But that might come. One day. Right now she didn’t want to think about it. Instead she took pleasure in having all her belongings so close to her on the platform, arranged in the duffel. Nesting her jeans at the bottom of her sleeping bag so they were loose and warm come morning. Stoking the fire for coffee. Doing what she needed to do.
41
A COUPLE DAYS INTO NOVEMBER a group clad in Gore-Tex pants, faded leathers, surplus sweaters with European flags sewed onto the sleeve, materialized in the clearing. Pierced and tattooed, they called themselves the Alaskan Travelers. Newt joked about charging them rent.
“They’d probably pay with clamshells or some shit,” he said.
Thomas made friends with a German woman, in her thirties or perhaps early forties, named Frauke. She had short bleached-blond hair and a spotted pit bull named Nanny. From across the clearing Tara could hear the sharp commands.
“Komm, Nanny! Sitz! Braver Hund.”
The barbell in Frauke’s nose gave her a doleful look, made sinister by a missing front tooth. She wore a washed leather jacket and army-green pants with pink trim and an assortment of flaps and buttons and pockets and safety pins and zippers. Staying indoors, she told them all, damaged your aura. Tied to her belt was a leather pouch that held chits of paper, an inspirational quote on each. Every now and then she’d take one out and stare at it, her lips mouthing the words, before crumpling it up and eating it.
“She is pure,” Thomas said, a step ahead as the three of them made their way back toward the clearing. “She has no wall to her reality, you know? She tastes each second in this life.”
“Yeah, she tastes it because she doesn’t work,” Newt said.
Disgusted with the growing crowd, Bailey sequestered himself on the far end of the hill. But he also made friends with a gray-muzzled Lab “looked after” by a pixie-faced, waifish girl from Oregon. The dog followed Bailey as he cut wood, sat by a cast-iron cauldron to boil water.
One evening, when they were all sitting by the fire, Newt setting a grate over the coals to cook black cod tips soaked in soy sauce, Frauke tapped Tara on the shoulder.
“I tell you your fortune. Yes?”
Elbow on one knee, smoking a cigarette in her tank-top and cargo pants, Frauke resembled a soldier. The tip of her tongue worried the empty socket in her gums.
“Sure.”
She tossed her cigarette into the fire, untied the leather string, took out a note from the pouch, shiny with age, and studied it. Newt arranged the fish with a fork.
“It is difficult for me to say. But basically it is that unless you try something higher, then you will always stay lower. Yes?”
Tara thought. “Like, don’t waste your time on bullshit.”
“Ah! Exact.”
Thomas, looking up from one of his Foxfire books, said, “Nanny does not waste time on the bullshit.”
Frauke sighed. “In Germany it is a rule that your dog is polite.”
Keta would behave himself out here, Tara thought, as she watched Newt turn the fish. She resolved to stop by Fritz’s to walk the old guy.
“Want some?” Newt asked, looking at the pit bull, who had been staring at the sizzling links of fish.
“I do not eat the gluten,” Frauke answered.
“I wasn’t talking to you, honey,” Newt said. “I was addressing das Hund over here.”
“Nanny? Ach, she is fasting.”
“The dog?” Newt asked incredulously.
“Yes. For two days. Liquid only. No fish, no solid.”
“Jesus, Frau-cakes,” Newt said. “You can’t make a dog fast.”
Frauke’s slight grin disappeared. She stood, walked toward the canvas flaps in front of her tent. “Nanny. Komm,” she ordered. Nanny continued to salivate by the fire, panting, watching the pan.
“Nanny! Komm!” Frauke ordered.
“Eh-oh,” Thomas said, reaching out to give Nanny a pet as she loped over. “Off you go.”
“Braver Hund,” Frauke said. “No beg, mein Schatz.”
Newt looked over at Tara and shrugged. “Woman seems to have forgotten where the dog is in the food chain. Let’s hope the woods don’t remind her.”
That night the full moon cast a flinty glow over the tents. There was the zip of a sleeping bag, a whisper followed by a laugh. Newt had retreated to the platform.
Restless, unable to sleep, Tara sat by Thomas, watching the coals pulse red in the breeze. Since the one evening when he tried to open the bottle, he had been keeping his distance.
Nanny poked her nose through the canvas. Thomas tsked, trying to coax the dog. Slowly her body emerged. She sat on the other side of the fire pit, panting.
A few minutes later the pixie girl’s Lab with the graying snout trotted up to the fire, a deer bone in his jaws. Without warning Nanny lunged. The old Lab yelped as the pit clamped down on her neck. Seconds later, he lay quivering in the mud.
Screams followed—Frauke in German, Thomas in French. A few of the travelers spilled out of tents to watch. Nanny gnawed serenely on the bone, growling when anyone approached. The pixie-girl and Bailey emerged from a tent, skin gray in the moonlight, Bailey pulling on his boxers and the girl in her underwear, shouting, throwing herself on the bloody Lab. Newt yelled in a groggy voice from the platform, “Everyone just shut the fuck up. Some of us gotta work in the morning.”
Chilled, Tara made her way to the platform and zipped herself into the sleeping bag, looking back as people milled by the fire. Frauke and Bailey dragged the dog carcass out of the clearing. The girl sobbed, head in her hands.
“Another scene like this and I’m back at the Bunkhouse,” Tara told Newt. But he was already asleep.
42
A COUPLE WEEKS before Tara’s second Thanksgiving, Betteryear invited her to gather the last mushrooms of the season. They would hunt for deer once the snow arrived, he promised.
After foraging they drove in silence past construction vehicles along the shoulders of Kiksadi River Road. The basket, filled with winter chanterelles, hedgehogs, and a few ragged-looking shaggy manes, bounced on her lap. A truck came toward them, and Betteryear lifted two fingers. She watched through the windshield for a response but saw none.
Betteryear shook his head. “All this is sacred land, a Tlingit graveyard. And now they’re buildings houses. It’s obscene.”
When she didn’t say anything he smiled over at her, his gloomy mood shifting. “Would you like to know how to prepare the mushrooms?”
“Sure.”
Instead of a right he took a left on Papermill Road. She realized he was bringing her to his home. It was okay, she decided. She was growing tired of eating fish from the processor boiled in shrimp ramen, which she and Newt bought in boxes. Occasionally Newt’s cans of refried beans and cream of mushroom.
A sheen of twilight reflected off Maksoutoff Bay. They climbed a hill. Just past the Church of God he parked the truck in a gravel pullout with a set of mailboxes. She followed him down a winding path to a cabin built just beyond the beach line. Roof shingles were bleached bone-white by the salt air. Stones and shells made a tinkling sound as the waves receded.
“Go explore,” he told her. “I’ll be inside.”
She slipped off her boots, folded the cuffs of her pants, and waded into the water, cupping her arches to avoid being stabbed by shards of shell. Waves lapped against her shins. She recalled a dream of trying to catch up to her mother on a curved beach just like this one. Seaweed draped over her mother’s shoulders, ocean gathering at her ankles as the tide receded.
A candle flickered in the uneven window panes of the cabin. Gray smoke rose from the chimney. This is what she had imagined all those years ago when she heard her cousin speak at Sunday dinner, when she read her report in fifth grade.
A worn stone step led into the cabin. Inside was a boxy room, with a single bed, made neatly with a quilt folded at the bottom, and a blanket chest at the foot. In the far corner a flitch counter and chipped porcelain sink sat bes
ide a wood stove. An assortment of cast-iron pans gleamed in the candlelight. A fat orange cat jumped from one of the wooden chairs around a rough-hewn wooden table and rubbed against Betteryear’s pant leg as he kneeled on a braided rug and built kindling in the wood stove.
“Is this a trucker’s hitch?” she asked, examining a knot on a clothesline.
“It is.” The air turned smoky as newspaper caught, and the cedar kindling crackled. Two bear skulls flanked him on the wall.
“Did you kill those?”
“You’re so curious,” Betteryear said. “Has it always been like that?”
“I don’t know,” Tara said, picking at the hard chinking between the logs. “In Catholic school the sisters always told us curiosity was a bad thing.”
Betteryear fanned the fire with his cap. He had more hair than she expected, black flecked with gray. He took down a metal colander from among the woven baskets hanging from nails in the rafters, and tipped in the mushrooms.
A gust blew branches against the leaded glass, and a brown curtain billowed over an open casement window. Raindrops hit the panes, then ran into the crosspieces.
“You should be careful, wading in the water like that,” Betteryear said as he separated mushrooms onto a muslin cloth.
“Why?”
“Kushtaka. The land otter spirits, shape-shifters. They come up from the sea, take human form, usually a dead relative, and tempt you into the water.” The fire snapped, and a tremor ran through her as she thought of her dream. The cat yawned. Betteryear took a bulging pillowcase from a nail on the wall, shook out a mound of Labrador tea leaves. “Then you drown,” he added. “Did you know, speaking of names, what yours means?” She shook her head. “The other day in the library I looked it up. In Polynesian mythology it is a beautiful sea goddess. Your mother must have known this.”
“Maybe,” she said in a soft voice.
“Tell me about her,” he said.
She watched as he took a teapot from the wood stove and poured boiling water over the leaves. He handed her a mug, and she sat down at the table. Tired, feeling drugged from the heat and exhaustion, she said, “My mother was killed. December twenty-third, two years ago this Christmas.”
“Did you hold secrets from her?” he asked.
“What? No.”
The cat snored by the fire.
Betteryear crossed the room, lit a scarred propane camp stove over the sink, turned, and rested a hand on her shoulder.
Through the wool of her sweater she could feel the uncomfortable warmth of his palm.
“Listen,” he said, before she could pull away. “No sadness tonight. Just good food. Yes?” He patted her head. “Come. You wash mushrooms. I’ll start dinner.” He set the filled colander and a wood- handled brush in front of her.
There was a fishy smell, followed by a clatter as he dumped a bowl of shells into a pan. “Limpets in seal oil,” he explained. “Are those mushrooms ready?” he asked.
“Sorry.”
When the nubs of meat from the limpets dropped out of their cone-shaped shells he added the cleaned chanterelles, hedgehogs, and chopped shaggy mane—also called a lawyer’s wig, he informed her. In a separate cast-iron pan he heated olive oil and garlic, pushed chopped eelgrass off a wooden cutting board, the rich bright scent filling the cabin. He handed her salmonberry relish and pickled bull kelp in ceramic jars, naming each food, directing her to put them on the table.
“Here,” he said, pulling up a rocking chair with a bear pelt over the back. “This is for you. Would you mind setting our table?”
Flames from the wood stove reflected off the scarred spruce tabletop. She laid out burlap placemats and muslin cloth napkins and silverware on top, then watched as he lowered a filet of white king salmon on a bed of sour dock, a tart rhubarb-like green that grew, he said, in the tidal grasses. He covered the fish with dulse, a seaweed the color of dried blood, wrapped the package in green skunk cabbage leaves, and slipped it into the wood stove.
While the fish steamed he lined up gumboots—chitons found on ocean-lashed rocks—flesh-side up, over a grate over coals. At the table, he demonstrated how to remove the eight shields of armor along their back sides, then scooped out the orange gonads with a finger before setting them on a shred of dried seaweed. She hesitated for a moment, then took the food. The meat tasted sweet, like lobster, with a burnt salty scent.
“Ka-ta-rina ru-sti-cana,” she chanted, the Latin name he had taught her for gumboots.
“That’s right,” he said. “What a spectacular memory you have.”
Billows of steam released as he unwrapped the singed skunk cabbage. He was right: the good food reassured her, set her at ease. They ate the mushrooms and limpets and fish with their hands, blowing on the flakes of salmon to cool them. Bleary-eyed from the food, Tara stretched out by the fire, alongside the cat, who blinked its good eye at her. Betteryear slipped on glasses, lenses smudged so badly they barely reflected the flames. He pulled a book from the shelf.
“Do you know,” he said, arranging a tallow candle on the table beside him, “that there exists, in Tlingit mythology, a curly-haired woman named Lenaxxidaq? During the new moon, at low tide, she gathers mussels, then leaves them for the poor.”
She found it hard to picture a Native woman with hair like hers. “Really?”
He peered over his glasses. “Each household she visits, she brings happiness and prosperity.”
She shifted away from the heat of the stove. “Whoever wrote that definitely didn’t have me in mind.”
“Perhaps not,” he said, shutting the book. “But it is a sign that you were meant to be here, in this cabin, at this very moment.”
He set a lamp on the floor and lowered himself in front of her. The cat rose, arching its back, and walked over to the bed in the corner, glancing at Tara before hopping up on the quilt. She turned on her side, put an arm out, and rested her head on it, watching him. Lamplight threw his eyes and mouth into shadow. “You look so sad, Tara.”
The panes rattled against the wind. When she allowed her eyes to close flames danced on the backs of her lids. For a moment she felt light, free, removed from her own body. Her awareness thinned, and soon she was asleep.
43
THE FRIDAY before the holiday it snowed. Flakes white as the underbellies of salmon sifted down. A high-pressure system with a northwesterly followed on Sunday, bringing blue sky and a biting cold. Ravens hopped on the crust of snow, black-purple feathers varnished by the sunlight. Squirrels flitted along the tree branches, chattering away.
When Betteryear said there wasn’t enough snow to hunt, she asked if he wanted to go to the Muskeg to hear bluegrass instead. He grew tense in public, she noticed, lost his grace, walking through doors first, rarely looking anyone in the eye. But she felt good beside him, protected by the breadth of his knowledge. She liked how slowly his eyelids worked, his long fingers as they tugged a salmonberry from its stem. How he rode his French bicycle everywhere, coasting the last twenty yards before stopping, just one foot on the pedal. How he pronounced words with clipped vowels. His patched workman’s cap, like Big Vic and some of the old Italian men wore back at the social club.
They sat for a bit in the Muskeg, drinking coffee and listening to music. He flipped the corner of his paper down and announced he wanted to take care of a couple chores back at the cabin.
“Would you like company?”
“Of course.”
Outside he blinked in the sun as they loaded into his pickup.
“You have plans for turkey day?” she asked.
“Probably the big potluck at the Alaska Native Brotherhood, along with the rest of the island.”
She flipped up the collar of her coat, her breath coming out in ragged clouds. Fritz and Fran had no way of getting in touch with her. She wasn’t even sure she wanted to return to their house, although she’d get to see Keta.
Betteryear started the truck. When she tried to shut the door it wouldn’t close. He said s
omething over the engine. When she slammed the door harder Betteryear hollered. “Look!”
She jumped. “Jesus, settle the fuck down,” she said.
“I don’t enjoy repeating myself.”
She saw that the corner of the saddle blanket covering the bench seat was caught. She pulled it up. “Just don’t shout at me.”
He rested a hand on her leg. “I’m sorry, Tara. I—I don’t know.”
Her good mood was broken. “Take me to the woods, please.”
They drove in silence. When they reached the trailhead she sat in the truck for a couple minutes, listening to the engine. Betteryear did not speak.
Finally, she got out, shut the door softly behind her, and started into the woods. A couple minutes later she heard the rumble of his engine as he pulled away.
44
ON THANKSGIVING, Thomas, Newt, and Tara heaped salmon dip, whale meat, roasted seal half-covered in tin foil, smoked ham, and butter-soaked stuffing onto doubled-up paper plates. The heavy clouds had returned, bringing the metallic scent of a more serious snow.
When she scanned the room she saw Betteryear, sitting alone. She waved. He gave a half-nod, wiped his lips. “Seal tastes just about as rubbery as it looks,” Newt said, making his way down the table of food. He sniffed a chunk of whale. He was leaving on the tender the following day to do cukes, and had announced his intention of stuffing himself before the trip. “We gonna sit with your buddy?”
Across the room she saw Betteryear start to stand.
“Hold my plate,” Tara said, breaking out of line. “I’ll be right back.”
The Alaskan Laundry Page 13