by Stan Jones
“I’m here on my own time.”
“Why?”
“Your father asked me to find you and give you a message. Your mother’s ill and she wants to see you again before … well, she’s not expected to recover. It’s cancer.”
“What kind?”
“Liver. Apparently she got hepatitis from a transfusion when your brother was born and it led to this.”
She smoked and studied him. “Why didn’t she ask you to come herself?”
“I gather she wasn’t well enough. Your father said your aunt was coming down from Isignaq to be with her.”
“Aggie?”
Active nodded. “I think that’s what he said, yes.”
“Is she bringing Nita?” She smoked and studied him.
“Who’s Nita?”
“Aggie’s little girl.” She paused and smoked again. “My cousin. She must be nine or ten by now. Not so little anymore, I guess. I lost track of a few years.”
“Your father didn’t mention anyone by that name. I don’t know if she’s coming or not.”
She looked at her plate, then at him. “But you’re doing all this on your own?”
He looked away, wondering that she didn’t ask more about her mother, and embarrassed by the question she had aimed at him. “I came down here to ask Angie what happened to you.”
“All this way?” Her eyes were still on his face.
“I had to know.” He shrugged.
“A round trip from Chukchi must be over a thousand dollars.”
“I was in Anchorage anyway. It’s only about nine-fifty from there.”
She smoked again and appeared to think this over. “Where are you staying?”
“I was at the Royal Islander. Now I’m staying here.” She flinched slightly, then was silent, so he added, “I could move, though.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
He was silent for a while. She had agreed to see him and knew why he was here, so perhaps she had a story to tell. But she just smoked the Marlboro and stared at her plate.
Active slid his chair along the table a few inches, hoping to avoid the air current bringing smoke to his eyes and nose.
She noticed, and extended her arm so that the cigarette was downwind from him. “Sorry.”
“It’s all right,” he said. “It’s just that I don’t smoke.”
She drew on the Marlboro and looked at her plate and muttered “Filthy habit,” or so he thought. When she didn’t say anything else, he picked up the conversation.
“Can I ask you some questions?”
“You can try.”
“I was wondering how you turned into Angie Ramos and what happened to the real one?”
“We were roommates, if you could call it that.” Her voice was flat and so low he found himself straining to hear.
“How’d she die?”
“Snowplow hit her one night while she was directing traffic on Four Street.” The Marlboro was down to the filter now. She snuffed it out in the mashed potatoes. “Tell me when five minutes are up and I’ll smoke another one.”
Active looked at his watch to note the time, but what he saw was Cullars’ photographs of what was left of Heavenly Doe. “Did she have an angel on her breast?”
Grace Palmer looked up, surprise on her face. “You knew her? That well?”
“I didn’t know her at all. The Anchorage police showed me her autopsy pictures. They never identified her. They called her Heavenly Doe because of the angel. I thought she was you.”
Grace winced and looked down at the mashed potatoes again. He caught the flash of silver and studied her eyes until he realized what it was. The whites weren’t really white, not a normal flat white. They were reflective, like mercury, quicksilver literally, producing the gleam when she was not looking directly at him. “Why?”
“We found what looked like your initials on the tattoo.”
“I was just signing my work.”
“You did the tattoo?”
She nodded. “I learned how in jail.”
He thought of asking when and where, but decided it was probably a pointless detour.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“Why didn’t you report Angie’s death? Maybe her people would like to know what became of her.”
“Fat fucking chance. Her father kicked her out when she was fourteen because she got pregnant.” She gave a sharp, harsh bark of a laugh. “Fucking Catholics. How long?”
“How long?”
“Till the five minutes are up.”
He looked at his watch. “Its been about ninety seconds.”
She shrugged. “Anyway, how could I have borrowed her name if I told the police she was dead? They would have wanted all her papers and stuff. Besides, street people never talk to the cops. Nothing but trouble.”
“You said she was directing traffic?”
“Yeah, she had a cold that night.” Grace Palmer fiddled with the Marlboro butt in the mashed potatoes and stopped talking as if that cleared up Angie Ramos’ death and everything connected with it. The kitchen doors banged open and she watched as a Native teenager came out with a bucket and mop and set to work on the cafeteria floor.
Active shook his head and tried again. “Why would she be directing traffic on Four Street in the middle of the night, cold or no cold?”
She gave him a pitying look. “You direct traffic when you want to get arrested. Some motorist calls the cops on a cell phone, a blue-and-white shows up in about five minutes and you spend the night in a nice warm cell. Angie had a cold that night and decided she needed to sleep inside for a while, so we went out to direct traffic.”
“You were with her?”
“Not when it mattered.” A look of pain crossed her face and she dropped her eyes to her plate. “I took her up there and kind of showed her what to do, since it was her first time. Sure enough, some John Q. stops to yell at us for blocking the street. We tell him to go fuck himself, he threatens to call the cops, we say he can go fuck them, too, and then he’s driving away with his cellphone to his ear.” She did a remarkably effective pantomime of a man steering with his elbows as he held a cellular telephone in one hand and punched its buttons with the other. Then she chuckled miserably.
“I’m cold, I’m out of Bacardi, I don’t want to get busted again, and I figure Angie’s all set, so I head back up Four Street to the bars.” She lifted her eyes, glistening now. “I heard a noise, kind of a scream on the wind and then a thunk and I went back and looked and I, I, I … fuck, I knew I should have stayed with her. She was sweet, God, she was sweet, but she was simple. You know?”
She looked down again as he thought it over. If the driver had called 9-1-1, the Anchorage police should have a record of it. If there was a driver. Cullars hadn’t mentioned any call from a motorist, just the snowplow driver’s report of a hazy figure in the blizzard. Should he give her a Miranda warning? Ask something else to keep her talking? If his head were clear about this woman, would he have any basis for suspecting her? She gave no sign of suspecting him of anything but a genuine interest in her story, which now seemed to have taken on a momentum of its own.
“You were sleeping out in the winter?” He said this gently, sympathetically, not sure if he was being sincere or manipulative, but definitely putting off the question of the cell-phone call that didn’t show up in the police records. “What about the shelters?”
“They won’t take you if you’re drunk, which Angie and I always tried to be at night. Anyway, we were both at that phase of our recovery where we couldn’t sleep indoors. We always slept out.”
“Your recovery?”
She nodded, but looked annoyed and didn’t elaborate. He changed the subject.
“So you had a camp somewhere? A tent or a lean-to or something?”
She picked the Marlboro out of the mashed potatoes and studied it. “How much longer?”
“What?” Then he understood and looked at his watch. “About a minute.”
“Hmpph.”
She pushed the cigarette back into the potatoes.
“You want it now? You don’t have to wait.”
“No, I don’t want to cheat. Under cars.”
By now, he thought, he should be used to the hairpin turns in her conversation, but he couldn’t sort it out. “Under cars?”
“There was no camp. We slept under cars.”
“Not in them?”
“Under. That was as close to inside as we could stand at that phase of our recovery.”
“And that was warmer than sleeping under a tree or a picnic table?”
“A little. We’d hang around the condos downtown until somebody drove up in a nice wide car like a Suburban or something. Then we’d crawl under it and lie close together. There’d still be some heat from the exhaust pipe and the engine. And that frost that falls out of the air on a cold night? It wouldn’t get on our faces. So it was a little warmer, yes.”
She looked thoughtful, for a moment, then chuckled.
“One real cold morning the woman who owned the car started it up and backed out while we were still asleep. We open our eyes and there she is yelling and honking at us. Then she comes running over and feels our throats to see if we’ve got pulses. ‘Don’t move. I’ll call an ambulance,’ she says, and she goes running back into her house.”
He smiled and gave a noncommittal “Hmmph,” not ready for any more of the dismal street yarn she seemed to find so cheering. But he saw there was no stopping her, and resigned himself to hearing it all.
“We certainly didn’t want to go anywhere in an ambulance,” she continued, “so we had to get away. But we always slept with our arms folded on our chests for that little extra warmth and this morning they were too cold to move, so we couldn’t push ourselves up. So we rolled around till we got up on our butts and we rolled around on our butts till we could get ourselves on our feet and then we tried to run away.”
Now she stood beside the table, still talking. “But our ankles and knees were frozen, too, so we looked like two little homeless Frankensteins making our escape.” She demonstrated, tottering stiff-kneed across the cafeteria, arms crossed on her chest. The short-haired woman looked up from her paperback, followed Grace with her eyes, looked at him briefly without expression, and returned to her novel.
Grace returned to the table and sat down. “All the way down the street, we’re working our fingers, working our wrists, and pretty soon I can get my cigarettes out and I light up and I take a drag and I give Angie a drag. And Angie, she gets where she can pull the Bacardi out of her jacket and she unscrews the cap and she gives me a pull and she takes a pull and we’re ready for another day on Four Street.”
She laughed, saw his expression, then looked into herself and fell quiet, muttering something he didn’t catch as silver flashed again.
“What?”
“That angel. You know who that angel was?”
He shook his head.
“Angie’s baby. She got an abortion after her dad kicked her out and the boy ran off, and it drove her crazy.” Grace stopped and shook her head at the memory. “Whenever she got drunk, she’d start crying about that baby, how it was an angel up in heaven now and how much she missed it. So one night I told her I could put the baby next to her heart and that’s how it got there.”
Active nodded, said nothing.
“She didn’t even know the sex, so I had to make it a little hermaphrodite.”
She chuckled again and he nodded absently, thinking of how Cullars had called the androgynous angel a jailhouse special.
“I did it one night after the Oil Dividends came out,” Grace went on. “We were at some motel, one of those three-day parties the street people throw when they get a little sudden money, and I did it in the bathroom after everybody else was passed out. Never got infected, either.”
“Did it help?
“The party?”
“The tattoo.”
She paused before answering. “I thought so at first. But then Angie started talking about the baby again and how much she missed it and it was worse than before. She even tried slashing her wrists, but she screwed it up. She did it like this.” Grace drew a finger across her the base of her hand. “The ER doctor said you have to do it along the veins or the bleeding stops by itself.”
She shrugged. “So I think maybe Angie jumped in front of that snowplow to be with the baby. Who knows?”
When Active didn’t answer, she glanced at his watch, then at the cigarette in the mashed potatoes. “Time yet?”
“Yep, five minutes is up.”
She pulled another Marlboro from the pack and lit it with a match from the Royal Islander book.
“If you smoke, why did you ask me to bring cigarettes?”
“I don’t smoke.”
He was still thinking that one over when she seemed to realize it needed explaining. “I quit smoking and drinking at the same time. But I knew I was going to have to do one or the other again the first time I talked to somebody about this, and I decided a long time ago I’d smoke. I can stop smoking again, but I don’t know about drinking.”
“You threw up when you saw me today.”
She shrugged.
“But you’re talking to me anyway.”
“I knew I’d eventually have to talk to somebody about this to complete my recovery. I figured if you came all this way, it might as well be you.”
She lifted her eyes to his and for the first time he had the impression she wanted him to explain himself. And for the first time, it was he who looked away.
“I don’t know why I came. I mean, I thought you were dead when I saw your initials on that tattoo, and I thought Angie Ramos could tell me how you died. And then I caught a glimpse of you on the slimeline today and it was like seeing a ghost. Mr. Phan told me to go to the washroom if I wanted to throw up.” He stopped, realizing he was babbling like a suspect who confesses helplessly at the first question.
She drew in on the cigarette, then spoke through a cloud of smoke. “One glimpse and you knew it was me?”
He nodded, feeling a great need to change the subject. “You keep referring to your recovery.”
She looked annoyed again, but answered this time. “Yes, I was in denial the first few years I was in Anchorage. I’ve been recovering ever since.”
“Even when you were drinking and sleeping under cars?”
“Especially then. I read some books and realized I was self-medicating with alcohol and that made me think I might be able to cure myself. So I started.”
“This was around the time Angie died?”
“I was thinking about it before. I saw my brother Roy outside the Junction one night. He said, ‘Come home, Sikingik.’ That’s my Eskimo name.”
She must have caught something in his face, he thought, because she stopped and raised her eyebrows. “Yes?”
“Your father told me about that.”
“Then he probably told you I was drunk and in the company of two men with dishonorable intentions. This was in my Amazing Grace phase.” She grinned defiantly, anticipating, he supposed, his disapproval. He tried to project indifference.
“You want Amazing Grace’s story, you’ll have to live with the unexpurgated version. It would hinder my recovery if I tried to clean her up.”
He nodded. “Roy thought the men looked like soldiers.”
She gazed at him with an amused look. “Were they? I can’t remember that, or much else about that night, except that what Roy said kept going through my head: ‘Come home.’ I knew I couldn’t do that, not in the sense he meant, but I started to think I was ready to find some kind of home, and not on the streets. That was when my recovery really began. And then Angie died. I got completely drunk for a couple of months because I blamed myself, but somehow it wore off or I got used to it, and then I wanted out even more.”
He nodded and noted the time as she snuffed out the second Marlboro in the mashed potatoes.
“And Angie’s death gave me a way to do it. At t
hat point, we were keeping our stuff in some bushes behind the junked cars in the rail yards, and Angie left her ID down there because she was hoping to get herself arrested under a fake name and keep her record clean. So I just took it and became Angelina Corazon Ramos.”
He shook his head. “It was that easy?”
“That easy.” She gave another harsh laugh. “All street people look alike to people who check IDs. Cops, bouncers, Alaska State Troopers.” She studied his face. “All brown people, too. Even half- brown people like me. You could vanish in no time, Nathan. If you weren’t a Trooper.”
He smiled. “Why would I want to?”
She shook her head. “Never mind. How long?”
He checked his watch. “About three minutes. Why did you need to be Angie Ramos to complete your recovery? Grace, Angie, what’s the difference?”
“Angie didn’t have a criminal record, which meant she could get jobs.” She paused to look into herself for a moment. “She’s on the street all those years and never gets arrested. And then the first time she goes out to direct traffic, a snowplow hits her and she still doesn’t get arrested.” There was another of her harsh laughs, ending in a half-sob.
He offered her his handkerchief. She took it but didn’t wipe her eyes or nose. Instead, she looked up and to his right, and he sensed that someone was at the end of the table.
“You OK?” It was the short-haired woman who had been reading the novel. He realized now that subconsciously he had been aware for some time of her watching his conversation with Grace Palmer.
Grace blinked rapidly and smiled up at the woman. “I’m fine, Wendy. Really.”
“You sure?”
Grace smiled again. “Really. You go on back to the room. I’ll be along soon.”
He sensed resentment from Wendy, who stood indecisively for a moment, then bent forward. He tried not to react as he realized she intended to kiss Grace, probably on the lips, but then something happened—he wasn’t sure if Wendy changed her mind or Grace tilted her head—but the kiss landed on the crown of the purple baseball cap.
Wendy straightened, hesitated, and looked him in the eye for the first time. She glared for a moment, then nodded with a jerk and walked away before he could nod back.