Cold Storage, Alaska

by John Straley

  CLIVE HADN’T BEEN able to reach his mother out at Cold Storage, though. He’d called her number several times, but there had been no answer. It had been at least ten years since he had been home. He didn’t know anyone in Juneau anymore, and frankly he had only assumed that his mom and his brother were still out on the inlet.

  Clive and Miles had grown up around planes and bad weather. Their grandmother had been a fine pilot; she had run a small flight service. It irritated him that there was no one he recognized at the airport. But it didn’t surprise him. He had always hated flying. He had never exchanged stories with the ramp rats who loaded gear into bush planes. He never bragged about his grandma’s exploits. He had never cultivated his faith in the physics and mechanics of flight. He wasn’t a puker; he just didn’t believe it was possible, no matter what the available evidence told him.

  He had just decided to call a cab, stay in a hotel for the night, and try to fly out again the next day, when a woman came around the corner and told him that they were “going to give it a try.” Clive didn’t particularly like the idea of a small plane “trying to fly,” but he raised his hands, palms up and shrugged. “Let’s go!” he said.

  The pilot, a Howdy Doody in a plaid shirt and dungarees, smiled sweetly. “I don’t think the kennel is going to fit in the Beaver like that, but the dog can be in the seat with you,” he said. Even though he didn’t like the sound of it, Clive had long ago given up on confrontation.

  The de Havilland Beaver was a single engine prop plane with landing wheels tucked under the aluminum floats on the undercarriage. It could land on the runway in Juneau and then land on the inlet at Cold Storage. To Clive, this particular floatplane looked like a piece of farm equipment.

  He walked around the tail of the airplane and saw two men loading what looked like his dog kennel, except the kennel was in two pieces; the men had made a nest from the two halves and set Clive’s suitcase inside. They were stuffing the whole thing into the cargo compartment behind the passenger seats.

  Little Brother stood by himself on the tarmac, his choke chain glittering in the milky sunlight that filtered through the clouds.

  “I don’t know …” The pilot’s head poked out from the doorway of the plane. “I guess your dog wants to wait for you …” His voice sounded wary. “He seems kind of touchy.”

  “I think he’s just sensitive.”

  “Well, he’s going to love the trip. I bet he sleeps right through until we land; they usually do.” He paused and looked at the dog. “You can handle him, right?” he asked.

  “Oh, yeah, no problem. Don’t worry about a thing.”

  “He’s kind of …” The pilot hesitated. “… impressive.”

  “Impressive is a good word,” Clive said, starting to climb into the plane without his dog. “Vicious might be another.”

  A kid loading baggage walked toward Little Brother and stopped about ten feet from the working end of his anatomy. The kid turned his head toward Clive and yelled, “You going to load him on up there with you?”

  “I don’t think so.” Clive kept climbing.

  “What do you want me to do?” His voice quavered.

  “Well, if he’s still there after we take off, you can keep him.” On the tarmac, Little Brother looked sleepy. He turned his head one way and then the other. Then he lowered his head and took a small step toward the plane. The luggage kid turned away, and the pilot started to crank the engine and close the side door.

  Little Brother came bounding up the stairs, clambering up the ladder, jumping into the seat next to him. Clive carefully patted the muscled hump between his dog’s shoulder blades, and the thin creature settled into the seat, his head on Clive’s lap, his breath filling the cabin with the smell of raw hamburger.

  The trip west was noisy and bumpy. The plane bucked, the single-radial engine blared, and Clive put his fingers in his ears. Things didn’t smooth out as they entered Icy Strait and headed toward the ocean; the plane dipped and rolled against the strong southwesterly wind. Clive watched the pilot scan the water and the clouds and try to adjust his altitude to find smoother air. It was going to be rough.

  According to the pilot, everything would be fine as long as the visibility stayed good. Clive quietly gripped Little Brother’s collar and stroked his ears. His head—big as a fishbowl—settled down to rest on Clive’s new parka. The plane jolted up and down, and the two of them closed their eyes. They might be rattled apart before they got to Cold Storage.

  The plane bounced over the mountains of Chichagof Island. The world below them looked like a cauldron of rock, water, and wind. Waves rolled and battered the outer islands, and sweeping spumes of water broke off the tops of the waves.

  Clive was about to suggest that someone should either lend him a parachute, or they should all turn around and fly back to Juneau. He opened his eyes, but before he could open his mouth to say anything, the pilot pointed to the water, gave Clive a thumbs up, and put the plane into a dive.

  Clive gripped his knees and kept his eyes open. Waves bombarded the aluminum floats, the plane bounced, and they came to rest on the surface. They were in Pelican.

  Clive and Little Brother watched silently as the pilot threw a line out to a bald-headed man in a red raincoat. Slowly they were pulled up to the dock, and the pilot handed the man a padded mailing envelope.

  “Great, Tommy!” he said. “Thanks for dropping it off. You headed over to Cold Storage?”

  “Yeah, Harry, I am, as long as the ceiling holds. You got something?”

  The man reached down and lifted a garbage bag off the dock. “You got room to take this salmon over to Miles? I told him I’d give him one this spring. Poor bastard can’t seem to catch one.”

  “Yeah, I’ve got room. But if we don’t get in,” he added, “I’m keeping it. That okay with you?”

  “Fair enough.”

  The man held out a black bag, and the pilot shoved it in under his seat. Tommy would take off again and make the short hop to Cold Storage and then back to Juneau and his home. Clive looked out. He remembered Pelican. Everything in Pelican was pushed together along one boardwalk, like some kind of Russian fishing village. Cold Storage wasn’t anything like Pelican. Pelican had smart children and beautiful girls. At least that’s what Clive had always felt. Pelican felt like the Paris of southeastern Alaska to a kid scraping along the boardwalk of Cold Storage.

  LITTLE BROTHER COULD smell the fish. His nose came up off Clive’s lap. His eyes narrowed, started to look almost primeval, and his muscles tightened. He hadn’t eaten well in either of the airports. He tried to get down onto the floor; he rooted and pushed against the seats and against Clive.

  “Is there a problem?” Tommy yelled over his shoulder.

  A rocky ridgeline lay a few hundred feet below them.

  “Just a few more minutes, and we’ll be down,” Tommy said. “Can you keep control of that dog?”

  “We’re doing fine,” Clive called. “We’re having the time of our lives!”

  He tried to wrap his new coat up around Little Brother’s shoulders, but the dog seemed to be growing. He would soon be the size of a buffalo, Clive thought.

  Looking over his shoulder, all Tommy could see was a massive rump of brindled dog pushing against the seat. Above the roar of the engine, he could hear deep growling.

  “Just a few more minutes,” he said in a weak voice.

  Clive pulled against Little Brother’s collar, but the dog wasn’t interested in calming down. He reached back, and with his teeth he grabbed the coat from around his shoulders. He began to furiously tear at the parka; feathers and dog slobber flecked against the windscreen.

  Tommy started pumping the flaps and leveling off for a landing, but hundred dollar bills were floating up over his shoulder and landing in his lap. He pushed the plane down on the water. Feathers and paper money fluttered through the cabin. The dog snarled, Tommy shrieked, and Clive closed his eyes.

  When they got to the float, no one wa
s there to meet them. Tommy jumped down; he tied the plane off to a cleat and sat down on the dock with his head in his hands. One thousand dollars in assorted bills were plastered to his hair, and his neck was covered with feathers and dog slobber.

  Coming down the boardwalk to meet them ran a flock of children, squeaking with short joyful cries like small seabirds. Miles was walking soberly in their wake.

  Inside the plane, Little Brother had finished tearing up Tommy’s seat and was busy ripping into the salmon. Blood, scales, and red bits of fish spattered the windows. Bills that had been sewn into the coat’s lining fluttered like leaves.

  Tommy picked himself up, turned back, and opened the passenger door. Little Brother, the king salmon firmly in his mouth, bounded up the ramp, crossed the boardwalk in two strides, and ran up into the woods. Everyone could hear him breaking through the brush, turning over the stones. No one offered to go after him. No one called or whistled for the dog to come back. They acted as if he were just another spell of bad luck that had happily just passed them by.

  Clive clutched the ripped bundle of his coat and jumped down onto the floats. He’d cut his hand on one of Little Brother’s teeth and was slathered with drool, feathers, large denomination bills, and his own blood.

  Miles pointed to the water beside the dock. A slobbery clump of one hundred dollar bills floated toward the Aleutian Islands and Japan. “That would be your money, I take it?” he said without irony.

  “Miles,” Clive said softly and opened his arms wide. “Come here and hug me, you lug!”

  Miles shook his head slowly from side to side. Behind him over his shoulders trees trembled on the hillside where the big brindled dog was charging up the mountain with the dead fish.

  CHAPTER SIX

  JAKE SET DOWN his menu and waited for the waiter to come. It was a fine spring evening in Seattle with the smell of rain on dry pavement drifting in from the parking lot. Jake looked around the restaurant at the young millionaires in T-shirts and jeans. All of them drinking coffee with their meal. All of them giving the impression that they had another eight hours of work to do back in some loft on the waterfront where they were planning the initial public offering of some bullshit idea that would make them dozens of millions of dollars.

  Jake was eager to get out of the drug business, and more and more he was eager to get out of computers. It was beginning to have the same kind of tension of the high stakes big deal where you didn’t really know what was in the other guy’s briefcase until you handed your case over to them. There was too much trust based on bullshit reputations, and the reputations were built by liars or, worse, young cokeheads.

  He had understood the drug business. It was substantial and easy. There was a seemingly inexhaustible need for people to get high. There was a substance they wanted, and he provided it by the pound. Classic entrepreneurial supply and demand. But all this computer stuff … People were investing in things that had not made—would not make—money. People were sinking money into imaginary products that no one really understood, for Christ’s sake. There was a company who hooked up people on the Internet to give and receive free things. Free: as in no money exchanged hands. This was a bad business for a drug dealer.

  Jake’s first love had been in films. But so far making films had been a money hole. Worse than owning a dozen boats. Films, like computers, had been bad business for a drug dealer.

  The waiter brought the calamari and a bottle of Washington Zinfandel. Jake spread his linen napkin evenly on his lap. He slowly expelled his breath and took a sip of wine. Miss Peel had given him a list of subpoenas a private detective had managed to get from the grand jury who had convened on a number of criminal enterprises in the south end of Seattle in which he was included. It was a federal grand jury and a CCE—Continuing Criminal Enterprise—investigation, in which he understood that he was not the main target but was presented as one of the “Capos.”

  Jesus, he thought, these fucking guys. How they love Francis Coppola. That guy changed the world. Not one of these Northwest guys is even Italian.

  Jake was anxious to get started on a new script. He had six strong ideas. All he needed to do was flesh them out, send out a few feelers, then take the strongest idea on through to a final script. One was a comedy about a single dad adopting a kid who was psychic. Jake was most hopeful, though, about his story of a husband-and-wife hit team going for marriage counseling; everybody would want this. In fact, he was thinking of shit-canning all the other story ideas and just moving on the hit team story. He’d already titled it Till Death Do Us Part.

  “Tarantino is a pussy,” he said, and took a long drink of wine. It was a tart white, with just a hint of lavender. “I can write violence,” he said to himself. But first I’d better kill Clive, he thought as he swallowed some more.

  He needed to get back on solid ground. He needed money for this enterprise. Clive had taken money from him … but even Jake had to admit that Clive had earned at least part of it. The money had come from Clive’s milk truck profits. The whole milk truck thing had been his idea and a damn good one. Looking nice, presentable, you could wander around those neighborhoods in the early morning hours and no one gave a fucking thought. But Jake needed the money, and he couldn’t risk the liability. Jake exhaled, shook his shoulders loose, and realized that he was nevertheless going to have to kill Clive, even if Clive had kept his mouth shut after getting busted. Crime is almost as dangerous as high tech. That’s just the thing you have to accept about being a criminal.

  Jake bit into his calamari and calmly scanned the room, as if he had just heard the voice of a good friend over in a corner. He didn’t want to look like a gawker, but he had heard that Bill Allen liked to come to this restaurant.

  One of the reasons Clive had been such an excellent business partner was that he didn’t snort coke. He was also smart and careful, which was unusual for a criminal. Clive wouldn’t blow the money; he’d squirrel it away someplace clean and retrievable, so Jake didn’t have to worry about that. What he had to worry about was the cops putting pressure on him. Clive was not a natural snitch, but he was not really in love with the life. Jake knew that. Clive was a wild man but not naturally dishonest. He was Alaskan, and once he was home, he wouldn’t want to go back to jail. Once he was home the threat of getting sent back inside could make him say anything. It was one of those things that was going to make Jake worry no matter how much comfortable soothing money he had. No matter if he put all his money out of high tech and into real estate and gold bars. Clive McCahon, whose name just happened to show up on this list of subpoenas to be issued, was just going to have to go.

  The waiter set a dish of swordfish with mango chutney in front of him. Jake looked down at it. An abstract painting.

  “What is it with this town?” he complained to himself. “The portions have gotten so goddamn small.” He forked a bite into his mouth, closed his eyes, and imagined buying acres and acres of land inside the lines of America’s most prosperous cities. Nothing was more secure than real estate. Real estate never went down. It was as restful as the afternoon nap he was going to take every day when he could finally work on his script full time.

  First, though, he had to find Clive, get the drug money, and kill that motherfucker.

  THE SENIOR CENTER in Cold Storage was still draped in pink and white crepe paper from the last birthday party. Eloise had torn down half of the decorations before Gary decided they should leave them up; since there was no middle ground, they argued until it was time for Annabelle’s memorial service to start. The hall stayed half-decorated.

  Clive wore a Hawaiian shirt under a blue sweater he’d bought in Seattle and stood in a corner drinking punch from a paper cup. A heater kicked in, and dust swirled through the room, rustling the remaining strands of crepe paper hanging from the ceiling. Miles had hardly spoken to his brother. He hadn’t asked about the dog, or the money, or what Clive planned to do in Cold Storage. He had walked Clive up to their mother’s house, sh
owed him how to work the oil stove, brought down some old photo albums, and piled them on the kitchen table.

  “You might like to look at these,” he said, and headed toward the door. His hand was on the knob before he turned around. “If you want to see her … her body … you can come down to the clinic. She has to be flown out to Juneau and then Anchorage tomorrow. She’ll have an autopsy and will be cremated up there.” He stopped and stared at the floor. “So,” he finished, “I’ll see ya.”

  Clive watched the door close. He stood there looking at it while familiar gulls called out over the inlet. “Hey … Hey … Hey …” they said.

  “Good talking to you,” Clive said to Miles through the closed door.

  By midmorning the next day, the hall was beginning to fill. Men and women carried plates of food, laughed and nodded to neighbors still arriving. Alice brought a baked salmon, and Terry arrived with a pan of halibut enchiladas; there were scalloped potatoes, strips of smoked salmon, a smoked ham, and blueberry pies. The buffet table began to sag in the middle. Ellen came walking in the door with a bag of chips and headed straight for the beer.

  Annabelle had been there at the very founding of the town. She had actually witnessed the changes others only remembered through stories. Annabelle’s mother had built Ellie’s Bar, which had brought Cold Storage its modicum of regional fame. Ellie’s was a destination drinking establishment. Alaska had had only seven governors since statehood, and all of them had had a drink at Ellie’s. Anarchists and libertarians drank there. Democrats had their pictures taken sitting at the bar, and Republican legislators wore Ellie’s silk bar jackets in the capital offices. This rightly should have been a watershed event in Cold Storage, but Miles was worried it would devolve into another boozy afternoon of overblown memories and bickering.

  Chairs had been set up in the center of the room. Miles had wanted the local minister to say a few words about Annabelle, but he was on vacation down at Six Flags in Los Angeles with his niece. Miles had thought of opening the floor to remembrances from people instead but had thought better of it. For one thing, Weasel would be there, and he’d probably bring up the movie club’s problems and ask people to pay him the money he was owed. Miles remembered when people were asked to speak at Bob William’s memorial. Two had spoken lovingly about their memories of Bob, but then someone mentioned that he had sometimes let his dog run loose on the boardwalk, and the memorial broke down into a melee of charges and countercharges until a fight broke out in the receiving line, which caused the widow to leave early with a sprained elbow.