The Ancestor

by Lee Matthew Goldberg

  “You’ll get bored up in Alaska,” her mother said, sucking a hit from a freshly rolled joint.

  “It’s pure up there,” Callie responded, because she’d caught the Alaska fever. Wide-open spaces, room to breathe. She had felt so stifled in California, her friends caught up in bullshit. Dating apps and dressing up, putting on a show. They lived close enough to L.A. to get lost in the Hollywood spillover. Each of them attached to this hot director, that model, this cute actor. She was guilty of it too but started to find it nauseating.

  “There’s no smog there,” she said, running out of defenses.

  “We’ll get you an air purifier.”

  “I’m in love.”

  This had been something she’d vocalized before with other boyfriends, but more because she’d been with them for long enough it seemed she had to. If she wasn’t in love like they were, then she was to blame. Cold and heartless Callie. With Travis, it felt magnetic, essential.

  “Someday, you’ll come back to California,” her mother said. “It’s in your name. It’s written in the stars.”

  But she was convinced Alaska would be her new permanent home. Vast and welcoming, uncharted and bursting with adventure. Full of good, true energy, and a crazy thing called love.

  Stu arrives with a six-pack dangling from his finger, Cora with a Bundt cake. Travis showered and shaved, smelling of musk. He knows Callie likes a forest scent, anything animalistic. He’s found her distant lately, but maybe it’s because he’s been receding too.

  What is a man beyond his work and his ability to provide for his family? Right now, he feels like sludge, a percentage rather than a whole.

  “Grandma, grandpa,” Eli yells, tackling Stu’s leg. Stu always hesitant with the boy, like he’d been with Travis and Bobby. Cora the opposite, made of hugs.

  “There’s my favorite sweet little boy,” Cora says, plying him with lipstick kisses and leaving marks. Eli fawning over the attention.

  Chinook starts barking like crazy so Travis takes him out to the doghouse with kibbles and water to last him the night.

  Afterwards, they settle in the den. The men talk of Travis’s hunt over beers. The women sip a sherry that Cora gifted last winter. Eli draws a moose.

  “That’s lovely, Eli,” Cora says, patting his head.

  “I know.”

  “This hair color,” Cora says, fingering a braid of Callie’s. “A bottle won’t get me close to it.”

  “I was once told as a child that redheads have no soul,” Callie replies.

  “Kids can be so mean.”

  “So a herd came by pretty fast?” Stu says, pivoting because of his bad leg. He gives the slightest wince, but Travis knows it hurts worse. Shot in the line of duty about ten years back, the first and only time.

  “Yeah, I think the caribous get bold after the winter when there’s no hunters around.

  You should come with Grayson and I next time.”

  A futile attempt, like usual. His father not going hunting in years, too much pain connected to those olden days.

  “Papa Clifford wanted to come, but didn’t have the energy,” Cora says.

  “We’ll do Sunday dinner at your place next week so we can see him.”

  “He’d like that,” Cora replies, catching Stu’s eye to get him to respond, but Stu focuses on a painting of a mallard over the mantle as if he’s studying fine art.

  “Shall we eat?” Callie asks, directing them to the dining area.

  She’d brought out the good plates they’d gotten from the wedding. It was a small affair, held in Nome. She didn’t even invite any of her friends, already feeling distant from them. Her parents insisted on coming. The attire was casual and her father wore a reindeer sweater. He spoke of it throughout the night like it’d been a charity he donated to.

  He and her mom calling Alaska “quaint” multiple times. They hid in their liquors and fled at sunrise.

  “I hope everyone likes stew,” Callie says, and Travis gives her a wink.

  “Smells of heaven.”

  “It’s all the crockpot. I did very little.”

  “Nonsense,” Cora says. “Travis, I always said she had a knack for cooking. I’d bet you’d make a great caterer.”

  “Who would I cater for around here?” Callie asks, and then nibbles on her tongue.

  They settle into the meal. Eli loves the “boo,” which is what he calls the caribou. Stu stays quiet like usual, never one for much conversation, even worse over the years. Cora monopolizes the flow, a role she took on long ago.

  “Did you hear about that goods store?” Cora asks, puffing up her curly hair that resembles a biker’s helmet. “Closed down.”

  “Heard it was a drug front,” Travis says into his near-empty beer.

  “That’s not public knowledge. But yes. Heroin.”

  Stu’s voice cracks as he says this. The table goes silent except for Eli who’s singing a song he made up about a boo.

  “I didn’t mean…” Cora begins.

  Stu holds up his hand, gives a firm nod. “Son, I wanted to talk to you.”

  Travis digs at the remnants of beer in the bottle with his tongue. “Yeah, Stu?”

  “I had a conversation with Smitty the other day. Runs the Cutthroat boat. Northern pike, rainbow trout. Salmon, of course.”

  “I know Smitty, tell him hi.”

  “Sure. I will. So Smitty’s been looking for a guy.”

  “A guy for what?”

  “Help on the boat. Old Charlie was making trips with him. But Old Charlie is getting, well, old.”

  “Stu, listen…”

  “Now, son, you got a family and money doesn’t sprout from trees.”

  “Smitty probably pays in coins.”

  “It’s something.”

  “And what does he need? He does all the fishing.”

  “Mostly the cleaning.”

  “Well, that’s…” Travis makes a fist. “That’s…I’m thirty years old. I’m above scooping out guts.”

  “No one is above nothing. We do what we must. I’ma tell him yes. You go out there for a day and see how it goes. Maybe he’ll let you fish some.”

  “Whoop-dee-do.”

  “Don’t. You hear me? Don’t backtalk me.”

  Stu points an imposing finger, and even a fighter like Travis goes quiet. As a kid, he may have posted up against Stu, but not anymore. Now it’d just be cruel.

  “I’m sorry. I’ll…okay. You can tell Smitty yes.”

  “I already did,” Stu says, and heads into the kitchen for another beer.

  “That was good,” Cora says, her smile trembling.

  Callie takes Travis’s hand. His is cold because he runs cold, always has. She rubs his hitchhiker’s thumb.

  He spins out of his chair and wobbles a little to the kitchen. Stu stands by the window over the sink staring at the moon. The moonlight silvery. The kitchen appliances buzzing.

  A faint tear lingering at the corner of Stu’s eye, barely noticeable except to Travis, since his father never cries.

  “Pop,” he says, with a heavy hand on his father’s back.

  “Sink’s dripping,” Stu replies, still transfixed with the moon.

  Travis wants to say something like, “He’s watching, he’s with us,” but words never suffice.

  Stu doesn’t wipe away the tear as it builds in power and trickles down a wrinkle in his cheek. His face full of lines, not in the past but deep grooves now. A short and solid man, hard as stone. Crewcut, lips so thin they’re hardly there, a Barlow’s nose.

  Out of the window, they hear a snap followed by a rustling. It doesn’t sway his father’s gaze, but Travis peers into the swell of darkness. Its blue-black lure. Alaska populated by black holes, places where matter disappears. Their home surrounded by animals, but this doesn’t sound like one. A human rustling, since humans are restive creatures. Animals more patient even though their time on Earth more limited.

  “Do you hear that?” he asks Stu, who lets out the un
iverse’s longest sigh.

  “Let’s go back ’fore your mother talks Callie’s ear off.”

  When Travis returns to the dining table, Eli has fallen asleep over his moose drawing.

  Callie scoops him up to take him to bed. Cora bathing him in more kisses.

  “Dinner was delicious,” he tells Callie, their sleeping son between them. She seems tired so he’ll let her sleep in.

  “Honey, we’ll do the dishes,” Cora says, beginning to clear the table. She nods for Stu and Travis to help.

  They stack plates and convene in the kitchen. The pull of the window absorbs Travis again. A dark silhouette flitting against the already dark night.

  “Do you see that?” he asks his folks, but they’re too busy scraping the plates into the garbage.

  “Bobby?” Travis says, so quietly, not out loud, only in his heart. The silhouette turns, sparkling from the moonlight. Beamed down from above, or likely from below since that was probably its final destination.

  He watches its dance, knowing it stays alive the more he conjures its spirit. He holds the clout. That’s what he wants to tell Stu, who squelches that spirit deep down, its tar-like substance glue in his guts, begging to be released, begging its host to finally release.

  7

  A desire to return to 201 Elk Road so Wyatt can invoke his wife and child again. Their memories already beginning to recede. Faint morsels, translucent and undefined. Her lyr-ical voice rounded with an Irish brogue. Little Joe muted, too much of a newborn to have a voice. Had he only known his son as a bleating baby? Wyatt’s legs, however, have given up the fight. Jellied and unable to trek through the woods again. With belabored steps, he peels off of the main strip down an unexplored lane. An abandoned goods store calls forth. Yellow police ribbon in an X across the entrance. A hole in the front window the size of a fist. He reaches in and twists the lock open.

  Inside smells damp, the place unlived. The floors stripped bare, no trace of any goods.

  Shelves thick with dust and grime. A ceiling dripping moisture. Only a hair warmer than outside, but he’ll take it. Behind a counter, he folds into the fetal position, knees to his chin, pinwheeling his legs to get circulation going. He’ll rest for a moment and then begin his journey to Elk Road, but sleep has another idea. Within seconds, he’s under its spell.

  A quaint house sways atop a small hill. Browned and in disrepair but immediately home. He’s drawn there, wanting to wrap his arms around what it represents. A farm surrounds. A few sheep, a chicken coop, pig sty, myriad of vegetables, a tractor idling. The sun an orange cracker in the bone sky. A fire cooks in a hearth, a pot of heated water beside. Adalaide with a child in her arms, no longer a newborn but still a little boy. A steaming washcloth to the kid’s forehead, his chills making him look like he’s seizing.

  “He’s so cold he’s like an ice block,” she says, the music gone from her voice.

  “Should I call the doctor again?” he hears himself ask.

  “The doctor,” she says, as if she’s given up. “He comes in, puffs out his feathers, and leaves without any change.”

  “Maybe this time will be different.”

  “I’m tired of your naivety,” she says. He scratches his head because he doesn’t know what this means. “He’s always cold, even in the boiling summer.”

  “Lemme stoke the fire more.”

  He pokes at the flames, just to give him something to do. That morning he was already out the door, ready to vanish for an indeterminable amount of time. An expedition, no longer to California anymore, which had been overrun and depleted of all its gold, but to Alaska, a new frontier full of shiny nubs. And then, this.

  “You can go,” she says, but she really means, don’t you dare.

  “If I bring back a fortune we can get him real doctors. Not just Dr. Greeson down the way.”

  “What if he’s not here when you return?”

  “Dr. Greeson? His family has lived here for generations.”

  “I mean Joseph.”

  At the sound of his name, Joe pops his head from out of the heavy quilt. Face pale, cheeks sunken.

  “Are you g-going away, Papa?”

  He kneels beside his child in his wife’s arms, not allowing any of Adalaide’s scorn to infiltrate.

  “Remember how I told you how a man is measured?”

  The boy manages to nod, teeth chattering and sounding like his mouth is full of glass.

  “This is my calling. Always has been. As a boy like yourself, I dreamed of gold in far off lands.”

  “You did?”

  “Sure,” He holds the boy’s cheek in his palm. Instantly, his own hand goes cold as if it has siphoned some of the boy’s chills. “Some men get a calling to the priesthood like Father McDaniels, or to the law like Officer Langley, but lemme tell you, Joe, once you see gold, nothing else seems to sparkle.”

  Now he falls in line with Adalaide’s daggers.

  “Don’t blunt the truth, Wyatt,” she says.

  “That is the truth. You don’t understand. You can’t understand. I’m restless, unfulfilled.”

  “Finally. A glimmer of you speaking from the heart. We’re not enough for you.”

  “No, you misunderstand. I don’t feel like I’ve fulfilled the promise I made to you on our wedding day.”

  “Health and happiness, that’s all I need.”

  “We don’t have neither. We’re barely scraping by. The home needs fixing. That’s why Joe’s sick. It’s drafty all the time. I want to tear it down and start again.”

  “You’re already out the door. And nothing I say will change anything. So go. Leave us.” “Not like this.”

  “You can’t have it both ways. Make a decision. Stay here and be miserable or leave us in misery. What’s most important to you?”

  He’d already set his pack by the doorframe full of provisions and hiking and camping gear. He had a ticket to a docked ship stuffed in his pocket, which cost more than he pretended it did. He’d invested in this journey, to turn around now a terrible admittance of defeat. Is that what he wants to teach his son?

  “I’m gonna call on Dr. Greeson to come by today to give Joe a look.”

  “Go.”

  He attempts to hug them but she turns her cheek. He has a horrible vision that her profile will be the last image he’ll have of her. Little Joe has closed his eyes, exhausted from a day of fits. When he kisses Joe’s head, it’s frigid, like kissing a tombstone.

  He barrels out of the house before he can change his mind. Warning himself not to be weak and give in. Certain that when he finds his way back with fistfuls of gold, it’ll solve all their woes. A strained relationship. Joe’s forever chills. The riches will create miracles.

  The sun setting by the time he steps outside. The crackling fire from within the greatest source of light as he makes his way through the gloaming. Passing homes full of families warming in front of similar fires until the town recedes so far in the distance it barely registers as anything at all.

  Slept but not rested. Wyatt awakes curled up, joints aching. Sliver of sunrise illuminating the dust mites. A dream and a nightmare fading: emboldened by envisioning his wife and child, tortured from realizing he’d been an abandoner. Chosen gold over them. It pained him to think that their last encounter ended with friction. He shuts his one eye to return, hoping that he couldn’t have fled when his son needed him most. But deep down where thoughts live but stay hidden, he knows he’s truly this monster punished by many lifetimes in ice.

  Again, Adalaide and Joe dissipate even more. Shades of their features vanishing. Unfair that he didn’t travel back to happier times. He needs the drug that will bring him there. The Barlow family on Elk Road.

  Morning brings out the fishermen along the docks. Pungent smells lining the air. Bristly beards and heavy gear to stave off the sleet. If he’d been looking closer, he would’ve seen Trav getting on one of those boats. He passes by not ten feet from his supposed ancestor, his possible great-great grand
son. But hunger gnaws at his stomach, his brain full of too much soup to be fully aware. The woods have his attention, the precise route to get him to Elk Road.

  When he arrives, the dog is mewling in its little house. Water bowl bone dry, a few kibbles hardened to the sides. It licks its lips as if Wyatt might provide breakfast now that dawn has broken through.

  He looks in the window at the living area, no trace of California or the boy. Passing around, he emerges at their bedroom. Mother and child nestled in bed and snoring away.

  She’s even more beautiful in sleep, an angel sent. Red-orange hair sprawled across the pillow almost aflame against the white sheets. The boy with cherub cheeks and a cowlick dreaming of something sweet. Oh, how he wants to crawl into bed with them and never wake. The window has been shut, locked from within. He surmises that is probably for the best. He doesn’t know what he might do if he had the ability to enter. This is the life he left behind and he swears not to make the same mistake twice.

  They could be his. They deserve to be his. They just don’t know this yet.

  But they will.

  They will.

  8

  Smitty runs a small operation. Not quite a commercial fishing boat like some of the others based along the dock that go out for days at a time. It’d been him and Old Charlie for the longest time. But Old Charlie’s rheumatism had gotten really bad and he’s known in town as a pretty miserable drunk. Too much of a hindrance so likely Old Charlie’ll be spending his days making bathtub gin.

  Travis stayed away from the waters for the past two years. Stu knew why, keeping the same distance. The fact the town is rimmed by ocean doesn’t help. But fears need to be faced. Travis had gotten up at four a.m. when it was still dark. The quietude of pre-mornings energizing. Poured two separate thermoses of black coffee and caribou soup.

  Callie and Eli still fully asleep, which made him glad. He’d have been upset if he woke her when she obviously needed solid rest.

  Took the pickup down empty roads. The sun flirting with rising, traveling in long orange fingers across the earth. The blackness of the sky turning a bewitching purple.