A Cabinet of Curiosity

by Bradford Morrow

  But then, Kodiak itself is different from the place I knew. The town that ended so abruptly it seemed to have been switched off now sprawls down paved roads that I remember as dirt. The funky cannery where Amy and I worked now lies within a corporate orbit and operates year-round at full capacity. The sweet guy who gave me a tour offered gentle correction to the term foreman (“production manager”) and pointed to the computerization of jobs like precision slicing, though the work in general still looks taxing and wet. As to whether college kids still migrate from the Lower 48 for summer work, perhaps he didn’t hear me, then didn’t hear me again; there was a whiff of nontransient employment to the crew.

  Even the huge Kraft supermarket that was once a town centerpiece is no more. Its beautiful peaked building stands empty, and a Safeway glows 2.4 miles out Mill Bay Road. Everywhere I went I got one response to the news that I’d lived here in the 1970s: “Oh, now, that was when we were still the Wild West….” Of course, even the Wild West is just an allegory.

  LA Network is a clutch of guys with dad bods and curious hair plus a woman in black who’s kept in shape. According to my notes, both the Friday and Saturday sets began with “Hollywood Nights,” but whatever the reasoning, it got the jury of their peers aroused, and after half a dozen numbers Sam Moon took the stage. Moon’s a large man whose trademarks are: 1) a decent channeling of Van Morrison, and 2) the caftans he wears to perform. Watching him dial up the feel-good with a version of “Moondance,” I wondered if the caftan was a drag thing or what, but by the time Sam and I chatted I’d decided that point was moot. Here was a guy who’d been at it a long time and did his bliss: more power to him.

  I asked Sam how he’d found the Beachcombers, and he said it was Legs who used to fly down to Vancouver to sign acts. In 1972 Legs booked him for a three-to-four-month gig that got renewed annually into the eighties. While I tried to figure if I’d known him in the old days, Sam told me of a janitor who’d worked the Beachcombers for years. The fishermen were high rollers, he said, and when the price per pound rose they’d stand rounds for the house. “Maybe two hundred drinks. Then they’d get wasted and lose track of their money. There’d be dropped coins, bills, sometimes jewelry on the floor.” He gave a chuckle. “And each morning the janitor went in and cleaned up.” Laugh line, bah-boom. Then it was time for him to go sing “Brown Eyed Girl,” and as I reentered the party room, a drunk with a narrow face offered a high five. I put my hand up, and he asked who the fuck wears a T-shirt in fuckin’ Alaska. It turns out a bar reunion’s a lot like a bar.

  But every poetry event’s poetic in its own way, as Tolstoy pointed out. Fishermen Out Loud included four men and four women, all with roots in Alaska commercial fishing. Some had flown in from other ports, and one missed the final night when the boat he captained went out before dawn. And, yeah, there was doggerel—“I’m not very good at writing anything that’s sad,” one big, grinning guy declared—but most was ambitious and serious and sharp; think Philip Levine with a haul of salmon on ice. Sacred testaments to the rigors of the job, hymns to the dangerous allure of fishing itself and to the impulses that draw the same person up into the Bering one night and to a roadhouse on dry land another. Narratives of wrecks and storms and lucky runs.

  Also: Carefully turned lines. Interesting diction. Attention to form and a measure of attitude. A poet called Meezie Hermansen said that a villanelle “turns out to be a French poem with a whole buncha stinkin’ rules, a few of which I followed,” then read an elegant one comparing painting to fishing. “When we reach the vanishing point, may we find a masterpiece.” There was a piece about a deckhand called Copacetic Tim, who got beaten at a summer party, and an angry, precise poem about crewing while female. There were shout-outs to XTRATUFFs, the only rubber boot anyone will be caught dead in, and references to gillnetting, chubs, kings, big tides, flares, trawlers, and the Caterpillar 3298. Also shore, home, and death. The most mesmerizing performances were by a guy called Steve Schoonmaker, who’d closed the bar at the Beachcombers one night twenty-nine years ago and drunkenly walked across Mission Road (“Before the guardrail,” cried an audience wag) and there, on the pebble beach, decided to fish. He’s been fishing ever since and writing poems since the nineties, his house sauce an incantatory anapestic tetrameter, as in: “Illusions of separateness that we exist on our own / Contained in our bodies, outside all we’ve known / Dividing up nature till we’re divided alone / At the top of some food chain we’ll conquer and own.” Whew.

  I went for a breather and ran into Justine, a boisterous charmer who was Ray’s wife through the boat years and still takes a proprietary interest in the place. She was scanning the memorial to the departed (five hundred–plus names, including one David King), and I said I mostly hadn’t known anyone’s last name. I said it helped if they didn’t have one and pointed to “Diablo,” and Justine said that in the old days you’d be in the women’s shower and hear a buzzing sound: Diablo drilling a peephole through the steel wall. A woman named Susan, she said, had banged a fist on the wall and cried, “Diablo! At least wait till I’m done!”

  For a moment we gaped at how thoroughly a world can change, then Justine took my arm and said this was what she regretted. She’d wanted an open-mike session for sharing old tales, but with all the activities plus a showcase for local musicians, it hadn’t taken off. “Maybe the next one,” she said. “In eight years, it’ll be seventy-five years since the Beachcombers’ founding.”

  I said I thought the poets had story hour covered; upstairs Toby Sullivan had just read an essay about a Beachcombers shooting. “They rolled him over on his back, and his eyes were open but unblinking. His left arm rolled across his chest and flopped on the floor next to him, the back of his hand hitting the dirty linoleum with a faint slap. I shut the door and kept the light off and lay very quietly in my bunk with my clothes on. The band kept playing upstairs.” Toby arrived on Kodiak in ’74, just like me. Like me, he had a room at the Beachcombers, but we did not overlap. And then Toby stayed on—fished, put down roots, started the Maritime Museum—whereas I hadn’t been back.

  How do you look at something that’s no longer there? Each day, stepping outside, I was struck by the familiar salt-fish smell of the town, which I’d forget each night in my room at the Best Western, and as I thought of the two routes I’d walked daily with Amy, I felt like young Marcel—or maybe old Marcel—accessing memories through sense. The sky on my last morning was a bright piebald blue, and I chose the Mission Road route, which had wended along a wooded coast back in ’74. But just past the Russian church, where the trees had once taken over, stood a row of houses, and around the next turn the houses continued. Modest homes, fancy homes, those on the left sitting up on a bank, those on the right on yards cleared to the water. I walked on, texting Amy, looking at trucks and boat trailers and little porches and nodding to neighborhood folk, and on a wild spur where on the night of June 21, 1974, I’d stayed up reading Swann’s Way and watching the sun fail to set, I discovered a landscaped compound with green lawn, gabled McMansion, seawall and outbuildings—but also nets hung to dry in a stand of carefully preserved pines. Across the street, the old gravel lot was now paved, and the third Beachcomber building, the one with the steel floor, completed a line of houses. There was a Salvation Army sign on it, and other Salvation Army buildings dotted the lot. Where Potatopatch Lake had once faded into grassy wetlands, a mobile-home community had sprung up.

  From the air—or from Google Earth—the shape of a prow is still visible as a promontory, bilaterally symmetrical, jutting into the lake. Ray had told me about a remnant at the spot where the extended LeGrue clan had taken that photo, and as I strolled toward it, a woman in a windbreaker appeared, heading the same way. I hadn’t seen her at the reunion, but I thought maybe she too was on a memory mission, so I called out, offering to let her go on alone. She turned, and I saw she was older than I, with the sunken face of a lifelong smoker. “I don’t needa see that,” she said gruffly. “I used to
work at the Beachcombers.” I said I’d once lived there and asked what she’d done. “I used to go there with my friend,” she said and turned her back on me.

  I watched her ignore me as she smoked at the edge of the lake, then I walked onto the promontory and found the bit of bow rising six inches above the grass. Just a rusted steel V, reinforced at the tip, it looked like a wishbone with a groove down each leg. The legs ran about two feet before cutting off abruptly; between them, a bent pipe with a chain attached poked from the earth. That was all there was left.

  I looked toward the ocean and imagined the line of the hull as I’d known it. It would shear through one of the Salvation Army structures, I decided. The awninged entrance we’d used would be there and the gangways there and the far side of the hull, where no one ever went, just about there. I thought of the times Amy and I had gone to the top deck to look at the sky over the bleak, rugged coast, then I walked my imagined plan and tried to gauge where the Little Bar had been, and the stairs and the gangways and washrooms, the communal shower where, once, after she was gone, I picked up a Russian sailor and brought him back to my cubicle.

  I pictured the blue stateroom Amy and I’d occupied together, its porthole overlooking a patch of reeds sprouting from stagnant water. Beyond the reeds the grim deli had stood, the sole structure in those days and a place where we’d shoplifted minijars of peanut butter and packages of jerky and Kraft singles. Back then the entire lake surface had looked mossily green, and junk was piled on the banks, possibly still from the ’64 disaster. But when I found the spot where I thought our room had been and turned toward our porthole view, I saw sparkling water, dark and fresh looking, with white puffs mirrored affectionately on the surface. Where the woods had been impenetrable on the far side of the lake were still more nice homes, several with mown paths down a slope for lake access. The deli building was included in the Salvation Army complex, all of it shut tight. At the lake’s edge, where I recalled marsh and trash, the banks had been cleaned up.

  And the town’s id, that outpost of badness—as it had been all those years ago, before nostalgia, before memory? It was the reason I’d come, but what had become of it? At my feet a breeze rustled the grass over the wishbone hull, and across the lake a child threw a stone at the water then went inside a house. The clouds reflected on the lake surface paused, and the mental plan of the boat, which I’d paced out minutes earlier, began to waver. Like the cabin on Potatopatch Lake giving way to a white-tablecloth hotel, like that place giving way to the boat I recalled, the boat I recalled gave way slipperily to a nonboat, huge and somnolent, rising as invisibly as a series of dots, a shimmering outline molded of blue air. A bird flew through the space where the boat had stood, and even the smoking woman—whoever she was or had been long ago—had somehow disappeared without my knowing.

  Mona Sparrow

  Lauren Green

  I met her on the first day of kindergarten, when her leaves were beginning to change. She had rosy cheeks and dark, strangely wizened eyes, like those of a horse. I was surprised to see her at first, because even at four years old, I thought I knew everyone in our Podunk town, which was hemmed in by salt flats on all sides—flats glassy as ice and so barren they whetted the horizon line to a single, precise seam. My father swore that if a person gazed at that seam for long enough, he would see where the earth curved.

  Every night, my father came home after working tedious hours in the salt mines and stood on the front porch, shaking crystals from the cuffs of his trousers and stamping his mucking boots against the wooden planks, causing raccoons to scurry out from below. Our town was known for the mines. In every other regard, we lived in an optionless place: one church, one schoolhouse, one barbershop, one supermarket, one graveyard.

  Hardly anyone ever tried to cross the salt flats; they were so limitless. That was why it was particularly strange to find Mona Sparrow sitting in her tiny desk chair on that first day, removing a spiral notebook from her knapsack. She wore white knee-highs with blue beads fringing the edges; her leafy hair was wild and ungroomed. Since it was September, the foliage had only just begun to color, and the tips of Mona’s leaves looked as if they had been dipped in flames.

  Mona didn’t mention the leaves until we asked. At four, we already understood when one thing was not like the others. We wanted to know where Mona came from and why her head resembled a tree.

  “Why haven’t we seen you before?” we pressed, encircling her desk like wasps around refuse. “Why haven’t you made angels with us on the flats? Or decorated salt-art bottles at Summerfest?”

  Mona shrugged. She didn’t like to talk much.

  Over the course of that year, and the next, and the next, we adjusted to the caprices of her leaves. By third grade, the school janitor had taken to keeping a rake beside the chalkboard to make cleanup easier when autumn came.

  Mona was our seasonal clock. If her leaves were scarlet, it meant Halloween was around the corner. If they were glowworm green, it meant the flowers would soon begin to unfurl, spilling over the earth with their cloying smell. During the cold and lonely winter months, she took to wriggling a pink knit cap over her bald pate so that none of us would stare.

  We stared anyway. Sometimes, to our great delight, birds would alight on Mona’s branches during recess. We would gather around to egg them on, urging them to peck harder and build their nests faster. We especially loved when it rained, and the droplets stayed suspended on her leaves, perfect iridescent globes. Every time she moved, rainwater dribbled down her neck and dampened the back of her shirt.

  I sat behind Mona in class since my last name too began with an S. I stared at her leaves every day, wishing they were mine. My hair was muddy brown. I had the sort of open, oval face that was forgettable, and I was painfully average at every activity I tried. Mona was different—she couldn’t help but be extraordinary. What I wanted was not to be friends with her. Rather, I wanted for her to want to be friends with me.

  In the fourth grade, Amanda Cotton hosted a sleepover party for her tenth birthday. Amanda’s mother insisted that if Amanda was inviting all the other fourth-grade girls, it was only proper that she also invite Mona. No one expected her to come. But sure enough, at six o’clock, Mona showed up at the door, emergency-yellow sleeping bag tucked beneath one arm, bearing presents for both Amanda and Mrs. Cotton.

  Mrs. Cotton warmed to Mona right away. “Well, aren’t you the cutest little thing,” she said, tousling Mona’s tawny leaves, which disintegrated beneath her fingers. I felt my heart pang and shut my eyes, imagining it was my hair Mrs. Cotton was playing with.

  Amanda had planned a list of all our activities—homemade mineral facials and late-night prank calls and pillowcase decorating with special fabric markers. We sat cross-legged in a single-file line and braided one another’s hair while Mona sat off in the corner, humming to herself and stroking her knobby branches.

  Her insouciance incensed us. In the face of our curiosity, there seemed something cruel in her indifference, how little she cared what we thought of her. We huddled together in one corner of the Cottons’ dank basement and whispered about what to do. “I have an idea,” Amanda declared, loud enough for Mona to overhear. “Let’s play Would You Rather.”

  The questions were standard at first: Would you rather lick a hobo’s foot or only be able to eat foods that are blue for the rest of your life? Would you rather be invisible or be able to read minds? Would you rather be married to a merman or a centaur?

  Finally, we turned to Mona. “Hey, Mona,” Amanda said, “would you rather be so ugly your parents never let you leave the house or be so pathetic you only get invited places because people feel sorry for you?”

  The tips of Mona’s ears reddened. She opened her mouth like she was about to say something. We waited. We wanted Mona to cry, to let us know that what we’d said was mean. Dry eyed, she simply turned her face and looked away.

  “Baby,” someone said, and we all snickered extra loud, refusing to mee
t each other’s gazes.

  Eventually, Mrs. Cotton shuffled downstairs in her slippers and bathrobe to shut the light. “Sweet dreams, girls,” she said. “I’m right upstairs if you need anything.” I glanced over at Amanda, whose face was flushed with embarrassment. I wondered if this was how her mother always tucked her into bed.

  We snuggled into our sleeping bags, cocooning ourselves in the familiar smells of our own homes, which suddenly seemed so far away in the mildewy dark. Around us, the floor was littered with candy wrappers. The ends of my fingertips buzzed.

  On one side of the basement, the hopper window was open, a night breeze drifting through. I rolled over to look out at the sliver of papery moon. Just then, a large gust of wind swept across the room. Leaves flew from Mona’s head, scattering over all the sleeping bodies. The smell of maple filled the air. I watched as Mona rose quietly, then stooped to pick the leaves up one by one. She tiptoed between the sleeping bags with such obeisance, it was as if she were moving through the rows of a cemetery.

  In junior high, Mona made more of an effort to insert herself into our activities. She joined choir and, since she was the tallest girl in the entire sixth grade, stood on the topmost riser, right behind me. When she sang, her voice had a haunting, silvery timbre, like she was a bird calling out for its fledgling.