by Adam Golaski
Nicolas thinks, “Where do I go?” and thinks, “There are three unopened bottles of vodka in a dumpster behind this building.” He steps into the rain, walks around to the back of the building, and stands in front of the dumpster. He puts his hands in his pockets—cellphone.
“Tom,” he says, “I just ran out of my apartment because there’s a man in my kitchen—” he pictures the non-face a moment, pushes the image from his mind— “and I’m standing in front of a dumpster where I threw three mini-bottles of vodka earlier this evening and I’m very, very close to just climbing in and getting them just to help calm my nerves.”
“So why don’t you?” Tom says.
“What?”
“What’s stopping you?”
“Well Jesus I thought you were going to stop me but—” Nicolas relaxes; slightly. “I don’t want to get drunk,” he says.
“Hold on a second.” Nicolas hears Tom shuffle through some papers. “It’s nine, isn’t it? You’ve missed the last meeting. You say there’s a man in your apartment?”
“Yeah.”
“Are you safe?”
“From the man?”
Tom laughs. “You want to meet me at the police station?”
“Jesus, really? No. No, I don’t. You think I should? No, I can’t. That’s too much. But—”
“I can get a cup of coffee with you. I can be downtown in fifteen minutes.”
Tension pours from Nicolas’s body like water. In the coffee shop, with Tom, Nicolas tells Tom he’s sure the man was just a hallucination. Tom isn’t convinced; before Tom and Nicolas are finished with a cup of coffee, Tom convinces Nicolas to go to the police station—“I hate the police,” Nicolas says. An officer drives over to Nicolas’s apartment building, where Tom and Nicolas are waiting to let him in. The three go into the building, and into Nicolas’s apartment.
The kitchen floor is covered with an inch of water. The board Nicolas put over the hole is floating near the kitchen threshold. “What’s this?” the officer asks.
Nicolas can’t make sense of the water, but only says, “Part of my kitchen floor collapsed. I guess there’s a sub-basement underneath that’s filled up with water.”
“You probably don’t want to stay here tonight,” the officer says.
“I hadn’t thought—”
“Good. Did you call your landlord?”
“I did.”
“And what did he say he was going to do?”
“Pump out the water.”
“Unless he has his own pump that’s not going to happen anytime soon. There’s flooding all over the area. He won’t be able to rent a pump until the rain stops.” The police officer steps into the kitchen and idly peers into the hole, now shoulder-wide. “What the?” The officer shines his light onto the hole; the water reflects the light back. The officer angles the light a little, crouches and leans close to the hole.
Nicolas backs away from the kitchen, walks backward toward the apartment door.
Tom asks, “What’s there?”
The officer stands and steps away from the hole. “Nothing. For a moment I thought I saw something. I might’ve.” The officer chuckles and says to Nicolas, whose eyes are wide and frantic: “Sir, you might want to drop a line down there and see if you can’t catch a trout!” Tom says, “Really?” The officer says, “I might’ve seen a fish down there. Not impossible.” The officer shuts off his flashlight. “You got a big problem here, but it looks as if your intruder’s gone, so I’ll be on my way.”
Tom says to Nicolas, “Did the landlord tell you he’d pay for a hotel?”
“No. I thought about it after. I had the vodka in my pocket.”
Tom nods. “Sleep on my couch tonight. We’ll go to a morning meeting together. You’ve had a bad day. Call your landlord in the morning and tell him he has to pay for a hotel until he’s got your place livable.”
“Should I mention the man?”
“If you want to. But—” Tom looks around the apartment. “What man?”
Nicolas puts clothes, toiletries and the Big Book into a duffle.
When the officer came into the apartment, the officer pushed the door wide open. The door remained open as they stood in Nicolas’s apartment. The officer left the door open when he left. Tom and Nicolas closed the door after themselves as they left. No one touched or saw the inside doorknob. So no one saw, stuck to the inside doorknob, the flecks of black, putrid skin, cells water-heavy to the point of bursting.
Rachel and I met at the base of Waterworks Hill, Nicolas recalls, awake on Tom’s sofa. I hadn’t had a drink yet that day; I knew after our walk I’d take her out for lunch, maybe to the Old Post where they have an afternoon lunch special, AKA cheap beer. This was summer, and Rachel was wearing little khaki shorts and a white blouse, like a hiker bought out of L.L. Bean, except better looking, busty, long legs. Her socks, expensive socks designed to wick away sweat (she told me all about the socks), were folded neatly above her hiking shoes. Her red ponytail stuck out the back of her white baseball cap. And the freckles! Lord they were everywhere (I knew, everywhere). We walked a short incline, then followed a path left, that led us along a ridge overlooking downtown Missoula. The air was dusty white, the sky pale.
“What’s that dome?” I asked Rachel.
“That’s a cistern, that’s where the water comes from, that’s why this is Waterworks Hill.”
She was fast outpacing me; I enjoyed having her in front of me. After lunch, we could pick up a few cans of beer and go see a movie.
She said, “They don’t need a water tower because of the hill.”
Grasshoppers clicked into the air.
“Come on,” she said, and laughed at me for being slow. The grasshoppers looked like orange moths when they jumped. They vanished by camouflage when they landed in the dry grass. I’d seen the valley from Mt. Sentinel and Jumbo. The view from the side of Waterworks wasn’t as impressive but better somehow. Not as distant. The downtown looked nice, kept after and brick, but outside the downtown, alongside I-90 and beyond looked desolate, dry. The sun was high and I was sweating hard: the band around my waist soaked, my chest and back soaked, my hair. Drops of sweat fell onto the inside of my sunglasses.
At a broken split-rail fence we made a right turn up the hill—it didn’t look too bad but was very steep. I put my hand to Rachel’s butt once, and she squeaked, but soon she was out of reach. I kept hoping she’d stop for a moment. I stopped, let her gain more ground.
We passed a little pine, which I thought would make a perfect Christmas tree, and a power shed. The ground leveled and Rachel stopped. On our right was rich green valley. If I looked in just the right direction, all I could see was green and mountains.
“Thank you,” I said. “This was worth the climb.”
Rachel laughed—a bright bird laugh that put me at ease. “We’re going past the peace sign.” She pointed uphill. “There used to be a peace sign. Now there are just stones. There used to be a reflector for the phone company up there, and people would spray a big peace sign on it. The phone company kept washing it off and people would spray on another. When the phone company didn’t need the reflector anymore, there were a lot of us who didn’t want it taken down.”
The whole effort sounded stupid to me, but I didn’t say so.
On the other side of a valley, horses grazed. Little blue birds flitted low to the ground, keeping ahead of us as we walked toward the former peace sign.
“There’s no one up here at all,” I said.
“No one hikes here this late in the morning. Too hot.”
“So you’re just crazy then?”
“Sure,” she said, and I loved that answer.
On our way down she pointed to ridges in the side of the hill. She said, “Those were shore lines. Missoula was once a glacial lake—the valley enclosed by great walls of ice.” She waved her hand in the direction of the downtown. “That was the bottom of a very deep lake.”
A single jet dragged its cloud
-line across the sky. I loved Rachel for what she knew and I loved her for how great she looked. I was lucky and I knew it and I was afraid one day she’d know it too and leave me. My brain should have been working overtime to figure out how to get her into bed before lunch, but all the way down to where I’d parked my car all I kept figuring was how soon I’d be able to get myself a beer and how long it’d been since I’d last had one.
A pattern of light, sliced by Venetian blinds, travels along Tom’s living room wall. Nicolas follows the light. He’s erect, remembering the way sweat had collected among the invisible little hairs between Rachel’s breasts, beneath her nose.
The heat from that remembered summer morning nearly drowsed Nicolas to sleep. The white sun-glare, which filled his mind’s eye, made it hard to keep his eyes open. From the edges of the glare infringed a tattered black ring, and then the whole of the image was black and cold and Nicolas saw the man’s face again, his non-face, the putrid open mouth. Nicolas, wide awake, replayed his first visit to the island. Counted each trip he’d made to the spot on I-90 where he could see the island at a presumably safe distance. He would go to I-90 right after meetings and sometimes later in the day. Each time he went, the river had risen a little higher.
Just after five in the morning the rain stops.
Tom and Nicolas go to an eight o’clock meeting. Toward the tail end of the meeting, Nicolas speaks to the group. “…I just want to say that what makes staying sober hard for me is fear. I guess I was afraid before and that’s why I drank, so I didn’t have to be afraid. Everything I do sober is new. A couple days ago I froze up in the supermarket [he doesn’t mention that he thought he saw a man like a shadow run from one end of the market to the other], I didn’t even buy what I’d come to get—all I needed were eggs. I had to work up the nerve and go back later. I worry that people can tell I’m an alcoholic, that I’m not walking like everyone else or I’m saying something wrong. All this fear. It doesn’t help they took my license. I feel like an asshole riding everywhere on a bicycle. It doesn’t help that I can’t remember what I did for large parts of the last nine years—people might know me and I wouldn’t know them, and they’d know me as a drinker. Sometimes people wave [a shadow-figure beckoned, the shadow-figure stood next to a tree with a great hole in its trunk and the shadow-figure waved]. I just pretend I didn’t see them. On top of being afraid that people think I’m a jerk, I’m afraid I’ll pick up again…”
After the meeting, Andrew, Tom and Nicolas go for breakfast. Tom says he’s buying, because Nicolas finally spoke. Andrew asks, “You free to come over and help with the shed? Shingles might be dry enough to finish removing the paint.” Nicolas agrees and Nicolas is glad neither Tom or Andrew question what he said at the meeting. For a time, Nicolas feels relaxed.
Andrew tells Nicolas that the supplies are in the shed. Andrew heads into his house for a fresh pack of cigarettes: “I’ll be right out,” he says. Nicolas crosses the sodden backyard and opens the shed. He pulls the light-string hanging from the uncovered bulb. In the back corner of the shed are carefully stacked paint cans, primer, paint-stripper, folded tarps and the putty knives Nicolas and Andrew had been using. On the floor, in front of the paint supplies, are six planks of wood, all varying widths and lengths—scraps from past projects. Instead of a stack, the planks are laid on the ground side-by-side, which Nicolas thinks is a little odd until he gets closer and realizes the planks are covering a hole in the cement floor.
“Christ,” he mutters. He backs away.
“What’s the matter?” Andrew asks. Nicolas looks over his shoulder, sees Andrew in the doorway.
“What’re the planks for?”
“A rotted patch of cement caved in. I guess all the rain soaked the ground beneath. You wouldn’t believe it, though, how deep it is. My guess is there was a septic tank here, or a well.”
“There’s a hole like that in my kitchen.”
“Shit, that’s terrible.”
Nicolas stops a moment, sure one of the planks is vibrating a bit. “Those’re like, those’re like the sticks I found on the island,” he says.
Andrew slaps Nicolas on the back, pulls on his cigarette. “There’s nothing to be afraid of here.”
Nicolas looks at Andrew, at the glowing coal of Andrew’s cigarette. Andrew’s hair is thin and unwashed. He’s missing one of his front teeth and his other front tooth is bright yellow. Nicolas sees Andrew’s face as a kind face. Andrew’s eyes are sunken, surrounded by soft wrinkles. He isn’t old, just about forty, but he looks older. Nicolas can see clearly the shape of Andrew’s skull. He sees the flesh rot from Andrew’s face, Andrew’s eyes sink and shrivel, Andrew’s lips pull back high over blackening gums. “I can’t work today,” Nicolas says. The planks tremble: a wind underground. “I need to go.”
Andrew nods, says, “There’ll be work here for you should you change your mind.”
Nicolas is grateful and leaves. The sun is high. Nicolas can’t think where to go. He spends the day in the Southgate plaza, watching teenagers shop and talk in groups. Young girls and boys, petulant, ignorant, thrillingly unhappy. He eats pizza for lunch and for dinner. He checks into a motel near his apartment and falls asleep with the lights on, the television on. He falls asleep with the taste of gin vivid in his memory.
Late April in Missoula: chance of hail and snow; mountain snow-pack breaks up and fills the river; black flies cloud the air. The sky remains bright late. By July, it’ll be light till ten at night. By July, the drought will’ve shown itself again. Shining just below the surface of the Clark Fork, visible from the Higgins Street bridge, a shopping cart. Fly fishermen will stand between the Madison Street Bridge and the footbridge, casting line. Boys and girls will spend all day floating down the river on oversized inner-tubes.
Lumber trucks rumble past Nicolas’s hotel. Nicolas wakes and feels the cotton-dry of a hangover. For the third morning in a row. He wakes fully and knows he didn’t touch a drop of alcohol, except for the little bit of mouth wash he absent-mindedly rinsed with the previous morning. The patterns in the textured ceiling are familiar. The carpet is red. He turns off the television. At the edges of the window, where the curtains don’t quite reach, are pale blue bands of light. Check-out time is eleven. The clock: 9:32. “This morning,” he thinks, “I’ll go home.” He thought the same the first morning he woke here and again the same the second morning. A mass of take-out boxes and empty soda cups line the dresser. He hasn’t been to a meeting since he went with Tom. Three days ago. Three days ago.
Before he got sober, he cured hangovers with a bloody Mary, or something made with V-8, or with Red Bull. “It’s not a real hangover,” he says. As if this matters.
The little taste of alcohol he’d had when he’d rinsed with the mouthwash had nearly set him off. “I can’t just have a little alcohol.” He thinks about the vodka he threw away, “what a waste.” He’s thought about the vodka often: hundreds of times, thousands. How often does he blink? His cellphone is on the dresser, dead. He doesn’t have a charger. There’s a phone by the bed, of course, but he doesn’t want to call anyone. He stares at the ceiling. The beat of the blood in his temples is a hard, dull beat, a knock on a tree stump. The clock: 10:47. Since spitting the mouth wash into the sink three days ago his mind has been going crazy, a rush of words and black holes, bottles and black hole faces.
He’s slept in his clothes for three nights. He doesn’t know where he left his duffel. It could be in the room, for all he knows. “All right, all right, I’m going,” he says and swings himself off the bed. Before leaving the motel room he slips into the bathroom and drinks the rest of the mouthwash.
Nicolas crosses the street and buys a bottle of gin. As he leaves the casino, he spots his girlfriend’s car in the parking lot. He doesn’t want her to see him with the brown bag under his arm. In the bright sun there’s really no way to hide, but he runs around to the back of the casino, climbs over a chain-link fence and up a grassy slope, crosses train tracks,
then follows I-90 east. There’s no logic.
He decides to kill the bottle on I-90, overlooking the spot of the river where the island was submerged, but when he finally gets to his lookout, he sees that the river has receded quite a bit, that the island is nearly completely exposed. This drains even the will to drink from Nicolas—for an instant. He considers calling Tom after all. A pat down of his pockets reveals no cellphone. He remembers that the charge had gone out of it anyway. He walks down the highway ramp, brown paper bag tucked under his arm. With every step the rolling weight of the bottle cries its soothing siren call and with every step Nicolas attempts to ignore the call, one more step, another. He crosses Broadway and the footbridge, walks the Kim Williams trail until he spies the little path that runs alongside the river.
The path is slick. Nicolas soaks himself as he brushes against bushes and tree branches.
“I can’t think this through, I can’t take this slow,” Nicolas thinks. “I can’t take a drink, I’m powerless against alcohol,” he thinks and he says, “My life has become unmanageable,” and, “restore me to sanity.” A branch whips his face.
He doesn’t hesitate at the dip in the trail, plunges down and nearly falls on his ass. He drops the bottle and panics until he determines that the bottle didn’t break. He leaves the brown bag on the ground. Nicolas mutters, “This clear liquid in this clear glass bottle is more refreshing than water more cleansing more clear and cool.” Nicolas knows this is a lie and resists for as long as another step, and another.
Where he’d made his plywood bridge is now too wide for that, and the plywood is gone besides. Nicolas steps into the water. First he doesn’t feel the cold, then the water shocks his ankles—deeper, his calves. “A little drink would warm you up,” he thinks.
Across from where Nicolas stands is the eddy, where the sneakers are caught. To his left, the grassy spine, the rotten tree the raven had called from and the coppice of pine trees. All this is sodden and slimy. The log lies a few feet from Nicolas. And built against the log is a low lean-to, “The same low lean-to,” Nicolas thinks. “Impossible,” Nicolas thinks.