by Неизвестный
Kris had remembered Annie when she was sitting in the Anchorage Airport waiting for the connecting flight to Fairbanks, wondering where she could stay so that Barrett couldn’t find her if he came looking. Annie Smythe was in the phone book and her answering voice mail message, after listing everyone else in the family, gave her work number. When Annie took the call—she worked at the Fairbanks Public Library—and heard who it was, she yelped “Kris”! Reflexively, Kris pulled away. Affection tended to front for other things, usually demands for sex or money, and Kris was suddenly sorry that she’d called. She tensed, feeling Annie read her; Annie quieted her tone and offered Kris a place to stay like she was making a deal.
“Stay with us, Kris. The kids always like someone new to play with and it’d be great to have another woman around. I’m swamped with maleness. My husband’s cool. Ringer doesn’t have enough testosterone in him to fire up a fly, and you can be in charge of the dishes and the bedtime story.”
Kris clicked her thumbnail down the armored cord attaching the receiver to the phone. Annie would want to know everything and the husband and kids would be a pain in the ass. Maybe, she could check into a hotel with a fake name.
“Kris, honey, what’s the problem?”
Kris ran her nail back up the cord. “Yeah, OK,” she said and gave Annie her arrival time. Annie told her where to wait for Ringer and to give him an extra fifteen or twenty minutes since it wasn’t likely he’d show up when he was supposed to.
Ringer led her across the terminal, scanning the milling mass of people. “Used to be, back when there weren’t any airplanes hanging from the ceiling and Fairbanks was a decent size, you’d always meet someone here that you knew,” he said. “Even in the Seattle airport, you’d meet friends at the Alaska gate waiting for the flight up. Friends everywhere, it was like coming home.” He paused for the automatic doors to open. “Now, almost never. The town is too big. It’s like a foreign city.” He looked at her. “It’s not like home anymore.”
The second set of automatic doors whisked open and the cold swept in around the edges of
Kris’s parka, cutting through her clothes and into her skin. Drier than Juneau’s soggy air, it stung any flesh exposed or clothed too lightly. The lights hanging over the parking lot turned the blackness yellow and purpled the exhaust billowing out of the tailpipes of idling cars. The pavement had been plowed, but across the road she saw in the semi-darkness, old settled snow, grayed by car fumes and city dirt.
“I spent the last couple of weeks working a gig with some friends down in Los Anchorage.” Ringer slid his mandolin under his parka as they walked down the steps into the parking lot. “What a madhouse; the place is everything you come to Alaska to escape. Cars, people, strip malls and McDonald’s. It’s one redeeming feature is that it’s only a thirty-minute drive from Alaska.”
Kris had trouble hearing him; her head was buried in the hood. She looked down as she walked, the hood tunnel and ruff pinched her sight to a small patch of pavement in front of her feet, and if she turned her head the hood wouldn’t move and she’d be staring at its inner fabric.
“Hey Kris. This way.”
Straightening, Kris circled around until she found Ringer waving off to her right. Without pulling her hands from her pockets, her duffle hanging from her wrist, she jogged over and fell in behind him. He stopped in front of a black pickup with rounded corners, pitted chrome, and a shack of slab wood built over the bed. They climbed in; the doors weren’t locked.
“Ole Bess is older than you,” Ringer said, gathering wires that hung out of the steering column in one hand while he searched under papers and coffee cups littering the dash until he found a screwdriver. When he touched the blade to the wires, a purple spark flashed and the engine cranked and fired.
“But she always starts. Trouble is, she doesn’t heat up too well. Lucky it’s not too cold out. We might just get a little warmth out of her by the time we get home. Drive is twenty minutes.” Ringer switched on the headlights and backed out.
Kris had never been to the airport when she was growing up and, as Ringer pulled out of the parking lot and onto a road headed toward the city lights, she didn’t see anything she recognized. She sat huddled in the parka, staring out of the windshield, which was cracked and pitted with collisions from gravel kicked up by passing cars, not really interested in the roads and the buildings they passed. Distant memories murmured and fidgeted uncomfortably in her. Never once, in the nine years since she had left, had she ever thought she would be back in Fairbanks. There had been nothing to bring her back and everything to keep her away.
Cars whizzed by, their lights punching through the darkness, their exhaust steaming behind them. Dirty heaps of snow, thrown by the plows, lined either side of the road and the pavement was black and dry.
“How do you know Annie?” Ringer asked, raising his voice over the sound of the engine and wind. Kris told him without going into too much detail.
“She’s a good lady,” he said, after Kris had trailed off. “I met her when I was pounding nails nine or ten years ago. She was punching a cash register at the Gavora Mall.”
Kris remembered Annie working at the mall, but she’d never mentioned a boyfriend.
“We got together and decided to build this cabin off Goldstream. Back then it was almost wilderness, now it’s mostly suburbs. Annie is one tough lady. We didn’t have the place closed in at the end of the season. That’s the point most women threaten to evacuate. Ever notice those places that have three or four courses of logs on the foundation and T-one-eleven from there to the eves? That’s a place where the lady said she was headed back to Brooklyn, if she didn’t have a warm place to spend the winter, Annie didn’t peep, we had all our money in the land and the cabin and couldn’t move back into town, so we spent the winter in a baggy. It was insulated, but six inches of glass wool isn’t a lot between you and fifty below. And we’re at the bottom of a ridge. If you looked close, you could see the slugs of cold air slide down the hill and roost on top us. Walk up that ridge when there’s a good inversion and its thirty degrees warmer at the top.”
They were outside the city now. The truck clattered along between black walls of spruce sometimes broken by a lighted house or the openness of a frozen marsh. Tiny flecks of crystalline snow danced and twirled in their headlights, lofted by the car whose red lights were always disappearing around curves and over hills in front of them. Air, sharp as steel, knifed in through cracks around the door. The heating fan added no warmth, only pushed the air around the cab making it feel colder. The cold bit the tip of her nose each time she took a breath and the frozen, cracked vinyl seat pulled the heat out of her rear.
L.A., suddenly, was a long way away.
“–ragging on me to have kids. No way. I was a dead set no. It was part of the deal when we got together: no kids. But she was timing out and nothing would stop her. Those were our roughest times. She was right, though. When I caught Murphy, I almost fainted. What an endorphin rush, nothing like it. When things had quieted down and all her lady helpers ran me out of the house, I went out to the brown study and bawled. I couldn’t believe I’d waited so long. I was ready to get started…”
A car arrowed past them in the dark, climbed over a low hill and was gone. Kris peered out of her side window, now that the lights of the city were behind them, looking for the northern lights. There was nothing, no lights, no moon, no stars, just an even blackness.
Ringer and his truck rattled on. He told stories about the days before the pipeline. When if three cars passed without picking you up it was a critically bad hitchhiking day. How strangers were friends and crashed whole winters in people’s cabins. How the richest were those who’d hustled enough work in the summer to have unemployment checks coming in during the winter. The Everclear and Kool-Aid parties where you’d lose track of the days because nobody was conscious enough during the forty-five minutes when the sun was up to know when one day ended and the next began.
“Then the pipeline came and—wham! Everything was different. People, mountains of money, construction, murders, suicides. What a show. Tent, this guy who lived in a tent, was one of the first to get out on the line. He sent us back a wad of cash to celebrate his birthday. We bought cases of canned whipping cream and sucked laughing gas for two days. Days of innocence. Six months later there was more coke in any given block in Fairbanks than in all of Columbia.
“Oil money ruined this state. Turned it middle class. People come here now to make a buck, not because they want to live the life. Last winter I had a regular job and every morning driving to work, this guy’d pass me in a BMW. A beemer. Send that carpetbagger back to Marin. He doesn’t belong—
“Hey! Do you feel that?” Ringer interrupted himself and waved his hand under the dash. “We’ve got heat. It must be warmer out than I thought.”
Ringer turned onto a gravel road and Kris couldn’t hear him over the noise of the truck knocking over the stones and bumps. A few miles later he turned into a driveway that curved down into a hollow. At the end of it was a plowed circle, another car and deep snow, pocked everywhere with leg holes. A dog started barking. Ringer popped the clutch killing the engine.
“Home,” he said.
__________
“Check the slop bucket.”
Kris opened the cabinet door under the sink and peered into the bucket beneath. Gray water with bits of food and scum floating on the surface filled it. Lifting it with both hands, she looked at Annie.
“On the other side of the driveway. You’ll see it,” Annie said. “Take the flashlight.”
Kris found the season’s frozen dish and bath water in a crater melted out of the snow on the far side of the clearing. Though only the temperature of the cabin, the water steamed in the sub-zero air when she poured it out. Up the driveway she could hear Ringer and his boys taking Wally for a walk. The dog was a husky mix with enough wolf in him to howl when you got him fired up. Murphy and Minto—Ringer’s M&M’s—had brought him in after dinner to show Kris their Indian war dance. They started howling, Wally joined in, and then they flapped their hands over their mouths and over Wally’s howling muzzle to make Indian war whoops. Ringer joined in and at that point the war party got out of hand and Annie had run them out of the cabin.
Kris shook the last drops out of the bucket and turned back to the cabin. It was in a small clearing hemmed in by spruce trees. It had eight sides—the logs weren’t long enough to make an adequately sized square cabin—and looked like a chocolate cake squatting in vanilla icing. The snow on the roof had thinned and patches of shingles showed through. Light blazed from the windows and threw golden rectangles onto the snow. Wally’s doghouse was in the back next to the woodpiles; one of cordwood, the other, an unstacked heap of cut and split stove lengths. On the left side of the cabin was a storage shed and the brown study, the outhouse. Annie had noted, as she’d given Kris directions to it, that after about twenty below, one tended not to study in it for very long.
Kris closed the cabin door behind her and hung her parka on a peg before repositioning the bucket under the sink’s drainpipe. Dirty dishes were stacked next to the sink and Annie poured water that she had heated on the stove into a washbasin. Kris looked around helplessly, this wasn’t a chore she wanted to do, but Annie patiently pointed out the soap and found her a sponge and pot scraper and then left her alone.
Annie looked older than Kris had expected. Her hair had grayed and loose wisps, pulled from her ponytail, floated around her face, which was lined and had filled out. Her eyes were warm, but assessing, and at times during dinner Kris looked away, uncomfortable with how much Annie might be seeing. Under baggy sweats, her breasts jiggled loose and heavy, and her belly had grown; it had pushed into Kris when Annie hugged her. Like Ben, she padded around the cabin in worn shoepack liners. She was shorter than Kris, which unsettled her; she remembered looking up at Annie, and now, looking down, Kris realized how much she’d leaned on Annie when she’d lived at the shelter.
They worked in silence, Kris clumsily sponging cups and silverware and Annie, with unhurried efficiency, returning things to drawers and cabinets. Food to be refrigerated, she grouped in a pile. “So I don’t spend my life climbing in and out of the root cellar.” She tapped a foot on a trap door in the floor. When the counters were clear, she pulled out a ceramic bowl, cookie sheet, and flour, eggs and butter, and started making cookies.
During dinner, Kris had told them about Evie’s death. When he heard that she’d lost her mother, Murphy, only five, dropped his spoon on the floor and broke into tears; Minto, three, looked at his brother and began wailing too. Ringer pulled them out of their chairs and carried them back to a curtained bed where he and Annie slept. Kris watched them go in surprise. Annie leaned over and whispered, “Murphy’s a pretty empathic little guy.”
“I didn’t cry when I found out,” Kris said.
“Maybe someday you will,” Annie said.
When the boys came back to the table, eyes dried, Kris told them she’d come to Fairbanks to find her half-brother and Ringer explained that Corvus—Corvus corax—was the Latin name for raven, which were the smartest birds and important to Athabascan legend. Raven was the trickster, the animal who tricked other animals and man out of their food and treasures.
Kris started in on the plates, sponging off the remains of a casserole most of the ingredients of which, she hadn’t recognized.
“Did you have any contact with your mother after you left Fairbanks?” Annie asked as she started measuring and sifting the flour.
“No,” Kris said.
Annie silently poured chocolate chips into her measuring cup, waiting for her to continue.
“I didn’t know where to write,” Kris said.
“You were pretty angry,” she said. Annie was impossible to bullshit.
“Yeah,” Kris said, letting Annie drag her out. “All I wanted was a bed, regular meals; she couldn’t even give me that.”
“She didn’t have many chances in life, though, did she?”
“What does it take to wait tables?” Kris, feeling the heat rise in her, wondered why it took so little to upset her.
“Self-confidence, knowing how to add, a nice dress, child care.” Annie was mixing the batter with a wooden spoon, the bowl in the crook of her arm.
“She never even tried,” Kris said. She pulled the casserole pan out of the pile; the rice was crusted on the bottom and in the corners.
“Alcohol is hard to beat.”
“Why are you taking her side?” Kris felt deserted; Annie had defended Evie all evening.
“Am I being unfair?” She came over, her mixing bowl still in her arm and stood by Kris. “I guess it’s because I’ve got a hidden agenda.” Annie stuck a finger into the dough and licked it off. “I’m a mother, and I want you to love yours.”
Kris found a spoon and started scraping at the crusted rice. “It’s OK,” she said.
Annie cut off a slice of butter and greased a cookie sheet with her fingers. “You know, none of us can help the things that life has done to us. They’re done before you realize it, and once they’re done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you’d like to be and you’ve lost your true self forever. Evie did what she could.”
Kris struggled with the dish and Annie dropped spoonfuls of dough in crooked rows on the sheet. She finished and began greasing a second sheet.
“Do you have a sweetie in L.A.?” she asked.
“No,” said Kris. The crust wouldn’t come out of the corners.
“Men are a problem?”
“Men are scum.” Too heated, she thought and tried to back up. “Some are OK. But look at you and Ringer. You have a job, and you work in the kitchen. You’ve gone backwards; it’s worse than when women just did the housework.”
“Who’s out with the kids?” Anne asked, lightly.
“That’s because it’s fun for him.”
Annie laughe
d. “It only counts when it’s a drudge? But you’re right. I do more of the work around here. Not too much more, he puts in eight or ten cords of wood a year, plows the road and fixes the leaks. I whine about it sometimes, but it’s more like I married a man without ambition, than I married a monster. Most days, I don’t have any regrets.
“What’s your problem with men?” Annie asked.
“Are you kidding? Power, control, violence, they take what they want –”
The door crashed open; cold air and bodies tumbled in.
“Are they done yet?” The boys ran over to Annie. Murphy scooped a finger through a raw cookie.
“Hey come back here,” Ringer yelled. “You’re tracking snow everywhere.” He got their gear off and their feet into slippers; then came over and, resting his chin on Annie’s shoulder, reached around her and shoveled dough out of the bowl with a finger. “What’s our time frame?” he asked.
“Fifteen minutes.”
“OK boys, let’s get ready for bed. Cookies in fifteen minutes.” Ringer herded them back into the shadows. Annie finished the sheet and slid it into the oven. She licked her fingers clean, then came over and stood next to Kris, touching her at the hip and shoulder, and took the casserole dish out of her hands. Kris picked up another pot.
“I can’t imagine why anybody’d want to be a man,” Annie whispered, “Isn’t it the most comical thing you’ve ever seen? Stretching and shrinking, wriggling around like that—like a worm trying to get out?”
Annie laughed. Kris tried to stifle hers and blew snot out her nose.
“Red alert, boys!” Ringer yelled from across the cabin. “That’s Mom’s men-are-knuckle-draggers snort. Get her!”
Kris looked over her shoulder and saw the boys, naked, streak out of the shadows, making Indian war whoops; Ringer right behind them. They ganged around Annie and paddled her butt. Kris returned to her pot. Just as they retreated, she felt the tentative pat of a small hand on her rear and then they were gone.