by John Straley
“No,” breathed Jake. “No police.”
Miles turned to his brother. “I take it this is the owner of the money?”
“Former owner, Miles.” Clive looked over at the bed. “We’ve worked all that out, haven’t we, Jake?” He leaned across the broken arm while Jake recoiled, tried to move to the other side of the bed. He was pulled up short by the tension on his elbow and winced, rolled back in agony.
“More drugs,” he pleaded.
“Soon,” said Miles.
“I am the sole proprietor of the money, and all she has purchased. Well, me and the dog. I think I’m going to have to cut him in for a full share after what he did for me.”
“This guy could turn you in to the cops, Clive. I mean, your dog did mess him up pretty bad.” Miles directed a sympathetic glance toward Jake, huddled at the far end of the bed.
“First off, somebody is going to have to prove I’m responsible for that dog. I mean, he lives on his own. But more importantly, if Jake goes to a hospital and says one word about that ugly meat-eater being my dog, I’m going to have to give federal law enforcement the whole poop on Jake. I don’t have anything to lose. I’ve got old business records that can account for all that money. My records might not stand up for long, but they will stand up long enough for the cops to get a load of Jake’s interest in me. I’ve done my time. I haven’t violated parole … at least, the spirit of my parole. I’ve got a new life going, and then this drug dealer came and attacked me. So my dog ate him.” Clive tapped Jake’s splinted arm. “Well, ate half of him anyway.”
Jake sucked air through his nose, tried again to escape to the far side of the bed.
“No,” Clive went on, “if federal law enforcement puts his name into their computer, the thing will light up like a pinball machine. Jake’s not going to a hospital if he can help it.”
“We’ve got to put him someplace.” Miles was running out of patience.
“Can I say something?” Jake whispered.
“He could stay with me.” Clive turned to face Miles. “But I don’t think the dog would care for it. I don’t know, that ugly bugger might wake up feeling peckish in the middle of the night.” Clive smiled at the thought.
“Excuse me,” Jake’s voice quavered.
“He can’t stay with me. I do not take patients home. Christ, if I did that I’d have half the town wanting to bunk with me. I’m not doing it, Clive.” Miles was turning away from the bed as if he were going to walk out on the conversation.
“The more I think about it, I’m certain he can’t stay with me,” said Clive. “What would our buddy the trooper think of me living with this chewed-up old crook? I’ve got my new, clean reputation to think of. No way, he’s not moving in with me.”
“You. Doctor. Listen to me!” Jake yelled, hauling his head up from the pillow. “If you don’t scurry around and get me some more pain killers, I swear to God when I get up out of this bed I’m going to shoot your nuts off.”
Miles glanced at his wristwatch. “I suppose I can give you some more Demerol. But listen, you are not staying with me. I don’t care which body part you threaten to shoot off.”
Jake lay his head back down and let out an exhausted moan.
A FEW HOURS later, Jake sat in a sturdy camp chair in front of Lester’s wood stove.
“This is one chewed-up-looking white man,” observed Lester. “Did your dog eat him, then spit him back out?”
“I tell you, Lester, he’s not really my dog.” Clive carried in a bag of groceries, set them on the counter. “I got some hamburger and some canned stuff. There’s milk and cereal and some bread here. I think there’s a jar of peanut butter. Hell, Jake’s not a picky eater.” Clive smiled over at the men sitting in the sunken area around the stove. “But I have to tell you, Lester. Little Brother. He speaks.”
“What he say?” The Indian man leaned forward.
“The first thing he said was, he complained about me tapping him with my foot.”
“You kicked him?” Lester said with alarm.
“No. Cripes. It was just a tap.”
“He say anything else?”
“No. He just warned me about Jake.”
“Is he an angel or something?”
“Who, the dog? Hell, Lester, he’s just a mutt.”
The carver sat quietly for a moment, staring at his wood stove. Finally he turned to the injured man and asked, “What brought you to Cold Storage, Jake?”
“I wanted to kill him and get my money back.” Jake pointed with his chin toward Clive.
“Oh … okay.” Lester put some more wood into the firebox. “So you got some assassination travel package: airfare, hotel, ammunition? That sort of thing?”
“Is everyone in this town a goddamn comedian?”
Lester continued feeding sticks into the stove, the flames lighting his face. “No, actually most of the people in this town are drunks or depressives, but we have our funny moments.”
No one spoke for a few seconds; the fire popped; Clive folded the grocery bag.
“Like when a hit man gets eaten by a dog,” Lester said flatly. “You’ve got to admit, that’s funny.”
“I’m out of here,” said Clive, but then remembered. “Hey, thanks, Lester.” He looked over at Jake. “If you feel up to it, come on down to the bar. I’ll buy you a cup of coffee.” He started to leave but doubled back again. “You don’t keep any guns here, do you, Lester?”
“I’ve got a deer rifle and a bear gun. But I keep ’em locked up.”
“Good.” Clive’s hand was on the doorknob. “Just keep them out of reach of old Jake here. We’re getting along so well now, but if he gets a little more bounce in his step, he might try to blow my brains out. Okay. See you later.” He was gone.
Lester slapped his hands together; he stood up and held them toward the stove for warmth and asked, “What other kind of work you do, Jake, besides killing people?”
“I’m in the movie business.” He didn’t look at his Tlingit host.
“Get out of here,” said Lester. “What were you in?”
“I wrote the script for a film called Stealing Candy, but they made a fucking mess out of it.” Jake leaned back, but there was no way to sit comfortably in a camp chair, especially with his arm in a fiberglass cast. He grimaced.
“No kidding. I read about that movie. Hell, Jake, you must be a player. Why you need to keep your day job of killing people?”
“It’s a long story,” he lamented.
“Yeah, everybody’s got a story.” Lester went over to his workbench, put on his jeweler’s glasses. “I got a story. In fact, I’ve got a book I’ve been working on, and it would make a hell of a movie.”
“Oh, Christ.” Jake groaned.
“That’s okay, I trust you. It’s called Circling the Wagons. It’s a crime story, but it’s really about white people in North America. There’s this Indian undercover cop, see …”
Lester started talking; the wind rattled under the eaves; if he’d been listening, Jake could have heard the yawp of a heron fishing on the tide flat underneath the house. The fire in the wood stove popped; the tea kettle rumbled on top of the iron; Jake closed his eyes and tried to shut out every sound in the universe.
IN OTHER PARTS of America, August was the height of summer, but in Cold Storage, it was the beginning of fall. The first two weeks of steady rain had already fallen. Those who were not used to this were emotionally pulled up short. Miles was cleaning up the clinic; he wanted to go home early and get a nap. He was tying the top of a garbage bag when the bell above the clinic door clanged. He put the sack in a box for burning and walked out to the waiting room.
There was Tina, her hands up to her cheeks, crying.
“Are you hurt, Tina?” asked Miles. “Has something happened?”
Miles had been in battlefields, scoured ground and dusty expanses littered with burned trucks and strewn bandages, smelling of diesel and desperate women under the hot sun. His job at home had dif
ferent kinds of battlefields. People often came to his office to cry. Some came because of some recent pain, a pain that had taken them by surprise. Others came on a kind of schedule; it could be the moon, the weather, or some personal orbit that brought them back to an old injury that continued to overwhelm. There was plenty of old pain in Cold Storage.
In any northern village there is a darkness lurking: the differing terrors of childhood; the men who have victimized children and inoculated them with dread that will last for the rest of their lives; the refugees from family wars who are as shell-shocked as any soldier on the front. Some grow up swearing they’ll never again end up in that situation, but most do. Some, from sexually battered families, know no other emotional territory and can’t leave. In happy circumstances, they feel like foreigners whose papers have been revoked; they’re always waiting for the knock from the secret police to take them back to their real lives. There are more than 700 villages in Alaska. No matter how much oil lay in the ground on the north slope and no matter how wisely it was allocated, it was at times hard for Miles to imagine how a twentieth century mind could navigate a Paleolithic world without a lot of chemical coaxing. Most of the people in Cold Storage drank, some of them lived alone and avoided human contact, but all of them periodically became unhinged and ended up in Miles’s clinic.
Miles suspected Tina’s pain was recent. “What’s happened?”
She lifted her head up out of her hands, looked up at the ceiling, and held her breath.
“What happened?” she repeated. “Oh … I’m sorry, Miles, nothing happened … It’s just … It’s just …” and she started crying into her hands again.
He put his hand on her shoulder, led her gently to the examining room. “Come on in,” he said softly. “No sense in you standing out here.”
She sat on the edge of the table and talked; her shoulders heaved; her words came out in spasms. Miles sat on a low stool with his elbows on his knees and looked up at her, listened to her voice float around the small room.
“It’s just the weather,” she explained, blowing her nose. “You know we get more than two hundred inches of rain a year here?”
Miles shook his head.
“People in Seattle think they have a lot of rain, but they only get some thirty-seven inches. I mean, really …” Her tears kept flowing. “Thirty-seven. That’s nothing … but the worst of it is, we only really get some fifteen really sunny days a year. Fifteen!” Again she started sobbing, for the fifteen clear days, Miles supposed.
“What else?” asked Miles.
They stared at each other for a while. Rain ticked down on the tin roof; they could hear kids rumbling by, pulling a wagon down the boardwalk.
“How’s Ed?” Miles asked, and Tina’s dam broke.
THERE ARE SO many people with broken hearts: there are parents and their children, husbands and wives, the hardhearted and the sensitive. They do horrible things to each other with whatever weapons they can muster. These emotional battles in Cold Storage were like drunken broadsword fights: sloppy and inaccurate. But the blows, when struck, were often crippling. It wasn’t the rain filling the fishing streams and creating the gamelan of their tin roofs that made people sad. It was the wrong turns their love had made. But the rain didn’t help.
As a teenager, Miles had been unsympathetic to these people. People in books and films—people in the real world had survived worse. Whole orders of magnitude worse. And they still did, every day. Not that the teenage Miles knew how they did it.
But when Tina let words push past her tears, a recognizable story began to unfold: Ed did not love Tina, or that was her fear. Ed was pulling away from her. School was starting, and he was sullen and distant. He disappeared out on his own to gather specimens for their classrooms, and when he returned, he would hang up his slicker and say nothing. In bed he rolled away from her, feigning sleep. Tina stared at his back and her mind rewound where they had been and where they were going, and discovered she couldn’t imagine a coherent future, or even a story of one.
It hadn’t always been that way. Ed and Tina had shared a common story, or so it seemed to her, from the moment they met. This was the story of two young people who went on an adventure to Alaska to touch, walk, and study the wild country other people only imagined—two people who each needed the other to reach their destination: the driver and the navigator. But now it seemed that Ed had always been happy to both drive and navigate and was ready to go on ahead by himself.
Miles was growing impatient. A thought was building up pressure in the depths of his mind: Why should I care about this woman’s sadness? he thought to himself, while at the exact same moment he knew that he did care. A world away, his friends still walked a battlefield where smoke roiled up from charred holes in the ground, and widows wailed for the missing. Brave men died while rescuing strangers, and here he was listening to this mildest form of suffering. But he listened for there was nothing else to do. Pain, no matter how slight, has a magical way of filling whatever container it finds—much like happiness but apparently more often.
Tina told Miles about the time she and Ed came up on the ferry. They had to back their rented moving van onto the ship in Bellingham. Tina stood in back and waved the directions. She waved and yelled and gestured, and all the while Ed was swerving back and forth in the lane. Finally, when the van pushed up against a parked car and broke off both vehicles’ side mirrors, Ed got out yelling.
“I was giving you good directions,” she countered.
“But you weren’t standing where I could see you,” he yelled.
“Now you tell me, Miles, whose fault was that?” Tina tried to pull herself up straight in her chair, but all she could muster was a defiant kind of slump.
Miles’s shoulders jerked, and he stirred himself. “He could have adjusted the mirror,” Miles said, “or he could have stopped and figured out a better way.”
“Or maybe I was standing in the wrong place, at the wrong time, trying to talk to the wrong guy.” She blew her nose again, smiled.
Miles smiled, too, and reached out and touched the top of her hand; she took her other hand and covered his; they said nothing. They stared down at their hands on her lap until Miles stood up, but she kept hold of him.
“Thanks, Miles, for letting me talk. It helps. It does. What about you, do you need anybody to talk to?”
“No,” he said, “my life’s not that interesting.”
She squeezed his hand and said, “You look funny.”
“I’m all right, I guess.”
“What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking that I’m a crappy salmon fisherman.” His voice held more seriousness than he’d expected.
“That’s pretty bad, Miles.”
She cupped his face in her hands and kissed him on the mouth, hard enough and long enough that he had to put his hands around her waist to hold her there. The rain, which was neither tears nor music, continued to fall on the tin roof, making a fine rhythm in the room, and slowly smeared down the windows.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THE CLINIC’S DOOR opened, and they heard Ed’s voice out in the waiting room. “Miles, you with somebody?”
Miles had his arms around Tina; he brushed her cheek with the back of his hand, and she looked straight up into his eyes. She did not look startled, she did not look worried, and she did not look guilty. Miles felt almost inordinately happy.
“Just one second,” he said to her and walked out to the waiting room.
“Tina came in; she’s in the examining room; she’ll be out in a minute.”
“Is she okay? What’s the problem, Miles?” Ed stood up on his toes to look over Miles’s shoulder, as if Tina were standing there. “She just ran out of school. I had to finish up by myself.”
“She was upset.”
“Well, I mean, what’s the problem? Is she going to be okay?”
“I think she’s going to be okay. But she needs to tell you what the problem is.”
It occurred to Miles that Ed was asking him a lot of questions considering she was his own wife.
“No,” he said, “I don’t think she’s going to need any medication. If this keeps up I think I could get her a telephone appointment with a counselor in Sitka. Maybe she just needs to talk things over with someone else.”
“Someone else?” Ed let the words linger in the air.
“A counselor in Sitka,” Miles said again to snip off the thread left floating. “I’ll see how she’s doing.”
Miles walked back, and Tina grabbed him—forcefully—kissing him even harder this time.
He ran his hands over her shoulder blades and down the curve of her waist. He pulled her toward him, feeling her legs against his, her breasts against his chest, his hands shaking against her strong back. Then he pulled away.
“I don’t know, Tina. You’ve got to talk to him. Tell him the story about backing the van onto the ferry.”
“I want to sleep with you, Miles,” she said. “I’ve just decided.”
“Well, that’s something to consider.” Miles made it sound like they were talking about alternative therapies; quite possibly they were. “But I can’t see you here in the clinic, and I really want you to talk to Ed.”
“You are a good guy, Miles.” She kissed him and pushed past him out of the room.
Miles stayed; he didn’t want to be in a room with those two right now. He pulled the paper lining down from the table, checked the connections on all the telemetry machines, even looked down in the trash basket to see if there was anything there that needed his attention, before opening the door to the waiting room.
It was empty, so he went to his office and filled out his log, identified Tina’s visit as a “wellness-consult, no treatment schedule.”
He had a stomachache. Sleeping with Tina would definitely qualify as a change in his circumstances. It would be a happening in Cold Storage once word got out, as it surely would. Tina probably hadn’t considered that yet; perhaps she was new enough to town that she thought that keeping something of a sexual nature secret was a possibility, which it certainly was not.