Like You'd Understand, Anyway

by Jim Shepard

  “Go to sleep,” his mother called back.

  We lay there waiting for him to go back to sleep. Tell her you changed your mind, I thought. Tell her you want to make a kid, right now. Show her. I had a hand on her thigh and she had her palm cupped over my crotch, as if that, at least, was on her side. “Shh,” she said, and reached her other hand to my forehead and smoothed away my hair.

  Set-net fishermen mostly work for families that hold the fishing permits and leases, which are not easy to get. The families sell during the season to vendors who buy fish along the beach. The season runs from mid-June to late July. We fished at Coffee Point on Bristol Bay. Two people lived there: a three-hundred-pound white guy and his mail-order bride. The bride was from the Philippines and didn't seem to know what had hit her. Nobody could pronounce her name. The town nearest the Point had a phone book that was a single mimeographed sheet with thirty-two names and numbers. The road signs were handpainted, but it had a liquor store, a grocery store, and a superhardened airstrip that looked capable of landing 747s, because the bigger companies had started figuring out how much money there was in shipping mass quantities of flash-frozen salmon.

  We strung fifty-foot nets perpendicular to the shore just south of the King Salmon River: cork floats on top, lead weights on the bottom. Pickers like me rubber-rafted our way along the cork floats, hauling in a little net, freeing snagged salmon gills and filling the raft at our feet. When we had enough we paddled ashore and emptied the rafts and started over again.

  Everybody knew what they were doing but me. And in that water with that much protective gear, people drowned when things went wrong. Learning the ropes meant figuring out what the real fishermen wanted, and the real fishermen never said boo. It was like I was in the land of the deaf and dumb and a million messages were going by. Someone might squint at me, or give me a look, and I'd give him a look back, and finally someone else would say to me, “That's too tight.” It was nice training on how you could get in the way even when your help was essential.

  How could you do such a thing if you love her so much? I think to myself with some regularity, lying there in bed. Well, that's the question, isn't it? is usually my next thought. “What's the Saturday before Memorial Day circled for?” my wife asked a week ago, standing near our kitchen calendar. Memorial Day at that point stood two weeks off. The whole extended family would be showing up at Don and Nila's for a cookout. I'd probably be a little hobbled when it came to the annual volleyball game.

  “Should you even have kids? Should you even have a wife?” my wife asked once, after our first real fight. I'd taken a charter all the way up to Dry Bay and stayed a couple of extra nights without calling. I hadn't even called in to the office. She'd been beside herself with worry and then anger. Before I'd left, I'd told her to call me back and then when she hadn't, I'd been like, Okay, if you don't want to talk, you don't want to talk. I'd left my cell phone off. That I'm not supposed to do. The office even thought about calling Air-Sea Rescue.

  “Bad move, Chief,” even Doris, our girl working the phones, told me when I got back.

  “So I'm wondering if I should go back to work,” my wife tells me today. We're eating something she whipped up in her new wok. It's an off day—nothing scheduled except some maintenance paperwork—and I was slow getting out of the house, and she invited me to lunch. She was distracted during the rinsing the greens part, and every bite reminds me of a trip to the beach. She must notice the grit. She hates stuff like that more than I do.

  “They still need someone to help out with the online accounts,” she says. She has an expression like every single thing today has gone wrong.

  “Do you want to go back to work?” I ask her. “Do you miss it?”

  “I don't know if I miss it,” she says. She adds something in a lower voice that I can't hear because of the crunch of the grit. She seems bothered that I don't respond.

  “I think it's more, you know, if we're not going to do the other thing,” she says. “Have the baby.” She keeps herself from looking away, as if she wants to make clear that I'm not the only one humiliated by talks like this.

  I push some spinach around and she pushes some spinach around. “I feel like first we need to talk about us,” I finally tell her. I put my fork down and she puts her fork down.

  “All right,” she says. She turns both her palms up and raises her eyebrows like, Here I am.

  One time she came and found me in one of the hangars at two o'clock in the afternoon and turned me around by the shoulders and pinned me to one of the workstations with her kiss. A plane two hangars down warmed up, taxied over, and took off while we kissed. She kissed me the way lost people must act when they find water in the desert.

  “Do you think about me the way you used to think about me?” I ask her.

  She gives me a look. “How did I used to think about you?”

  There aren't any particular ways of describing it that occur to me. I imagine myself saying with a pitiful voice, “Remember that time in the hangar?”

  She looks at me, waiting. Lately that look has had a quality to it. One time in Ketchikan, one of my pilots and I saw a drunk who'd spilled his Seven and Seven lapping some of it up off the wood of the bar. That look: the look we gave each other.

  This is ridiculous. I rub my eyes.

  “Is this taxing for you?” she wants to know, and her impatience makes me madder too.

  “No, it isn't taxing for me,” I tell her.

  She gets up and dumps her dish in the sink and goes down to the cellar. I can hear her rooting around in our big meat freezer for a Popsicle for dessert.

  The phone rings and I don't get up. The answering machine takes over, and Dr. Calvin's office leaves a message reminding me about my Friday appointment. The machine switches off. I don't get to it before my wife comes back upstairs.

  She unwraps her Popsicle and slides it into her mouth. It's grape.

  “You want one?” she asks.

  “No,” I tell her. I put my hands on the table and off again. They're not staying still. It's like they're about to go off.

  “I should've asked when I was down there,” she tells me.

  She slurps on it a little, quietly. I push my plate away.

  “You going to the doctor?” she asks.

  Outside a big terrier that's new to me is taking a dump near our hibachi. He's moving forward in little steps while he's doing it. “Goddamn,” I say to myself. I sound like someone who's come home from a twelve-hour shift and still has to shovel his driveway.

  “What's wrong with Moser?” she wants to know. Moser's our regular doctor.

  “That was Moser,” I tell her. “That was his office.”

  “It was?” she says.

  “Yes it was,” I tell her.

  “Put your dish in the sink,” she reminds me.

  I put the dish in the sink and head into the living room and drop onto the couch.

  “Checkup?” she calls from the kitchen.

  “Pilot physical,” I tell her. All she has to do is play the message.

  She wanders into the living room without the Popsicle. Her lips are darker from it. She waits a minute near the couch and then sinks down next to me. She leans forward, looking at me. Her lips touch mine, and press, and then lift off and stay so close it's hard to know if they're touching or not. Mine are still moist from hers.

  “Come upstairs,” she whispers. “Come upstairs and show me what you're worried about.” She puts three fingers on my erection and rides them along it until she stops on my belly.

  “I love you so much,” I tell her. That much is true.

  “Come upstairs and show me,” she tells me back.

  That night in 1958, undersea communications cables from Anchorage to Seattle went dead. Boats at sea recorded a shocking hammering on their hulls. In Ketchikan and Anchorage people ran into the streets. In Juneau streetlights toppled and breakfronts emptied their contents. The eastern shore of Disenchantment Bay lifted itself fo
rty-two feet out of the sea, the dead barnacles still visible there, impossibly high up on the rock faces. And at Yakutat, a postmaster in a skiff happened to be watching a cannery operator and his wife pick strawberries on a sandy point near a harbor navigation light, when the entire point with the light pitched into the air and then flushed itself as though driven underwater. The postmaster barely stayed in his skiff, and afterward, paddling around the whirlpools and junk waves, he found only the woman's hat.

  “You know, I made some sacrifices here,” my wife mentions to me later that same day. We're naked and both on the floor on our backs with our feet still up on the bed. One of hers is twisted in the sheets. The room seems darker and I don't know if that's a change in the weather or if we've just been here forever. One of our kisses was such a submersion that when we finally stopped we needed to lie still for a minute, holding on to each other, to recover.

  “You mean as in having married me?” I ask her. Our skin is air-drying but still mostly sticky.

  “I mean as in having married you,” she says. Then she pulls her foot free of the sheets and rolls over me.

  She told me as she was first easing me down onto the bed that she'd gone off the pill but that it was going to take at least a few weeks before she'd be ready. “So you know why I'm doing this?” she asked. She slid both thighs across me, her mouth at my ear. “I'm doing this because it's amazing.”

  We're still sticky and she's looking down into my face with her most serious expression. “I mean, you're a meat cutter,” she says, fitting me inside of her again. The next time we do this I'll have had the operation. And despite everything, it's still the most amazing feeling of closeness.

  “Why are you crying?” she whispers. Then she lowers her mouth to mine and goes, “Shhh. Shhh.”

  Howard Ulrich and his little boy Sonny entered Lituya Bay at eight the night of the wave, and anchored on the south shore near the entrance. He wrote about it afterward. Their fishing boat had a high bow, a single mast, and a pilothouse the size of a Portosan. Before they turned in, two other boats had followed them in and anchored even nearer the entrance. It was totally quiet. The water was a pane of glass from shore to shore. Small icebergs seemed to just sit in place. The gulls and terns that they usually saw circling Cenotaph Island in the middle of the bay were hunkered down on the shore. Sonny said it looked like they were waiting for something. His dad tucked him in bed at about ten, around sunset. He'd just climbed in himself when the boat started pitching and jerking against its anchor chain. When he ran up on deck in his underwear, he saw the mountains heaving themselves around and avalanching. Clouds of snow and rocks shot up high into the air. It looked like they were being shelled. Sonny came up on deck in his pj's, which had alternating wagon wheels and square-knotted ropes. He rubbed his eyes. Ninety million tons of rock dropped into Gilbert Inlet as a unit. The sonic concussion of the rock hitting the water knocked them both onto their backs on the deck.

  It took the wave about two and a half minutes to cover the seven miles to their boat. In that time Sonny's dad tried to weigh anchor and discovered that he couldn't, the anchor stuck fast, so he let out the chain as far as he could, got a life preserver onto Sonny, and managed to turn his bow into the wave. As it passed Cenotaph Island it was still over a hundred feet high, extending from shore to shore, a wave front two miles wide.

  The front was unbelievably steep, and when it hit, the anchor chain snapped immediately, whipping around the pilothouse and smashing the windows. The boat arrowed seventy-five feet up into the curl like they were climbing in an elevator, their backs pressed against the pilothouse wall as if they'd been tilted back in barber's chairs. The wave's face was a wall of green taking them up into the sky. They were carried high over the south shore. Sixty-foot trees down below disappeared. Then they were thrown up over the crest and down the back slope, where the backwash spun them off again into the center of the bay.

  Another couple, the Swansons, had also turned into the wave and had their boat surfboard a quarter mile out to sea, and when the wave crest broke, the boat pitchpoled and hit bottom. They managed to find and float their emergency skiff in the debris afterward. The third couple, the Wagners, tried to make a run for the harbor entrance and were never seen again.

  Four-foot-wide trees were washed away, along with the topsoil and everything else. Slopes were scoured down to bedrock. Bigger trunks were snapped off at ground level. Trees at the edge of the trimline had their bark removed by the water pressure.

  Sonny's dad was still in his underwear, teeth chattering, and Sonny was washing around on his side in some icy bilge water, making noises like a jungle bird. The sun was down by this point. Backwash and wavelets twenty feet high were crisscrossing the bay, spinning house-sized chunks of glacier ice that collided against each other. Clean-peeled tree trunks like pickup sticks knitted together and upended, pitching and rolling. Water was still pouring down the slopes on both sides of the bay. The smell was like being facedown in the dirt under an upended tree. And Sonny's dad said the time that passed afterward—when they'd realized they'd survived but still had to navigate through everything pinballing around them in the dark—was worse than riding the wave itself.

  A day or two later the geologists started arriving. No one believed the height of the wave at first. People thought any devastation that high on the slopes had to have been caused by landslides. But they came around.

  My wife fell asleep beside me, wrapped over me to keep me warm. We're still on the floor and now it really is dark. We've got to be late in terms of picking up Donald from his play date, but if his friend's parents called, I didn't hear the phone.

  One of my professors at Saint Mary's had this habit of finishing each class with four or five questions, none of which anyone could answer. It was a class called The Philosophy of Life. I got a C. If I took it now, I'd do even worse. I'd sit there hoping he wouldn't see me and try not to let my mouth hang open while he fired off the questions. What makes us threaten the things we want most? What makes us so devoted to the comfort of the inadvertent? What makes us unwilling to gamble on the noncataclysmic?

  Sonny's dad was famous for a while, selling stories with titles like “My Night of Terror” to magazines like Alaska Sportsman and Reader's Digest. I read one or two of them to Donald, though my wife didn't approve. “Do you like these stories?” he asked me that night. In the stories, Sonny's mom never gets mentioned. Whether she was mad or dead or divorced or proud never comes up. In one his dad talks about having jammed a life preserver over Sonny's head and then having forgotten about him entirely. In another he says something like, in that minute before it all happened, he'd never felt so alone. I imagine Sonny reading that a year or two later and going, Thanks, Dad. I imagine him looking at his dad later on, at times when his dad doesn't know he's watching, and thinking of all that his dad gave him and all that he didn't. I imagine him never really figuring out what came between them. I imagine years later people saying about him that that was the thing about Sonny: the kid was just like the old man.

  The First South Central

  Australian Expedition

  April 1st, 1840

  The three of us traded Christmas tales during our long portage. Hill and Browne both professed shock at my contribution, which seemed less than shocking to me. I had related to them the method by which my father, with what I remember to be the sad-eyed support of our mother, celebrated our Lord's birth each Christmas Day.

  Having three sons, myself the eldest, he had resolved, he said, to no longer be tyrannized by the understanding that during this particular season he was obligated as a Christian to provide even more for his family, by way of gifts, than he did in the course of the normal round. Henceforth, then, one and only one child each year would be favored with a lovely gift to commemorate the day. He hoped that the child's siblings would derive the pleasure they should from their compatriot's good fortune. In accordance with his understanding of the general workings of the natural world, t
he process would proceed by lot. So it was entirely possible that one child would be favored by chance two or even three years in a row. We would all find out only upon coming downstairs on Christmas morning, when we saw what was set about the hearth.

  He made this announcement having gathered the family together on Christmas Eve the year I turned five. My brothers, being at the time only three and two, hardly knew what they were being told. His wife and our mother, by all accounts gay and outgoing before her marriage, stood by while he entertained questions about his decision, and then did her best to salvage some measure of wan cheer over the course of those Christmas Days that followed.

  My story was greeted with an extended silence. We were having trouble with the horses in the current. Browne announced himself, finally, to have been cudgeled about the head by the damned thing. He meant my story. Hill found it odd that such a father would have shown a willingness to finance a part of the expedition. “I'm sure it's not entirely unusual,” I remarked to them, some time later, about my father's notion of gift giving. “I'm sure it is,” Browne responded.

  April 3rd

  My father instilled in me the habit of resolving every day to make a resolution, to be repeated aloud when dressing and undressing. Today's has been: “Think well before giving an answer, and never speak except from strong convictions.”

  “Are you conversing with yourself?” Browne asked from outside my tent this morning when he overheard.

  The rock here is of an oolitic limestone and treacherous with hollows throughout. The surrounding area is beset by stupendous tufts of porcupine grass (spinifex) four to five feet high. The country so far has been stupefyingly consistent. We are now fifteen weeks out and for the last six have continued to wait for some kind of happy transformation in the path ahead.

  We stopped at a marshy creek and it came on raining, and Cuppage shot himself. Somehow in stowing his saddle he managed to allow a binding loop to catch the trigger. The ball came out his back under the shoulder.