by John Straley
“That’s what I can offer. Does this look like the Copacabana?” said Clive.
Bonnie looked around. The band had more than doubled the population in the bar. Now that the music had stopped, Lester and Jake were putting their coats on and were getting ready to leave. Ed was deep in conversation with Nix, and the minister had already gone home. It was Saturday night.
“This bar looks like a place that really needs a band,” she said.
“I couldn’t agree more,” said Clive, “and so here is my offer. You all can live with me up at the house. There’s a small cabin out back we can turn into an extra room. I’ll provide dinner every night and a five-dollar bar tab per player. You play a minimum of Thursdays through Mondays, and if we start turning a profit on a weekly basis, I’ll give you a percentage of the bar. If we start turning a profit. Which we might have a shot at between Christmas and New Year’s. That’s all I can do.”
Billy came up, whispered something in Bonnie’s ear. She nodded and turned back to Clive. “The band can buy food and supplies in Juneau, and you will pay the shipping. And you’ll let me look at the books so I can see for myself when you start turning a profit.”
Clive smiled and shook his head. “She’s tough, Billy. You’re lucky she was there when you dumped your sorry butt into the ocean.” He held out his hand but quickly added, “No special flights. I’ll pay your freight as long as it’s coming out with the supplies for the bar.”
Bonnie glanced back; Billy shrugged, nodded. She shook Clive’s hand, and it was done: Blind Donkey was the official house band for Mouse Miller’s Love Nest.
Clive brought out a bottle of champagne someone had given him when the bar opened. He’d had it buried down in the ice machine, but now he started pouring it into beer glasses while the band members came surging toward the bar.
“And,” said Clive as if proposing a toast, “I want you to play that last song, that instrumental, every night at closing.”
Blind Donkey raised their beer steins of champagne to their great good fortune.
“Love is the answer,” toasted Nix.
“Hear, hear!” came the answer from the bar.
They drank their champagne, and the band started to unplug. Clive chatted with the horn section about creating a small riser on which they could play; they were pacing off distances in the bar and looking for a new place for the pool table. Nix came up to Bonnie and Miles, Little Brother still beside her. The ugly dog was apparently keeping Ed at a respectable distance.
“So we’re good to go?” asked Nix.
“Looks like it,” Bonnie said.
“Ed—I think he’s the biology teacher or something—said he could show me where we’re staying. He also said he’d take me out kayaking tomorrow, if that’s cool with you.” Her voice was tentative, as if she didn’t really know if she needed to ask permission but wanted to all the same.
“Sounds good, just be careful, okay? Crazy things happen kayaking around here.” Bonnie smiled.
“I’m nothing if not careful.” Nix headed for the door, and Ed held it open for her. Just as she got to the threshold, though, she bent down and cupped the ugly dog’s massive head in her arms, kissed him on the top of his coffin-shaped snout. “Good night, puppy,” she cooed to him. She waved gaily to the room, winked at Little Brother, and walked out the door with Ed. She was gone, but something of her still lingered, like an echoing bell.
Little Brother stood flat-footed, contemplating the door for a full minute, then walked slowly over to his pad, let out a low groan, and flopped down, hitting his lower jaw on the floor. He let out another long breath, a sigh which sounded for all the world like a moan.
“Oh, just great!” groaned Clive.
“What?” Miles asked him.
“Just what I need now. A love-sick bouncer.”
THE NEXT DAY Ed met Nix down near the floatplane dock. He’d carried the kayaks there so she would have an easier time getting in. It was still snowing, but there was not a breath of wind. The snowflakes fell silently into the milky green sea.
Nix, already bundled with a hat, a pair of mittens, and a fleece coat, put on the float vest Ed gave her. She listened to a few instructions on paddling and some reassurances: the water was very cold but they weren’t going far, and there wouldn’t be any need for sudden movements. She sat in the little slipper of a boat awkwardly but when she pushed away from the dock, she felt as if she were suspended in air. She moved as easily as a cloud gliding through the sky while snow gathered on her hat, on her mittens, on her kayak.
Ed got into his boat and paddled toward the wharf of the inner harbor. He loved showing people the world around Cold Storage. He especially wanted to show Nix everything there was to see; he wanted to talk his head off. He wanted to explain about the rain forest and the tidal environments, the rivers that flowed into the inlet. He wanted to tell her everything about the place, and as he dipped his paddle into the green, he started thinking of every story he knew: the stories about deer and bear and salmon, the stories about the black cod and the shorebirds and the diving ducks. He wanted to tell her everything all at once. But he had sense enough not to talk.
The tide was approaching the low water mark, so he was able to paddle under the wharf of the old cannery building into a forest of tarred pilings. Some were cocked at odd angles. Water dripped from a broken water pipe, and everything sounded cavernous. Alongside them, a few gulls paddled about, making a clucking sound as they swam, nodding back and forth, searching for the small fish darting beneath the surface. Further away, some gulls swam on the surface, riding the tide back up the poles to fresh feeding areas. Others stayed by the pilings, picked at encrusted mussels. Red starfish clung to the sides of the pilings and below them drooped flaccid sea anemones. Just under the surface, Nix could see anemones coming to life, billowing like silk flowers in the water.
Ed pointed toward the back of the wharf near the shoreline where the shadows were the darkest. She looked back at him and saw a heron that had been watching them let out a great yawp and lumber into flight. The bird seemed prehistoric as it flew over, its long neck stretching out, its nearly six-foot wingspan beating the air in half-stalled flight. The heron pulled itself awkwardly through the pilings, but once clear of the wharf, it lengthened out into a steady rhythm, flying through the falling snow. Nix laughed and pointed after it with a clumsy mittened hand.
They paddled for another hour, drifting slowly along the shoreline, watching river otters darting up the beach, coming upon a seal that watched them with curious human eyes. Nix loved everything she saw but she started to shiver, and Ed suggested they paddle hard to help warm up on the way back to the dock.
Ed was full of things he wanted to tell Nix. He wanted to tell her about his students and about the projects he’d planned for them; he wanted to tell her about the age of the short raker rockfish and about collecting smolts in the streams in spring. Nix held the aura of the exotic. Ed looked at her and felt a door opening. He didn’t know where this door led or who might be on the other side, but it didn’t seem like a problem. He just looked at her and felt opportunity, felt that if he passed it up now he might never get another chance. He hadn’t expected this fullness in his heart and he knew it was both stupid and dangerous, but he hadn’t been in love long enough with Tina to know that he should be taking the small feelings of restraint more seriously.
Nix was awed. She was grateful and flushed and looked for all the world as if she were in love, but she wasn’t, not with Ed anyway.
It was this place, this forest in the sea, and it was the experience of paddling through the snow. She’d thought that Ed might have a crush on her, but that wasn’t unexpected. Many men fell in love with the bass player; bass was a sexy instrument. And it was easy enough to shake men off in bars. There was always lots of space to fade into, and other people to fade away with. But this morning, as she paddled back to the dock and looked at the tiny village, at how much it looked like a little town inside on
e of those snow globes, she realized that her tactics had better change.
The bow of her boat bumped the dock, and Ed was already out of his own and ready to help her tie up.
“That was amazing,” she said. “Thanks, Ed, I’ll never forget it.”
“Aw, don’t worry about it.” He was slapping his gloves together and shifting from foot to foot. “Listen, I have a sauna out in back of my place. I was thinking of getting it warmed up later. You all could come. You could bring the whole band by. We could eat something, take a sauna, you know, get warmed up.”
“That might be great. I’ll ask the guys. Would we get to meet your wife?” Nix beamed wholesomely. She didn’t want her question to sound like a sleazy accusation; she wanted to sound casually friendly, but she saw Ed’s expression change.
“Yeah … yeah … you could meet Tina, and we could take a sauna. That would be great. Maybe in an hour or so the sauna will be hot.”
“You know, Ed, I think I’m going to pass this time. We’re talking about getting the stage set up and getting our gear and set list together. Why don’t you bring Tina to the club tonight? We’ll meet her there. I tell you what, the drinks will be on me. We can talk about a sauna then.”
“Sure … good.” For a moment Ed started to despair in the way only desperate lovers do. But then it occurred to him that she was saying she wanted to see him again, and he was buoyed by blissful optimism in the way only desperate lovers can be.
“Yeah, great, I’ll see you tonight then,” and he waved as she walked up the ramp to the boardwalk.
The great blue heron had flown up to the top of one of the light poles in the harbor, had settled there to survey the vastness of the inlet. It watched Ed stuff the spray skirts into the boats and Nix walk up the ramp and the entire world fill up with snow.
Back at Clive’s house, the rest of the band was just waking up. Bonnie was making scrambled eggs, and Rick was cutting up green onions; Clive was standing in front of the window drinking a cup of coffee; Earl the drummer was wrapped in his sleeping bag on the couch watching It’s a Wonderful Life on television. He’d worked a week in a rhythm and blues band in Victoria and got tired of it; he’d turned down a salsa band in Winnipeg; he’d decided to follow the band to Alaska.
“Man, I hate that fucking Mr. Potter,” he said. “I mean, the man has that fucking eight thousand dollars. It pisses me off every time I see this movie. I tell you he’d be missing something more than his legs if I worked at that bank. You can believe that!”
“They needed you in Bedford Falls, man,” Rick called out from the kitchen.
“Damn,” said Earl. He got up and ambled to the kitchen in his underwear. “I’d get Uncle Billy his eight grand long before they have to have that party and shit.” He cocked his thumb and pointed his forefinger at the side of Rick’s head. Rick laughed and scraped the green onions into the eggs.
Earl was showing off for Clive, and the other band members knew this. They knew Earl was always a lot more “black” around club owners, a sort of defense mechanism or something. They liked him both ways, but they knew he wasn’t really “street.” He came from a wealthy family in Toronto with a father who was an orthodontist and a mother who taught piano in their home. Before attending Oberlin, he’d studied at McGill. Before that he’d probably been a hockey player. He was a hell of a good drummer, and Rick wanted to hold onto him.
Billy was down on his boat checking his gear. Weasel had promised to look after things and he’d done the minimum, but the old boat felt cold and dank. Mildew had set in on the pads and the bedding; rainwater had started to leak in from the top of the house next to the radar pulpit. Nothing feels as cold as an old wooden vessel that’s been left unattended; it’s a bone-cold that goes all the way through you. Billy sat on the edge of his bunk and wondered what he was doing back in Cold Storage. As soon as he’d walked onto the boat, his old life had come up and hit him in the face. His old life felt like this boat. It was cold, cramped, and impractical. It took a force of will to enter the dream world of Cold Storage, and Billy didn’t know if he had the strength to reclaim that life. He didn’t know if he wanted to.
He rummaged around, trying to get the stove started so he could at least get the stink out of the bedding. He unpacked some of the gear he’d brought along from Vancouver, found The Tibetan Book of the Dead, and held it in his hands for a few moments before putting it back in his pack. He turned off the oil stove, plugged in an old heat lamp that worked off of the shore power, grabbed everything that wasn’t mildewed, and trudged back to the boardwalk. He would live in the house with Bonnie and the band.
Billy’s old life was gone; it had left him when he went into the water off the coast. It was yet to be seen what his new life would be or to whom it belonged, but one thing was certain. It didn’t belong on this boat in the winter.
THE WINTER EASED along from one dark day to the next. Lester and Jake worked on their script, and Blind Donkey played at the Love Nest. Trooper Brown was apparently off chasing crooks in some other part of the state because no one in town reported any contacts.
For two weeks in January, the snow piled up along the boardwalk until a northern high pressure system stalled over the outside coast. The clear skies brought temperatures in the low teens, and the town was encrusted in a frosting of snow. The school children got out early to go skating up on the little lake behind the main water supply for the fish plant. Ed took the kids up there, but Tina stayed in school, preparing lessons.
A few fishermen came in with winter king salmon, and a local diver hauled king crab up from the inlet. After Christmas, the café started offering a “Feast of Kings” buffet on Sunday mornings. It featured crab, crab omelets, eggs any style, poached salmon, and bagels flown in from Juneau; it cost twenty-five dollars a head but was all you could eat, at least until something ran out.
The Sunday morning buffet became a regular event for the band after their Saturday night gigs. If they could make it to the café before eleven o’clock in the morning, they could count on having a meal that lasted them the rest of the day. They were under contract to play a full set on Sunday after the church service and usually rehearsed Sunday evenings while the regulars listened, playing records between sets.
Miles finished off his crab omelets and watched kids bundled in hats and gloves run along the boardwalk. Their toboggans slipped along behind them and through the windows—steamed up from the coffee urn, which had overflowed earlier in the morning—they looked like Christmas decorations. Miles was content.
He drank the last of his tea and was about to get up when Tina came in the door. She smiled at the waitress and waved at the two other people sitting on stools at the counter but walked directly to Miles’s back booth and sat down.
“If I get a divorce, will you be my boyfriend?”
Only a few months ago, before Clive had returned to town and reopened the Love Nest, Miles might have answered differently, but now he thought for a moment and asked, “Would you be a Betty or a Veronica kind of girlfriend?”
“Betty or Veronica?”
“You know, like in the Archie comics.” He got up, grabbed another pot of tea from the counter.
She opened the menu. “I’m a Betty. Definitely a Betty.”
“Jeepers, I don’t know. I’ve always been more of a Veronica kind of guy,” said Miles.
“First of all,” she said, leaning in with real urgency, “you are not a Veronica kind of guy. Every man thinks he’s a Veronica kind of guy, and that’s just crap. You want to have sex with Veronica, you might even marry Veronica for her money, but you’ll divorce her and end up with Betty. But whatever. I can change. Betty … Veronica … I can change.” She brushed her hair back from under her collar and sat back in the booth. Clearly irritated now, she went on, “What I want to know is will you be there for me if I got a divorce?” She closed the menu, turned her head, looked at him.
Miles stirred some milk and sugar into his tea and looked down into
the muddy swirls. The kid washing dishes in the kitchen dropped a salad bowl, and someone was swearing at him.
“I don’t think you can change that much,” he said. “I think you just have to be either a Betty or a Veronica. It’s like saying you could become a Reggie or a Moose if you were really a Jughead …”
He stopped mid-sentence, embarrassed now. She stared at him for a long moment. Someone in the kitchen cracked an egg on the hot grill.
“Are you making fun of me?” she said.
“Ah … I don’t think so,” he said through a painful grimace, wishing now he could turn back the conversation like a page of a book.
Clive came in, pulling off his mitts. He looked around, walked over to their booth.
“Which character from the Archie comics do you think I am?” Tina asked, her voice rising.
Clive pulled off his hat, slid in beside Tina, lifted up the lid on the teapot and peered in. “Oh man … Let me think …” He snapped down the lid and looked her up and down three times before speaking again. “She is secretly a Veronica, but she wants the world to think she’s a Betty.” He pulled off the scarf wrapped around his neck, looked at her again for a long moment, then shook his head in confirmation of his own judgment.
Tina was becoming upset. “Fine. I’m a Veronica. Fine. But will you be my boyfriend if I get a divorce?”
Now the cooks were out leaning their elbows on the counter waiting for the answer.
“Wow … This is a different conversation than I thought.” Clive turned and waved to Meredith in the kitchen, got up and walked over to the buffet.
“And I suppose you guys think you’re both Reggies?” Her voice was rising in pitch as if she were about to start screeching for her butler.
“That’s a very Veronica thing to say,” Clive called. He kept loading bagels, cream cheese, and prehistoric-looking crab legs on his plate.
“Yeah,” Miles said, as if he were reappraising Tina in a new light.