Geography of Water

by Mary Emerick

  Maybe it was better to erase the past the way the high tide blotted out the day’s stories: dainty deer tracks, the skiff of sand where someone placed a tent, the wash of salty bull kelp. The high tide started a new story, one that would change again at slack. Water was always in a state of restless change. Nothing mattered except for the present.

  But I found I wanted to know. Whatever it was, the secret would slowly cut into any sort of future I could have with Sam. It would carve a wedge between us. I would not be able to look at him without wondering what he was keeping from me. There had been enough secrets already.

  I watched him as he trudged slowly through the muskeg, scanning the swampy ground for the best route. Muskegs reduced everyone to the same pace. Navigating through them took time and patience. Time to pull each boot firmly out of the mud before it was sucked off our feet. Patience to find the lowest water between drainage channels instead of sloshing through and overtopping boots. Time to toil up one rolling slope and down another, feet sinking deep into the pillowed soil. For all their openness, muskegs yielded no easy passage.

  I would find out today, I told myself. Whatever it took, I would know what really happened in the bear tunnels of Enchantment Bay.

  Leaving the muskeg, we started up the red cliffs. They loomed over us, keeping us in perpetual shade as we began to climb through a series of ledges. Frost still clung to the small strands of grass that dared to grow in the weaker places. Pieces of rock crumbled through my fingers and my hands were covered with a fine dust as I reached to pull myself higher. We hurried across shelves no wider than our feet, trusting that each step would hold us. Below us the cedar forest receded until it looked harmless and insignificant.

  Once we climbed the pockmarked face of the main cliff, the hardest part seemed to be over. A chain of plateaus scissored in front of us toward the divide. This was easy walking, the edges scalloped through erosion but mostly flat as though someone had come along with a giant rolling pin and beat them into submission. We climbed each plateau like we were walking stairs to the sky. Starting with the size of a dinner plate, the plateaus widened until the three of us could walk abreast.

  “Are we really doing this?” Sam asked, saying the same thing I was thinking. Each step took us farther away from what we knew, each step irrevocable, making it harder to turn around.

  The cliffs moaned and sighed as the wind flowed over them. Gnarled plants clung to crevices, their branches twisted by the ceaseless wind. We sidestepped murky pools draped with lily pads. Strange dark birds flapped silently away from nests. This far above the sea, we were way past tree line, the place where the forest gave up and retreated. There was nowhere to hide up here. These cliffs were fully exposed to the gales that swept across the island, unhindered for sheets of snow and rain, unstopped by terrain or vegetation.

  This was a place of firsts. Some plants only grew here, on these cliffs, Birdman told us. This was the only place in the world you could find them. These were the only rocks like this on the coast, forced upward by violence and now weathered by time.

  “Hard to find tracks here,” he said. We were surrounded by rock, nothing to sink our feet into and leave a print. Turrets of red rock separated us from other paths we could have taken. The plateau we crossed now was fifty feet wide, the bottom slice of a slowly tapering wedding cake.

  Sam echoed what I thought we must all be thinking. “This is a hell of a good place to disappear into.”

  “Let’s stay close,” Birdman said. “A guy could wander off the edge of this thing and end up a thousand feet below in the ocean without even trying. And look for ribbons as you go.”

  I was sure there would be more ribbons, a solid line of them pointing the way up the divide. But there was nothing on the cliffs to show that anyone had been there before us. There were only clouds of tiny birds diving for food in the low bushes and the whines of early mosquitoes around our heads. We were walking on faith alone.

  Then I saw something that did not belong. Not a ribbon. Not a woman in a brown coat like I thought at first, but a bear, trailed by two pudgy cubs. I had not been paying attention, my eyes focused on the ground we were covering and the cloud of little birds swooping over the low bushes. It was a common error. Big picture stuff, my father used to lecture. Take it all in, in one sweeping glance. Don’t get caught up in small details. Otherwise it could cost you dearly. Inattention could mean a rock in the prop. Coming hard aground on a sandbar. Anchoring too close to a cliff. Bears where you did not expect to see them, despite this morning’s tracks.

  The wind was not in our favor, blowing into our faces instead of into hers where she would have smelled us long ago. We were close, too close. Close enough to see the muscles rippling under her skin as she nosed the ground, so close that I could see individual strands of chocolate-colored fur, silver tipped with water. The bear jerked up, startled, and stared deep into my eyes.

  I had encountered hundreds of bears before, too many to count. The bears looked me over and moved on, realizing they didn’t want to get tangled up in whatever danger I represented. The animals were fat and happy here, my father used to tell me, pacified by a diet of salmon and berries. Not like the barren ground grizzlies of the Interior. Here in Southeast you kept an eye out, always, but nine times out of ten you could say something, anything, and they would move out of the way. It was almost like they rolled their eyes: another human? I waited her out, hoping she would do the same.

  “Jesus Murphy, what’s a bear doing up here?” Birdman whispered. The cubs scampered closer to their mother, watching for a clue. The bear stood on hind legs, seeking a better view of the danger. Her front legs pounded back onto the ground and she gave a low growl in warning.

  Sam moved quickly as a cat. In seconds he had worked the bolt action, slamming a slug into the chamber. He raised the rifle to his shoulder and looked down the barrel. I saw his trigger finger move.

  “No,” Birdman shouted, shoving Sam to his knees. The rifle clattered to the ground. With a startled woof, the bear leapt away from us, pounding over the rock plateau and out of sight, her cubs bouncing along behind her.

  I dropped down to sit, my body suddenly boneless. Slowly everything returned to normal. A feeble sun poked out from the clouds. The little birds flitted back to the bushes. A mosquito landed on my hand, a little jolt of pain. Looking up, I could see the divide only a few feet above me.

  I could hear Birdman, his voice a tight line, keeping emotions in check. “What the hell was that? That bear wasn’t going to charge us. What were you thinking?”

  Sam rolled over and sat up. He could not meet our eyes. “Hell if I know. For a minute I was back there, in the tunnels,” he said. “I could see it happen all over again.”

  A sharp spike of dread ran through me. Here it was, what I wanted to know. “The bear tunnels? In Enchantment Bay? But you said you weren’t anywhere near the tunnels. You were with the boat. Watching the boat. That’s what you said! So that it wouldn’t go high and dry!”

  From somewhere else I watched Birdman put a calming hand on a girl’s shoulder. The girl had long hair that strayed from a fat braid. She wore a coat that did not fit her. Her dirty face was streaked with tears.

  I imagined that I could feel the red rock pulse beneath me, the heartbeat of the earth pounding through all the layers of heat and stone to reach me. The red cliffs felt solid, something I could lean against while everything else shifted.

  I took a long, ragged breath. “I’m not walking another step until I know what happened in the bear tunnels.”

  Time slowed. Each second stretched out as wide as the sea. I was afraid of what I was about to know. I was afraid that Sam would not say a word. Birdman crouched beside me, his hand the only thing I could count on in the whole world.

  Sam rested his chin on his knees. He seemed as unaware of us as the tugboat I could see far out in the strait. The boat steamed along with purpose, pulling a barge. It could be going as far north as Juneau or even farther,
Haines or Homer or even Anchorage. For a moment I wished I was on that tugboat, concerned only with quartering the boat into the swell, wondering where to anchor or whether to just roll on through the dark robe of the night until I came to my destination, far away from here.

  As Sam spoke I could see it in my head, clear as a movie reel. A man and a woman on a lonely dock, the ripples of a boat wake slowly fading into nothingness. The rumble of a motor receding.

  Minutes before they clasped hands across the table, all three of them.

  No guns, Althea said.

  They locked eyes. No guns, Roy agreed finally.

  Now a man and a woman on a lonely dock watch a man they both love at the tiller, curly hair blowing in the wind. He does not look back. He never looks back.

  Go after him, she says.

  They look at each other.

  I don’t know, he says. He won’t like it.

  Please.

  He hesitates.

  Please.

  All right.

  Take a rifle with you, she says.

  He nods.

  Promise me you will keep him safe. Promise me.

  Yes. I promise.

  He takes the old skiff, because that is all they have left. It needs bailing every few miles; the drain plug is not tight, the gas line troublesome. The daughter, escaping, took the other one. Where was it now? Was she still in Floathouse Bay? Or had she hailed a boat, let the skiff loose with the tide, was it washed up on some beach, a twisted heap of aluminum? Nobody knows for sure, although the last time Ernie came by she was still down coast. That was months ago though, back in the fall. Winter is a season he does not know here. Anything can happen in winter.

  He hugs the shore so he won’t be seen, keeping an eye on the boat he is following. But the bigger boat is much faster than his aging Lund, and by the time he gets to the bay he is about a half an hour behind. It is anchored, turning lazily with the incoming tide. Nobody is in sight.

  It is a bad time to anchor, the tide heading out across the estuary flats in a sweeping curtain. His anchor might not hold. He is still not good at this, even after all these seasons. The boat could drift in, get smashed on the rocks. He waits, thinks about it for a minute. Wouldn’t it be better to wait here? He hates himself for his fear, but he always has it. It is a part of him that lurks in the background, a thing he has learned to punch down, but it is always here.

  Yes, better to stay here. He will wait, and Roy will come back. Probably it is a false alarm, coast gossip only. They will drive in tandem along the coast, two boats in a parallel line, their wakes crossing each other. He will feel safe, like he always does when Roy is around. Sure, he screws up and Roy yells, but when it comes to finding your way home in a following sea, Roy is the man you want to guide you home.

  Then he hears a shot. A scream maybe, it is hard to tell. Impossible to ignore. He shifts from foot to foot. He has to go in.

  He leaves the boat with a prayer that the anchor will hold.

  He leaves the boat with a prayer he cannot articulate in words.

  Because he can do nothing else in this moment, he heads across the flat to the tunnels.

  When he gets there, deep in the tunnel, he hesitates, holding the rifle in sweaty palms. He stops far enough away so that he is not seen. Man and bear are so entwined he cannot see where one ends and the other begins. He knows he has to do something, but he is strangely paralyzed. He knows if he moves, gets closer, the bear will see him. It may even drop its victim and come to him. He is not sure he can take an accurate shot from where he is. He could hit the man, not the bear.

  The fear washes over him, more powerful than any tide. It is a fear he has carried with him every season, the knot in his stomach when he wakes, the fear that never really goes away. Without thinking he turns and runs, back to the shore, back to safety. The whole way he imagines that he has done this for Roy. That the bear will chase him instead, and he will leap in the boat to safety. Figure it out from there. But he knows that he is lying to himself. The bear was too intent on Roy to even notice Sam was there.

  The boat is okay, bobbing slightly in the tide. He cannot go back in there. He is anchored here, for better or worse. He sits slumped on the bow, holding the cold aluminum in blood-drained fingers. What to do. What to do. He hears a shot finally. Not Roy, he didn’t have a rifle. The cruisers?

  Finally the fog clears in his mind. He goes to the big boat, pulling it to him by the anchor rope. His hands shake. He pulls out the marine radio and calls for help. Even now he can’t go back. It’s over now, he assumes. He sits there on the boat, waiting for absolution.

  “I think Roy saw me,” Sam said. “I never asked. He never said a word, after, although there was always this thing between us, something left unsaid. In my dreams I do it right. I go in and shoot the bear. Done it a hundred times for the clients, right? I never missed any of those times. I wouldn’t miss this time. Roy gets up and walks out of there. We have a good laugh. Cheated death again, we say. But then I wake up.”

  I watched one of the birds light on a bush near me. A few wrinkled blueberries clung to its branches. No good now, drained of juice and flavor. Bitter. Even the birds didn’t want them.

  Sam put his head in his hands, his voice muffled. “The cruiser kid got it together, went in and shot the bear. He had some courage to do that. Courage I didn’t have.

  “I kept punching this down, but it keeps coming back up until I can’t swallow it anymore. The last couple of years I’ve made up a different ending, where I never go in at all. I thought on it hard enough that after a while I almost started believing it. But just now, with the bears, I was back there in the tunnels. I honestly believed I was there.”

  I lay flat, pinned by something invisible and heavy on my chest. For the first time I wished to be more like granite than water, my heart encased in thick folds of stone. My eyes ached with the weight of unshed tears. If Sam hadn’t run, the bear would not have inflicted so much damage. If the bear hadn’t inflicted so much damage, both of my parents would still be living in isolation in Never Summer Bay, the circle unbroken. But was that better than what happened to them in the end?

  Sam said, “Believe me, if I could have it to do over I would go the other way. I only got a second to choose and I chose wrong.”

  I could not force any words to come. They lodged inside of me like bullets frozen in a gun.

  “I didn’t tell you the truth about Enchantment Bay because after a while I really believed my own story,” he said. “I could see the otters rafting up just beyond where I stood in the bay, the mud getting thicker as the tide went out. I could even feel the boat as it bumped against my legs and how I kept pushing it out into deeper water. I know it sounds crazy but that’s what I remember when I think about Enchantment Bay. Not the other.”

  I couldn’t look at him. Instead I sat up and looked out over the cliffs. On the ocean side, the cliffs dove abruptly to the water far below. If I looked far out enough I could see the long sweep of Turn Back Strait where it turned to meet the tip of the island and the darker places where rip currents paced through the water. The red cliffs were a strange island in a sea of green and blue.

  When the anger came it was like the tide, knocking me off my feet. It was just like the times we had been caught, my mother and me, dreaming out on the flats, not paying attention to the signs. Tide came in a series of inconsequential waves, each stronger than the last, until you were up to your waist, your shoulders, your eyes. Water seemed light until it filled up your mouth and your nose and you were unable to breathe. Anger, it seemed, was the same.

  “You were the last person I thought would keep secrets,” I screamed. My voice was torn from me and hurled over the cliffs like scraps of paper in a gale. I was screaming as loud as I could and still it was not enough. There was so much country that drowned me out.

  Without realizing how it happened, suddenly both of us were standing, my hands curled into fists.

  “I thought you we
re different. I trusted you. Why did you get to choose what truth to tell me? Why did everyone get to choose? When do I get to choose? Tell me! Tell me when I get to be the one to choose!”

  My throat was raw, my hair tangled around my shoulders, and tears and rain worked their way down my face. I was hollow all the way down to my bones. The anger left me as quickly as it had come. There had been so much anger, breaking its back over all of us.

  I was someone I did not recognize.

  “I’m just like him,” I whispered.

  “You’re nothing like him.”

  I slowly unclenched my fists. “Did I hurt you?”

  “You never touched me.”

  “Oh.”

  “Winnie,” Sam said, “you’ve never let yourself be angry before. You’ve pushed it down all your life. This one time doesn’t mean you will be like him.”

  I wanted to believe him.

  Birdman was silent, watching us, hunched on his heels. He had started worrying a piece of wood with his knife. The soft heartwood piled up by his feet. “Sort this all out later. Best be moving on,” he said. “Not a good place to linger. Go down or go up, those are our choices.”

  Both men waited for me to choose. I glanced out over the plateau on which we sat. If a plane flew over right now, the pilot would never see us wave. If a boat passenger on the tugboat scanned the cliffs, he would never see us. We did not belong up here. Birdman was right. It was time to go.

  For a minute I thought I could go on without either man. I could just follow the hard line of the rocks until I was as high as I could get. Then I would read the country like Birdman was teaching me and find my own way to the lake.

  As I thought this I knew that I did not want to go alone. I had come to rely on Birdman’s steady presence leading the way and the reassurance of Sam following behind. Bookended between the two, I did not feel so alone.

  “Let’s keep climbing,” I said.

  Sam held out a hand. “Truce, for now?”

  I considered it. Taking his hand seemed like a betrayal, but even if Sam had stayed in the alder tunnels, would both men have come back alive? There were so many things that could have gone wrong: missed shot, slug caught in the barrel. Misfire. And there was this: How long should he pay for his mistake? He would carry it forever, an unseen anchor tethering him to this coast. No matter where he went, whether it was the desert or the mountains, he would still wake in the night remembering what he had done. Maybe that was enough.