by John Straley
Clive returned the gesture so they were arm in arm as they had once been walking down the boardwalk. “Don’t worry about it.”
They started up the stairs to Annabelle’s house. The wind was shrieking now, and a branch of a tree scraped against a metal roof. They stopped in the dark and looked up toward the noise. There, at the peak of the roof, sat a strange yellow bird with orange dots on its cheeks. Clive saw it clearly as a fever dream. He pointed without saying a thing, and the bird flew away.
“Look,” Clive whispered even though the bird had flown.
“What?” Miles said, following his brother’s gesture but seeing nothing.
“I must be imagining things.”
Just as they reached the dark porch they heard a deep-throated growl. Miles pushed past Clive, picked up the flashlight stored on a shelf, and pressed the switch. He swept the beam of light into the darkness.
Twenty feet away was Clive’s brindled dog. Black tree limbs swirled above him. He sat, the stubs of what were once ears erect, taking short puffs of breath and holding a dead cat in his jaws; red paint daubed the pads of the cat’s feet.
“I would like to take this opportunity to apologize for my dog,” began Clive.
“Whoever owns that cat is not going to be happy,” Miles said, as if to himself.
“Well, they can take that up with the dog.” Clive turned to go into the house.
“What’s his name?”
“Little Brother!” Clive called through the closed door.
“Perfect,” said Miles. The sigh of the wind in the trees blended with the growl of the ugly dog with a dead cat in its mouth.
CHAPTER SEVEN
IT WAS A clear morning; the sun hadn’t risen yet above the ridgeline, and the sky flared blue and silver above the inlet. Out to the west, a layer of fog rolled in from the coast. It should burn off by the time Billy reached it, but if it didn’t, he could hug the shoreline of the outer coast.
His kayak, loaded and heavy with gear, was tied up at the floatplane dock. She sat low in the water, but every inch of her looked buoyant, long and narrow like a eucalyptus leaf caught in a back eddy. Billy had built her from strips of Sitka spruce and canvas following a modified plan of an Aleut design, and the bow swept up to a large, flat holding point shaped like a dragon’s head. Billy had painted a pair of eyes up there to watch over his progress.
He had packed a few clothes, a small tent, a sleeping bag, and some charts. He planned to build fires most of the time but had a small gas stove along, just in case. He had dehydrated pinto bean flakes, rice, cheese, vitamins, and chocolate bars. He had a small fishing rod and a spinning reel with a box of lures, since he was almost certain he could jig up rockfish just about anywhere he put in. On top of the boat, he’d lashed two extra paddles.
Tina had given Billy a gift for this trip. She had wrapped it in a waxed canvas bag and tied it up with a length of tarred twine. The Tibetan Book of the Dead. It was an old library book by Dr. W.Y. Evans-Wentz. Billy flipped through the pages, scanning each page as if he were reading a map.
“I thought you might need it.”
“Cool!” He hugged her and closed his eyes as if he were committing the moment to memory. “I knew you believed in me.”
“I never said that.” She whispered into his ear, “I just want you to come back, one way or another, and this might help.” She held him a little longer than usual.
Billy had ordered a brand-new dry bag from Seattle. It was bright yellow and carried all of his most important papers: his passport, his money for the trip, Clive’s money for the Dalai Lama, and some flyers he’d made that described his trip and requested donations. Inside all of these papers, he had placed the photograph taken at Annabelle’s wake. He added Tina’s new book to the bag.
Billy took off his boots, rolled them up, tucked them behind his seat. He put on his warm slippers, eased into the kayak, and wriggled around in the tight cockpit as if he were putting on a new pair of blue jeans. He put a bottle of water on his lap and slid his rolled up slicker under his thighs. He pulled his spray skirt over his head, stretched it tight over the hole in the cockpit; he slipped wrist gaiters over his long-sleeved shirt and looked around.
A few gulls were floating like chips of ice on the surface of the inlet. Tina had disappeared. A couple of kids were running up the boardwalk pulling a red wagon, clattering like a bucket rolling on its side. Smoke was sliding out of the chimney of Lester’s house and rising up, ghostly white, against the sides of the mountain. Billy undid the painter line from the dock and pushed away.
He had hoped a few more people might have come down to say goodbye, even though he knew that his sentimentality about the place was an illusion. He had Clive’s money and two thousand dollars in pledges if he made it all the way to Seattle, but he knew that was an illusion of sorts, too. The substance of this trip was compassion. And even though compassion was supposed to flow from him and not toward him, he was still a little ticked off that no one had noticed his leaving.
He pulled his paddle through the water. “I take refuge in the Dharma,” he murmured sadly, thinking that he must still be a pretty crappy Buddhist.
He pulled his way through the water and past the pilings of the cold storage. Fat drops of water plunked into the water from a broken pipe. With each new stroke, his boat felt sleeker and stronger as if she, too, were looking forward and pushing ahead. A fat raven flew down from the roof of the cold storage and landed on the bow of his kayak, and he stopped paddling, sat still. The bird cocked its head from side to side and looked at him expectantly. Billy had a peanut butter sandwich in his coat pocket; he fished it out, broke off a corner, and tossed it toward the raven. It made a loud cry, jumped, caught the bit of bread in midair, and flew low over the water back to the shadows under the wharf. Billy watched it weaving between the pilings. He could hear the air pushing past its wings as he started paddling toward Seattle.
He made it around the first point out of town in a few minutes. A squall from the west was blowing through, and fog lay ahead. Should he cross the inlet? He looked to his right and saw the sign.
They had hung the sheet about twenty feet up in the trees at the end of the boardwalk. A white sheet with some kind of red design that was hard to decipher because the wind pushed the tree limbs around and pulled the sheet in all directions. He tried to identify the pattern but couldn’t, so he turned to face the sheet head on and stopped paddling.
The squall passed. The branches hung motionless. A group of people stood beneath the sign, and Billy saw Tina reach up and pull on a rope tied to one corner of the sheet. The red lettering on the sign snapped into focus; it read: “We love you, Billy. Whatever is here, that is there.”
The kids who had been running along the boardwalk were now standing on their wagon and waving, as if he were floating away in a hot air balloon. Clive was standing beside his brother, and Billy heard Miles call out over the water, “I put some extra medication in your boat. Some ointment and antibiotics. I thought you should have some just in case.”
Billy raised his hand and shook it in a short embarrassed wave.
Weasel pulled his pants down and mooned him.
“Meeeee, tooooo!” he screamed. And the children started swaying with laughter, almost falling out of their wagon.
Clive was waving as if he were the Prince of Wales.
Someone shouted, “Give our best to His Holiness!”
And the girl from the cold storage yelled, “You go, boy!”
Billy waved again and started paddling toward the head of the inlet where fog was easing in from the coast.
CLIVE DRANK A cup of coffee, walked along the boardwalk, and tried to decide what to do. Radio reports had tracked a storm off the coast, but for the time being the air was clear. A light breeze drifted across the inlet, teasing the steam rising from his mug.
Clive had spent a week going through his mother’s house. Some evenings Miles would come over, and the two of them would start
packing boxes and end up cross-legged on the floor or parked at a table, flipping through piles of loose photographs. They would talk, try to help each other remember names or places, and drift back into their separate reveries.
Only a few boxes were filled. Annabelle’s clothes still hung in the bedroom closet, and her sheets lay untouched in the linen closet. Clive slept in her bed but borrowed bedding from Miles because he didn’t want to use hers. There had been no more discussions about Clive’s past or about the money sewn into the down parka.
Little Brother ranged on the hillside and over in the far river valley; Clive left food in a bowl and found it empty in the mornings. No cats were reported missing, not even the white cat that had been killed the night of the wake. Clive had been prepared to make a substantial payment to the aggrieved cat owner, but none appeared and Miles wasn’t surprised. Most of the cats in Cold Storage belonged only to themselves; they had to survive on scraps from the fish plant and from the garbage cans along the boardwalk.
MILES WAS AT the clinic tending to Teddy, whose knees and elbows were full of splinters from a particularly spectacular bicycle wreck.
Clive was restless. He didn’t want to look at pictures and the inside of Annabelle’s house was beginning to feel close. A storm was expected to blow through soon, and Clive felt a headache coming on.
He eased around the southern border of the boardwalk and walked into Lester, who’d clamped a music stand onto the top rail of the walkway to make himself an easel. He had a piece of fiberboard set up and was scratching at it with a tiny putty knife.
“Hey, Clive,” Lester murmured.
“Lester,” Clive nodded.
He squinted at the drawing on the board. It was a traditional Tlingit design of a raven; thick black lines surrounded the stylized ovoids, the eyes and the beak reflecting the same circular forms.
A raven flew across the tide flat, back around the point and out of sight. Lester wiped the palette knife on a rag, then daubed at the canvas, watching the bird. Clive looked at the stylized drawing, then to the bird, then back at the canvas. He started to ask why he was watching a raven when Lester obviously wasn’t drawing from life. But he held his tongue, remembering enough of the manners he learned from before he left Alaska the last time.
“Can I ask you a question, Lester?” he finally said.
“I don’t suppose it would hurt,” the artist replied without taking his eyes off of his work.
“Do you think animals can talk to people?”
Lester put aside his palette knife on the top of his supply box. “Before I get into that let me ask you something.”
“Okay.”
“Were they giving you some medication in jail that you stopped taking? You know what I’m asking? The pills that made the voices stop?”
“I don’t need medication, Lester.”
“At the risk of employing a cliché, Clive—that’s what they all say.”
“Come on, Lester. What about all the old stories? Animals used to talk to people, didn’t they?”
Lester wiped his hand on an oiled cloth. “You are serious about this, aren’t you?”
“Yeah, I guess I am.”
“And you’re not talking about parrots and mynah birds, are you?”
“No. I’m not.”
“Because there is a girl up at the cold storage who has lost her parrot, and she’s going crazy looking for it.”
“Somebody really lost a parrot?” Clive thought back to the vision on top of his mother’s house.
“Okay …” Lester bullied his way through the silence. “It’s not like the animals talked to people. It’s more like people used to be animals. It wasn’t such a big deal. Like you talk to your dog, you don’t really expect the dog understands everything you say, but you talk and the dog gets your meaning because … I don’t know. Because you have a relationship. It used to be that way with animals and human beings. They all were related somehow. They talked to one another, and even if they knew all the meaning wasn’t getting through, they could still understand each other.”
“Could it happen now? Could someone start understanding the animals now?” Clive asked in a low voice, obviously embarrassed now.
“Are we back talking about the pills thing? Maybe you should talk to someone about that.”
“No. I want to know. Could it happen to someone now?”
“Why the heck are you asking me?” Lester snorted. “You’re not some new age nut job who is going to ask me to lead them on some frigging dream quest, are you?”
“No. I just remember the old people talking about it when I was a kid. Even some of the old Norwegian fishermen, they’d tell stories about hearing seals talk and the birds. I remember the Indians talking about how to act around bears and what to say and stuff. I’m … I’m just …” And he stopped speaking and turned to walk away.
“Hold up,” Lester called to him, and Clive turned. “Yes. Yes, it can happen now.”
“What would cause it?”
“All it takes is getting over yourself as a human being. Living with animals for a long period could do it.”
“Is it a bad thing?” Clive asked.
“Are any animals telling you to start killing Indians?”
“No.”
“Then it sounds fine.” Lester snapped shut his supply box. “But again, I’m not sure why you are asking me.”
“All the square-headed Norsky fishermen are dead.” Clive smiled.
“You’ll be fine,” Lester said as he unscrewed his makeshift easel. “Just don’t try and go Native. That’s just so eighties. Schizophrenia is what’s happening now. Go with that.”
“Thanks for the tip,” Clive said, then waved and walked down the boardwalk.
Up to his left, he could hear a large animal walking along the rocks of a steep-sided stream bed; he had heard that there had been a bear in the garbage cans out in front of the restaurant, and in fact had heard dogs barking in alarm early in the morning when he was cooking his breakfast. The trees rustled fifty feet away, and Clive started whistling the tune to “Don’t Fence Me In,” hoping that the bear would recognize him as a kindred spirit and give him a wide berth.
So he was whistling when he turned the corner and saw the fallen-down bar. Actually, he saw Little Brother sitting on a loose piece of roofing lying out in front of a salmonberry thicket some ten feet from the boardwalk. The big dog was lying in the sun with his head on his front paws; his eyes were barely open, and he seemed to be content.
“It’s good to see you,” said Clive as if greeting an old friend at the post office.
The brindled dog lifted his head just slightly, turned, and said nothing.
Clive headed toward the dilapidated structure. The sun was breaking over the ridgeline, and the building started to glitter; steam began to rise from the roof. Clive stopped and watched for a moment. The thicket came up and around the back of the roof; just up the hillside, two gnarled hemlock trees leaned out from the forest with their trunks almost shading the bar. This was a magician’s hiding place, Clive thought, and something he later recognized as optimism rose in his chest.
This was Ellie’s Bar. The wildest and most storied drinking spot along this stretch of coast. From World War II and onward, fishermen had yearned to make port here. Now its spongy boards were melting into the moss. All he had to do was push the wooden door aside, and it came off of its hinges. He ripped some of the plastic off the windows to let the light in, and when he had, he knew he had taken the right path. Chairs were stacked on tables in the center of the room and old high-backed booths lined the walls; dusty bottles stood at the back of the ebony bar; the ceiling was water-stained plaster. Wet dollar bills hung over the room like wilted leaves from tacks that had been pinned there years before. All around the bar and on the edges of every booth, people had carved the names of their boats: The Defiant, The Lisa M, The Samuel R Wiks, The Point Hope, Willie’s Raider. There were hundreds of names of fishing boats carved around the
room. There were tin beer signs, and an old horsehair dart-board, green with mildew. At the back was a slate pool table with leather pockets; one of the legs had broken through the flooring and the whole table listed forward like a ship gone aground; colored balls rested in the leather pockets, mossy with neglect.
Clive pulled a chair off the top of one of the tables and sat staring. He could smell something underneath the mildew and spilt heating oil. He could smell burgers cooking, and perfume; he smelled beer foaming over thick glass mugs. He could hear the gurgling of the coffee maker as morning regulars came in to chat; he heard music and women laughing at badly told jokes. Something about the bar’s decrepitude attracted him. This was the opposite of his old concrete bunker in protective seg. This was some place the forest was going to eventually get back; this was only a temporary shelter from the storm. Unlike prison, this place was designed for impermanence and escape. Clive sat with his eyes closed and imagined such a thing.
Little Brother walked in and lay down on a mat at the end of the bar.
“You want to be a bouncer?” Clive asked the big dog. “You are family now. I could probably put you on.”
Little Brother raised his head and looked down behind the bar, whimpered softly, and put his head back down on his front paws.
Clive went over to where the dog lay. A pad and a ring of candles in shot glasses rested on the floor; a fairly new sleeping bag was spread out, and a backpack stuck out from under the bar where the garbage cans had been. A sour smell of rotten meat reached out and enveloped them both.
There was a foot in a rubber boot, attached to a leg.
Clive walked past the dog and over to the body. Half of the sleeping bag was resting over the shoulders of the short, bearded man. Clive rolled him over. The body was stiff, hard as wet clay under the damp wool jacket; small animals had already started in on the exposed flesh of the face, but Clive could still make out the features.