the mud streets between the few scattered buildings that made up the place. Shadows seemed to eat whatever electric light there was. She saw someone coming toward her but didn’t realize it was Michael until he was three feet away.
“This is all I have,” he said, holding out two crumpled twenty-dollar bills.
She snatched it and kept walking.
“I might be able to get more. A guy at the bar last time said he’d pay me for a blowjob. I’ve never done that but I’ll do it for you.”
“It’s not the same thing, you know. You can’t make it right.”
He looked away. “What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to get out of here.”
“How?”
“I don’t know!” she yelled. She turned and walked back to the clinic. “D
on’t you dare follow me.”
The woman at the counter was surprised to see her again.
“This situation,” Livy drew a vague circle around her body, “is not my fault. I did not choose it. I am a very careful and thoughtful person. I am a responsible person. I have great self-control. I would not forget to use birth control.” Her throat tensed. “I am also a private person.” She paused. “Do you understand? I cannot,” she pointed toward the harbor, “get back on my boat. Help me.”
The woman rubbed her temple. “The nearest real police station is in Unalaska.”
“I just want a morning-after pill. I have a hundred and twenty-seven dollars. And thirty-six hours to take it. Help me get out of here.”
The woman nodded and picked up the phone. “I have a cousin who works for the airline. They get discounts.”
The woman dialed. Livy stepped back as the woman spoke to her cousin. She heard the words jump seat and favor. She heard unofficial and family and thank you and beer. The woman covered the receiver with her hand and motioned Livy closer.
“If you can get to the airport in Unalaska, she can get you to Anchorage.”
Livy took a deep breath. Another idea surfaced.
“Wait. Don’t hang up. Can she get me to Juneau? My last skipper is there and he owes me money.”
The woman asked. More thank you. More beer.
“She says she can get you to Juneau, but you have to get to Unalaska by tomorrow afternoon. Some of the guys run skiffs between the islands. Ask at the bar.”
“Thank you.”
Livy turned to leave.
“Do you have a place to stay?” asked the woman.
Livy shook her head. The woman drew a map of the village with an X by a house. “You can come to me later.”
“Thank you. Really, thank you.”
Outside Michael was waiting.
The Great Offshore Grounds Page 17