People of the Whale

by Linda Hogan

  The dark man in overalls remembers Thomas and Ruth, then only Ruth and her boy. He says, “He hasn’t lived there in, oh, maybe twenty or more years.” Since before the war.

  Lin looks at him and blinks back the tears. For some reason, she hadn’t considered this, that her father would be gone.

  A woman in the building stares at her, then steps forward, a kindly woman, a mop in her hand. She sends Lin next door to the gas station. “Really, they’d know more about it there, sweetie. They know him. Don’t worry. It’s a small place. Someone will know how to find him.” She watches Lin leave. “Don’t you think she’s the spittin’ image of him? Her nose, her forehead?”

  The gas station smells of tires and oil and smoke. One of the men is pulling the slot of a candy machine. Almond Joy. Lin asks if they know where Thomas Just lives. She gives him the address.

  He takes a long look at her. “That was a long time ago.” He yells over his shoulder, “Hey, anyone seen Thomas?”

  “A real long time ago.”

  There’s a rumor Thomas is at Witka’s, but no one’s gone out there because they stay away from the places where the old ones lived. They think they are still inhabited by ghosts. Some even hear them, and of course that is true, but what they really fear is being seen. As if the spirits of old bent men or women will walk out the door, come out and look at them, deep in the eyes, and see what they have become, what they have done. Or they will slip into them and take them between worlds or down beneath the layers of earth to an older time where untouched objects of bone are dwelling; hooks, fish skin smoothers, needles. It’s the same reason they don’t go over to the once-white houses place. But no one has seen any lights on at Witka’s dark gray house. “He could be at his father’s, but they dislike each other, so I don’t think so. Besides, old senior likes to be alone, to work.” He laughs. “And they plain old don’t get along.”

  She stores the information in her mind like paper in a file. On a piece of dirty paper, a man with short fingers makes her a dirt-stained map. It is to Aurora’s. “Here, this woman and her girl know where everyone is.”

  “Thank you,” Lin says, grateful, but she feels like crying. She is exhausted and it is getting late. “Is there a place to sleep near here?” she asks. He points her toward the town motel. “It is the only one, the Midtown. You can’t miss it. You’ll just wish you did.” He laughs at the same old joke.

  When she leaves, the men look at each other. One says, “Hot.”

  “Why do you think she’s looking for him?”

  “Who cares? She can find me anytime.” Dwight shakes his hand and blows on it like it’s on fire. “It puts me in a good mood just to look at her. Hey, are my tires ready yet? I’ve been here all afternoon.”

  “They’re too big. We told you we had to go get some.”

  “I like ’em that way.”

  Lin drives to the motel, locks the car door, and walks past the puny flower beds. The screen door has a hole in it. She rings the bell. Al comes and sizes her up before he gives her the key to number eight. She pays with cash. She checks in and looks around her room. It is not very clean. She goes to her bag to get a paper clip to hold the patterned curtains together. Threads are coming loose from the cotton bedspread. A hair is on the pillow. It smells of cigarettes. The heater is at the bottom of the window. She can’t get it to work. She is tired and hungry. Her hair is moist from the ocean air. She brings in the goldfish from the floor of the car and sets it on the table. She sprinkles the food in and watches it eat. Its fins are like the red silk scarf of that strong woman from the story she heard as a girl. It reminds her of her grandmother’s scarf. She falls back on the bed and it squeaks. She’s hungry and there is nothing to read. The light is bad anyway, almost yellow. She lies on her back and tears fall down into her hair as it all catches up with her. She is not as competent or as strong as she seems.

  News travels fast in Indian Country. After a phone call from someone’s wife, Ruth, at her mother’s, hears about the girl. Sure as an electric current, she feels who this girl is. “Mom. It’s his daughter. The one I dreamed about. I’m sure of it. Remember?”

  “Oh? What are you waiting for? Go get her.”

  At the motel Ruth asks Al which room the young lady is in. “What’s her name?” She knocks on the door. When Lin opens it, Ruth stares at her. She looks like Thomas, only slender and tall for a woman, and with an expression that says sweetness but also says she has seen a world broken to pieces. A feeling of knowing comes over Ruth. Also, she sees the younger woman has been crying.

  “We’re related, you and I,” she tells Lin. It’s true, in some odd way they are, but she can’t say how. It confuses even her, but she wants Lin to stay with her. “Our family will help you. You can stay with us. Here. You haven’t even unpacked. Let me carry your things. I’m Ruth. Are you Lin?”

  Lin nods. This other woman has taken over so easily, so smoothly, and she lets her. Ruth takes the key back and rings the bell at the desk. Al comes from the secret rooms behind. “Hey, Al. Can you give her a refund? I’m taking her with me.” He doesn’t want to refund her money. “It’s my policy.” He points at the sign.

  “Well, she didn’t even use the sink. Besides, I see the receipt here and you overcharged her to start with. I know your rates. And then, Al, the room wasn’t clean. The heater doesn’t work and you put her in the smallest room you have when the rest are empty. In fact, I don’t even know when you made it into a room instead of the closet where you used to keep linens, and I want to know, are you going to give her back her money or am I going to make a public scene and publicize this?”

  Always the same threat now, Ruth going public, but he can’t imagine this in a newspaper: “Man Overcharges for Motel Room.”

  Al puts out his cigarette. Slowly. He pushes his dog out of the way with his foot. He has a fifties hairstyle still. Ruth thinks he sprays it. Aurora swears he keeps a stash of Brilliantine behind the counter. He says, “This is why everyone here hates the hell out of you, Ruth.” But he goes back and gets the money for the little “gook foreigner.” His eyes reveal how much he dislikes her.

  Lin looks at Ruth. Lin has a smile in her eye. She’s only heard a few women talk that strongly. At home they have other ways of getting what they want, not so direct. Ruth is dressed in a T-shirt and jeans. Women at home in Vietnam wear skirts and blouses these days, but it’s changing there, too. Ruth has brown strong arms, not at all dainty. She picks up Lin’s things. Lin, usually strong, carries the fishbowl gingerly and walks like she is once again a girl, her heart afraid, but also trusting this woman who is called Ruth.

  Ruth stops at the door. “You know what they hate, Al? They hate that I am honest. They hate that I believe in truth. Ponder that awhile, why don’t you?” She lets the screen door slam.

  There is something calm and steady about the woman with strong arms, and in spite of what she has said to the man, she has a gentle nature. Lin can see it in her warm dark eyes.

  As they drive, Ruth smiles at Lin. “I see him in your face.” She also saw her once, in a dream, on his lap. She has seen her running about the green fields as a child. She has seen her surrounded by flowers without knowing the meaning of it, but she can smell them now, as if Lin’s skin is made of flowers. She has known Lin for a long time, in her dreams, even in brief waking moments, but she doesn’t tell Lin that. “You want to find your father.”

  “Do you know where he is?”

  She hands her the money Al returned. “Yes.”

  She doesn’t say that he is a wounded man and you don’t ever know what you will find with him. She only says, “We’ll go there. I’ll take you.”

  Lin looks at Ruth and thinks of her father and feels her heart beating quickly in her chest.

  At the little house with flowers outside, Ruth and Aurora offer Lin fruit, bread, and tea. “Wait here! We’ll get your room ready. Eat. You must be hungry.”

  The two women make up a bed for her in the back bedroom
. “Oh my God,” says Aurora. “What do you think he’ll do?” She pats down the bed and turns down the sheet so that it is welcoming.

  Ruth takes things out of two drawers. “I have no idea. He’ll probably deny everything. But isn’t it so strange how I always dreamed her?”

  “Maybe that’s why she’s here.”

  When they go back to her, Lin is asleep on the couch. Ruth covers her with one of the knitted afghans her mother made, then looks at Lin’s face. No matter what Ruth’s life has been, she can’t imagine the life of this girl, not even the country with its stone water-bowls in the streets, the many old bicycles, wheels blurring. She has traveled far. She has a hint of lip color. Ruth kisses the top of her head lightly. It has a human smell. It smells of hair that hasn’t been washed in a few days. It reminds her of Marco when he was young.

  Ruth loves the girl already because she is the child of Thomas. She looks at her and sees him. She’s not the kind of woman who would be bothered by the other woman, the mother of Lin. Thomas, she realizes, was never her own. She tries to think of how to deal with Thomas and all of the pain that is about to hit him. Then she thinks, It is time. He has been protected too long.

  Above them a night bird flies, calling out names, talking to the ocean and all the other currents moving within life: hope, need, desire, like being human.

  The next day Ruth and Lin first go to the small gray house out on the rock. The trail there is steep, but it is beautiful. Lin looks at the black rocks protruding from the water like dragon teeth. Ruth clears her throat, then knocks on the door, announcing their presence. Usually people here whistle as they approach, or they hum. Sometimes the older men will drum. But Thomas knows Ruth’s voice and he is accustomed to her invasions.

  Lin, who had been a girl afraid of nothing, then a woman with courage, is afraid when she arrives at her father’s small dark house on the black rocks. Will he remember her? She carries the fishbowl in her hands, worried she will drop it. She is now dressed in a pale pink American tee.

  Ruth knocks first, then opens the door herself.

  “Look who is here,” she says into the shadows. “It’s Lin.”

  Thomas should reach out and pull Lin toward him right away. He should hold her and love her. He should say to the young woman fighting back tears, I’m so proud of you. Because she lived, if for no other reason. He’d spent years thinking of what he’d left her to. The boy-warriors from the Thai border. Cambodia. He stands up, but as soon as he sees her, Thomas thinks Lin looks like her mother. His chest aches, but he does not go to her. He says nothing to her except “Hello.” Even hello is a struggle for this man who should be so proud of this surviving girl. In one moment, he remembers too much. As the two women walk inside, he sits down on his unmade bed.

  Lin looks at him and thinks, He is a small human being. All these years I thought so much of him, so large, so strong, but he’s only a man and we’re the same size.

  “Lin. This is your father. Don’t mind him. He’s shy. This must be a shock,” Ruth says.

  “Here, sit down.” Ruth pulls a kitchen chair out for Lin. “I’ll make some tea.” Ruth strikes a match and lights the black stove. As the water is heating she goes outside to leave them alone.

  Lin speaks to her father. Softly. “I brought you this.” She reaches out to offer him the bowl with the goldfish, dark red, swimming in a glass bowl. “Do you remember?” He does. It is so bright a color it reflects on the inner walls of the bowl. She doesn’t know it will make him remember the war, and the death of the whale and the red water. His son. She thought it would remind him of the same gift he had given her so long ago, one of her first memories. The American. Papa, she called him, with dark skin and black hair, had once brought her a goldfish. She didn’t know he was a deserter. He was present and kind and sometimes he cried. At those times her mother would take him in her arms and tell him how good a man he was, how he had saved her life and that of her mother and aunt, even the old grandfather of the village. So Lin thinks of him in that way. When she sees him, she is surprised. He does not look kind. He does not look like he saved a soul in the world, not even his own. He looks weary. He even looks old and nearly American. He sits down at the table across from her, speechless but full of words. He only nods.

  When Ruth comes back in, the breeze blows Lin’s hair in her eyes. Thomas can’t touch anyone, but he wants to push her hair back. He does say, “Thank you,” for the fish, even if he hasn’t really looked at it except from the far past, and from that past he smells the lotus blossom the day he carried gifts to his wife and daughter up the narrow pathway.

  “I am proud of you. My grandmother said you were a hero,” Lin says. She looks around old Witka’s place. She has lived in huts, in pieces of wood put hurriedly together, in bamboo forests, grasses, on streets, in trees. “This is a beautiful place.”

  He is silent, but his eyes are moist looking at her, wondering how she survived, thinking of all the ways she might have lived, how she may live now. But he says nothing. He looks old and tired and sad.

  She and Ruth exchange glances. They drink tea. Then Ruth stands and says to Thomas, “I’m sorry. We should have let you know we were coming. Anyway, feed it every day, your fish. It’ll keep you company and we’ll come back.”

  As they leave, she says to Lin, “It must be quite a shock. We should have let him know ahead of time.” Lin and Ruth walk back to the car. Ruth leads her by the hand. The tenderness makes Lin want to cry.

  “I try to imagine his life,” Ruth says. “But I never can.” Then she says, “Oh! Wait here, I left a key.” She goes back in. He is staring at the fish. She walks straight toward him. “You bastard. I will never forgive you for this. I can forgive you all your other things. Your rudeness. Your lying around feeling sorry for yourself. But you pull yourself together and treat your daughter like a human being! Here is something back in place. Where’s your heart? Where is your soul?” She slams the door as she leaves.

  Lin hears it and thinks, Wow! This is the second time. What a door-slammer.

  When she comes back out to Lin, she says, “He’s not a bad person, I promise, but he’s been like this since he came back. It’s been worse since our son died.”

  “Your son?”

  “We were married once. My son was older than you. Your brother, Marco, was from before the war.”

  Before and after, those were words that described people on both sides of the water.

  “Your father was my husband then.”

  Lin doesn’t ask what happened. Ruth doesn’t tell. She takes the girl back to her mother’s house.

  “So,” says Aurora. “You are already back. He was himself, I take it.” They sit at the table where women have always sat together and shared more than food and that night they have a beer, even Aurora, and they cry with her.

  Lin’s expectations and hopes are gone.

  “No. He’ll come through. He just needs time.”

  He, Thomas, is all that Lin has left from before.

  That night Lin is awake in a bed in a foreign country. She remembers one night when her flower-shop mother lay down beside her and pulled her close with one arm and softly began to cry into Lin’s hair and how she felt loved and cared for.

  Old Mother still makes baskets, as does Ruth, who has won awards for her dogbane and grass baskets. “Ruth still has a lot to learn,” the old woman, Aurora, tells the girl. She forgets Ruth’s hair is turning gray. “But she’s come a long way.” She doesn’t mention that the men stole Ruth’s baskets off the boat. “Oh, my, I’m rambling on. But here, look at this basket.” She goes to the sink and puts water in it. “It doesn’t even leak. There’s a story of a woman who made a small fishing boat for her husband by weaving it. He was safe in it, safer than in wood. But the other men were jealous and they set fire to it.”

  Old Mother, Aurora, takes care of herself, but gets confused. She forgets last week. Like Ruth, Lin soon helps remind her of things.

  “You won fif
teen dollars last night at Bingo,” Lin tells her. “Here, let me fix your hair.” Lin takes off Old Mother’s glasses and washes them for her. She arranges her soft white hair in a beautiful style, a French twist, but soft at the face.

  “My, you have a talent,” says Aurora, looking in the mirror. “Have you ever thought of going to school?”

  Lin smiles. She never boasts of her accomplishments. “I’ve thought of it.”

  A few days later, it is time for Ruth to prepare the boat for fishing. She and Lin go out first in the rubber Zodiac, the engine roaring, the two of them puffy round with life jackets.

  They pull up to the boat and climb to the deck. When Lin first steps onto the Marco Polo, she looks around in surprise. “Oh, it’s like a home in here. There’s even a bathtub.”

  “In the bow. Yeah, it used to be a horse tank.”

  Lin looks around at the table, the cracked leather chair, chained down, the bunks, the built-in seating. Ruth has made it comfortable. There are rugs on the floor, braided out of old clothes that belonged to her mother, her grandmother, and even herself. They are clean. Paintings are on the walls, an octopus, women dancing in red dresses. There are black-and-white photographs in black frames against a blue wall, the face of a young boy, young Ruth with an infant, older Indian people dancing, standing together by a fire at the ocean. Even plants.

  “Yes, it’s been my home.”

  Ruth already fixed up the bunks. She gives Lin the top bed because Ruth’s back hurts. This is better anyway, because Lin needs a light all night or she feels nervous. Ruth can barely make up either bed any longer. Even making up the lower one hurts her back, bending.

  After watching Ruth work for a while, Lin says, “Let me do that. You work so hard.”

  They have just carried in groceries. Ruth bought condensed milk for Lin’s coffee. Ruth carried the heavy box of ice for their trip out fishing. Then there was some maintenance, cleaning, lifting, bending, coiling ropes, folding nets, putting them in place. Ruth is constantly at work, in motion.