Cold Water Burning

by John Straley

  The doctor/drummer paused and stared at me to confirm that our understanding was intact. I returned the doctor’s stare and said nothing as he continued with his hypothetical diagnosis.

  “A patient like this can be debilitated by despair and then swing the other way and live in an almost frenetic elation. Both states make it hard to function.”

  “Is the patient aware of this erratic behavior while it’s hap­pening to him?”

  “Think of it this way, Cecil. Psychosis is a condition of disor­dered thinking; mania is disordered moods. He sees what we do and hears what we do, but he feels differently than we do about these things. So when he is swinging into a high, he knows it, but it feels so good to him that often he convinces himself to stay off his meds. At the upper reaches of the manic highs there is often ideation which becomes disjointed or unconnected. But he’s not crazy really, he’s just happier than it is normally possible to be.”

  “What happens if he goes untreated?”

  “Well, judgment is often bad. There are feelings of invulnera­bility, of increased prowess in almost all areas. Some people hurt themselves this way—diving off cliffs and such. But some are artistic adventurers—painters, sculptors or musicians.”

  Here the doctor smiled and tapped his drumsticks on the tabletop.

  “I’ve seen some interesting paintings recently,” I offered.

  “I bet you have!” Clem exclaimed. “They can be wild. In an agi­tated state, a patient might not sleep for forty-eight or seventy-two hours. His painting will seem an ecstatic expression of genius. Sometimes the work will bear the mark of the genius’s ecstasy; think of Van Gogh. But often, with others, their paintings remain only—what?—artifacts of their elevated mood. He feels like a ge­nius. But that’s not really enough, is it?” The doctor cracked his knuckles, then grabbed the sticks he had thrust down in the booth cushions, twirled them once and tapped a rhythm on the tabletop.

  “Will he hurt himself? Will he hurt anyone else?”

  “There is nothing in this disorder which marks a person as more or less violent. That’s a function of other things. Like I said, Jonathan doesn’t much care for you or the police. But again, who can say?”

  Clem played a complex rhythm with his fingers and looked down at the bouncing tips of the sticks.

  “In a severe upswing he could be a danger to himself if he takes risks he is not prepared for,” Clem said down to the tabletop.

  “I think Jonathan has taken his sailboat out into the storm.”

  Clem didn’t say anything for a moment. He stared down at his taped hands. “Okay,” he finally offered. “I mean, Jonathan is sup­posed to be a good sailor. But this storm is a whopper, isn’t it? It could be a good example of the kind of bad judgment we were just talking about. We should get him back.”

  “How long will he be on the upswing?”

  “Theoretically?” Clem smiled a moment and then he pushed on, tired of the pretense. “Look, if Jonathan is sick, find him and bring him to me. It’s hard to tell what kind of danger he is in or how long this will last. Weeks maybe. The body usually can’t sus­tain the rigors—lack of sleep and the exertion that extreme elation demands—for long. He’ll exhaust himself and then he’ll crash. If he is untreated then, that is the time to be concerned about self-destructive behavior. The lows are proportionally low, and often the circumstances—the disarray, the alienation in the wake of the high—conspire to make it harder for a person to recover.”

  Jay, the guitar player, walked past the table and signaled that they had better start playing. Doug and Vern both walked in with their guitar cases. Gary waved from the corner of the tiny dance floor where he had just finished tweaking the sound system. Mary thumped a short riff on the bass. Sitka’s own Screaming Love Bunnies were chomping at the bit.

  Clem stood up from the table and took a step toward the band, then came back, putting a hand on my shoulder. “Do you think you can bring him back in?”

  “I’ll try,” I said without looking up into his face. But then I added, “Do you know anything about the money Jonathan has come into?”

  Clem smiled. “I saw him a couple of days ago—socially, you know—at the coffee shop. I could tell something was going on with him. He was ‘up’ and I asked if he was taking his lithium and he said he was fine. I should have known he was headed for trouble.” Jay played a G chord and stared at Clem. Gary started honking his A harp into the green bullet mike.

  “Anyway . . .” Clem waved at his bandmates and then turned back to me. “Jonathan said he had to clean up his boat. Get ready for a trip. That’s all.”

  “Did he say anything about Richard Ewers?”

  The band was tuning and the noise in the bar was building. Clem cupped one hand to his ear and said, “Ewers?”

  I nodded and the doctor shook his head. “That name is familiar to me somehow but I can’t really remember why. Wasn’t he a politician or some rich fisherman?”

  “Close. He was an accused murderer. He was a crewman on the Mygirl. He was found not guilty for the killing of Chevalier’s little brother. I worked for Ewers. I helped walk him out of jail.”

  “Well, that would explain Jonathan’s attitude toward you.” He watched me as if he thought I was probably making that last part up. “Anyway, Jonathan gave me a hundred-dollar bill and thanked me for everything.” The other band members were starting to chant Clem’s name into their mikes.

  “Why’d he give you the hundred?” I asked as he walked away and sat squarely behind his drum kit. “Why’d he give you the hun­dred?” I yelled across the bar.

  Clem clicked his sticks together, giving the Screaming Love Bunnies the time. “He said that I probably needed money and that he didn’t have any use for it,” Clem said into his vocal mike, and then began the backbeat. The Bunnies ripped into a cover of a song by Southern Culture on the Skids, and people streamed onto the floor in front of the band.

  The Pioneer Bar is a classic waterfront bar, but it’s not set up for dancing. The Screaming Love Bunnies were set up right on the linoleum floor where the pool table usually sits. There’s no riser and certainly not a stage. The musicians stand on the floor with their backs against the two walls of the far corner. Even so, there is only about a ten-by-ten area to dance. As a result, just a few people make a crowd, which I’ve noticed is pretty true all over Alaska. I had to dance my way through the tight mass of athletic young women dancing with their eyes closed and their hands raised above their heads, and around the young men with ball caps, laughing and clutching their beer bottles as they careened around the floor bumping into the band equipment. I fought through the dancers toward the cool air in the back alley. Gary was blowing a solo on his A harp and trying to steady his music stand with his feet while a young woman spun around and around in front of him, bumping the music stand with each rotation. I waved at him, but he was busy so I headed home.

  The wind was blowing much harder now and more steadily. A garbage can rolled down the middle of Katlian Street and a plastic fish box from the fish plant cartwheeled end over end down the sidewalk. Streetlamps trembled in the wind. The whole street seemed in motion. A fat dachshund named Hogan barked at the skipping shadows near his doghouse and pulled incessantly at his chain. A panel truck rolled slowly down the street rocking from side to side. The wind was howling in from the southwest now, and after it hammered against the houses and the panel truck, the gusts seemed to rise straight up through the thin light and disap­pear into the dark.

  In Out of Africa, the Baroness wonders if Africa would know a song of her, and if the full moon would throw a shadow that was like her over the gravel of her drive. I had always been struck by the sadness of that question, but what if Katlian Street tonight, this crazy dog, and the wind blowing garbage cans down the middle of the street, what if this was like me? What if this was the song that Alaska was singing of me?

 
I locked the door to my house against the wind. The storm was supposed to last until late tomorrow night. I listened to the sounds around the house. Todd’s radio was on in his room. The refrig­erator hummed. The old house creaked on its pilings and I could hear the waves slapping against the rocks beneath the floorboards. I unlocked the door and checked our skiff, which was hauled out on a ramp under the house.

  The tide was high, so the storm was pushing the waves farther up the ramp than usual. Some small waves were dumping into the stern of the skiff. I made sure the drain plugs were out and used the old plastic bleach bottle with the bottom cut out to bail water from the outboard well.

  Jane Marie had ordered the yellow skiff from a researcher in Mexico. It was a twenty-three-foot Panga open boat with a short canopy for storing gear. The Panga was made of fiberglass with a self-bailing deck so water would run out the aft drainholes while the skiff was running or at anchor. Jane Marie had named the skiff Amelia, and she was a stout runner: her high bow and narrow beam made her good for launching through the surf down in Mexico. Her design also made her stable running into the weather. As long as you didn’t overload her and kept good headway with the engine running, Amelia would stay upright and keep you off the beach.

  She was taking a little bit of a beating in the storm, so I cranked the windlass attached to the front piling and pulled her higher up the ramp. I secured the stern with a line on each side and doubled up the bow line. I patted her hull and murmured “goodnight” be­fore I turned to go inside.

  Jane Marie met me on the upstairs landing. Her flannel robe was belted loosely around her waist. Her black hair was mussed around her face. “How’s the skiff?” she asked sleepily.

  “Good. I just pulled her up a little and put a couple more lines on.”

  She put both arms around my neck and pulled me close as if we were dancing to the faint sound of the Love Bunnies down the street. They were playing “Got My Mojo Working,” and I could make out the guitar and harmonica but not the vocals. Clem’s drumbeat hit the house like rain.

  “What are you going to do tomorrow?” Jane Marie whispered in my ear and pushed against me. I reached inside her robe. Her skin during the pregnancy was as soft as anything I had ever felt and it remained so.

  “I’ve got to get hold of Harrison Teller. I’ve got to get access to the Ewers file. I also need to try and track down some people in Ketchikan.” She was kissing my ear now, and I ran my hands over the small of her back and down her hips, cupping my palm on the outside of her leg. She raised her other leg up into me and backed me against the wall.

  “Do you think Teller will know anything about where Richard went?” she said between kisses.

  “He must. Teller saved Richard from a life sentence. He would confide in Teller if he would anyone,” I said. Then I kissed her back for a long moment.

  “Ewers is probably fine,” I said, not believing it.

  Jane Marie is a particularly good kisser, in almost any weather: slick, shivery kisses out in the snow, or those rare, sun-warmed kisses on a beach towel. Honestly, she excels at both.

  Soon I was thinking about what I could do to improve my own kissing ability and not about Richard Ewers or what I was going to do in the morning. I kissed down her neck to the soft cleft of her shoulder.

  “I do love you, Cecil,” she said.

  “Thank you,” I told her skin.

  She leaned my head back and cupped my face in her hands. Her breath was warm. Her hair was a wild spray around the sparkle of her eyes.

  “Are you getting in trouble?” she asked.

  “Can you help me get through this?”

  “Get through what, baby?” she responded.

  I kissed her and could taste the ocean on her lips. “I just don’t want to dream tonight,” I said.

  “I’ll try,” she answered, pulling me toward our bedroom.

  “I love you too, you know,” I said, as she undid my shirt.

  “Of course you do” was all she said as she shucked off her robe.

  What do the gods see when they are looking down at a man and woman making love? Two creatures without fur or feathers facing one another, paddling around in their own shallow reflections, odd white elbows flapping around? I don’t know. But that night our bed was a warm pool easing over every centimeter of our skin. We licked and stroked each other, saying each other’s names in the dark, filling each other up as if we could pour ourselves back and forth, spilling and refilling our bodies over and over again.

  The baby started to cry from her bassinet moments after we came to rest. I got up and brought her into our damp bed and put her between our slick bodies so she could suck at her mother’s breast. We sheltered her there in that warm bubble defined by our bed. This bubble could have been our universe as I slept, except for the storm blustering around our house and pulling at the rusty nails in the roof, and if those capricious gods were watching us there in our drowsy bed, I hoped they were disconsolate with envy.

  That night I dreamed I was walking through the hull of a boat. I was holding a gun and children were screaming. The shots rang so loud they made my nose bleed and the deck was slick with blood. I heard a young boy whimpering until a banging like nails being driven into metal stilled the boy’s voice. The darkness was silent for a moment, then came the rumble of flames.

  I heard a sharp knocking. I was still sleeping and thought it was more gunshots on board the Mygirl. Or it could have been gunshots from the playground over the hill. The swings were empty and creaking back and forth in the wind. The banging kept on but finally it popped the bubble of our warm bed, and I could tell it was someone at our front door. The knocking would not stop. Just as I lifted myself on one elbow I heard Todd’s padded footfall as he walked down the stairs and opened the door.

  I cupped Blossom’s head in my right hand, feeling her breath on my palm, touching her ear and curling my knuckle against her cheek. I heard a man’s voice turn into a thudding commotion on the stairs.

  Then I felt the crack of a gunshot shake our bed. Someone fell on the stairwell, and Blossom wrinkled her tiny face like a walnut and started to wail.

  8

  Kevin Sands was standing over Todd with what looked to be a forty-four-caliber handgun pointed at Todd’s head. There was a hole in the stairs inches from Todd’s hip. He lay propped up on his elbows with splinters of wood on his pants. His eyes were wide with a distant kind of concern.

  “I am not fooling around here,” Kevin said evenly.

  “It would appear not,” Todd said in a soft voice.

  I stood at the top of the stairs in my underwear and T-shirt. Jane Marie locked herself in the bathroom with the baby, or so I assumed after I heard her footsteps and the rattle of the lock. There was a window in the bathroom that led to the shed roof from which she could reach a fire ladder if necessary.

  “Jesus Christ, Kevin. Why are you shooting up my house?” I said, in what I hoped was a jocular tone.

  “You and that cop shot my brother.” The gun in Kevin’s hand wavered in the air. A forty-four is heavy, and Kevin was trying to hold it in one hand at arm’s length. His left hand was on the doorknob, in case he had to run out the door, I suppose.

  “I liked your brother, Kevin. I had nothing to do with shooting him.” I took one step down the stairs.

  “Everyone is saying he was going to shoot some kids. That’s crazy. Sean would never shoot those kids. He’s not that kind of boy. He’s disciplined.”

  Kevin’s voice was less angry than mournful, the words choppy and blunt. His pale face was blotchy from crying. His chest heaved. “I need the money. I took the risks; I deserve my share and I’m not going to take the fall for all of it. No fucking way. I need to get that money, and I need George-fucking-Doggy off my back.” Kevin coughed, blowing air out of his lungs as if he were a weight lifter willing himself to work through the pain.


  “We can talk to Doggy. We can work this out with Ewers, Kevin.” I was fishing, and Kevin looked at me as if I were a phantom floating above him.

  “Nobody’s working nothing out with Ewers. I fucked up big time, I mean big time. The only chance I have of working something out with Ewers is if I find Jonathan. I’ve got to find him. I’ve got to find him today.” The gun seemed to be pulling Kevin’s arm down toward the steps. Todd watched the end of the barrel as it traced down past his knee toward his foot. Todd started to sit upright and Kevin pulled the pistol’s hammer back.

  “Listen, Kevin,” I said, sitting down on one of the stair treads, “can you put the gun away? I’m with you on this. I want to find Jonathan just as much as you do.”

  “Why?” he spat out, and he raised the gun up toward me.

  “His doctor asked me to. Jonathan is sick. He needs to come in for his medication. He might be in big trouble if we don’t find him.”

  “He’s in big trouble all right,” Kevin snorted and then uncocked the gun. Todd sat up and started pushing himself backwards up the stairs.

  “We were counting the money. That’s all I’m telling you. We were supposed to be alone. Ewers’s wife came in. Fuck, man, I told you this. She was screaming. She wasn’t supposed to be there. She didn’t know the story. Shit! I got that money straight up. It was mine. Sean didn’t know a thing. I was supposed to protect him. Then the cops came breaking through the door and things got way crazy. I didn’t know it was the cops. At first I thought it was someone else. I didn’t even see her get shot. I was pushing Sean out of the way. That fucking Chevalier just grabs the money and dives out the back window.”

  Kevin was leaning against the doorjamb, breathing hard, and I walked slowly down the stairs toward him, stopping when I reached Todd sprawled out on the stairs. Todd was listening in­tently to Kevin, but I could feel him shaking as I eased past him on the narrow stairwell, placing my right hand on his shoulder.

  Kevin took a long breath and raised the gun back up, pointing directly at Todd’s head, about four feet away from the end of the muzzle.