by Laura Furman
“It’s okay now, but what if you get sick?” my mother said. “Later on, I mean. What if you need help and there’s no one?” My health stood every chance of staying excellent for a while, Mick had once made me a hot toddy when I had a cold, and we all knew women lived longer than men anyway. “Someday,” my mother said, “you’re going to have to decide.”
• • •
Lots of people at the Maritime Union knew Mick, but my name was still Mrs. Pfeiffer to them. I never lied about any of my life, when asked, and because of that I was considered very frank and outspoken. Imagine that. The job suited me—the old thuggish union guys in their rumpled suits, the seamen getting their papers, the no-nonsense women in the office. And every day I was glad to have something to do with keeping the boot of heedless profit off the necks of workers. The newsletter was a little hokey, but I did my best.
A number of people pointed out that I wasn’t going to be young forever, but I was young for a really long time. Mick and I went hiking in the Grand Canyon, and another year we went snow-shoeing in Utah, which turned out to be a handsome state. Mick, who’d once worked as what my mother called a “stevedore,” tended to like physical stuff. I liked it more than I expected, and for a while I even took ice skating classes at a rink on a roof in Midtown. “You always surprise me,” Ted wrote. “I’m thinking of you in a little twirly skirt.”
“I wear slacks,” I wrote.
Okinawa was subtropical and never got below fifty. Ted claimed to miss the snow but I didn’t believe him.
Well into my thirties, people thought I looked much younger. Ruthie’s kids called me Aunt LouLou, as if I were a cartoon auntie. They loved coming to my apartment—much bigger than the last, with blue-painted floors and Guernica replaced by a Matisse—but they could never believe I lived alone. No one else here, really? I wasn’t just making up a story?
What I didn’t like, actually, was when Mick showed up out of nowhere without letting me know in advance. “I have rules,” I said, but he ignored them. I was always glad for the sight of him, so I gave way, but it leaked out in other ways, my sense of injustice. We’d quarrel over how much hamburger to buy or which store was a rip-off or who was really a very self-centered person.
Once I had to announce to him that Ted, my husband, was showing up again in August. Ted only came back to the States every few years and he stayed with me when he did. It was, as they say, a given. And Mick had to know to keep away. How difficult was that?
“I think you’re telling me to go jump in the lake,” Mick said. “Very friendly.”
“Don’t sulk like a girl,” I said.
One remarkable thing about Ted was that he never seemed any different, no matter how much time went by. Oh, there was always a moment when I was surprised at how old he looked, and he’d start in about things I’d totally forgotten from his last visit, but we got used to each other at once. We’d hop into bed right away (the same bed, with the maple headboard), and then we’d lie around having a conversation we might have begun only the day before. He’d hold my hand and stroke my fingers. “Hey, Louise,” he’d say. “What’s up?” It was all very sentimental.
Ruthie was always asking me, “Does he just think he owns you?”
She knew I’d been brought up with much talk about property—property is theft, property is the exploitation of the weak by the strong. “What you really mean,” I said, “is that I should exert my ownership rights on him. Reel him back in, make him mine.”
“You could.” Maybe.
“For freedom there is no substitute, there can be no substitute,” I said. It was an old quote from Rudolf Rocker, an anarcho-syndicalist my father loved. I didn’t think it was all that interesting or true—it was a slogan!—but it had become true for me. Or true sometimes. My mother would’ve cringed at that qualifier. I used to always tell my parents I was not an ideologue. “So what are you?” my mother would say.
“Not a hypocrite.”
“That’s minimal,” my mother said. “That’s not an answer.” But I thought it was. I liked how I’d turned out. Through trial and error.
Ruthie said, “Oh, you just think you’re too cool for the way anyone else does it. You want to make everything up as you go along.”
“So?”
“Oh, please,” Ruthie said. “How can anyone trust you then?”
“Well, they can,” I said.
When I was close to forty, I had a major quarrel with Mick, about the usual. He wanted me to fly out to see him in St. Louis, for a four-day weekend. “I happen to be employed,” I said. “I can’t just take off.”
“I’m paying, darlin’,” he said. “It’s on me.”
“So? Please. Not the point.”
“You know what it is?” he said. “I’m the one you don’t take seriously.”
A man I saw five or six times a year was talking about serious? “If your hubby wagged his finger to invite you to Japan, you’d hop on a plane and go.”
“I don’t want to go to Japan! I don’t!” I mostly didn’t, not any more.
“St. Louis is a great town. Got the Arch, got the Cardinals. Only needs you.”
And I went for those four days, to placate him. St. Louis was fine, but right away he pestered me about staying an extra day, and I got indignant about the sneakiness of that. Why would I neglect my newsletter for him? It was not a good trip, and Mick started to call less often after that.
My father was disappointed to lose sight of Mick. They’d been fans of each other, all these years. “Pussycat,” my father said. “I thought things were going to turn out differently.”
“You did? I didn’t.”
“Some men are always on the move,” he said. “That’s just how they are.” Listen to my father, trying to sound worldly. People were always feeling sorry for me for the wrong things.
And Mick didn’t disappear altogether. In the middle of the night he’d need to talk to me, or I’d let him slip over when he was in town. So I wasn’t entirely single. My solitude had a flavor to it, a tint of distant admiration. It wasn’t bad getting those phone calls out of nowhere, kisses on the line. Then I’d stay up late, reading in bed, with his company in the air around me but a pure silence in the room. My room.
Ted was not really that old when he decided to sort of “retire” from his teaching career in Okinawa and set himself up over there as a private tutor of English. He could make a decent amount by the hour and he was looking forward, he said, to living in Japan in a different way. It was really not that expensive for an American to get by, and he would continue sending money home, but less money.
He didn’t exactly ask what I thought. Really, the amount he mailed had not changed much over the years and was by now pretty puny. My own salary had moved forward by the usual decent increments, so the change wouldn’t break me, would it? My mother was hotly outraged and would’ve sued him if she’d believed in governments. She actually said, “He owes you more.”
Ted was moving into the town and out of the gated and guarded base (which my mother always said sounded like a prison). I sent him a set of curtains for his new house, a very sharp geometric print I thought he would like. I didn’t entirely know what he liked any more but I knew something.
Afterward I worried that I’d picked the wrong fabric. “You are so weird,” Ruthie said. “Go buy yourself a new sofa instead.”
We were on the phone at the time, and I looked around at my house. I liked everything in it, from the floor I had painted a clever shade of blue to the chrome lamp to the bowl of oranges glowing on the table. I was secretly enchanted with my own cruddy décor and its history. What did I need? Nothing wrong with my sofa, which had been in my parents’ living room. My stubborn dear parents. You don’t know what you’re going to be faithful to in this world, do you? It was true I didn’t have what other people had, I knew that, and yet I couldn’t think of a single other life I envied—no, I couldn’t—though I knew better than to try to get anyone to believe it.
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br /> Melinda Moustakis
They Find the Drowned
HUMPIES
Oncorhynchus gorbuscha
A river loses strength, loses water. Scientists catch the humpies and put them into tanks and drive to the Kenai River. The humpies are released near the mouth when the reds are running. The humpies don’t know where to go—they don’t know the Kenai and they don’t follow the reds. They don’t recognize the currents of the river, or the smells, or the way the light refracts into the water and bounces off the bottom. The reds run up while the dead humpies float down. They die because they have the wrong memories.
OUTHOUSE
A woman with long, dark hair falls asleep with throbbing shoulders from fishing all day. She sits up and rummages in the cabinets for aspirin. She can’t find the bottle and doesn’t want to wake the others. But her daughter wakes up and tugs her shirt.
The woman takes the girl’s hand and they tiptoe out the cabin door. The girl forgets and the door slams shut.
They wince and wait for the others to stir, but no one does. They walk the short trail to the outhouse and the girl goes first, the mother standing outside. She hears a rustle and a low, throated moan. And then nothing.
The woman looks around. The girl takes a long time, so the mother raps her knuckle on the door. “Shouldn’t take this long.”
The rustle comes closer. She sees a large, dark creature in the woods. And then nothing.
Did her daughter think this was a game? She knocks hard on the door. “Are you in there? Answer me.” She stops knocking to listen. “I said answer me.”
The rustle creeps closer. “Open this door.” The woman kicks the door in with her unlaced boot. The wood splinters from the force.
“Stop,” says the girl from inside. She opens the door. Her eyes marvel at her mother.
An animal bursts out of the bushes and the woman shoves the girl behind her. A grizzly charges toward them, running as if he’s going to knock them over. The woman holds her ground. Then he stops. Sniffs the air. Walks toward the river. The bear wades into the Kenai, crossing water to reach the mainland. When they see him climb the bank on the other side, they hurry back to the cabin.
The woman remembers the first aid kit has packets of aspirin and swallows two tablets. She puts the girl back to bed. “Don’t do that again.”
The girl, thinking of the broken door, is soon asleep.
LOON
Gavia immer
A loon drifts down the current. The bird has a daggered beak and with his black, black head, red eyes, and white-striped wings, he’s easy to spot. The loon dives down and disappears and the scientist times him, scanning for the breach. After a minute and eleven seconds, the loon reappears upstream, shakes the water off his head. There are loons and there are ducks. Ducks are never alone.
STORM
The woman’s husband knocks on the door. They were looking for him. He has blood soaked down the front of his shirt. They hadn’t heard a gun. Maybe the axe, but there wasn’t a wound. A thick, familiar smell calms them.
He stumbles over the doorway and falls. Two of his buddies carry him to the boat and he’s vomiting red into the river. The woman watches the boat leave her and the island and the blood behind. “This is the last time,” she says. She nods as she’s nodded before, lays towels over the mess, and wipes the blood with the toe of her boot. Then she dips the towels into the river, wrings them out.
The woman sits on a stump near the bank. In the stillwater, the smolt move like a storm of comets. The terns swoop down with their pitchfork tails and scoop up small fish. Seagulls on the gravel bar bicker over scraps.
THE SCIENTISTS
The scientists sit in a boat and dip tubes into the river.
“Turquoise,” says one, noting the color of the water.
“Green,” says another.
“Glacier blood.”
“Crushed sky.”
“Kenai Blue.”
They test levels of sediment from the ice fields.
LIFE JACKET
The neighbors across the river have a big family. Grandma has a whip of a cast, a fluid flick of line into the water. Grandpa wears his white underwear to swim—his barrel of belly hanging out. The grandchildren scream and splash about in their life jackets. There are five boys and their shouts echo and amplify through the spruce, scaring away the moose and the mosquitoes, if mosquitoes could be scared away. The boys swim out past the dock and let the current carry their floating heads downriver. They stay in the shallow, where they can put their feet down and climb the bank. But if their feet miss, they can grab the net rope fixed to an orange buoy. Sometimes they swim farther across and spend an afternoon on the gravel bar with the gulls.
SPRUCE BARK BEETLE
Dendroctonus rufipennis
The scientists call it the plague—the outbreak of spruce bark beetles that has infested the forests of the Kenai Peninsula for over ten years. A couple of warm summers and the beetles became a blight. They have eaten through two million acres of white, lutz, black, and sitka spruce.
They are the length of a small bullet and they thrive in dryness and heat. The scientists hope for a summer of rain to contain them. The beetles burrow through the bark and chew a path to the cambium layer, the only part of the tree that is alive. They tunnel a gallery inside the host tree and lay eggs. The scientists set pheromone traps and watch as the forest turns into firewood, the dead outnumbering the green.
ROLL
The woman hunches over the reel and her long hair falls forward. Her hip’s bruised blue from fishing, but she’s got to anchor down with the rod. Boats move out and make a clear path as they drift down.
“Everyone wants to be you with this big ol’ fish,” says her husband.
They pass the end of the drift and he takes a side channel to avoid the backtrollers.
“Let’s get this one in,” he says.
She reels in slow and steady. The spinner flashes and he strikes with the net. The king thrashes. He slips to one knee, loses the handle. The king rolls, fifty pounds of fish wrestles out of the net. He steps in and grabs the handle, then grasps at the mesh. She reels but the hook springs loose.
“A hen,” she says. “Could’ve used those eggs.”
“Don’t jaw me,” he says. He throws down the empty net. “I know.”
MOOSE
Alces alces gigas
The scientist has a favorite—he calls her Al and every once in a while he’ll sit on the river near Bing’s Landing and look for her. She has twins now and crosses to the island at night when the river is quiet. He found her on the side of the road after she’d been hit by a truck on Sterling Highway. The driver died and he didn’t think she was going to pull through. The scientist visited her when she was bandaged and bruised—he’d talk to her. “Listen,” he’d say. “You’re the first thing I’ve been good to in a long time.”
YELLOW PATCHES
He and his buddies cut the trees that were turning brown from the blight, where bark beetles eat and weaken the tree from the inside. The diseased trees are yellow patches in a quilt of green. They are also dangerous. The woman is afraid the closer trees might fall over and crash into his cabin. But they’re laughing and she calls them a bunch of idiots with axes.
One by one, the trees crack and fall away from the cabin. They splash into the Kenai and the current pushes them toward the bank. But one won’t fall. His axe wedges into the diagonal cut. The tree teeters toward cabin and land, not water. Women and kids scatter. After the boom, the cabin stands untouched. They stand unharmed. He raises a bottle of beer to his good fortune.
RAINBOW TROUT
Oncorhynchus mykiss
Rainbows are the shimmering litmus, the indicator fish. If anything goes wrong in the Kenai, the rainbows tell the scientists. If there is pollution, they die. If a feeder stream stops feeding, they die. Kiss a rainbow, the scientists say, and you’ll know all the river’s secrets.
A SIXTY-POUNDER
EAGLE
Haliaeetus leucocephalus
The eagle is perched up in the tree, singing. His call jumps octaves, runs with scales. The scientist records the eagle’s sounds and writes down the time of day. A boat drifts down Super Hole and stops near the scientist.
“Isn’t that something?” says the fisherman. He and the woman both wait for an answer.
The scientist holds up his recorder and points. “Shhhh.”
“Well, if you knew anything, you’d know they sing all the time.” The fisherman’s boat starts downriver. “They sing opera.”