by John Straley
“Before you get started, Trooper Brown,” Miles interrupted, “I want you to know that I’m to blame for all this trouble.” He could hear the congregation inside singing “Many Rivers to Cross.”
“Did Ed tell you that Clive was involved in any criminal activities?”
“He said that your brother was importing marijuana. He said he was associating with his former drug lord connection. He said your brother assaulted that old associate.”
Miles spoke politely. “Well, Trooper, first of all, if you have reason to believe that anyone has broken the law, then you should make an arrest. I think you’ll find all the parties here.” He held out his hands toward the congregation as if inviting Ray Brown into the church and continued in the same low voice. “But you have to understand the motives behind Ed’s statements to you, Ray. You see, he is very, very angry with me.” Miles spoke softly, as if not wanting to disturb the devotions going on inside.
“Does he have good reason to be angry with you?” Brown asked with some interest.
“Actually, yes.” Miles lowered his voice further. “You see, I’ve been having sex with his wife for several months now,” he lied.
The trooper nodded nervously. Inside the church, a chorus of cracked voices swooned up to the high notes. Brown looked over the top of Miles’s head through the dirty front window into the church where Clive stood with his arms wide and his voice raised in song while the musicians of Blind Donkey churned out the rhythm. The trooper watched dumbfounded, until Rick took a step forward to take his saxophone solo; then he swung back to speak fiercely to Miles. “I don’t know what you think you’ve got going here, but I’m going to keep an eye on all this,” he said, and stalked down the boardwalk, out of his face, but certainly not gone for good.
A murder of crows rose in a chorus and whirled out over the boardwalk. Miles wondered where Bonnie had got the hat she was wearing; he wondered if he would be able to see her after he got back from cutting trees and, if he did see her, what her expression would be. He looked at the sunlight slanting down through the wet cedar boughs and smiled at the thought of donning the armor of light.
“The day is at hand,” Miles said out loud. He stood up, poured cold coffee over the edge of the boardwalk, and walked toward the harbor. He could hear the floorboards of the bar creaking as people got to their feet; he could hear them chatting as Clive stood in the doorway shaking hands, thanking everyone for coming, while this new sunlight slanted all around him through the clouds. It was almost ridiculously serene.
MILES WAS THE first one down to the boat. He sat and sharpened an axe for a few minutes until he heard footsteps banging down the dock.
“Christ, it’s cold in here.” Jake jumped onto the boat, still wearing his church clothes but with a canvas jacket thrown over his shoulders. “Let’s get this thing going. Don’t we have some wood to cut?”
More boots clomped down the dock, and the boat tilted with the weight of the men getting on board. Clive thudded onto the deck and started putting coveralls on over his black suit. “Brother!” he shouted to Miles with a fine smile on his face. “Good to see you in church this morning.”
For the rest of the morning and on into the early afternoon, the logging crew was busy in the woods on the other side of the inlet. It took them half an hour to fell two spruce snags just off the beach. Their tips just reached the beach and the six men limbed them, bucked them into manageable lengths, and rigged the hand winches to pull them to the tide line. Clive and Miles used a heavy axe; the others whined and rattled with the saws. Lester worked on the rigging to pull the logs down onto the beach, and Jake tended the fire and sharpened a couple more axes. For a man with a torn up arm, he looked remarkably happy.
They took a lunch break at one thirty. The silence as the saws stopped seemed to rise from the ground. They’d worked up a fair sweat, so they put on dry jackets and gathered around the fire, spread their life jackets against the hillside and leaned against them to eat sandwiches and drink coffee.
The day held clear and cold. The slush from the previous day’s rains had frozen on this side of the inlet. The sun slanted through the canopy, created pools of light on the forest floor, and icy snow lay in patches beneath the bare bushes. Everything seemed frozen and brittle.
Jake came over and sat down next to Miles and Clive. He put his head back and raised his face to the sunlight; he took a deep breath, smelled the wood chips and the earth they’d disturbed on the forest floor, smelled the wood smoke and felt the heat from the fire warming his legs. “Hey, boys, chow!” he said, and bit into his sandwich. He swallowed and turned to Miles. “So,” he asked, “is the trooper happy?”
“I don’t think he’ll ever be happy until one or the other of us are in jail.”
“I’m a little disappointed that he didn’t search the place.”
Miles swallowed his hot coffee too quickly. “Why’s that?” he choked.
“It would make Weasel feel a lot better about what he has to do.”
“What are you talking about?”
Clive whistled into the woods and a forlorn Weasel came down the bank dragging a tarp behind him. The cutters had been building up the warming fire with slash and had split up rounds of an old hemlock which had long ago bleached silver on the beach. They were smiling broadly.
“Jesus, you’re not really going to make me do this, are you?” Weasel pleaded as he used two hands to drag the bundle down the street.
“I paid you the money you fronted, and I’m giving you a job at the bar. That pot is my product, and I know what I want to do with it.”
“But my God, Clive.” Weasel was desolate.
“Come on now. I know you have some personal use put away. This is a good deal for you now, Weaz. You shouldn’t have put that stuff in my place. You know that. It was a mean thing to do, and you are not cut out to be a mean guy.”
“No … I suppose not.” And with that Weasel pulled back the edges of the tarp and exposed three very chunky bricks of compressed marijuana, each one about the size of a five gallon can. Miles was surprised at how much bigger they had looked under the rafters of the Love Nest.
“Go on now,” Clive said, and Miles noticed just the hint of threat in his voice. As soon as he recognized the tone, he noticed that Weasel had a rather prominent black eye. Clive shook his head as if he had been bitten by a wasp. “Go on now.”
“Ah … I just can’t, Clive. You do it.” Weasel slumped down on one of the slick beach rocks.
With that, Clive got up and put the three chunky bricks of pot on the beach fire. All the cutters shifted around to stand downwind.
THE AFTERNOON PASSED at a fine, lugubrious pace. The men ate their peanut butter sandwiches slowly, chewing each morsel, and those lucky enough to have salmonberry jam licked it off their fingers.
The sweet smelling smoke shimmied around the cove like a belly dancer, and no one worried about the tide or the time but took simple pleasure in their work of rolling the firewood to the beach.
“Why in the hell did Weasel put his pot in your attic?” Miles finally asked.
“Who the hell knows?” Clive smiled. “He probably thought that if anyone found it he could always blame me. But I also suspect he had some half-assed idea of selling the stuff out of the bar. Like I wouldn’t notice him going in and out of the attic all the time?”
They both laughed too long. Then stopped. Then laughed again, embarrassed. Then they let the silence fall around them like tropical rain.
“Seems like kind of a waste,” Miles said finally.
“I suppose so.” Clive sighed.
“Why are you doing this?” his younger brother said as if the rashness of the act had just occurred to him.
“I guess I didn’t want Weasel going to jail,” he said, and took a deep breath as the trees sighed softly with a damp breeze blowing down the inlet. “And I guess there has to be some obedience if you want the love.”
The brothers sat in silence again, the words
churning over in Miles’s fogged and tingling mind.
“Do you think Ed is going to kill me?” Miles finally said.
Clive watched his brother chew his peanut butter sandwich. “No,” he said. “I don’t think so. I don’t think he’s as pissed at you as he used to be.”
Miles stared down at the toe of his boot as he spoke. “He was fairly pissed at me last night. Lord knows what he’s going to think after this morning.” He stopped for a moment. “I’m sure the trooper will tell Ed I confessed to sleeping with his Tina.”
“Yeah, but I’m pretty certain Ed’s mad at me now.”
“You? How come?”
Clive stood up; he turned his back to the fire and held his hands behind him, palms to the heat. The other men were already down on the beach re-anchoring the boat. “He’s mad because he heard that I’m in love with Nix.”
Miles rocked back and forth gently, unwittingly. “Whoa …” was all he managed.
“After that little drama he had with you on the boardwalk, Ed asked Nix if she would move in with him, and she told him that she was moved in with me.”
“Is that true? I mean … is that true?” Jake squinted and moved his head to be more directly in the smoke.
“Which?” asked Clive. “That she told him, or that she’s moved in with me?”
Miles wore a twisted grin. “Is it true that you are in love with her?”
Clive rocked his head up and down slowly as he watched the smoke from the burning weed curl into the sky. “Yes,” he said finally. “The best part is she feels the same way about me.”
“Has she really moved in with you?”
“Yeah.” Clive blew on his hands, taking a new pleasure in everything about the gesture, the warmth of his breath, the smell of wood chips, even the look of the dirt under his fingernails. “Imagine a love that isn’t unrequited,” his voice drifted off. “But of course Ed didn’t take it well.”
“I don’t imagine.” Miles started putting on his work gloves.
“You know what her name is?”
“Who, Nix?”
“Yeah, her name is Maya. Really. It’s Maya Kendricks. She’s from Madison, Wisconsin.” Clive said the name of the city as if it were one of the moons of Jupiter.
The brothers were silent. The fire popped, and Mayan dancers far off in Madison, Wisconsin, were dancing in the streets.
“No kidding,” Clive said eventually. “Her father teaches anthropology, and her mother’s a freelance photographer. Maya Kendricks, can you believe it?”
The fire crackled, the sparks swirling upward in twisty courses toward the green boughs above, and Jake shook his head. “Yes,” he said. “I think I can believe it.” He pushed himself upright, steadied his legs, and walked toward the mountain.
By two o’clock, the sun was behind the ridgeline, and the cold began to bite down through their work clothes. The fire had burned down, and Weasel kept standing over the ashes, stirring them with a stick.
The rest of the crew wrestled logs down to the beach and rolled them with Peaveys over the rocks and onto the beds of eel grass; they set an anchor in the mud and tied a line to staples they’d driven into the logs. Someone would come back after dark when the tide was higher and pull the anchor and tow the logs across the inlet. They would tie the logs to the pilings of the community center, and then the splitting crew would take over, would buck and split and carry the stove wood up the hill to the woodshed to be stacked for the winter. Those fat columns of spruce were as satisfying as rolls of coins waiting to be unwrapped.
The day darkened until there was only a violet glimmer on the water. Miles’s muscles were sore. His contact high from sitting near the fire was wearing off, leaving him feeling a little prickly, but he was content sitting in the cabin of the boat as it ran across the water to town.
When they got back to the dock, it was four o’clock and stars were starting to blink in the lavender sky. Miles and Clive helped put away the tools and headed along the boardwalk toward the Love Nest. Across the inlet, killer whales broke the surface, headed back out to sea. They stood and watched a moment and tried to count the animals. A mile to the north, an unscheduled floatplane was easing down for a landing.
THAT EVENING THEY built a big fire in the community hall and planned to watch Jake’s movie. Weasel was still sulking, but he thought that watching a movie might make up for the loss of his capital investment in marijuana.
Jake hadn’t seen the final cut of Stealing Candy. He’d told himself he wasn’t going to see it at all, but when Weasel showed him the tape box with the title of the film in some secretary’s handwritten lettering, an icicle of envy ran down his back. He had to see it, after all. Call it pride, vanity, or morbid curiosity, but he wanted to see what they had done with his original story.
Weasel had carried over a big video monitor from the school and propped it on a coffee table; had hooked up the cables, plugged in the machine, and pushed PLAY. The film buffs settled into their chairs; Jake felt nauseated. But as the credits started to roll and the film began, he lost himself in the dream of a man staring at a fire. Images flared and flickered: a blonde woman with red lips holding a revolver close to her face as she walked down a deserted hall with no pictures on the wall, a man in a leather coat crawling through the heating duct of a building. Then there was the blur and rattle of gunfire, the squealing of car tires with fat yellow California sunlight in the background of every exterior shot. Jake watched the movie, felt the images pushing him back further into his head, and he had the sinking feeling that he was watching dated pictures from his old life, a life before Cold Storage, a life of machines and concrete. He might have been watching jerky black-and-white images from a documentary about the French Crimean War.
He got up just as the blonde woman with big lips was putting her pistol in a holster strapped to her upper thigh. He walked out and stood on the porch and watched wet snow slice down to the ground. He could hear the wood stove rumbling and the characters’ voices limping through their dialogue; their faces seemed like emissaries from another country, a nation of which Jake had once been a citizen. He didn’t want to answer questions about Stealing Candy. He wanted to go for a walk, so he curled up his collar and stepped out into the sleet.
But there was a hand on his elbow.
“You wrote that?” asked Lester.
“Well, I wrote something like that. I’d like to tell you it was a lot better in my version …” Jake looked at Lester. “… but I’d be lying.”
“It got made, though.” Together they walked back toward the café and the clinic. “You’ve got a track record.”
“I got nothing really. I didn’t get a cent. I didn’t get a credit.”
“So, what you are trying to tell me is you are not really a Hollywood big shot?” Lester’s voice was grave.
“No. I am not a big shot. I’m a small-time crook. Actually,” he added to save a bit of face, “I’m a medium-size crook.”
“That was never really a secret.” Lester spoke more seriously to his friend than he ever had before.
“I guess I knew that too,” Jake said. “I was just hoping we didn’t have to deal with it.”
“Well, from what you’re telling me, there is nothing to deal with. If we’re talking about your reputation, that is.” Lester smiled. “It’s no big deal. I don’t care about any of that. I never did. We got a movie. We play it in our minds. It will be here.” Lester tapped on his forehead with his index finger. “And if we finish it, we can watch it anytime we want.”
“Great,” Jake said, but he sounded like he was stepping into a dentist’s office.
The sleet was gradually turning to snow, the grey slashes of ice floating, curling into balls, and rolling down the inlet on the westerly wind. Jake started to shiver.
“You are going to have to go back and talk to those folks.” Lester nodded over his shoulder.
“I don’t want to.” Jake jammed his good hand into his pocket and hunched his shoulde
rs; he’d stretched a wool sock over the end of his sleeve to keep his other hand warm. “Let’s talk about our movie. We need an ending.”
“He can’t die.”
“Why not?”
“I’m sick of movies where the Indian dies. That’s just no fucking story at all.” Lester was resolved.
“What?” Jake asked. “Indians are immortal? Would it be better if he were white and then he could die?”
“Yes.”
“I can’t fucking believe this.”
“Listen, I just don’t want him to die. I don’t want him to be some kind of mystic or some kind of wild spiritual guru. He’s just as fucked up as anybody else alive in this century. Maybe a little more.”
“Now wait a minute.” Jake stopped. “You don’t want him to be some kind of mystic, but you want him and everybody else to turn into animals in the last scene of the movie. What in the fuck is that about anyway?”
“It would be cool,” said Lester.
“Cool,” Jake grunted. A young heron flapped through the curtain of snow and landed on the hand railing of the ramp to the dock; it sat and stared at the men walking along the slick boardwalk, rubbed its beak against the metal rail and looked up again as they drew nearer; stood perfectly still for several heartbeats, then unspooled its body back up into the air.
“So what do you want for an ending?”
“I think we’ve got him set up to become a martyr. He has done some terrible things in the movie, things that were understandable given the context, things that were heroic from a certain point of view, but hell, he’s spent, he’s alone, and besides we’ve got no sequel. Why not just kill him off?”
“Nope.” Lester wasn’t changing his mind.
Rinds of ice began to build along the toes of Jake’s shoes. “So you are going to stick with your animal ending? Everybody simply transforms into wild creatures at the end of the movie?” Jake said, as if pleading.
“Unless you think of a better ending.”
They walked in silence for a little ways until they reached the café. Lester decided to go in and have a cup of soup, said he’d meet Jake back at the community center later after the movie was over, and the question-and-answer session began. Jake grimaced.