Cold Storage, Alaska

by John Straley

  They finished scouring the rocks, put the plug back in, and scrubbed the decking around the tub as it filled with fresh water, then sat in the clean water on the freshly scrubbed rocks and enjoyed the product of their labor for a few moments.

  Miles swept the floor of the dressing room and Bonnie got dressed, then she folded some towels for the lost and found as Miles got dressed. The job was done, and they looked around. A silence overtook them as if the door to the dressing room opened up onto a busy city street, and they didn’t want to walk out there just yet. Bonnie reached up on a shelf where someone had left some hair bands wrapped around a pair of reading glasses. She stretched the hair bands between Miles’s fingers and plucked them with her thumb.

  “Come by the club tonight. They are going to be working on some new material,” she said. “It’s good. Some really wild arrangements of Stan Rogers songs, kind of sea shanty swing.” She nudged his shoulder with hers and smiled. “Don’t be glum.”

  “I’m not glum,” said Miles. “I’m just not ready to go outside, you know, to work and everything.”

  “What would you rather do?” she asked.

  “I would rather watch you clean those rocks,” he said seriously.

  “You were watching me?” She laughed. “My God, Miles, I thought you were a professional.”

  Miles started to lean away from her, embarrassed, but she stepped forward and kissed him and he could feel the heat of the earth through her clothes as they held on to each other in a long kiss, until they heard footsteps coming toward the door. It was time to open the bathhouse for men’s hours. There was a knock on the door, but Bonnie and Miles kept hugging each other in their damp clothes, each of them wanting just one more second.

  The knocking came again, and Miles said, “I better get that, or they just might break it down.” He went over and unlocked the door, and there was Lester, standing in sweatpants and slippers with a towel slung over his shoulder. He stared at them, and they picked up their towels, got ready to go. His eyes scanned them: Miles, then Bonnie, then back to Miles.

  “I’m glad you two finally got together,” he said. “Is it like official now, or do you want me to keep it on the QT?” Lester smiled. It might have been the most perfect smile of irony that Miles had ever seen.

  THEY WALKED THE boardwalk down to the Love Nest through snowflakes floating like dust motes. Bonnie slipped her warm hand into Miles’s, and he squeezed softly but let go.

  The bar was dark, a CLOSED sign hanging in the door. Miles rapped against the glass, tried the handle and they walked in, flipped on the one set of lights behind the bar. Little Brother raised his head from his bed and growled but only halfheartedly.

  “I think this dog trusts women,” Miles said. He looked around the bar. Where was Clive?

  “I’m not saying a thing about this dog and who he trusts or does not trust.” Bonnie eased around the other side of the bar away from the dog, but his eyes followed her and his chest heaved gently like a bellows with the fire banked down.

  “Clive?” his brother said, and shined a beam of light around the room. He spoke to Bonnie. “He said he needed me to sign some papers.” The beam of light landed on a missing ceiling panel with a ladder standing underneath. They stopped to listen.

  No sound.

  And then a bump in the attic. Little Brother was up off his pad, standing beside the ladder, and growling up into the mouth of the hole in the ceiling. Miles started to climb but he heard scuffling along the rafters; he held the flashlight high above his head and away from his body in case it attracted the wrong kind of attention … or he had to use it as a club. The ugly dog roared, and Miles jumped up the ladder, two rungs at a time, shining the light toward the rustling.

  There was nothing to see at first, just a series of forms stacked along the rafters. Then he saw the top of Weasel’s head, poking out from between a dozen or so bales of marijuana.

  “Some fucking lookout you are!” yelled Weasel.

  Little Brother barked and lay back dwn on his pad by the door.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  THE NEXT MORNING, Tina wrote a letter to the school board asking for an extended period of unpaid leave to last for an indefinite period of time. She walked up the boardwalk, dropped the letter on the counter of the city office, and asked Betty to give it to the school board. She walked down the ramp to the floatplane dock, swung her small daypack up to the pilot, climbed into the back seat, and flew away.

  Ed was at the clinic within half an hour. Miles was there waiting for a kid who had phoned ahead to tell him, very loudly, that he had a peanut stuck in his ear.

  “Jesus, Miles, you could at least have told me you were sleeping with my wife!”

  Miles sat at his desk, stared out the window overlooking the harbor. The southerly weather had come in overnight and rain was falling on the snow, turning the ramps and floats of the harbor into rutted runways of slush.

  “Ed, I’ve got someone coming to see me in five minutes. I don’t have time to get into this with you.”

  “So you are not denying it?” His face was flushed, his leather boots were soaked, and he looked like he was hot and cold at the same time.

  “I’m saying I can’t get into this right now. Come back at five. We’ll go have a cup of coffee and you can yell at me all you want, and I’ll tell you everything I know about this situation.”

  “Shit!” Ed blurted. “You know that Trooper Brown? He called me. He’s coming out here tomorrow. I’m going to fucking tell him everything. You know, I’m going to tell him everything about Weasel and the marijuana.” He stormed out and slammed the door.

  Miles felt the echo as he watched rainwater streaming off the icicles hanging from the eaves. Maybe he should have told Ed that he had never slept with Tina, but it wouldn’t have helped. Ed would have blustered and fought, and he would have still been arguing when Mark White walked through the door to have Miles take a look in his right ear.

  When Mark was four years old, he’d had a raisin lodged up his nasal passage for “an unspecified number of weeks,” according to his old medical records. Miles was curious to see what might be lodged down Mark’s ear now and didn’t want the kid scared off by the sight of an angry teacher screaming at the only health care provider in sixty miles.

  Ed could wait. In fact, Miles thought it might be a good idea all round if Ed thought he had been sleeping with Tina. If word was out that Miles was sleeping with Tina, the local judgment against him would be harsh, but if it were followed by the rumor that he was actually sleeping with Bonnie, then he would be redeemed and brought back into the fold without ever having done a thing. This was the backfire theory of gossip, and Miles had seen it successfully applied on a number of occasions.

  But the idea of Ray Brown coming back to Cold Storage was worrying him. There were bails of marijuana in the rafters of the bar, and it wouldn’t take much of a drug dog to sniff it out; there were probably patrons of the Love Nest who were coming in there just for the contact high.

  Fine, Miles thought, let him come. Search warrants and evidence teams, lawyers and plenty of gossip, his only brother being flown out of town in handcuffs—there was nothing Miles was going to try and do about it. He had to get a peanut out of a kid’s head.

  Mark claimed to have no idea how a cocktail peanut had wedged itself into his ear, and Miles didn’t press him for a confession; he just flushed it out with baby oil and a soft plastic probe, got the papery peanut skin out with warm water, and sent Mark scrambling out the door to meet his sledding buddies. In Cold Storage, the snow season was so short that kids were willing to put up with the regional challenge of snowboarding through slush.

  Miles was in his office when Jake arrived.

  “Where’s your receptionist, for God’s sake?” he called down the hall.

  “She’s on vacation.”

  “Really?” His voice was headed for Miles’s office. “How long has she been gone?”

  “I don’t know.” Miles
didn’t look up from his desk. “I think she went to Disneyland sometime in the winter of 1979. No one has heard from her since.”

  “I can see why. They’ve added a lot of good stuff in Disneyland.” Jake pulled up a chair and sat down, his blue sling visible under a wool coat of Lester’s.

  Miles finished up his report on Mark. “Are you getting tired of our idyllic little corner of the world?”

  “I’ve lived in worse spots.”

  “You aren’t interested in getting back to your old life?”

  “Which old life you talking about?”

  “Your glamorous life of crime.”

  “You know, Miles, I don’t care how good Quentin Tarantino makes it look. Crime sucks.” Jake had refused to go into Sitka for treatment. He’d cut his cast off months ago. He and Lester had fashioned a unique type of binding/sling arrangement that still bedeviled him with itching and periodic rashes. He flopped down in the clinic chair and started poking a knitting needle he had brought with him down into his binding.

  “How so?” Miles set the notepad down and looked at Jake, watched him scratch his arm.

  “Too much stress. And you have to deal with too many assholes.” Jake closed his eyes and moaned slightly as he scratched under the calico fabric he had bought from Tina.

  “Isn’t the money good?”

  “You know how much you can make on one of those friggin’ spaceship movies?”

  “Which spaceship movie?” asked Miles.

  “Christ, pick one!” Jake kept scratching. “A ton of fucking money. Even a bad spaceship movie is better money than cocaine, and the best part is people love you. They point you out to their kids. Waiters are genuinely nice and ask for your autograph. That kind of shit doesn’t happen to Pablo Escobar.” Jake withdrew the knitting needle and inspected it as if expecting to find some strange organism stuck on the end of it. “At least not in America, and who the fuck wants to be famous in Columbia, no matter how much money you’ve got?”

  Miles wheeled over on his chair and started inspecting Jake’s arm and gently unwinding the packaging.

  “That is true,” Jake continued. “Trust me. Not many people make it. But that’s the same in crime. Shit, crime is a lot more competitive, and of course the competition is a lot rougher.” Jake pantomimed a pistol to his head. “But this script. I can feel it, Miles. This script Lester and I have got going. It’s bankable. I’m telling you it has what people are looking for: humor, social comment, great characters, and fresh action.”

  “You got an ending that is satisfying? That’s my big problem with most movies.” Miles watched Jake’s face as he rotated his shoulder.

  “Fucking endings. Ouch! Christ, that still hurts!” Jake tried to get his damaged limb back from the PA.

  “That’s because you have a torn rotator cuff. You are going to have to have that looked at when you get somewhere with a good hospital. You can tell them you did it playing softball.”

  “Yeah, softball … Let me ask you something: do you think Lester is stubborn?”

  “Lester?” Miles looked amazed. “I don’t know quite how to answer that. I’ve never heard of him apologizing or ever changing his mind, but I guess that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s stubborn. He may be the one person who is always right.”

  “This guy! He’s a genius. He comes up with things that I couldn’t in a million years, you know what I’m saying? He’s like a pipeline directly into some deep fucking well or something. But he doesn’t know how to piece the stuff together. I mean, if it were up to Lester this would be a six-hour picture. I’m begging him to cut, and then I go on and he forgets about what he wanted. But this ending, he won’t cut it and he won’t forget it. I’m telling you, this ending is just not going to work, and I can’t get him to budge.”

  “What’s the problem?” Miles started wiping down the pale white and discolored yellow skin of Jake’s arm with an antiseptic lotion and a disposable wipe.

  “In the last shot he wants everybody, all the characters, every single one, to turn into animals.” Jake stared straight into Miles’s eyes.

  “And there is a problem with that?”

  “This is an action picture. Can you imagine the look on the face of some studio big shot when I try to pitch the ending? Christ, I mean, we do something like that, we might as well make a movie about trees or something. I don’t know. I might have to go back into crime.” Jake raised his good hand to his forehead.

  “You say Lester is good at his script ideas?”

  “He’s the best I’ve ever come across. I mean it.” Jake reached out and touched Miles’s elbow as he made his point.

  “Then do the ending his way, wait a bit, and read it back to him. If it’s stupid, he’ll know how to finish it. But my advice is not to try to fight him. It’s a no-win proposition.”

  “I believe you are right.” Jake stood up. “But I’ve got too much time invested here to come up empty. You know what I’m saying?”

  “Yes, I do,” Miles ushered Jake out the door. “There’s a cop coming to town tomorrow. He’s an Alaskan state trooper. I just thought I’d tell you in case you’ve got something you might be worried about.”

  In the waiting room, Jake stood by the window, looking at the boats in the harbor. “I’m not in on that action. Shit … all that pot, having it dumped in the ocean side and bringing it back here to dry out. What’s he going to do with it now? He needs a better business model. But I ain’t giving it to him.”

  “Why don’t I ever hear about this important stuff? I hear all the bullshit, but when a member of my own family is committing multiple felonies no one says a word. Didn’t you ever think of telling me?”

  “No,” replied Jake.

  “What do you think I should do? About Clive and all this pot?”

  Jake still stared out the window. “I don’t know. Maybe we’ll smoke some and all just turn into animals,” he said, and his breath made an ovoid circle of fog on the windowpane.

  Miles gave him some ointment for the itching and started saying something about obstructing justice and the possibility of going to jail, but Jake was lost in thought. “Yeah,” he said absently, “we just need a good ending.”

  GLORIA BALLISTER CAME to see Miles every other week because she felt terrible. She weighed 285 pounds, smoked two packs of cigarettes a day, and easily drank a fifth of vodka every two days. Her husband was a heavy drinker, and she had stopped trying to get him to cut back. They lived out past the end of the boardwalk in a damp cabin with broken fishing gear piled in front: nets with holes and rusty haulers moldering into the moss.

  Gloria was sick. Miles had given her everything he could think of in the way of practical health advice. She had boxes of books and pamphlets on everything from weight loss to sobriety. She had an oxygen bottle to help her breathe even though it was not strictly necessary, and she had gotten this on her own; she said the oxygen made her feel better, and Miles didn’t dispute it.

  Gloria wouldn’t get up on the scales anymore. She came to the clinic to talk about her aches and pains; she came to ask questions about getting her stomach stapled; but mostly, Miles was convinced, she came just to get out of her cabin, have some human contact.

  “Your color looks better this week, Gloria,” Miles said. “Have you tried to walk a little more each day, like we talked about?”

  She overflowed the small chair in the exam room, her arms folded awkwardly high up on her chest as if her body was trying to pinch them off. Her red eyes sank back into the folds of her face. She slurred her words, she was drunk, and everything about her spoke of unhappiness.

  Miles had tried to be stern with her. He threatened not to see her at the clinic unless she flew in to Sitka and had a full screening, started taking responsibility for her health. She missed a few scheduled visits after that, and Miles got a call from a neighbor up the trail that Gloria hadn’t been seen outside. He went and found her, lying on a filthy pad on the floor, her ankle badly sprained, blood and vomit
smeared across her face; her husband sprawled unconscious on the bed in the middle of the room, his white belly extended like a corpse. Miles got a wheelchair, stopped her nose from bleeding, and made sure her ankle was propped up. She’d cried as they bumped down the trail to the boardwalk and as they’d trundled along to the clinic; Miles had let her spend the night there.

  “You’ve just got to be ready, Doc,” she said to Miles. “You’ve got to be ready before any change will come.”

  “What can we do, Gloria?” He spoke in a soft voice and patted her on the shoulder. “What will it take to get you ready for that change?”

  “I don’t know, Doc.” She wheezed, touched his fingers. “Maybe I am as ready as I’ll ever be.”

  So Miles let her visit the clinic every other week, and he tried to say something to inspire her to fly to Sitka. Every week he talked about a new diet plan or told her stories of people who had turned their lives around. She picked apart every suggestion, waved them away as if they were flies.

  But Miles knew she was ready for change, ready for the most substantial kind of change. Nothing was going to shake her off her course. She was not going to stop drinking or start exercising, no matter how possible or even easy Miles made it look, and one day he would get a call from a neighbor or her husband might be sober enough to make it down to the clinic. Miles would grab some volunteers and a stretcher and lug Gloria’s empty and unhappy body to the plane for Sitka where they would do a postmortem examination and ship her to the mortuary to be cremated.

  Both Miles and Gloria knew that the day was coming soon, and after acknowledging it with gestures and subtle shifts in the tone they used with each other, they both relaxed. Miles still pestered her, but gently, and she still came to see him; she’d been the first to tell Miles the joke about a patient with only a few minutes to live.