by John Straley
“Absolutely.” Clive didn’t know why he’d given the cab company a false name; it was simply the first name that popped into his head and had nothing at all to do with the plan. He set his box of personal effects in the back seat, slammed the door, and walked around to sit in the front passenger seat.
“You want to go to a grocery store?” He squinted at his run sheet.
“That’s right,” Clive said. “If it’s not too much trouble.”
“No problem, Mr. Cheesewright. Would you like me to wait while you shop?”
“Naw … just drop me. I might be a while,” Clive said, but then added, “You know a place with really fresh lettuce?”
The driver smiled. “I think if you want the really fresh stuff you should go over to the Farmfresh store down Sixth. It’s good, you know. They really do buy it from the farmers and everything. It’s a couple of miles out of town, but it’s worth it.”
“Perfect,” said Clive. The driver punched the meter and wheeled to his left, down the road away from the prison.
Clive watched the fence posts stutter by. He watched the sunlight filter through the evergreen trees, and he watched a cow eating in a green field, a rusty bell hung from her neck. She lifted her head as the cab sped past, and Clive could imagine the soft clonking of her bell. Clive asked to stop for a moment; the driver put on the turn signal and eased the van to the gravelly edge of the road. Clive thanked him, leaned back in the cab’s mildewed seat, and smiled. He sat that way for a few moments, smiling and listening for the cow’s bell.
“You do a long stretch?” the driver asked.
Clive nodded, his eyes closed. “Yes,” he said. “It’s time to go home, I guess.”
“You want me to get going?” the driver asked.
Clive nodded again, his eyes still closed.
“Let’s go get you some lettuce then,” the driver said, and pulled the blinker all the way down, rolling the cab back onto the road.
CLIVE WAS BOTH happy and nervous. He had looked forward to this day with an urgency that few people who haven’t been in prison could know. But just as it was happening he felt a kind of raw anxiety. He could not go back to crime, and although he had scrubbed his mind clean, he knew that in this world of free men he understood little else besides crime. Crime was now, in his new state of mind, too chaotic, too unpredictable. Clive wanted to be rooted to something as certain as the rising of the sun.
McNeil was an old federal prison that had been remodeled as a medium security jail when it was turned over to the state of Washington. The Birdman of Alcatraz had actually done most of his time at McNeil. The main building had the original feel of the place: thick iron doors, WPA-style murals on the walls of the mess hall. It could have been a large public library in some small Midwestern town if it weren’t for all the sex offenders.
In jail, Clive had been known as the “Milkman,” for that’s what the newspapers had dubbed him. He had been a semi-famous drug dealer when he had been caught—famous for his method of delivering his drugs and famous for never snitching on his customers or his partners.
He had seen arterial blood spurting and painting the shower floor red. He had seen the black holes that handmade knives leave in young white skin. He had heard all the swearing that there was in the world and the blubbery threats made through spit-stuffed lips. All he wanted now was peace. No grittiness. He was done with it. He would always be a sinner, he knew that, but he could at least try not to sin as much. He had thought that even if he could cut back on his sinning by ten percent, that would still leave him plenty of room, while giving him a shot at some minor redemption at least.
In the last three years, he had purposely kept himself in segregation. He told the jailers he was going to be killed and that was the truth of it, but that was not what mattered. He wanted the quiet of the stone slice of ten by ten, the only noise a basketball bouncing on echoing concrete in the exercise yard where they let the segregated inmates out, one at a time, an hour and fifteen minutes every day.
All he took into segregation with him was a Bible and a pencil. He kept his journal in the margins.
It wasn’t until the beginning of his third year in segregation that he started listening to bugs. A blue fly landed on the edge of the Bible page, which was open to Numbers. The fly twitched what he imagined to be its filthy legs. The spidery printing of the first word was almost the size of the fly itself:
How can I curse whom God has not cursed?
How can I denounce whom the Lord has not denounced?
For from the top of the crags I see him,
From the hills I behold him;
Behold a people dwelling alone,
And not counting itself among the nations.
“What?” Clive said aloud, leaning even farther toward the book. “What was that?” But the fly had not said anything.
THERE WERE TWO picnic tables beside the store where Clive was going to eat his salad. Cigarette butts fanned out on the pavement. An overflowing garbage can sat next to a bike rack. Clive brought his packages out and set them down carefully. He had asked the produce manager to wash all of the vegetables. He had bought a plastic bowl, a cutting board, a knife, and some bottled oil and vinegar dressing. He reached inside his bag and took the knife and the cutting board out first. A kid, riding a trick bike in the parking lot, stopped long enough to stare at the skinny man in the dark suit smelling a tomato, then hopped the bike onto the rack, skidded down the top pipe on his cranks, landed, and wheeled away.
The spring weather in western Washington was strangely warm. Clive sat and slowly cut the vine-ripened hothouse tomatoes. He washed all the vegetables under the outside spigot once again, just to be certain. He peeled the carrots and sliced them into thin strips. He had two kinds of lettuce, one red pepper, a bottle of artichoke hearts, and one fresh avocado. He spoke to no one, but chopped and sliced with great deliberation. After all the vegetables were laid out in his bowl, he stared at them and licked a bit of ripe avocado off his fingers. He added the fresh Dungeness crab meat to the salad. He opened a bottle of white wine and poured himself a glass. He said a short prayer, swore that he would never eat canned spaghetti or unidentifiable meat ever again, and ate his first meal in the free world.
The bottle of wine was three-quarters empty by the time the cabdriver came back to check on Clive. He was sitting at the picnic table with his back against the building; long shadows from the poplar trees next door played out across the parking lot. The salad was gone, and Clive had the wine bottle stuck down between his legs and a plastic fork in his mouth.
The cab rolled up on the crunching gravel and came to a stop. The driver lowered his window.
“You got a place for tonight, Stilton?”
“No, I guess not.” Clive pulled the fork out of his mouth.
“You got a plan?” He fished out his smokes.
“Oh yes, I have a plan.” He looked back at the cabdriver. “Foolproof.”
It was only then that Clive noticed that the driver had brought a little dog back with him. The corgi stood now on the driver’s lap, sniffing the damp air through the open window.
“What’s your dog’s name?” Clive asked.
“Bandit,” the driver replied, and the dog wiggled up and put his whole head out the window.
“You haven’t got a plan,” the dog said.
“Excuse me?” Clive said, a little distressed, for never before had he heard an animal speak so clearly. But then again it had been a while since he had seen such a large non-human animal.
“You got a place to go?” the driver asked.
“Sort of. I’m going to pick up my dog.” Clive offered the driver the bottle of wine. “Then I’m going back to Alaska.”
“It’s a long way to Alaska,” the driver said, and took a drink from the bottle. “You’re going to need some money for that.”
“Well, that’s what the plan’s about,” Clive said. “I’ve got my money the same place where my dog is.”
Bandit s
niffed the air again and shot his ears straight forward. “You don’t have a plan,” the corgi said again. Which distressed Clive all the more. The dog was telling the truth.
“I got a little travel trailer out back of my place. You can spend the night there if you want,” the driver said as he stroked the little dog’s head.
“No. I’ll be all right,” Clive insisted.
“Get in,” Bandit said, and Clive gathered his things.
CHAPTER TWO
THE JOKE WENT like this: The doctor comes back into the waiting room and tells his patient, “I’m sorry, Mr. Smith, but I have some bad news. It appears you have only eleven minutes to live.” The horrified patient beseeches him, “Please, doctor, isn’t there something you can do for me?” The doctor looks around the room and at his watch and says, “Well, I suppose I could boil you an egg.”
The joke was everywhere on the boardwalk. It seemed to Miles McCahon that it had infected the residents of Cold Storage like a flu virus. He heard it everywhere, and he was beginning to wonder why.
Maybe it was the darkness or the rain. Maybe it was the fact that almost everyone in Cold Storage was either clinically depressed or drunk most of the time. But they loved that joke, and Miles was beginning to take it personally.
Miles had spent most of his life in Cold Storage. There had been trips out for a few years in college and his years in the Army Rangers. When his brother had gone to jail in 1993, Miles had been in Mogadishu as a medic with his delta team and had mustered out soon after that well-publicized mess. He had told himself he was never again going to leave the quiet of Cold Storage, but now he was beginning to wonder.
Miles was the medical technician and physician’s assistant in a village without a doctor. He splinted broken bones and stopped bleeding. He stitched up severe cuts and treated people for shock. He monitored medications and researched medical issues for the 150 residents of this failing fishing village on the outer coast of southeastern Alaska. He was the closest thing to a doctor they had, and maybe it was for this reason he didn’t get the same amount of glee from the joke as everybody else obviously did.
Miles was cooking Sunday dinner at the community center. He had used some of the money left over from a health and prevention education grant the previous PA had written. That PA had tried to hold classes on heart disease and diabetes; he had started “Healthwise” informational gatherings to which only a few people came, but none of those people were the ones who really needed the information. The principal of the school and the secretary came to the first two classes, the city administrator and her husband came to a few more, and then nobody came. The PA left town after six months.
But the money had to be spent because the administrators in Sitka could not show unspent money in their program at the end of the fiscal year. They phoned Miles and told him to do whatever he could to clear the account. The administrators had kissed a lot of ass in Washington to get these funds, and it would be an insult to leave them unspent. So Miles started hosting dinner parties on Sundays. He tried to cook reasonably healthy food, but health concerns couldn’t get in the way of turnout. This Sunday he was cooking three meat loaves, each roughly the size of a carry-on luggage bag.
“I don’t see why you can’t buy us some beer,” complained Ellen from her wheelchair next to the Jell-O molds.
“Ellen, I can’t buy alcohol with the health education and prevention money. We’ve been through this. I’m already on thin ice for the cheesecakes and heavy cream.”
“That’s just like government thinking,” the old woman wheezed. “I mean, what if—I’m saying what if—I’m going back to my place for a beer and I slip and break my hip? What the hell kind of health education is that?”
Bob Gleason piped up, “You’re not going to break a hip. You always drink someone else’s beer.” Here he nodded toward Miles. “Besides, you ride that frigging wheelchair everywhere you go, even though there’s not a frigging thing wrong with your legs.”
Ellen didn’t give even a hint she’d heard Bob’s comments. “Miles, you could at least buy us some beer,” she insisted, “if you were really serious about doing a good job.”
“Listen, Ellen, next week I could maybe include some non-alcoholic beer in the order.”
Ellen stared up at him with strange, squinting eyes as if he had suddenly started speaking Japanese. “Non-alcoholic beer?” she asked feebly. She reached a claw-like hand for something to hang on to, accidentally landing it in a bowl of raspberry Jell-O with bananas hovering at the top.
“Somebody better get her medication,” came a wheezing voice from over by the furnace.
“Take more than near-beer to kill her. Better men than us have tried.” Bob levered a shingle-sized slice of meat loaf onto his plate, set it next to the pond of gravy in the potatoes. “Goddamn, this looks good, Miles. Don’t have any boiled turnips, do you?” He held out his plate.
As luck would have it, Miles did, and he ladled them out quickly. Bob’s hand wavered, and hot water slopped against the side of the old man’s thumb.
“Christ, Miles, watch what you’re doing, would ya?”
“I’m sorry.” Miles handed him a napkin. “I’m just kind of in a hurry.”
“I heard.” Bob nodded knowingly, staring down at his plate of food. “There’s a cop here to talk to you.” He reached onto his plate, fingered a slice of turnip up into his mouth. “It’s about your brother.”
Miles wiped his hands on a dishcloth and took off his apron. He walked out the door without saying a word to anyone.
The police officer, Ray Brown, had sent word to Miles that he was in town as soon as he’d gotten off the floatplane. Miles had been in the middle of getting the giant meat loaves ready and so had arranged to meet with the trooper at the clinic later in the day, just before Brown’s plane took off for Juneau. That way, he thought, he could talk with the officer and then walk him back to the hall to check on the community dinner. It might be a good thing to have a police officer with him when he returned, in case any fights broke out in his absence.
Miles wasn’t eager to show that police officer around. No matter where they were from, visitors always wanted to ask questions. They started with history: why is this place here? To this Miles would usually answer, “Fish … mostly.” He longed to tell the whole story but the truth was people didn’t really want to know.
What they really wanted to ask was, “Why in the hell would anyone live here?”
But to truly understand, it helped to know the whole story. Just walking around town you wouldn’t feel the history of the place, wouldn’t know its old jokes or see the ghosts who still roamed around in everyone’s memory.
Cold Storage, Alaska, was first settled by white men in 1934. These white men were a group of Norwegian fishermen looking for a place to ride out the storms on the outer coast. They drove a few pilings and ran a boardwalk along the edge of a steep-sided fjord. They chose it because of the good anchorage with protection from all four directions of the compass. But as one of the Norsky fishermen put it, “She’s hell for snug except when it’s coming straight down.”
Cold Storage got approximately 200 inches of rain a year; the exact number was subject to debate. That rain led to the second reason the old Norskies chose to build on this particular spot: a natural hot spring just off the beach where the thermally heated water dribbled out between the rocks. The old fishermen cribbed up some walls and a roof and made a quite passable tub where they could lounge in the warm water while watching their wooden boats ride at anchor out in the bay.
In 1935, the town got an infusion of energy when a battered logger, a woman Wobbly, and her little girl with glasses fled the mine strike in Juneau in a leaky dory and made the place their home. The logger was named Slippery Wilson. The woman was named Ellie Hobbes. She was a pilot and a committed anarchist. The little girl with the thick glasses was Annabelle. When Slip and Ellie built the first store, the old fishermen complained that the town was growing too fast.
But when Ellie turned the store into a bar a few years later, the complaining stopped.
No one in his family had been fond of the police. It wasn’t an active antagonism, it was more of a wary indifference bolstered by living in a town some ninety air miles from a police station. There had been the old man who ran the supply boat who had been some kind of detective in Seattle. But that was long ago, and he had never done any policing in Cold Storage. The old Seattle detective was dead now, and only a few of the older people remembered the stories about him.
Miles stopped at the door of the clinic and put his hand on the cold metal knob. He didn’t want to go in, but as he considered going back to his meat loaf, the door jerked open, and Ray Brown stood before him in an immaculate blue state trooper uniform. He was pressed and tidy. His round, brimmed, Mountie-style hat had gold braid laid out against the blue. He was imposing, like a patriotic monument of some sort. It made Miles feel a little like Jeanette MacDonald.
“McCahon!” Brown barked, as if giving Miles permission to have the name. He jutted out his hand. “Ray Brown. How are ya?”
“I’m doing well, thanks,” Miles began. He was about to mention the fine weather for flying and maybe add something about going fishing if there was time.
“Two things,” Brown lumbered on. “First, a little bit of shop and then some personal business.”
“Personal business?” Miles walked around the big trooper to pick up the coffee pot sitting on a table in a corner of the waiting room. The coffee had been reheating for weeks as far as Miles knew. He just turned the same coffee on and off every day and evening. It didn’t matter because no one ever drank it. He kept it there only to chase people out of the clinic.
“That’s second. The first thing has to do with Harold Miller. Do you know him?”
“Coffee?” Miles held out the pot.
“No, I’m topped off.” Brown patted his flat stomach. “Harold Miller?”
“I know a Mouse Miller.” Miles put the pot back into the plastic coffee maker.