by John Straley
People would know. There were the obvious tip-offs, of course—being seen walking out of someone’s door at an unexplainable time or being seen kissing through a partially closed curtain. These things were common risks in a small town but didn’t explain people’s near-miraculous ability to divine the sexual quality of any relationship. The people of Cold Storage had an uncanny sensitivity to the body language of lovers and their slight changes in habits.
Edna Whelaby, while sitting on the examining table, had once told Miles that she couldn’t keep a boyfriend in town because of “everybody’s damn sex radar.” Edna was eighty-three years old at the time and between boyfriends. Miles had known her all his life so it was with some trepidation that he asked her to explain “sex radar” and to his discomfort she was happy to oblige:
“Ah, Christ Mary on a crutch, Miles. Everybody in the coffee shop, everybody at the post office or the library can tell if you’ve been sleeping with somebody. They just know. It’s like radar. It’s the least little thing. Lipstick on when it usually isn’t. Teasing somebody when you usually don’t, not teasing somebody when you should. These are all the signs, Miles, and the people around here just have a sense for it, I swear. One night in the sack, and there’s hell to pay when you go for your next cup of coffee. There’s not enough men around who can stand up to that kind of treatment,” she complained. “I’ve been thinking of moving to Juneau.”
Miles had been skeptical. He thought the old woman was just elaborating to show off her superior knowledge of life. But after, he had been alarmed when his own sex radar started to kick in. He saw a woman flush at the mention of someone’s name. He noticed a fisherman, who had always slapped his money and the check down on the counter, was handing them to the waitress instead. It wasn’t just that he handed it to her, either, for that could be just his attempt to flirt. It was the way her fingers curled up quickly around the money in a furtive attempt to touch the tips of his fingers; it was how she leaned forward on the dairy case and smiled as he came in and would sometimes walk around the counter when he left.
These were things that told Miles that the two of them were sleeping together. And he knew this because he hadn’t been sleeping with anyone in the years since his return. He had become finely attuned to all aspects of desire, as if the loneliness he hadn’t even admitted to himself had honed his senses. Lonely people recognize those in love like a parched tongue senses moisture. It may not be their own love, but it feels like a blessing to them.
Miles opened the door to the empty waiting room and stepped out into silence. Weasel waved from the boardwalk, and Miles had a sick feeling in his stomach. He had become accustomed to thin rations of affection, and these two kisses, as thrilling as they were, had given him a stomachache. It was as if he had eaten a rich meal much too quickly.
JAKE WAS LYING on a pad on the floor on the upper tier of Lester’s studio/home. He had a phone cradled against his shoulder and was listening to Miss Peel speaking with a kind of urgency that reminded him of a typewriter key striking a roller on the end of the line. She was holding onto a subpoena to appear in front of a grand jury. Jake tried to soothe her, even though the pain in his arm was twisting up his torso and into his brain like an electric drill bit. He was making it clear that he was not advising her to avoid responding to the subpoena, then he paused and read an account number for a bank in Arizona plus two addresses in Tucson. “Yes, yes. Now read those back to me please.” He paused. “Good. Thank you, Miss Peel. You, too, dear. You, too. Good luck and have a good trip. Yes, God bless.”
He hung up, gritted his teeth until the pain subsided, stared up at the ceiling as Lester carved on a two-inch strip of silver that would become a bracelet.
The pain passed, and he eased back down onto his sleeping pad. “So, how come you live here then?” he asked. “I mean, why don’t you live in one of those, you know, Indian villages?”
“I’m on a scouting mission.” Lester peered through his jeweler’s glasses down onto his design.
“You said you been here ten years. That’s quite a scouting mission. When you going to make your move?”
“We’re a patient people.”
“That’s bullshit.” Jake tried to heft himself up onto his good arm so he could look at Lester. “My bet is you got thrown out of whatever life you had before. Just the little I’ve seen of this place, I can’t believe anybody would live here if they weren’t hiding out from someone.”
“This place grows on you.” Lester didn’t look up from his work.
“Yeah, like toe fungus,” agreed Jake.
“Exactly.” Lester looked over at Jake sprawled out on the mat and started to add something. He was almost tempted to justify himself, to launch into an explanation, but he stopped and looked down at the bracelet he was making instead.
It was a bear design. Bear had been the clan crest of his mother’s people; he thought of telling Jake about the different clans with their strict rules and the rivalries between them; he thought of telling him about the complex structure of protocol, politics, and ancient grudges that a contemporary Tlingit person needed to understand in order to live peaceably in a village. He thought of telling him about how he had quit drinking only after it was too late, but he stopped himself. Lester was not in the mood to teach Indian 101 to another uninterested white man.
“So,” Lester said, “tell me what you think of my story idea.”
“It’s got no arc.”
“What do you mean, no arc?” Lester was a little irritated.
“Christ, man. Arc. You know, what connects the story from beginning to middle to end. Listen.” Jake took a deep breath and broke into a professorial tone: “Movies are really about one thing happening to one person. That’s it.”
“That’s not true,” Lester threw down his carving knife. “Jurassic Park, what was it about?” Jake stared at the ceiling.
“It’s about people’s greed and arrogance toward natural systems they don’t understand,” Lester explained, took another tool and started back to work.
“That’s the message, but that’s not what it’s about. Jurassic Park is how a snotty scientist discovers that he really loves kids. That’s the one thing that changes during the entire movie. In the opening, he hates kids, and by the end, he’s cuddling with them in the friggin’ helicopter. That’s what’s going on.”
Lester gestured toward Jake. “The lawyer gets eaten.”
“True, and that was a great moment. But it’s a perk, an extra bit of action that happens while the snotty scientist is learning to bond with the kids. Your story is all perks. Little bits of action strung together with an implausible mission of this Indian cop, but the main character doesn’t really change. He’s a sarcastic shit heel in the beginning, and he’s a sarcastic shit heel at the end. He’s just eaten up a hundred and twenty minutes sleeping with sexy women and killing irritating white men. It’s an interesting setup, but it’s no story.”
“You know, you don’t have to sugarcoat your opinions for me. Just spit them out.” Lester picked up a tiny fleck of silver and placed it carefully in a jar of similar flecks. “James Bond doesn’t change,” he added, almost petulantly.
“Fucking James Bond is a franchise. He’s not a character. The problem with your guy is he just keeps killing the bad guys off, but he never rescues anybody. He doesn’t learn anything, and nobody is going to give a shit about him by the end of the movie.”
“So, you want him to change?” Lester looked up through his jeweler’s glasses.
“Hell, man, I spent ten minutes with your snotty fucker, and I was begging for him to change.”
“This is a white thing, isn’t it? You’re saying to make him dance and shuffle, make him some mystical holy man, make him ‘sympathetic’ to the mass audience, aren’t you?” Lester’s annoyance was obvious.
Jake continued to stare at the ceiling. He could hear the rain falling on the roof. No rush of freeway, no car horns, no sirens. Just the rain, the fire in th
e stove, and the wind against the house. He lay there, examining the hand-hewn beams above his head.
“Hey, Lester,” he said. “I think you should use your left hand to carve that bracelet. It would give it a rougher, more primitive effect.”
Lester stopped carving. “You don’t know shit about carving or about me or about anything, as far as I can tell.”
Jake didn’t look at Lester. He just spoke calmly. “You are two-thirds right. I know dick about silver carving and I know nothing about you, but I know about movies and your idea sucks, at least as it stands now.”
Lester was standing now, ready to take a step toward the injured man lying on the floor.
“And don’t give me that ‘make him dance’ crap. I don’t care if your guy kills everybody in Washington, DC, and declares himself emperor. I don’t care if he is a mystic or a Republican. I’m just here to tell you that if you don’t know who he is, and if he doesn’t meet some challenge that substantially changes him, if you don’t get him to help somebody—even himself—you aren’t going to get fucking Sitting Bull to watch your movie.”
Lester took a step away from his workbench, a step back, and sat down. “I’ll give it some thought,” he said.
“You could give him a pet,” Jake suggested. “That would make him sympathetic.”
“I’ll give him an ugly dog who eats white people.”
“That could work,” Jake agreed. “You could make it a buddy movie.”
There were footsteps in the outer porch, a stamping of boots, and Jake leaned up on his good arm to watch Miles walk into the room and hang his coat on a peg by the door. It wasn’t wet enough to hang by the stove.
Lester lifted his head slightly. “Hey, Miles.” He kept working.
“I’ve come to announce that Tina McCarty wants to have sex with me. She just told me. I know you guys will hear about this sooner or later so I wanted to tell you right off the bat.”
The fire popped and sent a small spark soaring out through the grate down onto the scarred piece of tin beneath the stove.
“Christ, Miles, that’s old news. Everybody knows she wants to have sex with you.” Lester was nonplussed.
“I’ve only been here two days, and I knew it,” chimed Jake.
Miles, deflated, sat down on the splitting stump. “I know you’re lying,” he said to Jake, “but Lester, come on, you didn’t really know she wanted to have sex with me, did you?”
“Come on, Miles, there’s a betting pool.” Lester reached into his pocket and pulled out a small scrap of paper. “It was a twenty-dollar buy-in. I bought November sixteenth.” He waved the stub at Miles.
“November sixteenth? So the person who buys the closest date to the actual date we …”
“Will be two hundred and forty dollars richer.” Lester looked up through his jeweler’s glasses. His eyeballs looked like wobbly saucers.
Jake reached into his pocket with his good arm. “Let me in on some of this.” But Lester waved him off.
Miles lowered his head into his hands. “She’s a schoolteacher! She’s married to a schoolteacher!”
“Oh yeah,” he said, “that’s why the pool sold out in two days.” He put the slip of paper back into his pocket.
“Well, I’m going to disappoint you, Lester.” Miles sat up and straightened his shoulders as if someone had just called his name. “I’m not going to have sex with her. I’ve just decided that.”
“Yeah, we’ll see. I still have three months. I’m thinking my November is looking good. It gets mighty cold and lonely around here in November. I say right around the election time. I’m cashing in on your sex life because I put my money on Gore, and I think he’s tanking.”
“Well, I’m not.” Miles sounded shaky but resigned.
“What? You’re betting on Bush?” Lester said with disgust in his voice.
“No. I’m not having sex with Tina.”
“I’m glad that’s cleared up,” Lester said without taking his eyes off his work.
“What’s the coverage in December?” asked Jake. “The holidays could be tough, you know. A little eggnog, a little mistletoe.”
“You might buy in, but it’s a waste of money because November is still a lock. I don’t care what this mook says. Anytime a man announces that he’s not going to have sex, either it means he already has or is just about to. This guy”—here Lester nodded to Miles—“is a little more earnest than most white people, so I’m giving him until November. You might as well give the money to me.” Lester stood up and walked over to Miles, gave him a slap on the back, then went over to a desk in the corner and took out a spiral notebook.
“Don’t worry about it, Miles. Nothing’s really different,” he said. “Everybody knew about it before, and everybody knows about it now. Nothing’s changed.” He took his notebook over to Jake. “Speaking of which … Jake here is going to help me out with the ‘arc’ of my story. You’re just in time.”
Lester pushed his jeweler’s glasses up on his forehead and sat down on the floor beside Jake.
“Let’s talk about change,” he said to the crippled gangster.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
IN THE MADERA Canyon Sports Medicine Rehabilitation Center, just southwest of Green Valley, Arizona, the September sun was like a luscious orange in the sky. Oscar Laurentis sat with his leg unwrapped after his sixth surgery, soaking up the sun as he waited to go to rehab. It was the one thing that he had insisted upon when he worked for Jake: Oscar had the best healthcare plan that money could by.
But he had little else and that was why he had milked every ounce of his coverage to get his leg back into shape. He told the surgeons right from the start that he had been a top prospect for professional soccer clubs in Europe, that he had just been out of shape on a new training regimen. He was going to get a leg like Pele’s, even though he barely knew who Pele was.
Oscar spent a lot of time reading crime novels in his various hospital beds. He began to seethe with the need for revenge. He also watched Bronson movies and Tarantino films. He loved how sexy damped-down rage could look. He thought that was what women must love: the man who could control his rage and release it in service of justice. This is what all the books and films seemed to teach. Chicks dug it. Oscar had a good cause. He was a victim. He was going to have a new kick-ass leg. All he needed was a big-ass gun. He was going to get an insurance settlement. Ann Peel helped him get policy limits from the insurance company as long as he kept Jake’s name out of the police reports. Fine. No big deal. Chicks didn’t like the whole courtroom bullshit. They wanted the mano a mano, we-take-care-of-our-own approach.
Yes. He would definitely do it. Someday. He would stick here a while. It was nice here. He didn’t know where Jake was anyway, and it was probably a long ways off.
It was some big deal visitation day. Some baseball player was supposed to sign shirts and cards for the patients today, to raise their spirits and everything. Oscar looked down the veranda, shading his eyes, and saw a massive Hispanic man.
“Who’s the meat?” Oscar asked the patient next to him, who wore a full lower body cast.
“I dunno. Manny Something. Hit over three hundred last year.”
But there, standing next to Manny Something and waving like a little girl on a Ferris wheel, was Miss Peel. In seconds she was clicking down the marble tiles to his raised and sutured leg.
“Ooooscar! Oh my gosh, you look … well, you look … good. You’ve gained weight, even! They must be taking care of you! How are you?”
She bent over and gave him a makeup-preserving kiss, her right hand spread over her chest to protect her gold jewelry from hitting him or to prevent him from looking down her silk blouse.
“I’m, uh, good, Ann … ah, Miss Peel.”
“Oh, Ann. Please. So, have you heard from Jake in Alaska?”
As Manny spent the next two hours signing baseballs and having his picture taken, Oscar and Miss Peel caught up on the intricacies of life in the world of Jake Shoema
ker and what the world might hold for the financial security for his former employees.
THE AUTUMN MOVED down from the north. Hunters ranged closer to town, afraid to be caught out in the storms. Kids stayed closer to home because there wasn’t enough daylight to wander past the boardwalk and up into the river valleys. The plumage on the diving ducks began to change. The mergansers appeared whiter, and the old squaw ducks showed up in shimmering white rafts near the inner harbor.
The bears stopped coming into town for garbage, and the dead salmon carcasses washed out into the inlet with the heavy October rains. The water of the inlet itself appeared brown as tea for a few weeks during the heaviest of the rains, and sometimes the ghost fish floated near the surface with their hollow eye sockets and rotted flesh staring into the sky.
The bathhouse stayed busy even though people weren’t covered in summer’s grime. Men came during men’s hours and women during women’s hours. They came to warm their pale bodies as the chill of the turning year started gaining a foothold in their bones.
Mrs. Cera let Anthony go back to Juneau, and he turned out for the wrestling team. He’d eventually win State at 164 pounds, break a finger in the last match, and come back to Cold Storage.
Little Brother began eating from a bowl in plain view of people. He stopped wandering up the hillside and never ate another cat that anyone missed. Every evening after Clive locked up, the dog walked down the boardwalk and up the stairs to Annabelle’s house. He waited for Clive to open the door and walked in ahead of him, settling himself onto a blanket beside the oil stove. He’d lift his jeweler anvil head and stare at Clive’s ankles as they passed by his resting place. The two had grown more relaxed in each other’s physical presence, but Little Brother had not spoken since he had tried to eat Jake’s arm. Clive spoke to the big dog as he lay on the bed. He would make small talk, discuss the weather or his unimportant list of errands for the day. Little Brother would lift his head with effort and simply stare back at Clive as if to say, “Are you talking to me?” and then, “Why?” then plop his head back on his paws. Clive was getting the impression that his dog was not much of a conversationalist and would only speak if, and when, he had something important to say.