The Dead Go to Seattle

by Vivian Faith Prescott

  Tova headed toward town again, this time going the other direction. She passed a large shop with whirligigs spinning in the wind. “In this shop, they’re selling Native products made in Canada or China.”

  Next, they passed a large cement and brick building. Tova turned right at the building and slowed. “And on your right is where you can get a good state job working with the Filipinos and all the other immigrants in town, especially if you have specialized skills: wipe front-to-back, front-to-back, front-to-back. It’s an old folks’ home, but it’s not half bad because we get to feed and roll and bathe and dress and talk in our Tlingit language if we want. Or talk Tagalog. The residents don’t care. Most of them have Alzheimer’s.”

  Tova slowed down as the road narrowed along the waterfront. She showed them the cannery and cold storage where many of her relatives had made their livings working the slime lines and egg rooms. At the end of the road, she turned the van around, back through town, and headed toward the old Sheldon Jackson College. She pulled the van up the hill to a small parking lot. Surrounding them were old brown buildings seemed to be weighted down with age. Moss grew on the roofs. “This is what remains of the closed down boarding school where they beat the little kids for speaking their language. It was run by the Presbyterian Church. There are still some churches in town that say we’re evil because we have totem poles and masks and raven worship. We can still feel the spirits here. They still haunt this place.”

  Next, they drove over the O’Connell Bridge, again. This time, she slowed way down, nearly stopping the van at the top of the bridge. She pointed beyond to the roof of the large Native hospital. “And, on the other side of the bridge is the Native hospital, and if you live here long enough you’ll get to see a Native kid commit suicide by jumping off this bridge.” She pointed to the right, over the edge. “I knew a kid who jumped from here one winter. He lived. But there was a girl—” She decided she didn’t want to talk about it and slowly moved on.

  “And over there is one of the only remaining boarding schools in Alaska. They take the brightest kids from the villages and educate them. Often those kids don’t go back home.”

  Tova turned the van around and swung out onto the main highway again, heading back over the bridge. She drove past the town center, the hotel, and the four-way stop. She drove past a large grocery store. “And, on your left, is one of the grocery stores that lock their Dumpsters to keep out the problem people who used to Dumpster dive there and get some pretty good food. And, now, they donate the food to the bear sanctuary. Those are the problem bears that keep getting into our garbage cans. I have trouble with that one ’cause both the people and the bears are my relatives.”

  Finally, Tova pulled into the parking lot where the lightering vessels—the small boats—were shuttling tourists out to their ship, which was anchored in the bay. She put the gear into park and leaned back in her seat. No one said anything. She opened the van door and got out and then went around the van and opened their doors. Outside, her passengers mingled around near the van and then she said, “One more thing. I think we need an exit song. Follow me.” She began to walk around the van and they followed. Tova started to sing, “Tsu héidei shugaxtootáan …” She turned to them, and they stopped suddenly behind her. “Sorry, but we have to sing the song four times. That’s the sacred number: four. Sing with me.”

  “Okay,” Quiet-Woman said, “we’ll try.”

  “Come on,” LL-Bean-Woman said, tugging LL-Bean-Man.

  “Tsu héidei shugaxtootáan yá yaa koosgé daakeit haa jeex’ a nák has kawdik’eét’ ei, hei hei hei hei, Yei hei, yei hei, hei hei hei hei,” she sang. She didn’t want to tell them it was the only Tlingit song she really knew all the words to besides “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.” She didn’t have a drum, and besides she would be the first to admit she was a terrible drummer. So she sang while the tourists followed her around the van, trying their best to scrape the strange letters across their tongues, slick them down into their throats, and spit them out the sides of their mouths—“Tsu héidei shugaxtootáan …”

  After four times around the van, she stopped. The other guides and their passengers stood around their buses staring at them. She thought she saw Marvin in the crowd, standing back, his eyes wide. She said to her group, “You just sang, Today we will open the container of wisdom that has been left in our care.”

  After a few seconds, Bindi-Woman opened her purse and was fidgeting around in it. Loud-Man handed Tova a hundred dollar bill. “Good job,” he said.

  The others surrounded her, thanked her. Someone handed her a ten; another, a twenty. The Masala kids gave her five dollars each. “Gunalchéesh,” she said.

  Tova busied herself stuffing the bills in her wallet when she looked up at the sound of a foot hitting the ground hard, not once, but several times: thunk-thunk-thunk-thunk. She looked beyond LL-Bean-Man and LL-Bean-Woman to Loud-Man who walked forward, arms against his sides, stamping hard. Uncle-Aaron and Cousin-Ray-Ban were behind him, stomping their feet. Quiet-Woman pulled Little-Greps forward and then stood—clomp, clomp, clomp. Then the Furry Folks moved forward, flopping their boots on the ground—ka-thump-ka-flop-ka-thump. Tilley-Hat-Chick snapped a photo while stomping her feet.

  Soon, Tova’s entire tour group surrounded her, stamping the pavement. Over and over they stomped, staring right at her. Tova blushed. "Gunalchéesh, thank you.”

  And at that moment, Tova felt the crust of her skin shifting, the surface of her two selves sliding past each another, her energy radiating outward. She looked down at their stomping feet, as the Old-Woman-Who-Lives-Underneath grabbed hold of their fault lines and shook them all from ten thousand feet below where they stood.

  Date: 2000s

  Recorded by John Swanton

  Assisted by Tooch Waterson

  Muskeg Swallows Restaurant

  Knut and Charlotte were having their usual breakfast in their usual place on the Loop Road at the airport’s River Flats Cafe. They’d met there in 1973 when Charlotte first moved to Wrangell. She’d gotten a waitress job at the River Flats. She was only twenty-five years old then, and she’d heard about Alaska pipeline jobs. Since she had to go to work after her trucker husband was killed in a jackknife on I-5 near Seattle, Charlotte hopped the ferry in Seattle and headed north. Charlotte only made it as far as Ketchikan though because that was the ferry’s first stop. She left after a week because it rained so much, even more than Seattle. So, she figured she’d try the next town—Wrangell. By then, she figured she’d better get used to the rain, so she stayed.

  Knut was from a prominent old Wrangell family, the Dammens, and had just finished taxidermy school. He had returned home to take over his dad’s business, Dammen Outfitters. The day Knut came in the diner, Charlotte thought the look on his face, as he ordered cream shrimp on toast, was one that wondered what she was made of. If she could have guessed, which is what she liked to do, she’d have figured Knut for a doctor or something. He had nice hands. And she wondered what lingered beneath those gray-blue eyes and broad shoulders.

  When Knut told her his name, she thought he was saying “eye-of-newt,” like an ingredient in a witch’s brew. Or maybe he was referring to “squirt,” an old childhood nickname. At that time, she wasn’t quite used to hearing the Scandinavian names.

  Eventually, she married Knut, quit waiting tables, and went to work at Knut’s family business. But she couldn’t figure out why she married Knut. Maybe it was the family name. Everyone in town enjoyed wearing their various Dammen Outfitters slogans: Dammen and Damn the Women, too. Get your Goods Dammen. Dammen the Authorities. Buy a Gun from us Dammen Folks. Animals are Dammen here. Dammen All.

  But he smelled like gun oil and that wasn’t as bad as smelling like whiskey like her late husband, Leo, did. Charlotte didn’t want to marry Knut, but she didn’t want to be serving greasy, double cheeseburgers all her life. She would rather have gone north. She’d never been to Koot’s in Anchorage to dance on the sawdust floor nor
ridden a funboard on Yakutat’s beaches. The farthest north she’d been was Juneau. She and Knut had only one child, a daughter, who was off at college in Fairbanks studying environmental engineering.

  Really, Charlotte had wanted to be a world traveler. Maybe take photographs for a magazine. She wanted to wander like a monk in the temples of Angkor Wat in Cambodia. She wanted to eat hangikjöt at a cafe in Reykjavík, Iceland. She never knew how she was going to do those things anyway. Life had gone by and she was sixty years old. And Knut, he wasn’t the intellectual type, unless you were talking about salt gradient in salmon or the epoxy used to shape the fake nose of Sitka blacktail.

  Knut ordered his eggs over easy, whole wheat toast no butter, and a small orange juice as he did every Sunday for the past thirty-five years. Charlotte sighed audibly. She held the menu in her dainty hands, turning it over and over.

  The waitress said, “Look honey, the menu hasn’t changed. What do you want?”

  Want? thought Charlotte, I want something different. “I’ll take the French toast with strawberries and whipped cream. And bring me a big cup of coffee.”

  Knut stopped sipping his coffee. “Char, you don’t like strawberries. They don’t agree with you. And coffee? Since when?”

  Charlotte shrugged. She didn’t tell him nothing agreed with her lately. Strawberries, cream certainly, Knut’s boxers on the floor, the way he left the toaster plugged in with crumbs all over the counter. There were some things, though, that did agree with her. She smiled and took a sip of her water.

  “What?” Knut asked.

  Oh, nothing. She didn’t answer him. She was a daydreamer. It bothered Knut that she could sit for an hour looking out at their garden. When he tried to probe her about what was on her mind, she never really told him. Well, take that back. Once, she told him she was thinking about the wonders of the wood frog. There is something mystical about frogs. The wood frog can survive in the Arctic. It can freeze in the winter and thaw out in the spring.

  Knut had guffawed so loud she figured she’d always tell him half-truths from then on like “Oh, Knut, I’m thinking about heading to Harbor Market for prime rib on special.” Or, “I was thinking about sending my friend Henna a card for her birthday.” Really, she was thinking about meat, more or less, since she’d met Henna’s younger brother, Tero, who was ten years younger than herself. She blushed whenever she thought about him.

  No, they had never had any real contact, except the way his hand brushed hers at Henna’s house six months ago when Tero was visiting. Charlotte had asked for her coat to leave and when Tero handed it to her, their hands met. Ever since then, she’d been thinking about that vibration. Was it static in her coat fabric? For a second, Tero’s eyes had held hers. She’d never held a gaze like that with Knut. It was as if the ground wobbled a bit.

  Charlotte and Knut’s breakfast came and the waitress set it down in front of them. Charlotte’s strawberries and cream were piled high. She scooped a gob of cream and put it in her mouth. “Mmmm,” she murmured, almost purring. And, that’s when she felt it, the feeling of being sucked into a vacuum cleaner. It was different from her hot flashes. She smelled it too, damp like rotting spruce trees, a smell she actually liked.

  Just then, the booth’s bench seat shifted. Knut seemed to sit a bit crooked. She was going to tell him to straighten up when he slunk to the side even more, tilting sideways.

  Charlotte shrugged and took another bite of cream, scooping up a big slice of strawberry. Whump! Crack! Knut’s eyes widened and she turned. The window in the booth next to them had cracked all the way down like a jagged bolt of lightning.

  “Earthquake?” she asked Knut.

  “Maybe. I don’t know.”

  The room shifted again.

  “Should we leave?” Charlotte asked, wiping her lips.

  “No, it’d be worse out there,” he said as the ground gave way around the parking lot. Their parked car slid into the crater. “We’ll be safer in here than on the road.”

  The restaurant wasn’t really crowded yet, because the crowd was still in church singing hallelujah Jesus or crossing themselves. Charlotte had never been a church person and, even though this moment had the possibility of becoming an emergency that might need prayer, she didn’t know any prayers.

  The room did seem to tilt a bit, Charlotte thought, and the hanging lights swung. Just then, a scream bellowed from the kitchen and something crashed. The waitress ran out, her mouth open, the scream leaching out half cried. Before she got to the door, the floor tilted and the diner dropped like an elevator going down.

  Charlotte took another bite of French toast. Outside, mud and water rose to the windows. She chewed and looked out.

  Knut grabbed his coat and stood up, hanging on to the back of the bench seat. “Come on, Charlotte, let’s get out of here. Something’s happening.”

  The waitress, still on her knees, her hand on the counter, tried to get up. She yelled, “We’re sinking!”

  Charlotte grinned as Knut held out his hand to her. She said, “I’m not going.”

  “What? We’ll be safer outside.”

  “I’m not going.” She started to cut into a piece of French toast when the room tilted more. Knut’s glass of orange juice sloshed and slid off their table.

  Knut’s knuckles turned white, gripping the back of the bench seat. He gritted his jaw and spoke through his teeth, “Get going. Now!”

  Knut had never been firm with her like that, so she knew he was stressed. But, she also figured it was the knight-in-shining-armor syndrome he’d always had, since he’d always assumed he’d rescued her from a life of drudgery. Trying to rescue her again, she supposed.

  “No,” she said. “I’m eating. Wait till I’m finished.”

  Knut huffed and turned around. He put one leg out and heaved his large body up the incline. “Suit yourself,” he said, starting to walk uphill. He clung to the tables until he got to the front door. The waitress was trying to open it. Knut reached around her and jerked the door open. Mud and water poured in, wetting them to their knees. He reached up and pulled on the jagged concrete now at waist level and pulled himself up onto the parking lot. Knut lowered his hand to the waitress, who grinned, offering her hand. He pulled her up like a big halibut being lifted onto a boat deck.

  The cook, Mrs. Johnsson, and another waitress emerged from the kitchen yelling at Knut. Knut bent down and helped them up into the parking lot.

  Knut walked along the edge of the broken concrete over to where she sat, which was now below him. He put his hands on his hips. Charlotte shook her head. She licked her lips and grabbed for the maple syrup jar wobbling on the table. She poured it on top of her French toast. She forked a bit into her mouth. “Hmmmm.”

  Now, no one else remained in the restaurant. Charlotte’s coffee tumbled off the table and rolled downhill. The building went woompf and sunk farther. Sirens howled. She could no longer see the parking lot. Surrounded by mud and water, the restaurant darkened and took on a musky scent. Suddenly, a window in the back of the restaurant gave way and mud and water poured in.

  Charlotte swept a piece of French toast through a puddle of syrup as the ceiling broke through near her, tumbling sheetrock chunks into the mud. A fireman hopped down in all his gear. He stared at her sitting there. She’d always loved firemen. He clopped over in his boots and grabbed her by the arm. Her legs stuck in the muck, but the strong fireman dragged her over beneath the hole. Someone tossed a rope down and he tied the rope onto her waist and told her to hold on. He motioned someone above, and tiny Charlotte went up easily.

  Up, up, up to the daylight Charlotte went. Up, up, up to the typical rainy, soggy, wet Sunday morning. Up, up, up to the flash of cameras. Up, up, up to Knut’s face, his eyebrows pressing his eyes to narrow slits. Up, up, up to what she didn’t know, nor did she care. Charlotte smiled. This would be something to write home about when it was the spring equinox and she was in Siem Reap eating lok lak and pau. It was something to think a
bout when she was bicycling to the gates of Angkor Wat, when she sat on the sandstone and laterite bricks with her notebook in her hand, when she stood in the center of the five lotus towers, where she would feel herself being lifted by herself.

  Date: 1990s

  Recorded by John Swanton

  Assisted by Tooch Waterson

  Year of the Fire Dragon

  One breath from Shen Lung’s mouth to spread the fire in the Presbyterian Church. Cooper was Lung Tik Chuan Ren, a descendent of the Dragon. He was a dragon. All it took was one breath like his brother had said. One breath.

  Cooper stood in the dark with a lighter in his hand. He could do this. He didn’t want to think about it. He poured a can of fuel along the inside back wall of the church on the woods side. He was crouched down between two pews when the stained glass window, depicting Jesus on his knees praying in a garden, shattered and a pipe bomb rolled in. What the heck? Who?

  Every part of his mind screamed “Run!” but he didn’t. Luckily, he was on the other side of the church next to the organ. He crouched down and covered his head.

  The bomb exploded and Cooper’s ears seemed to blast into his head, as if inside a firework. It was a familiar sound, a familiar smell, a familiar red flash. He raced for the fire extinguisher near the double doors to the sanctuary and then stopped. Next to the doors, he closed his eyes and blew out a big breath of air.

  At once, the fire burst through the sanctuary, eating the wood benches and swallowing the wall hangings.

  “Burn, burn,” he said softly, watching the Bibles ignite.

  Goddamn Mr. Young, preaching about the old evil ways of the Natives and the Chilkat blankets, the ermine hats that floated out eagle down feathers when you shook your head, and the dancing and singing and the Tlingit language. In a week Mr. Young planned to have a bonfire at City Park. He was going to burn evil things, just when people were starting to carve again and starting to learn songs and dances. For months now, Young’s sermons kept getting more radical. Then someone, he didn’t know if it was Young or not, mentioned something about burning the evil stuff like they did in Kake in the 1920s. Holy crap. Wasn’t there something about inherited trauma he’d seen on the news? Sperm and eggs and stuff like that could pass on fear and trauma. He was a fireman. He knew about trauma. He’d seen his friends suffer over the years, and they weren’t even born when they burned the evil stuff in Kake, when they took kids away, when they made them stop dancing and drumming.