Where Dreams Reside

by M. L. Buchman

  Finally, unable to escape the town, as the road simply ended five miles past either side of Ketchikan, she’d gone back to the lodge, lay down on the bed for a few minutes, and finally gotten much of the sleep she’d missed last night.

  It was late that afternoon by the time she again braced herself to venture out into the Alaskan “sunshine.” A bright gray sky offered a near blinding brightness in every direction, backed by just enough moisture in the air to drench your hair if you walked through it, but not enough to justify an umbrella. That was a laugh, she had become a city girl. Umbrellas were useless in Ketchikan, because rain here often rode in on gale-force winds. And she hadn’t come equipped with a hood or hat. Even crossing from hotel to rental car had dampened her freshly dried hair.

  Driving back through town, only touching the back roads this time, the windshield wipers squeaked and stuttered across a windshield too dry to wipe properly and too speckled to ignore. Once she reached her destination, she parked, but couldn’t force herself to get out of the car.

  Jo looked up through the rental car’s windshield at the spitting sky. She tried to ignore the new car smell that was rapidly mutating to take on the sickening overtones of lichen and moss, no matter that the windows were sealed tight. The tall fir trees were standing stock-still against a uniform bright gray sky. No big blow coming for at least the rest of the day, probably not the one after that either. Other than the light precipitation, this was a perfect fishing day. And she was certainly about to go fishing—for any clue she could find.

  Looking back down from the sky, she glared at the bar across the street. The Crab Hole was really too nice a name for the place. It bore a notorious paint job. Fred was a cheap son of a gun, or maybe he just didn’t care, no one could decide for sure and it wasn’t a topic he bothered with. Either way, he bought the mis-mixed paints at the paint store for half price. Someone orders five gallons of peach that comes out puce? The Crab Hole’s south wall will be puce for the next five years. Half the trim pale-piss yellow, the rest of it pumpkin orange. The only thing that never changed was the large, carved-wood sign. Until you knew what it was, it was hard to make sense of it.

  Jo could still remember the heat on her cheeks when at the age of eleven she’d finally figured it out.

  A crab hole is what the crab fisherman called a place in the ocean that crabs gathered. Often a dip in the ocean floor, it caused crabs to swarm and cluster. Good crab holes are deeply protected secrets passed down generation to generation within a family. Crabber captains lie to their crews about their actual coordinates to hide the locations. So she’d always thought the Crab Hole was named for a good place to go crabbing.

  At eleven years old, Jo’s mind had finally matured enough to unravel the aged, weather-softened carvings of the sign. It was a male crab mounted on a female’s back. That wasn’t so unusual. The Arctic Bar just down the road had a logo of two grizzly bears humping. What was out of place on the Crab Hole sign was the very obvious, once you knew how to see it, the human phallus that the crab was ramming up the she-crab’s backside.

  People thought it made the place colorful. Tourists who made it this far down the waterfront always took a picture of themselves with the sign over their shoulder in the background. Only a few, however, had the nerve to venture inside. This was completely a locals’ watering hole.

  Jo forced herself from the car and tried to forget how many times she’d gone through that door looking for her father. She wished she’d worn gloves, but forced herself to take the door handle shaped like a giant crab claw, a hand-worn electric green at the present time, and go inside.

  Almost twenty hours a day of sun here in mid-June Ketchikan, and at four in the afternoon the bar was a place of shadows and smoke. Right, you could smoke in bars in Alaska, she’d forgotten that. New York State and Washington State barely let you smoke in your own home, which was fine with her.

  Here, a low cloud of nicotine stained the walls a motley brown. Mixed with the ever constant smell of deep-fry fish and chips and grilled burgers, that were not bought for their “percent lean,” it had a palpable nastiness that was bitter on the tongue and nose, stung the eyes, and left her feeling the instant need for another shower.

  For “ambiance” the Crab Hole had the KTKN broadcast offering inaudible but constantly murmuring talk radio that no one listened to, but it filled any overlong silences, as if there was a busy background debate going on in the room. The other entertainment was an old Wurlitzer juke box that might have been worth something, but hadn’t worked since as far back as Jo could remember. She’d dreamed for hours as a little girl of all of the places it could take her. California Dreaming, Girl from Ipanema, both the Dionne Warwick and the Frank Sinatra versions, she’d even wanted to ride The Last Train to Clarksville, wherever that was. Back then, it took an active interest to make out the faded titles through the layers of grease on the curved glass front. Probably wholly invisible by now.

  The whole scene created a miasma so thick that it could have been chopped up and sold for poisoning typical house pests. The atmosphere blurred the backs of the regulars at the bar until they appeared to blend together.

  But Jo didn’t need to see them clearly to know who they were. Adam, Bernie, Carl, and Dan. Had nothing in the place changed? She’d been gone a dozen years and all they’d done was get a little wider and Carl’s long hair showed a little grayer where it hung down in a severely dated mullet. Dan, the massive Tlingit, so big he must be part Samoan, anchored the row on the fourth stool. The fifth stool at the bar was empty. They always sat in alphabetical order for reasons none of them claimed to remember. The bar would have to find an Eric or Evander to sit on the stool that had belonged to Earnest Jack Thompson as surely as if he’d bought and paid for it.

  From the hazy shadows she inspected the rest of the bar. A thousand, maybe ten thousand crab shells had been glued to the wall. No legs, just the shells so close together they were nearly indistinguishable. Not just Dungeness and Alaskan King. Travelers who had braved the Crab Hole went home and sent in new ones from all over the world. Blues, spider crab, stone, rock, South American land crab… She’d learned them all, when bored with sitting at some sticky table doing her homework and sipping a Coke. Floor to ceiling, the shells covered the wall.

  The place looked as if some mad painter had blotched the walls with a ragged sponge then covered the whole place in dust to gray out any real sign of shape, color, or semblance to anything natural. Rather than crab shells, the ceiling had been mostly covered with dark blue mussel shells, with some gray clam and white oyster mixed in. That was almost pretty, if a little oppressive as it wasn’t a very high ceiling.

  There were a dozen or so patrons. The locals were quiet and wore tough working clothes or sensible sweaters for the cool summer day. But there were a few tourists off the cruise ships, the more adventurous ones who were seeking that “authentic Alaskan experience,” all marked very clearly by the urban clothes and cruise ship attitude that was practically tattooed on their foreheads.

  She’d hated that as a kid. Because of her half-Alaskan heritage, she looked native enough for all of the tourists to want a picture of her up against some wall of the Crab Hole as if she were an attraction placed there for their own enjoyment. She’d started charging them a quarter a shot. Her father’s sole comment about the whole situation was that she should charge a buck. She tried it and it worked. Almost well enough that she stopped minding as much, though not quite. She spent most of her take at Parnassus Bookstore which left her canning factory gift shop paychecks to go into the college fund savings account.

  Behind the counter sat Fred, looking old and craggy exactly as she’d always remembered. Near him, drawing a beer, was the woman Steve had mentioned. Gerta stood about Jo’s height. She had short blond hair, a narrow face, and athletic shoulders. Jo wondered if Fred had hired her to continue the alphabetical chain.

  Gerta had noted Jo’s entrance right away, though her only reaction had bee
n a quick glance of dark eyes. Fred must have noticed Gerta’s attention, as his gaze drifted in Jo’s direction.

  The smile he offered when he recognized her was slow, slow and sad. He was the one who’d called her to tell her that her father was dead.

  Jo sat on her father’s stool in the Crab Hole, hoping that no one with initials “H” and “I” showed up while she was here or she might never escape. It was creepy. She’d never sat here before, not even in her dad’s lap that she could remember. He hadn’t been a lap kind of guy.

  Thankfully he also hadn’t been a drunk, particularly. Not the way she always thought of them anyway, staggering out of the Seattle clubs at two a.m. as likely to walk into walls as along the sidewalk. Or the burnout alkies begging around Pioneer Square.

  Yes, her father had gotten off the boat, gone to his stool at the Crab Hole, and not moved until closing or near enough. But he nursed only a couple beers each night. It was some sort of sad male bonding that caused these five guys to perch every night in front of Fred’s bar and talk sports, fishing, weather, and tourists. Which was most of their repertoire, leaving a lot of time for KTKN to drone quietly in the background.

  Fred no longer got up to wait the tables. “Too much arthritis in my old hip.” He’d practically become one of his own patrons anchored to a stool, just on the other side of the bar. Gerta serviced the tables, cooked the fry or grill orders, and tended the bar with a quiet efficiency and actually appeared to be happy with what she was doing.

  “Better than nuclear specialist in Ukrainian Army,” Gerta had offered in barely recognizable English when she noted Jo’s attention. Actually, if Jo hadn’t grown up in a town where there were many Russian fishermen, she’d not have understood Gerta at all. And once Jo had unraveled Gerta’s words in her head, by which time the woman had moved on, Jo hoped that she hadn’t heard them correctly.

  Fred had gotten Jo a beer personally, even though she hadn’t wanted one. But she was too polite to say so, and knew Fred didn’t serve wine, nasty or otherwise. All of them from Adam to Fred were clearly at a loss of what to do with the empty stool, it had probably been filled nearly every night for thirty or more years. Gerta didn’t appear to be bothered by much of anything.

  “It was fast,” Fred told her. “Funny, he wasn’t the drunk one. It was the one who hit him that was out of his gourd. Twenty-two year old tourist kid who just totally wrecked his own life. After he hit your dad, he overcorrected and drove into that new antiques place on Madison. Busted up his leg and hip and what the Californian owner claims is about a quarter million worth of the ugliest junk you’ve ever seen. For a while we didn’t know whether or not his old man was going to kill him before the cops let him out of the hospital on bail.”

  “And,” Bernie chimed in, he always liked adding the last line to a story. “Rumor is he was far more pissed about the antiques coming out of his insurance than some manslaughter charge his son might get slapped with.”

  “Didn’t come out right there, Bern.” About the only statement Adam ever made was correcting Bernie.

  Somehow it was appropriate that drink had been the instrument of death for Earnest Thompson, even if she wasn’t going to say so in this bar.

  “‘Course he had less than six months to live,” Carl offered.

  “He what?” Jo leaned forward to look around Dan’s bulk.

  “Liver,” Bernie offered without really turning to look at her as if he were still trying to puzzle out what was wrong with his last utterance.

  “Prostate, ya’ fool,” Adam corrected.

  Dan, as usual, said nothing. He simply dug into a pocket, set a key on the bar with barely a sound and slid it over to her. The house key. Dan was big, but he was also the youngest at the bar, probably only in his late fifties or early sixties. As such, it had clearly been his task to climb the fifty-six stairs to her father’s shack and oversee what needed overseeing.

  Jo didn’t want the key and all that it implied, but she didn’t want to offend Dan either. She nodded to him and stuffed the key in her pocket.

  She’d just found out her father had been dying anyway, that he hadn’t told her, and she could think of nothing to say. Heck, she was fitting right in at the bar of the Crab Hole.

  “Jo, I knew you come!”

  Before she could identify the voice behind her, she was tipped back on the stool and swept into a kiss.

  Yuri Andreevich!

  One arm around her shoulders held her tipped back and off balance, the other started at her hip but was headed straight toward her chest. He drove the kiss at her even as she shoved against his massive chest, to little effect.

  He broke the kiss for a moment. “I know you come here when your father die. And now he no longer scare you away from beautiful Alaska and you can stay here for me and we can make many babies together.”

  He leaned back in and she managed to shove him aside long enough to say, “No!” Her entire system was galvanized with revulsion. She didn’t think there was a way to make the Crab Hole worse than it was, but Yuri had found one.

  He drove at her again with his whiskey breath and she slapped him as hard as she could, putting every inch of her workout muscles into it.

  Yuri’s head barely turned. He just smiled. “I knew you missed me. Now we can make love like two Russian wildcats.”

  Abruptly she was free, so fast that she’d have fallen to the floor without Dan’s steadying hand on her back.

  “The lady said, ‘No’!”

  She turned to see which of the alphabet gang had pulled Yuri off. They were all off their stools and moving in, but the fist that connected with Yuri’s jaw hard enough to snap his head back belonged to Angelo. Angelo was a head shorter, but with shoulders just as wide as Yuri’s. Yuri stumbled back into a crab-shell covered wall with a loud crunch that broke dozens of shells showering tiny flakes of calcium carbonate to the floor.

  Angelo didn’t give him a moment to recover. Two more hits, gut and chin again. Before Yuri could collapse to the floor, Angelo grabbed him by the hair and the back of his belt. He got him into a stumbling run and ran him at the heavy wooden entry door.

  Angelo released him just as he hit. Yuri crashed through the front door, opening it with his head, and tumbled out onto the sidewalk. A short scream came from some tourist he almost bowled over as he collapsed against a car parked at the curb. A little display of local color. Another tourist snapped a photo even as the door swung shut.

  Angelo came back to her slowly. The others were gathered around her asking if she was okay. Even Fred had made it out from behind the bar. But that was all a mere background buzz.

  “How?” Jo gestured helplessly toward the wall of shattered crab shells.

  “I grew up with Russell. He was always getting us into some rissa. Scuffle.”

  “Oh. Uh. What are you doing here?” She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry or shout or throw herself at him.

  He stopped a foot away, massaging one hand with the other.

  “I, uh… You shouldn’t be alone when family dies. Cassidy said you had no one else and she couldn’t leave Russell, so I came.”

  “But how?” She really wasn’t being very lucid was she. She pointed toward the door Yuri had so recently exited as if that would complete the question she couldn’t formulate. It swung open as a couple tourists came in, looking over their shoulders at the man now up on all fours and shaking his head.

  Angelo shrugged in that Italian fashion of his. “I came in and saw you at the bar. I didn’t want to disturb you.” He pointed at a half-finished beer sitting at a small table to the side.

  She stepped in until their bodies brushed together. She ran a finger down his cheek.

  “Thank you,” she barely mouthed it then simply wrapped her arms around his neck and lay her head on his shoulder. Yuri didn’t really matter, the alphabet gang would have pulled him off in a moment more, though it wouldn’t have been half as satisfying.

  But no one had ever dropped ever
ything and come two thousand miles just because she shouldn’t be alone. Being in Angelo’s arms was the first rational thing that had happened to her since the stupid phone call.

  “Adam, Bernie, Carl, Dan, Fred, and Gerta. This is Angelo.” Jo couldn’t stop holding his hand and Angelo wasn’t complaining for a second. Gerta found him another stool somewhere in the back, and Jo had them shoved together so close that they couldn’t sit without touching.

  Russell had mentioned over Sunday breakfast at Cassidy’s condo that Jo’s dad had died and she’d gone to Alaska. Without thinking, or even saying goodbye, he’d simply walked out the door and headed to the airport. No luggage, nothing. Just two phone calls. One to Manuel that the restaurant was his for the moment. The other to his mother to help Manuel. Mama had said only one word when she heard why he was already racing to the airport, “Go.” Then she’d hung up and he could only hope everything would be okay.

  The whole flight north he’d been torn. A summer Sunday, he really should be at the restaurant. He’d abandoned everyone at a moment’s notice. On the other side, he couldn’t get to Alaska fast enough.

  Russell had texted him sometime during the flight and he got the message when he landed. Cassidy had recalled some college story about a bar called the Crab Hole. Who could forget a name like that? Starting there for lack of a better idea, he’d rushed in and come to a halt when he’d seen her at the bar with an untouched beer sitting in front of her. He’d almost gone forward, but he knew this scene from a dozen different bars, though never one this oddly decorated. He recognized the slow conversation of regulars. She knew these people and they knew her.

  He’d raised a single finger to the bartender and tipped his hand as if opening a beer tap. She’d brought a pint of whatever she had on draft to the side table he’d chosen. From there he could watch Jo’s profile. Only sitting there watching her, did he finally realize that he could have just called her cell phone when he landed. But that didn’t matter now, he’d found her anyway.