Cold Storage, Alaska

by John Straley

  Every Sunday, Clive preached a sermon at the Love Nest. He stuck closely to his major theme of love and slowly circled around the whole issue of obedience. He read the story of Jonah, mostly for the character of the worm who God commanded to destroy the shade tree. He stayed away from the crushing tedium of Ecclesiastes.

  It snowed on Halloween, but the flakes were fat and soggy so that as soon as they hit, they disappeared into a sloppy film on the boardwalk. But three hundred feet above town, the branches of the spruce and hemlock trees gathered white pillows of snow.

  The contested election came, and people were pissed off for a few weeks. But no one in Cold Storage could really muster much enthusiasm for the race. Almost everyone agreed that there was certainly some sort of criminality involved, but no one could decide exactly the nature of the crime or the mastermind behind it, although theories abounded.

  The movie clubs continued to meet, and eventually Weasel brought a monitor and VCR into the Love Nest for one evening a week for the men’s movie club. Clive made an exception to his no-pop-culture rule and offered the use of the bar to both the men’s and women’s movie groups, but the women politely declined—not because they didn’t approve of the surroundings, but because they had a nice setting of their own along the water side of the back of the library. And because, as one man said, “They don’t want to mix their pleasures, lest the whole thing go sour.”

  Some American sailors were killed in Yemen by a group of people unhappy with the US. Several people in Cold Storage hung yellow ribbons on their fences, but most of the people in town were not sure what the ribbons meant, other than a vague sense of patriotism.

  Miles didn’t have sex with Tina McCarty in November, for which Lester barely forgave him. Instead, Tina and Ed took a three-day weekend trip to Juneau after the second parent-teacher conferences of the school year and came back with gifts for the schoolchildren. Tina brought Miles a sweater from an Irish woolens shop, and he noticed that Ed had begun to drink beer at the Love Nest late into the evenings, even on school nights.

  JAKE’S SHOULDER STAYED sore for weeks. He scratched under the cast with thin pieces of firewood and complained loud and long whenever he saw either Miles or Clive. Miles pleaded with him to go to Sitka for X-rays, but Jake refused. He tried calling Miss Peel on her cell phone, but there was never an answer; eventually, he was greeted with a recorded message that the phone had been disconnected. This seemed to satisfy him for some strange reason.

  Jake spent his days sprawled out on the floor of Lester’s shop, working on their story ideas. Jake had convinced Lester to put the novel aside and work out the story as a film script, and he sat on the floor, cast propped up on pillows, with a large board that Lester usually used for cutting up meat on his lap. Twenty large sheets of butcher paper were attached to the top of the board; each sheet was divided into six sections, and each section represented a page or approximately one minute of running time.

  Jake and Lester argued over the relative merits of each plot point and every subtle change in the character’s growth. Jake wrote in pencil, often rubbed out whole scenes with a fat pink eraser while holding the pencil in his teeth. Sometimes at night he lay on his pad listening to the wind in the trees; somehow they didn’t sound as lonely as he’d once imagined they would.

  As the days went by, Jake could see that he and Lester were shaping something original and unexpected, something that had the feel of the familiar but was, upon second look, completely new. And Jake forgot about the ranch above Santa Monica; he forgot about dot-com holdings and real estate. All he thought about was Lester’s story and the strange transformation of the beautiful land mass now called North America.

  Lester sometimes sketched out scenes or props that Jake couldn’t visualize, and Jake would tape them onto his flopping butcher papers. The manuscript grew; he’d forgotten about his other script ideas and never even mentioned Till Death Do Us Part. Since that ugly dog had nearly torn his arm off, he’d learned something about himself: he was a natural critic. He was such a good critic, in fact, that he couldn’t bear to work on his own ideas, and it finally became clear to him that he was the kind of writer who enjoyed talking about his stories but couldn’t really bear to be in their company. A husband-and-wife hit team going in for marriage counseling was a good idea as long as it stayed an idea, but just the thought of trying to write it up started to make him sick because his first impulse always had been, and always would be, to rip ideas to shreds.

  In Lester, he found the perfect partner. Lester was a fountain of ideas, most of which were terrible, Jake had to admit, but for some reason having a terrible idea didn’t seem to bother Lester or impede his progress. He just kept on spinning out new ones.

  Lester had a definite point of view. It was hard for Jake to understand this, but Lester was somebody, as opposed to most of the people he’d met in the movies who had only wanted to be somebody.

  Even if Jake had been willing to risk the possibility that the police were still looking for him, he didn’t have enough money to travel very far. As it was, Clive footed most of his expenses: food, coffee, and medical treatment. In the end, though, it was neither the lack of money nor the fear of the cops that kept him in town.

  There was something amorphous about the place, about the smell of the wood stove and the clattering sound of the carts in which people carried their groceries up and down the boardwalk. As hard as this was for him to admit, Cold Storage was a place his father would have chosen for himself. Jake could imagine his old man sitting at the corner of the bar or wrestling a big fish up the dock to show his cronies, and when he thought of such things Jake’s body became somehow more solid, as if there were something in his chest besides his bruises that made him feel like he didn’t want to muster the energy to move on.

  Jake liked the easy rituals of the days in Cold Storage: coffee, work, visiting with people who seemed to spend their afternoons wandering along the boardwalk. He looked forward to walking down to the Love Nest every evening at nine o’clock. Once in a great while, Lester would come along, too, would drink coffee and listen to old records with him. It was on such a night in the middle of November, that an event happened that would change everything in Cold Storage for years to come.

  The first real snow of the year was falling on the boardwalk, and the only footprints to be seen were those of Lester and Jake. Inside the bar, Ed played pool with the young visiting Lutheran minister, and Clive listened to Charlie Parker records. Visibility had been down in all directions, and no planes had landed in the inlet for three days. Weasel had come into the bar earlier to say that a small boat had tied up to the dock. “Who’d be wandering around in weather as crappy as this?” he’d asked.

  Lester was lifting his coffee cup to his lips and bouncing his head to the looping sax of Ornithology when the door of the Love Nest opened. In a perfect cinematographic moment, the falling snow on the boardwalk made a silhouette of two figures standing there in the doorway.

  Little Brother looked up and growled.

  Bonnie Sue Mellon and Billy Cox walked in with packs on their backs and pushing padded cases on pieces of plywood in front of them. They’d come in answer to the ad for a new house band.

  Clive sounded stunned. “There’s never been an ad,” he said.

  “Then there shouldn’t be much competition for the job,” said Bonnie and put her amplifier down next to the bar.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  “YOU ARE GOING to have to play before I sign you on,” Clive said to the group. “I’m mighty fond of this record machine.”

  The band didn’t hear much; they were busy searching for electrical outlets and a place to set up. Nix was taking off her coat, looking for a hook on which to hang it. She had a gold stud through her lower lip and a golden rose through one nostril; her short golden brown hair shimmered with blue highlights, and to Clive, she looked like a fairy child sneaking into his bar to warm up before flying out of a window, back into the forest.

/>   “Hey, puppy!” she squealed and leaned down beside the ugly dog.

  “I really wouldn’t …” Clive started, but she was already on the floor, Little Brother’s head in her arms. She was hugging him as if he were a childhood toy. “… do that …” Clive’s voice trailed off.

  The dog’s eyes drooped serenely. He was panting, and his tongue lolled out the side of his face.

  “You are just a big lover, aren’t you? Just a lover …” Nix was cooing and hugging him close.

  Little Brother’s spotted tongue licked her face, and she rocked back laughing, wiping her cheek on her sleeve.

  “Yuck, sloppy kisses on our first date!” She stood up, still laughing, while Clive watched her in amazement. “I’m Nix,” she said. “I’m the bass player. You’re going to love the band.” She held out her hand.

  “Do you have this kind of effect on all animals?” Clive motioned to Little Brother, standing next to Nix now, looking up at her with adoration.

  “Oh yeah,” she said. “I’m an animal person. A big animal person.” She took back her hand from Clive, who seemed to have taken temporary possession of it.

  “Then you should go over well in this place.” Clive kept staring at her.

  She looked around the room and smiled winningly at the three patrons. “Oh yeah, I think we’re going to be good for business. Definitely.” She held out her hand again. “I’m Nix, by the way.”

  “We’ve already done this, you know, Nix.” Clive held onto her hand again, though.

  “That’s right, we have.” She held on and smiled. “We have.”

  Lester called, “Did you say your name was Nix?”

  “That’s right,” she replied.

  “That’s really funny because I think Clive has your name tattooed on his ass.” The Indian carver-turned-screenwriter eyed them over the lip of his coffee cup.

  “Really?” Nix turned to Clive with an interested twinkle in her eyes, and for the first time since he could remember, he started to blush.

  “No … not really … he’s just fooling around.” He picked up a clean glass, started wiping it down with a dirty bar rag. “Don’t listen to him.”

  But she pointed her index finger at him and winked. “More about this later,” she said, and picked up her bass, bringing it over to the corner of the room where her bandmates were setting up. Little Brother followed close on her heels.

  “You are cut off,” Clive hissed at Lester.

  “That’s fine by me,” he said, and rapped his coffee cup down on the bar. “I’ll never get to sleep as it is anyway.”

  THE ORCHESTRA FROM the SS Universe had been fired in Vancouver after a spectacular fight with the cruise director. They had been playing livelier and livelier music and been making continuous, subtle modifications to their costumes until Nix was wearing Billy’s tuxedo and Billy was wearing a strapless evening gown. The two of them had been racing through a medley of songs by The Talking Heads. This was grounds to terminate their contract, proclaimed the director, but the union got them the rest of their season’s salary and part of the next season’s as a severance package. They decided to start a new dance band. This had been Billy’s idea, and he’d been working out the details even as he’d zipped up the back of his gown.

  So now they were a seven-piece band: bass, drums, guitar, saxophone, trombone, trumpet, and vocals. Bonnie, their manager, insisted they find a “wood shedding gig,” that is to say, a place where they could work on their sound away from the public eye. This was important. They were looking at forming a band that crystallized the cross-influences of swing, The Squirrel Nut Zippers, and the Canadian folk tradition, with perhaps some spare kind of New York electronica reminiscent of Arthur Russell. Nix had been playing her bass with a bow. Bonnie said that the band was shooting for a kind of hep-cat hallucinatory maritime swing sound, and they already had a name: Blind Donkey.

  They’d spent some of their severance money on a portable sound system, and in a matter of minutes they were set up in the corner behind the pool table and launching into their first number. They were a bit ragged at first. Because they wanted to impress the owner, they ripped into a swing version of “Sailor’s Hornpipe,” but their fingers were cold and the horn section slurred a little, so they bailed out of it after the second set of changes and pushed on into a ska version of “The Wreck of the Edmond Fitzgerald” that came off quite nicely. Billy sang to the enthusiastic applause of the audience and took a deep bow. He was happy to be home. He smiled at everyone; he even smiled at the pool table and the dog in the corner.

  They played an original composition to close out the audition, an instrumental ballad that Billy introduced as “Love Is the Answer, But What Was the Question?” The horns started in together in kind of a minor key fanfare until the saxophone picked up the melody and played it through twice before coming back to the turnaround with the rest of the band. There was something lonely and ardent about the tune; it sounded like a foghorn at night or a train running past a slaughterhouse. It made you sad, but there wasn’t an ounce of self-pity in it. It said that this life is just too goddamn short, and we’re lucky to be here. This was the song Mouse Miller would have wanted to dance to, the melody he would have been humming while he pinned dollar bills on the rotten ceiling of the abandoned bar.

  Miles walked in during the middle of the ballad and stopped short. He didn’t even close the door. He was surprised to see a live band, surprised to see so many strangers, surprised to see Billy back from the sea. But mostly, he was surprised to hear a strange and affecting melody coming from the saxophone.

  “How do you like the new house band?” asked Clive.

  “They’ll do.” Miles didn’t want to talk. “They’ll do all right.”

  Bonnie was leaning against the door, watching the band, watching them make all the changes she’d heard them rehearse a hundred times, and she smiled. Not everything is an accident, she thought.

  The song ended. Bonnie applauded along with everyone else as the band nodded, took their bows. Rick kissed his saxophone and walked to the bar.

  Lester, Jake, and the minister stood around Billy; Lester made introductions, and the minister slapped Billy on the back. Ed talked with Nix as she wiped down her bass guitar and unplugged the cord. Clive looked at his ledger and tried to total up some numbers.

  And Bonnie turned to Miles, since they were the only two people in the place who weren’t engaged in something else. “I’m Bonnie Sue Mellon,” she said, and Miles introduced himself.

  “You know the guy who runs this place?” she asked.

  “He’s my brother. But don’t take that as it sounds. I’m not really that familiar with him.”

  Bonnie squinted at Miles, tried to figure out if he was serious or not. “Think he’ll give us a job?”

  “He’ll give you work,” he said. Ed was laughing at something with Nix, and Clive appeared to notice.

  “Will he be sneaky and try and screw us over?” Bonnie was conscious of how she sounded, but she was taking her managerial position seriously.

  “No. If anything, he’ll screw you right up front. Are you their manager?”

  “It sounds lame, doesn’t it? Manager.” She shrugged and wrinkled her nose. “Did you know people in high school who were managers of things? Manager of the fencing team, manager of the chess club.” She turned her head away in a sudden spasm of embarrassment.

  “You know it’s not the same thing, being the manager of a band. These guys are really good. How in the world did you get hooked up with Billy?”

  “I pulled him out of the ocean.” She didn’t look at Miles.

  “Now see? That’s not lame. Those guys in high school didn’t have answers like that.”

  “It’s true, you know. He had fallen out of his kayak. I’m the one who pulled him out,” she said. “I’m not kidding.”

  “I know you’re not kidding.” They walked over to the bar, and he rapped the bar for service. “And I for one would like to thank
you for bringing him home. Now, what would you like?”

  “I’d like to meet the owner.” She watched Clive walk toward them, and she held out her hand.

  Clive was the older brother and as such had always felt superior in the biological sense; that is, he never gave much thought to his younger brother as they were growing up. When Miles was toddling around the living room, Clive was playing in the woods up behind the house. When Miles played T-ball, Clive was in Little League. When Clive was a criminal, Miles was a student. It wasn’t until now, as this young woman walked toward him, that Clive realized that he didn’t want to be out ahead of Miles.

  Bonnie and Clive bantered back and forth about what Clive would be willing to offer Blind Donkey in the way of remuneration. She tried to smile but kept nervously brushing her hair back; a poker player would’ve called it her “tell.” Clive nodded and tried to look serious while tapping on the closed ledger book.

  Miles knew that Clive was reaching the end of the money that he’d sewn into the lining of his coat. He knew that there had to be some new source of income soon.

  Business in the autumn was lively but hardly profitable, even in a small town of alcoholics. And the truth was that Clive wasn’t catering to the alcoholics. There was too much sunlight in the bar during the day and too much laughter at night. The hard drinkers stayed at home drinking in their caves where no one could see them, and they didn’t have to deal with the world.

  But it was December, and no one could pay for a seven-piece band in a town like this. Then again, it was December, and Miles hoped that they stayed.

  He looked at Bonnie dickering with his brother, and he smiled. She had a nice way of being forceful, as if she really were looking out for your best interests even as she tried to put forward her own agenda.