Like You'd Understand, Anyway

by Jim Shepard

  She was never the same after that, my aunt told me. This was maybe by way of explaining why I'd been put up for adoption a few months later. My mother had gone to teach somewhere in Alaska. Somewhere away from the coast, my aunt added with a smile. She pretended she didn't know exactly where. I'd been left with the Franciscan Sisters at the Catholic orphanage in Kahili. On the day of my graduation, one of the sisters who'd taken an interest in me grabbed both of my shoulders and shook me and said, “What is it you want? What's the matter with you?” They weren't bad questions, as far as I was concerned.

  I saw my aunt that once, the year before college. My fiancée, many years later, asked if we were going to invite her to the wedding, and then later that night said, “I guess you're not going to answer, huh?”

  Who decides when the time's right to have kids? Who decides how many kids to have? Who decides how they're going to be brought up? Who decides when the parents are going to stop having sex and stop listening to one another? Who decides when everyone's not just going to walk out on everyone else? These are all group decisions. Mutual decisions. Decisions that a couple makes in consultation with one another.

  I'm stressing that because it doesn't always work that way.

  My wife's goal oriented. Sometimes I can see her To Do list on her face when she looks at me. It makes me think she doesn't want me anymore, and the idea is so paralyzing and maddening that I lose track of myself: I just step in place and forget where I am for a minute or two. “What're you doing?” she asked once, outside a restaurant.

  And of course I can't tell her. Because then what do I do with whatever follows?

  We have one kid, Donald, named for the single greatest man my wife has ever known. That would be her father. Donald's seven. When he's in a good mood he finds me in the house and wraps his arms around me, his chin on my hip. When he's in a bad mood I have to turn off the TV to get him to answer. He has a good arm and good hand-eye coordination but he gets easily frustrated. “Who's that sound like?” my wife always says when I point it out.

  He loses everything. He loses stuff even if you physically put it in his hands when he's on his way home. Gloves, hats, knapsacks, lunch money, a bicycle, homework, pencils, pens, his dog, his friends, his way. Sometimes he doesn't worry about it; sometimes he's distraught. If he starts out not worrying about it, sometimes I make him distraught. When I tell these stories, I'm Mr. Glass Half Empty. Which is all by way of getting around to what my wife calls the central subject, which is my ingratitude. Do I always have to start with the negatives? Don't I think he knows when I talk about him that way?

  “She says you're too harsh,” is the way my father-in-law put it. At the time he was sitting on my front porch and sucking down my beer. He said he thought of it as a kind of mean-spiritedness.

  I had no comeback for him at the time. “You weren't very nice to my parents,” my wife mentioned when they left.

  Friends commiserate with her on the phone.

  My father-in-law's a circuit court judge. I run a seaplane charter out of Ketchikan. Wild Wings Aviation. My wife snorts when I answer the phone that way. My father-in-law tells her, who knows, maybe I'll make a go of it. And if the thing does go under, I can always fly geologists around for one of the energy companies.

  Even knowing what I make, he says that.

  Number one on her To Do list is another kid. She says Donald very much wants a little brother. I haven't really heard him address the subject. She wants to know what I want. She asks with her mouth set, like she's already figured the odds that I'm going to let her down. It makes me what she calls unresponsive.

  She's been on me about it for a year, now. And two months ago, after three straight days of our being polite to one another—Good morning. How'd you sleep?—and avoiding brushing even shoulders when passing through doorways, I made an appointment with a Dr. Calvin at Bartlett Regional about a vasectomy. “Normally, couples come in together,” he told me at the initial consult.

  “This whole thing's been pretty hard on her,” I told him.

  Apparently it's an outpatient thing, and if I opt for the simpler procedure I could be out of his office and home in forty-five minutes. He quoted me a thousand dollars, but not much out of pocket, because our health insurance should cover most of it. I was told to go off and give it some thought and get back in touch if and when I was ready to schedule it. I called back two days later and lined it up for the Saturday before Memorial Day. “That'll give you some time to rest up afterwards,” the girl who did the scheduling pointed out.

  “He had a pretty big trauma when he was a baby,” my wife reminded her mom a few weeks ago. They didn't realize I was at the kitchen window. “A couple of traumas, actually.” She said it like she understood that it was going to be a perennial on her To Do list.

  So for the last two months I've gone around the house like a demolition expert who's already wired the entire thing to blow and keeps rechecking the charges and connections.

  It was actually flying some geologists around that got me going on Lituya Bay in the first place. I flew in a couple of guys from ExxonMobil who taught me more than I wanted to know about Tertiary rocks and why they always got people salivating when it came to hunting up petroleum. But one of the guys also told the story of what happened there in 1958. He was the one who didn't want to camp in the bay. His buddy made serious fun of him. The next time I flew them in I'd done my research, and we talked about what a crazy place it was. I was staying overnight with them, because they could pay for it, and they had to be out at like dawn the next morning.

  However you measure things like that, it has to be one of the most dangerous bodies of water on earth. It feels freakish even when you first see it. Most tidal inlets are not nearly so deep—I think at its center it's seven hundred feet—but at the entrance there's barely enough draft for a small boat. So at high and low tides the water moves through the bottleneck like a blast from a fire hose. That twilight we watched a piece of driftwood stay ahead of a tern that was gliding with the wind. The whole bay is huge but the entrance is only eighty yards wide and broken up by boulders. Stuff coming in on the high tide might as well be on the world's largest water slide, and when the tide running out hits the ocean swells, it's as if surf's up on the north shore of Hawaii from both directions at once. We were two hundred yards away and had to shout over the noise. The Frenchman who discovered the bay lost twenty-one men and three boats at the entrance. The Tlingits lost so many people over the course of their time here that they named it Channel of the Water-Eyes, “water eyes” being their term for the drowned.

  But the scared guy had me motor him up to the head of the bay and showed me the other problem, the one I'd already read about: stupefyingly large and highly fractured rocks standing at vertiginous angles over deep water in an active fault zone, as he put it. On top of that, their having absorbed heavy rainfall and constant freezing and thawing. The earthquakes on this fault were as violent as anywhere else in the world, and they'd be shaking unstable cliffs over a deep and tightly enclosed body of water.

  “Yeah yeah yeah,” his buddy said, passing around beef jerky from the backseat. I was putt-putting the seaplane back and forth as our water taxi at the top of the bay's T. Forested cliff faces went straight up five to six thousand feet all around us. I don't know how trees that size even grew like that.

  “You have any kids?” the scared guy asked out of nowhere. I said yeah. He said he did too and started hunting up a photo.

  “Well, what's a body to do when millions of tons avalanche into it?” his buddy in the back asked.

  The scared guy couldn't find the photo. He looked at his wallet like what else was new. “Make waves,” he said. “Gi-normous waves.”

  While we crossed from shore to shore they pointed out some of the trimlines I'd read about. The experts figure their dates by cutting down trees and looking at the growth rings, and some of the lines go back as far as the middle of the 1800s. They look like rows of plantings i
n a field, except we're talking about fifty-degree slopes and trees eighty to ninety feet high. There are five lines, and their heights are the heights of the waves: one from 1854 at 395 feet; one twenty years later at 80 feet; one twenty-five years after that at 200 feet; one from 1936 at 490 feet; and one from 1958 at 1,720 feet.

  That's five events in the last hundred years, or one every twenty. It's not hard to do the math, in terms of whether or not the bay's currently overdue.

  In fact, that night we did the math, after lights-out in our little three-man tent. The scared guy's buddy was skeptical. He was still eating, having moved on to something called Moose Munch. We could hear the rustling of the bag and the crunching in the dark. Given that the waves occurred every twenty years, he said, the odds of one occurring on any single day in the bay were about eight thousand to one. There was a plunk down by the shore when something jumped. After we were quiet for a minute, he joked, “That's one of the first signs.”

  The odds were way smaller than that, the scared guy finally answered. He asked his buddy to think about how much unstable slope they'd already seen from the air. All of that had been exposed by the last wave. And it had now been exposed almost fifty years, he said. There were open fractures that were already visible.

  So what did he think the odds were? his buddy wanted to know.

  Double-digits, the scared guy said. The low double-digits.

  “If I thought they were in the double-digits, I wouldn't be here,” his buddy said.

  “Yeah, well,” the scared guy said. “What about you?” he asked me. It took me a minute to realize it, since we were lying in the dark.

  “What about me?” I said.

  “You ever notice anything out here?” he asked. “Any evidence of recent rockfalls or slides? Changes in the gravel deltas at the feet of the glaciers?”

  “I only get out here once a year, if that,” I told him. “It's not a big destination for people.” I started going over in my head what I remembered, which was nothing.

  “That's 'cause they're smart,” the scared guy said.

  “That's 'cause there's nothing here,” his buddy answered.

  “Well, there's a reason for that,” the scared guy said. He told us he'd come across two censuses of the Tlingit tribes living in the bay from when the Russians owned the area. The populations had been listed as 241 in 1853 and zero a year later.

  “Good night,” his buddy told him.

  “Good night,” the scared guy said.

  “What was that? You feel that?” his buddy asked him.

  “Aw, shut up,” the scared guy said.

  What's this thing about putting people to use? What's that all about? What happened to just loving being around someone? Once, when I'd gotten Donald up off his butt to make him throw the baseball around with me, I asked that out loud. I only knew I'd done it when he said, “I don't know.” Then he asked if we could quit now.

  “Did you ever really think you'd find someone that you weren't in some ways cynical about?” my wife asked the night we'd decided we were in love. I was flying for somebody else, and we were lying under the wing of the Piper that we'd run up onto a beach. I'd been God's lonely man for however many years—twelve in the orphanage, four in high school, four in college, a hundred after that—and she was someone I wanted to pour myself down into. I was having trouble communicating how unusual that was.

  That morning she'd watched me load a family I didn't like into a twin-engine, and I'd done this shoulder shake I do before something unpleasant. And she'd caught me, and her expression had given me a lift that carried me through the afternoon. Back in my room that night, she made a list of other things I did or thought, any one of which was proof she paid more attention than anyone else ever had before. She held parts of me like she had never seen anything so beautiful. At three or four in the morning she used her arms to tent herself up over me and asked, “Don't we have to sleep?” and then answered her own question.

  Around noon we woke up spooning, and when I held on when she tried to head to the bathroom, we slid down the sheets to the floor. She finally lost me by crawling on all fours to the door.

  “Well, she's as happy as I've ever seen her,” her father told me at the rehearsal dinner. Twenty-three people had been invited and twenty-one were her family and friends.

  “It's so nice to see her like this,” her mother told me at the same dinner.

  When I toasted her, she teared up. When she toasted me, she said only, “I never thought I would feel like this,” and then sat down.

  We honeymooned in San Francisco. Here's what that was like for me: I still root for that city's teams.

  I've always been interested in the unprecedented. I just never got to experience it very often.

  Her family is Juneau society, to the extent that such a thing exists. One brother's the arts editor for the Juneau Empire; another works for Bauer & Gates Real Estate, selling half-million dollar wilderness vacation homes to second-tier Hollywood stars. Another, go figure, is a lawyer. On holidays they give each other things like Arctic Cats. Happy birthday: here's a new 650 4×4. The real estate brother was 11-1 as a starter and team MVP for JDHS the year they won the state finals. The parents serve on every board there is. Their daughter when she turned sixteen was named queen of the Spring Salmon Derby. She still has the tiara with the leaping sockeye.

  They didn't stand in the way of our romance. That's what her dad told anyone who asked. Our wedding announcement said that the bride-elect was the daughter of Donald and Nila Bell and that she'd graduated from the University of Alaska summa cum laude and was a first-year account executive for Sitka Communications Systems. It said that the groom-elect was a meat cutter for the Super Bear Supermarket. I'd done that before I'd gotten my pilot's license, back when I'd first gotten to town, and the guy doing the announcement had fucked up.

  “You don't think he could have checked something like that?” my wife wanted to know after she saw the paper. She was so upset on my behalf that I couldn't really complain.

  It's not like I never had any advantages. I got a full ride, or nearly a full ride, at Saint Mary's in Moraga, near Oakland. I liked science and what math I took, though I never really, as one teacher put it, found myself while I was there. A friend offered me a summer job as one of his family's set-net fishermen my junior year, and I liked it enough to go back. The friend's family got me some supermarket work to tide me over in the winter, and it turned out that meat cutting paid more than boning fish. “What do you want to do?” a girl at the checkout asked me one day, like if she heard me bitch about it once more she was going to pull all her hair out, so that afternoon I signed up at Fly Alaska and Bigfoot Air, and I got my commercial and multiengine, and two years later had my float rating. I hooked on with a local outfit and the year after that bought the business, which meant a three-room hut with a stove, a van, the name, and the client list. Now I lease two 206s and two 172s on EDO 2130 floats, have two other pilots working under me, and get fourteen to fifteen hundred dollars a load for round-trip flights in the area. Want an Arctic Cat? I can buy one out of petty cash. At least in the high season.

  “So are we not going to talk about this?” my wife asked last week after her parents had been over for dinner. We'd had crab and her dad had been in a funk for most of the night, who knew why. We'd said good night and handled the cleanup and now I was lunging around on my knees trying to cover my son in Nerf basketball. He always turns into Game Fanatic at bedtime, so we hung a Nerf hoop over the inside of the back door to accommodate that need. He was taking advantage of my distraction to try and drive the baseline but I funneled him into the doorknob.

  “I'm ready to talk,” I told her. “Let's talk.”

  She sat on one of the kitchen chairs with her hands together on her knees, willing to wait for me to stop playing. Her hair wasn't having the best day and it was bothering her. She kept slipping it back behind her ear.

  “You can't just stay around the basket,” Donald
complained, trying to lure me out so he could blow by me. He was a little teary with frustration.

  “I was going to talk to Daddy about having another baby,” she told him. His mind was pretty intensively elsewhere.

  “Do you want a baby brother?” she asked.

  “Not right now,” he said.

  “If you're not having fun, you shouldn't play,” she told him.

  That night in bed she was lying on her back with her hands behind her head. “I love you a lot,” she said when I finally got under the covers next to her. “But sometimes you just make it so hard.”

  “What do I do?” I asked her. This was one of the many times I could have told her. I could have even just mentioned I'd been thinking about making the initial appointment. “What do I do?” I asked again. I sounded mad but I wanted to know.

  “What do you do,” she said, like I had just proven her point.

  “I think about you all the time,” I said. “I feel like you're losing interest in me.” Even saying that much was humiliating. The appointment at times like that seemed like a small but hard thing that I could hold on to.

  She cleared her throat and pulled a hand from behind her head and wiped her eyes with it.

  “I hate making you sad,” I told her.

  “I hate being made sad,” she said.

  It was only when she said things like that and I had to deal with them that I realized how much I depended on having made her happy. And how much all of that shook when she whacked at it. Tell her, I thought, with enough intensity that I thought she might've heard me.

  “I don't want another kid,” Donald called from his room. The panel doors in our bedrooms weren't that great in terms of privacy.