The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley

by Hannah Tinti

“That’s what I like to hear.”

  Hawley went back to the truck and retrieved the suitcase. He rolled it across the gravel. It made a lot of noise, so he grabbed the handle and carried it the rest of the way onto the beach. He flipped the case onto the rocks. “You can count it if you want,” he said.

  “Don’t mind if I do.”

  Steller put her rifle down, then came forward and unzipped the case. The girl hung by the tent and kept her eyes on Hawley and a loose hand on her gun. She had a pretty face, but her body was too thin. She had another tattoo of a bird, between her thumb and forefinger. She scratched her chin and the bird looked like it was flying.

  Every once in a while there’d be another popping sound, like distant gunfire, and Steller would stop counting the money and glance over at the massive shelf of ice. Whenever she did, Hawley found himself looking, too.

  “The Tlingit call it ‘white thunder,’ ” said Steller.

  “The glacier?” Hawley asked.

  “No,” said Steller, “the sound the glacier makes when it breaks.”

  She was crouched at Hawley’s feet, rifling through the suitcase. He looked down at the part in her hair. There was a small area at the back of her head that was starting to go bald. The skin there was red from the sun and covered with brown spots. Hawley imagined putting the barrel of his gun there. He tried to shake the thought, but the idea haunted him the whole time she was counting the money.

  Steller zipped the suitcase back together. Then she extended the handle and tried to wheel the bag across the beach. The aluminum banged against the rocks and wedged itself between two large boulders. It made Hawley think of Mabel Ridge, her giant roller-bag stuck between cars at the train station.

  Hawley helped the woman get the case loose. “What kind of name is Steller?”

  “My father was a scientist. He named me after Georg Steller. You know, the sea cow?”

  Hawley shook his head.

  “First white man to step foot in Alaska. But the sea cow is why he’s famous. Discovered the last ones, right before they went extinct.”

  “He doesn’t give a shit about Steller,” said the girl.

  The older woman shot the girl a look. She tugged at one of her pigtails.

  Hawley said, “Maybe I do.”

  The girl was still scratching at her chin, the skin there growing red, the bird tattoo fluttering its wings open and closed. “Can’t we get this over with? I just want to get this over with.”

  Steller moved close and touched the back of the girl’s neck again. Hawley waited for the girl to shrug it off. He wished the girl wouldn’t. But she did. And this time something crossed Steller’s face, like skin tightening up over a scar.

  “Behave yourself,” Steller said. Then she ducked down and crawled inside the tent. When she came back out, she was holding a square wooden crate, about the size of a small television set. She set it down on the beach, pried the top off with the back of a hammer and started pulling out handfuls of straw.

  Inside was an old ceramic bowl, the color of sand. The sides were covered with engravings. Figures of people and some sort of writing. There were also bands of rings, circling all the way down to the base, chips along the edges and a hole pierced through the bottom. It looked like a crusty old flowerpot.

  “What the fuck is this?” Hawley asked.

  “It’s a clepsydra,” said Steller.

  “It’s supposed to be a clock.”

  “It is a clock.” She ran her finger along the rings. “You fill this with water, and as the level goes down, you know a certain amount of time has passed. Like an hourglass,” she said.

  Hawley picked the clepsydra up and turned it in his hands. He thought of all the money stashed in the aluminum suitcase. “A bowl,” he said.

  “A clepsydra,” said Steller.

  He set the piece back down. “How do I know it’s not a fake?”

  “There’s only seven of these left,” said Steller. “The rest are in museums. This one should be, too.”

  “How’d you get your hands on it?” Hawley asked.

  “You don’t want to know,” said the girl.

  The gashes and shapes along the sides of the bowl seemed to hold meaning by the way they repeated. There was a wedge that looked like a double cross, another that resembled a mountain turned on its side. Hawley peered into the bowl, ran his finger along the rings. He wondered what this clock had measured. Hours. Weeks. Years. Maybe entire lifetimes.

  The women flanked Hawley on either side. As they stood there he imagined two bowls full of water. One for Steller, another for the girl. The time they had left streaming through. He touched the hardened clay around the base of the pot, then slid his finger through the hole in the bottom. The channel felt cool and smooth, deep as an exit wound. When he removed his hand, his knuckles were covered with a thin powdering of dust.

  “Next time,” Steller said, “they should send someone who can read cuneiform.” She reached and fixed one of her pigtails again, and as she did Hawley realized that all this time, as they’d been standing there on the beach and talking, she’d known that he was thinking of ways to kill her.

  “It’s breaking!” shouted the girl.

  They all turned. A spray of ice slid down the side of the glacial shelf and fell into the river. It looked like a waterfall of snow. For a moment the white powder seemed to be gathering in force, and then it trickled away. Some one hundred feet above, inside a dark furrow of blue ice, another waterfall began, arcing in a shimmering line. Then that, too, stopped.

  Hawley felt the air get thin.

  The girl had gone back to her camera, crouching before the viewfinder. She twisted the lens back and forth with her hand, scanning the glacier. One last plume of snow spattered into the river, underneath a giant overhanging block of ice the size of a three-story building. The shower of flakes slowed, then stopped, and the river evened out and became calm.

  Hawley waited with the women. They waited some more.

  “Ah, man,” said the girl.

  And then the air cracked and split and roared. The front of the glacier was breaking apart. Chunks of ice, one after the other, and then the giant block came loose. All three of them froze, rooted in place, as if they’d been cast under a spell. Time slowed as the hunk of ice traveled, and when it finally smashed into the river, a ripple went back up the side of the glacier, and then the whole face of the shelf came loose and started sliding down.

  It was as if the earth were collapsing. A skyscraper thrown over a cliff. The sight made Hawley ill, like some part of himself was falling with the ice. Everything that ancient, frozen water had seen, the passing of millennia, the formation of the continents, and now, here it was—the end of the road. When the slab finally hit, the river exploded in a spray of brown and white, shooting columns of ice and water so high into the air they transformed into clouds of smoke and sparkled like glass, splintering and shimmering and shooting directly for the beach.

  Hawley stumbled backward and fell over the wooden crate, scraping his ribs. All along the shoreline the river sank and pulled away, like a drain had been pulled. Chunks of floating ice were sucked under as the river displaced and began to crest. Steller and the girl were already making a run for it, the camera slung over the girl’s back and the aluminum case banging between them. Hawley snatched the clepsydra and followed. The women were yelling something but the roar of the water covered it all. Together they scrambled over the rocks, up the incline toward their car. Hawley caught his ankle and fell again. Up ahead, the girl had reached the parking lot. She turned and threw her arm back. Steller dropped the suitcase and the women grabbed hold of each other and then the wave was upon them.

  The force of the water caught Hawley up from behind. The shock so arctic-freezing-cold it knocked the wind out of him. As he struggled for air, he had the sensation of being carried along, pushed toward some higher plane, and then his feet lost hold and he was tumbling in the froth of white, his body flipped and the wei
ght of the water crushing him down against the rock bed, then dragging him backward by the ankles. He was inhaling water. Sand and dirt and salt. The clepsydra was filling, filling, filling, an anchor pinning him in place, and then the river tore it loose from his hands.

  His only thought was that he could not breathe. He fought the current but he could not find the surface. His father had always been afraid of drowning, so he’d kept Hawley from going in over his head. He’d wanted to protect his son, but as another wave of ice crashed into Hawley he understood that by doing this, his father had failed him. And that he did not want to be a father who failed.

  His hand passed over something solid, a tree fallen over into the river, and he grabbed the branches and held on long enough to pull his face out of the water. Hawley forced a breath. Everything around him was movement. A heaviness caught around his legs, dragging him under again. He pulled and kicked until he saw a flash of purple nylon. It was Steller’s tent.

  He was maybe two hundred yards downstream. The wave had picked him up, pushed him forward and then hauled him along the edge of the river. The current was still choppy and rolling, chunks of blue slush bobbing along the surface. Hawley clung to the tree and used it to pull himself toward shore, his limbs aching from the cold. The entire beach was still flooded, but he could see the current pulling back through the boulders, receding to its original shape. Hawley reached the base of the roots where the tree had been forced over, the wet bark scraping his nails, and in one final push dragged himself free of the river.

  The beach was swamped, pools left behind cloudy with rust-colored water. Hawley touched his ribs. They were tender. The side of his cheek was torn open where he’d hit the rocks. He’d lost his gun and his wallet. His body was shivering, his clothes drenched. He turned to look at the glacier’s altered face, the empty hole where the ice had sheared away.

  His coat was so heavy with water that it felt like the weight of another person across his back. Hawley shrugged out of the sleeves and threw it to the ground. He pulled his shirt over his head and wrung it out, his muscles shaking, his skin awash with goosebumps. When he put the shirt on again, he felt colder than before. He slid his hand into his front pocket. Lily’s note was still there, but the ink had blossomed and bled, so that each letter was now three times the size. A GIRL. Hawley held the paper between his fingers. Then he folded it carefully and put it back into his pocket.

  His boots squished as he staggered toward the parking lot. When he climbed over the embankment he saw the women, soaked and slick as rats. They still had the aluminum case. They were standing by their Silverado with the hood open, pulling out blankets from the trunk. Hawley glanced at his pickup truck. The bed was full of water.

  “You made it,” said the girl.

  “I guess so,” said Hawley.

  “The engines are flooded.” Steller was holding a flashlight. She let it slide down the length of her hand. But the girl gave him one of the blankets.

  “You get your picture?” He wondered if they had even tried to look for him.

  “Nope,” said the girl.

  “I’ve never seen a piece that big fall before,” said Steller.

  “I thought we were dead,” said the girl, and she started to laugh. Steller laughed, too. The women were giddy, their voices pitched high. They had held on to each other and it had been enough to keep them on land. It was something they’d talk about in years to come. And later—when their lives were full and they no longer loved each other—forget.

  But Hawley would never forget.

  “Where’s the clepsydra?” Steller asked.

  Hawley looked down at his hands. He could still feel the bowl’s weight pulling him to the bottom of the river. “Gone.”

  “You lost it?” said the girl.

  “I think it broke,” said Hawley. He remembered the pot being wrenched away from him, the sound of something fracturing beneath the waves.

  Steller hurried back toward the beach, but stopped just short of climbing down. She stayed on the upper banks of the river and scanned the shore. Hawley and the girl followed her, blankets wrapped around their shoulders, and all three went back and forth along the edge of the parking lot. The beach was covered with debris, branches and piles of fish tossed up from the wave. A massive swarm of birds—hawks and gulls and crows and starlings—were eagerly devouring the salmon, picking out chunks of flesh and carrying away pieces in their claws, as the fish flopped and twisted on the rocks. Hawley saw the ragged remains of the purple tent in the distance, floating downstream. But no sign of the clepsydra, or the crate.

  “Maybe it will wash up,” said the girl.

  “You know what I went through to get my hands on that thing?” Steller said. “It was more than three thousand years old, for fuck’s sake!”

  Hawley would have to return the money to the bank in Anchorage. Then he’d call Jove and tell him the deal had been a bust. There’d be no extra cash, no happy reunion with Lily, just a long ride home with his tail between his legs. His hand slid to his belt. It wasn’t until he felt the gap there that he remembered his gun had been washed away.

  He said, “I’m going to need that case back.”

  Steller took a step closer to the girl. “We delivered the clock as agreed,” she said. “We did our part.”

  “It’s your fault it got lost,” said the girl.

  “The only thing that matters is that I didn’t get what I came here for.”

  “You think we’re going to just give you the money back?” the girl asked.

  They didn’t know he’d lost his gun. But then again, maybe they did. The adrenaline and icy water had cleared his head completely. Even with the blanket the girl had given him, he was in danger of hypothermia. His body was starting to shut down, his shoulders trembling, his teeth chattering. But he couldn’t go back with nothing. It was either the clock or the money.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “I’m sorry, too,” said Steller, and from underneath her shirt she produced a snub-nosed Ruger. It was the kind of gun an old man might own. Someone who didn’t care anymore about how things looked, only if they felt right. Hawley had always thought Rugers looked like toys, the handles longer than the nose, but they were tough guns. He’d seen Rugers run over by trucks and still fire without any problems.

  “I’m going to give you five seconds,” said Steller, “to get in your car and get out of here.”

  “You’re not going to shoot me,” said Hawley.

  “That’s one,” said Steller. She cocked the hammer, and the cylinder spun into place. Hawley saw there were at least three slugs inside. “Just stop,” he said. “Wait a minute.”

  “That’s two,” said Steller.

  Hawley stood there in his wet clothes, trying to figure if the woman was serious. She looked serious enough. He glanced around, trying to gauge the distance for cover. He didn’t have much to work with. The Silverado, his truck. And the girl. She was twitching like mad, holding on to the hood of the car. In a few steps he could have his hands around her neck.

  The sky rumbled and they all felt the glacier shift. Steller kept her eyes straight, but Hawley turned to the river. There was no waterfall of snow, no signs of cracks on the surface. But he could feel the change, an internal compaction coming loose, deep within the ice shelf, a place so used to pressure, the molecules had shrunk and now there was a stirring, a cave full of secrets about to yawn and spill open.

  “Three,” said Steller.

  “All right.” He raised his hands. The blanket fell from his shoulders. He started walking backward, toward his car. “I’m leaving.”

  Steller backed off from the Silverado and followed him. “Check it first,” she said to the girl. “He’s probably got a rifle in there.”

  Hawley waited while the girl hurried over and opened the driver’s side door. He watched her rummaging and calculated how many hours he had left before he had to make the drop. Once the window was missed, King would contact Jove. And J
ove wouldn’t have a choice—it was too much money—he’d have to tell him it was Hawley who had failed to deliver. Then someone would be on their way to Anchor Point.

  The girl took his long gun from the dashboard. She checked under the seat and found the Colt. “I think that’s it,” she said.

  “Four,” said Steller.

  Hawley climbed up. He sat there like a fool with the door open. The sun was just above the horizon, the sky beginning to gray. In another hour, the sun would rise again to a full and bright morning. Back in Anchor Point, Lily was probably still sleeping. But soon she’d be awake. She’d put on her slippers and head to the kitchen and see what there was for breakfast. She’d open their fridge. The light would illuminate her face. And then there would be blood mixed with milk. Pancakes burning on the stove.

  He couldn’t leave without the money. He couldn’t take the chance. He got out of the truck and faced the women. “My wife,” said Hawley. “She’s having a baby.”

  “Shit,” said the girl.

  “Five,” said Steller. And then she shot him.

  —

  IN THE END it was his father who came. Hawley saw the old man walking toward him across the parking lot in the old brown waders he used to wear surf casting. The waders came up to his chest and had a pair of green suspenders. Whenever he got home from the beach Hawley’s father would shed the rubber like a second skin and hose the waders off in the yard—the legs smelling of mold and fish guts, no matter how often they were rinsed out. Afterward the waders were tied to the clothesline, and whenever a breeze came up and filled the legs with air, it looked like a ghost dancing in the wind.

  “Are you all right?” Hawley’s father asked.

  “I’ve been shot.” Hawley’s voice came out soft and quiet. He wondered if the man could hear him.

  “Shit,” said his father. “How long have you been out here?”

  Hawley wasn’t sure. He remembered waking up facedown in the gravel. The way the small rocks stuck to his eyelids when he raised his head. A few of the pebbles were still there, clustered on his cheek like barnacles. He could feel them but he could not lift his arm to brush them off.