“Don’t wait up,” he tells Callie, and kisses her on the cheek. She seems disgusted, blaming him by association. They turn on the road into town, but Grayson shakes his head.
“No, drive me home.”
“Can’t leave you like this.”
“I’ll sleep it off. I’ll be fine.”
“A round is on me.”
They get to Elson’s and it’s quiet, just Tuck at the bar tearing into a steak with gravy.
With a full mouth, he salutes them. They pull up and Grayson commiserates with Tuck about lost love. Tuck speaks of a girlfriend down in Anchorage that he never saw so they called it quits. They cheers to being old bachelors.
Elson’s watching the hockey game, doling out drinks without taking his eyes off the TV. “Hey, is Wyatt still here?”
Elson raises one thick eyebrow. “Just left.”
“How’s it working with him?”
“He shows up, does his job, so I’m pleased as punch.”
Travis throws his arms around Grayson. “Hey, buddy, I’m gonna step out for a bit.
You okay with Tuck?”
“I’ll be fine,” Grayson says into his glass.
Travis hurries out of the bar over to the abandoned goods store, but Wyatt isn’t there.
Where does he go? he wonders, feeling a twinge of jealousy. That this drifter has others to rely on in town. He walks the barren streets covered in a thin film of white over the permafrost, hands brittle because he hasn’t brought gloves, teeth chattering. Turning down a side street, he passes by Raye’s, a possibility of finding Wyatt there. Inside glows warm, the air full of perfume and music. Jesse’s at the spider-webbed bar with a woman twice his size. They’re giggling and then she yanks him by the collar, leading him up the stairs. Travis unsure if Jesse spotted him. Raye leaps upon him like a cat ready to mark its territory.
“Hi, new handsome face,” she purrs, her dark red lips formed into a kiss. “What’s your fancy?”
“I’m looking for someone,” he says, coughing nervously.
“Blonde, brunette? I peg you as a red.”
He gulps, thinking of Callie and the hot water he’d be in if she knew where he was.
“No, I’m looking for a friend of mine. We look quite similar although he has a big beard. Name is Wyatt.”
She lights a long cigarette and holds it between two sharp fingernails.
“I’m not about to reveal my clientele. Wouldn’t be professional.”
He takes out his wallet, removes the money Smitty gave him today.
“That change your mind?”
She eyes the bills, licking her teeth with her tongue.
“Sure, he comes in here. Even saw him tonight, except his fancy called in sick so he marched right out, no interest in anyone else.”
“What time was that?”
“About an hour ago.”
“But he wasn’t where he’s been staying.”
“Sweetie, I’m sure he’ll turn up. Doubt it’s all that serious. Now, while you’re here…”
The sleeve of her nightgown tickles his cheek as she fingers his chin. He recoils, which only makes her want to pounce more.
“Sweetie, lots come in here proclaiming ulterior motives, but I’ve found that pussy usually reigns.”
“I have a wife,” he says, inching toward the door.
“You tell yourself that, but my music will trickle over to where you live some night and you’ll find yourself floating to me, unable to resist.”
He turns the doorknob, a rush of cold air blowing in. “I doubt it.”
When he’s outside, he wonders why he feels the need to find Wyatt after only twenty-four hours apart. It’s like a piece of himself is missing, although that makes little sense since up until a few days ago, he’d never met the man before. But every other relationship of his seems to pale in comparison to his double, his gleaming mirror. So he waits by the abandoned goods store, almost taking a chance and going inside the broken window, but deciding against it. He waits with the gale-force winds, and the crackling of ice on the branches, and the dark, dark street for Wyatt to show. He doesn’t know how long he keeps watch, only that he won’t allow himself to go. Midnight ticks by, then two in the morning, his fingers blue, his toes numb in his boots. His doppelgänger has found somewhere else to sleep, and since he’s got to wake up to fish in a few hours, he must sleep as well.
Back at Elson’s, his car is the only one in the back lot. The drive home is eerily quiet, so he turns on the radio, an old, jaunty tune like he heard at Raye’s, a long-gone era invading. He listens for a while, but then feels like he shouldn’t, so he snaps it off and continues in silence. At home, he checks on Eli who’s fully in dreamland and Callie who’s likely faking. He peels off his shirt and jeans, hoping she won’t stir but when he sinks into the covers, she rustles awake.
“Where were you?” she murmurs, in and out of consciousness.
“With Gray.”
“Elson’s closed a long time ago, I called there.”
A jolt wreaks havoc on his insides, the few drinks he had bubbling.
“We were driving around,” he says, praying that she hadn’t called Grayson as well when the clock hit three in the morning.
“Hmmm,” she replies, into the groove her arm. Either disbelieving or too tired to care, saving any accusations for morning. He can’t keep his double a secret much longer. But he truly worries that if he tells someone else, the whole miracle might vanish.
Along with the promise of gold.
21
Wyatt had already found out from Elson where the Native American reservation was located so when Aylen didn’t show up at Raye’s, he knows where to go. Technically, it isn’t an actual reservation since it’s unrecognized by the federal government. It resembles more of a settlement: a string of trailers, a few homes tucked away in various stages of disrepair. It’d been about a three-mile walk to the area, and his limbs are frozen solid, so he welcomes a bonfire where a couple of teenagers pass around a tin cup, their eyes as red as the sun.
“Mind if I get warm?” he asks. One with floppy hair shrugs.
Wyatt lets the flames almost touch his paralyzed fingers. Slowly, circulation begins.
“I’m here for Aylen,” he says. “Although that might not be her name here.”
A girl leaning on Floppy Hair’s arm looks directly at a trailer. “What you want with her?”
“She’s someone I care about,” he says, surprised by that response. “I was told she’s sick. I came to see if she needed anything.”
“A good fuckin’,” Floppy Hair’s friend says, and the two slap hands.
Wyatt has the urge to grab this boy’s throat, choke him good. But he maintains.
“Which of these is hers?” he asks, indicating the trailers.
The girl points at the one she was staring at, then she removes a corroded glass pipe from her pocket and takes a putrid puff.
“What is that?” His nose rejecting the smell.
The girl starts laughing, a weird and uncomfortable cackle. She passes over the pipe.
“Go on. Try.”
Her voice has an otherworldly quality and he almost complies, but guesses that the red in their eyes is due to whatever’s in this pipe. He tried opium in a Chinatown in California and it kept him sedated for days, his limbs like they were made of mud. So he hands the glass pipe back.
“We’re always here if you ever want some,” the girl says.
“Don’t you go to school?”
The teens laugh more until it seems like he’s being assaulted, so he goes over to Aylen’s trailer. On one end, instrumental music spills out of the window. At the other, the violent sounds of a gun being fired except it doesn’t sound real, as if someone captured the sound and replayed it.
He knocks on the trailer. The gunfire becomes muted as a man opens the door.
“What the fuck do you want?”
He’s lean, almost disturbingly so, tall enough to have
to stoop to fit in the doorway.
His shirt soiled and he’s not wearing pants, only undergarments. A tic in his eye that a scratching finger won’t fix.
“I’m here to see Aylen,” Wyatt says, lowering his voice to assert dominance.
The man spits in response, an orange-brown glob against the stark white snow.
“Aylen!” he yells.
“What?” comes a murmured voice.
“Some bum’s here to see you.”
Because of the way he eyes Wyatt, they both turn into animals. Wyatt knowing a tussle in store for their future. He’ll keep coming to Aylen and this man won’t like it. Wyatt watches him disappear into his side of the trailer as the gunfire resumes.
Aylen’s door creaks, her eye in the crack. Unsure what stranger has come to her home.
“It’s you,” she says, her throat hoarse. “I’m sick.”
He takes out a jar of honey and a lemon from his pocket. “Got these from where I work when I heard you’re sick. A remedy from my time.”
“We still do that,” she says, opening the door fully. She’s in a lavender nightgown and covered by a hand-stitched blanket where a detailed bison chase plays out across her body. “I’ll add some whiskey and make two.”
Afterwards, in her cramped room with a record player and a loom, they toast mugs of hot toddys.
“Are you, like, trying to be with me or something?” she asks him.
“Am I courting you? Why, yes, I do believe I am.” He goes to the record player.
“Think I worked one of these things once. Or at least, it sort of looked like it.” He observes the large black plastic disc. “What’s a Fleetwood Mac?”
Aylen laughs into her hand. “It’s an old band. My mother, she used to listen. It’s the first music I remember hearing. Do you not know how to use a record player? After your time?”
“We called them phonographs.”
“Raye has a pretend version in the main room. Looks like it’s old, but it’s really playing CDs, which actually is old too.”
Wyatt puts on the record.
“Gypsy,” she sings.
“What’s that?”
“That’s the beautiful song.”
They see a spinning of red lights outside her iced window.
“Police,” she says. “Shit, fifty percent of the time it’s for Tohopka.”
“That’s the man you live with?”
“It ain’t like that. He’s my cousin. He’s my only family left so we’re connected, always will be.”
Wyatt peers out the window. A sheriff stands at the bonfire, talking with the teenagers.
“What kind of criminal things does your cousin do?” he asks.
“Drug stuff mostly. Hell, that’s pretty much why the police come. There’s an underbelly in these parts, right outside this town, but it’s close and we feel it. Wayward kids getting lost to these parasites.”
“Who?”
“Let’s just say my cousin’s involved with people he shouldn’t be. I pretend to know nothing.”
Wyatt sees the girl that tried to give him drugs point right at the trailer.
Aylen’s bedroom door flings open, Tohopka panting.
“I’m not here!” he yells.
“What did you do now?” Aylen whines.
Tohopka’s sweating profusely. He slaps his own face.
“Fuck if I know. I’m out the back window.”
“What should I tell him?”
“Figure it out.”
Tohopka goes to the desk with the loom, flings out a drawer causing stuff to spill everywhere.
“Get out of my shit, Tohopka.”
She hits him on the back, but he turns around, smacking her on the head. The blow looking like she’d walked into a wall. She regains composure, but Wyatt steps in, their inevitable tussle happening earlier than he imagined. He doesn’t raise a fist; he only speaks calmly.
“You touch her again and I’ll end you.”
“And who the fuck are you again?”
Wyatt slams him into the wall, his hand on the man’s throat.
“I am Death.”
He lets go as Tohopka coughs. Rushing over to the desk drawer, Tohopka grabs some bills. “I just need some cash, I’ll pay you back.”
“Get outta here!” Aylen yells, holding her head. A knock at the door. They watch Tohopka hop up on the sink in the kitchen and slither through a small window, then a plop of him falling into the snow and scurrying away.
Another knock.
Aylen smooths down her thick hair, fixes her disheveled blanket, and opens the door, making her cough more pronounced. Wyatt observing from the darkness of the bedroom.
“Yes, Sheriff. Can I help you?”
The sheriff, a squat older man with a buzz cut and ropey arms.
“Your roommate here?” He’s rubbing his hands together since it’s cold outside.
“Haven’t seen him around all day. Think he’s in Nome on business.”
“Business,” the sheriff says, in a huff. “The kind of business you both do…”
“Plenty of your officers come to see me, so you can leave your judgement at the door.
We done?”
She goes to close the door on him, but he stops her, takes off his hat.
“I want to ask your roommate some things. I believe he knows a lot of people, people who might have answers. I’ll stop by again in a few days. You make sure to tell him because I can just as easily come into your trailer and find enough junk to arrest you both.”
“I’m not a part of anything he does.”
Wyatt steps out of the doorframe now, his shadow cloaking Aylen. “I think you should go now, Sheriff. She was mighty compliant.”
Right away, the sheriff squints, as if he’s trying to read him. “Sheriff Barlow.” He extends his hand.
“Wyatt,” he says, lighting up upon touching his great-grandson. He witnesses shades of himself in the sheriff’s visage: the Barlow nose, the solid and defined shoulders, the twinkle in each of their eyes like they all know a secret everyone else in the universe doesn’t.
“He’s a friend of mine in town,” Aylen says. “Staying with me.”
Wyatt looks at her startled, then catches on. “Yup, yup she’s been very kind.”
“Well,” the sheriff says, sucking in a deep breath, “enjoy Laner. It’s a special place.”
“I plan on it,” Wyatt says, and the sheriff reiterates for Aylen to tell her cousin about him stopping by.
“I will, Sheriff.”
The sheriff’s taking his sweet time leaving, saying, “I wouldn’t want to have to bring you into your cousin’s messes. You don’t want to be guilty by association. You’re better than this.”
He chews on the last words. “You take care, Ms. Oxendine.”
She mumbles under her breath as she closes the door on him.
“I’m staying with you?” Wyatt asks, but she shakes her head.
“Just for tonight, barely room for two in this shit can. I’m going to bed.”
She folds under the covers, wrapping herself tight. Wyatt gets in beside her, eager for a warm night. Outside, his great-grandson walks up to the next trailer, ready to give the same speech. But then Aylen pulls the curtain shut and he sleeps more soundly than he has in years.
22
By the time Callie wakes, Travis has already gone. Sometimes she gets a moment with him in the morning: sharing the mirror while they brush their teeth, early coffees in silence before she has to get Eli up. Today she didn’t want to face him until she can get her thoughts together.
When he hadn’t returned until three in the morning, she called Elson’s finding out he had left prior to midnight. Then when she woke up an inebriated Grayson, he verified the same thing. The two of them had not been driving around, which meant whatever Travis was doing, he was keeping it a secret from her.
She confirms the worst. Much like what happened to Lorinda, she believes Travis was cheating on her. He’d b
een withdrawn, barely even acknowledging Eli after they’d spent so much time together when Travis had been out of work. Even Eli questioned, “What’s wrong with Daddy?” Usually, her answer had been his unemployment, but now she feared a more sinister explanation.
At Pizza Joint, Lorinda acts chilly from last night, and Callie’s fine with that since she doesn’t really want to talk to anyone. She switches off during the breakfast rush, pouring coffees, but not registering who she’s serving. Until Tuck and Jesse sweep in around lunch.
“Jesse convinced me to do lunch off the boat,” Tuck tells her.
“Waves were choppy and I thought I might hurl,” Jesse says.
“You need food that’ll stick to the walls then. We got a gumbo as the special today.”
“Gumbos all around,” Tuck says.
After she puts in the order, she can sense someone standing right behind her. Cool breath on her neck. Sweat that smells like the boys she used to fool around with in California.
“Callie?”
She turns around and has to peer up to see Jesse who stands at six-six. He’s all angles, sharp elbows and bony shoulders.
“Is everything all right?” he asks, in his sweet way. Unable to look her in the eye.
She’s caught off guard, the waitress pad falling to the floor. He picks it up and static sparks between them.
“Yeah. Thanks. Yeah it is.” And then, with more curiosity. “Why do you ask?”
“You seem melancholy,” he says, as if he’s proud of using vocabulary like that.
“Wanted to make sure.”
“That’s nice of you.” Now she’s suspicious and wants to flee his gaze. “I got orders.”
“Just that…well, I saw your husband.”
“Okay, Jesse.”
“I mean, I saw him at a place he shouldn’t be. That I shouldn’t have been either. But I haven’t met someone I liked in some time, and…”
“Spit it out,” she says.
“It was at Raye’s.”
The rest of the day in a timeless blur. Callie can remember being at Pizza Joint until her shift ended, but what she said to Jesse, or anyone else, a mystery. She knows she picked Eli up from Huskie Day Care, since he’s home with her now watching some cartoons and drinking apple juice, but how she made it there is beyond her comprehension. For Travis to set himself apart from Grayson when he was doing the exact same thing is disgusting.
The Ancestor Page 13
