She saw the key in the corner, snatched it up, and thrust it at Jeremy. He was sliding it into the ignition when a huge wave broke over the wheelhouse and he fell with his hand still on the key ring, accidentally turning off the engine.
The harmonic convergence of the resonating ocean rang the little gillnetter like a tuning fork. Livy got down on the floor and yanked aside the hatch cover behind Jeremy’s feet to get at the engine. The starter was shot. It had died the week before and they’d been starting the engine by striking it with a wrench but she didn’t see the wrench anywhere. Jeremy put the key back in.
“The wrench! Where did you put the—”
A giant wave smashed straight down onto them, blowing out the wheelhouse windows and hurling them against the portside wall. Water rushed into the tiny steering room. Livy and Jeremy scrambled on their bellies through freezing seawater and tempered glass to get the hatch cover back over the engine.
“Get to the cabin!” Jeremy yelled.
The next rush of water swept them backward toward the open hatch, which was working now like a basin drain. Feet through the hole she swung down, hands on the overhead rail, but slipped on the ladder and fell to the cabin floor. She felt Michael’s hand on her arm and grabbed him as he pulled her in. Jeremy, just behind, managed to get the hatch cover on, killing the last shaft of light as a new wave scoured the wheelhouse.
They were adrift without power or light, GPS or radio. The one survival suit was stowed in the abandoned wheelhouse, which was probably now an aquarium. The sea anchor and whatever ballast it offered had long gone, the bilge pump was still and the hull was filling with water. Even if they could get down there and bail they would only be moving the ocean from one part of the room to another. They braced as a wave hit. Livy had to jam her back and shoulders into the curved wall behind her and press her heels hard against the lip of the bunk to keep from getting thrown into the galley cabinets.
The subsonic hum of the ocean vibrated their bodies. The terrible sea breath syncing now with the circulation of blood through their hearts; the crashing, the howling, they were one thing. Over the next two hours the hull filled with water. They got thrown hard larboard as the Jani Lane slid sideways into fifteen-foot troughs, and slammed starboard as she was dragged up the other side. Eventually the storm began to die. By the time they could go above, the cabin was more than a foot deep in water and the sea was coming up from everywhere. She found the wrench and mercifully was able to start the engine. The pump began to work and they began to bail. With all clocks stopped and everything shorted out or soaked they had no idea what time it was. In the weirdness of the Alaskan summer light and with the storm still muting the sky it could be 4:00 a.m. or noon. A light wind out of the southwest began to blow.
The mooring lines were ripped off, nets torn right on the reel. The sea anchor and three wheelhouse windows were gone. The phones, the batteries, the computer keyboard were all soaked in seawater, but the three of them were better off than they had been two hours earlier.
Jeremy emerged from the wheelhouse braiding his frizzy pigtail. His shoulder hair a copper haze in the sun, he crossed to where Livy squatted, jamming electronics into grocery bags filled with instant rice.
“That was a bitch,” he said.
He swatted her on the shoulder, a mano a mano gesture meant to turn all events into an adventure—Here’s to brotherhood! (or ineptitude) Raise a glass! (hopefully not of your own urine). Behavior like this deserves a three-thousand-mile skiff ride in open sea.
“I don’t want to talk to you,” she said.
He pointed to the rice where his cell phone was half buried. “Will it work?”
She emptied the last box of Uncle Ben’s over his phone and tossed the box aside.
“I’m glad you’re here. You’re solid and I appreciate it,” he said.
She looked at Jeremy. He was in the same white sleeveless shirt he’d worn since Sitka. Stained with coffee and engine grease and with a yellow patch along one side the size and shape of a liver, which Livy guessed was powdered lemonade. His face had not fully healed from the chainsaw accident but the superglue was holding the skin together. Despite her rage and the fact that she didn’t respect him at all, at his words a rush of pride ran through her. That betrayer, that craving for the compliments of men.
“It’ll be better when we’re in Bristol,” he said. “We’ll be drowning in fish and none of this will matter.”
Reaching the Homer Spit they came along a yellow bull rail. Michael made fast to a deadman and Jeremy jumped off.
“I’m for the harbormaster.”
Half an hour later Michael returned but Jeremy was gone for hours. They looked for him around the dock and on the barstools of the Salty Dog but could not find him. That evening he came back carrying a shitty computer and singing a song he made up.
“Down the chain! Down the chain!” He handed the computer to Livy. “We go tonight. Straight south!” he said, for some reason pointing at the sky.
“Are you crazy?” said Livy. “We’re going to miss even more of the season.”
Michael came up from below. “What’s going on?”
“Your uncle wants us to sail this piece of junk six hundred miles down the Aleutian fucking Island chain and all the way back up instead of dragging it sixteen miles across those mountains.” She jerked her head toward Cook Inlet. “Right there.”
Michael took the computer from her. “I thought we were going to portage,” he said.
“Fuck portage,” said Jeremy. “Too expensive. We go around.”
“We’ll make the portage fees back in one day of fish,” said Livy.
Jeremy stretched his hand out gravely like an opera singer. Taking a deep breath, he tucked his chin and puffed out his chest. “Down the chain! Down the chain!” he sang in his best basso profundo.
“We have enough money to do it,” Livy said.
“Had,” said Jeremy. “Had.”
He clapped and made a clownish face. Livy shook her head. Michael walked away with the computer.
All night, Jeremy was in an exceptionally good mood, wide awake and sweating in his tank top; tiny rivulets cut pink paths through the dirt on his face. He talked twice as fast as he normally did and chain-smoked, even though Michael said he had quit years ago. Watching him grind his teeth and sing Pure Prairie League songs, Livy got an idea about what had happened but there was nothing she could do.
Driving the boat away from the dock, the mild breeze and the twilight made the water and coastline beautiful. As they passed dead boats, derelict and weathering on the spit, Jeremy rolled one cigarette after another, smoking them down to his fingers then tossing the butts out one of the broken windows. Chatty again, buoyant, he spoke of various skippers he’d fished with when he was a teenager.
“Jennie told me a story once,” he said, “about a fisherman she met years ago. A Tlingit from Kake. He’d grown up near her and was a few years older. She said he had this boat, the prettiest little seiner she’d ever seen. Cherrywood, sunny yellow trim, a little brass bell, and he named the boat after his girlfriend. One day he goes out into the channel and doesn’t come back. The other fishermen go look for him. Coast Guard. A helicopter. Nothing. But his girlfriend won’t believe it because there’s a Tlingit story about a man who went out like that and it turned out he was down south stranded on an island full of oranges and finally made it back—you know how people grasp at hope, anyway. One night this girl and Jennie and some other folks are doing acid on the beach near the old dryfish camp. Halfway through the night the girl starts freaking out saying she’d made the whole thing happen and that his death is all her fault. Nobody knows why but she’s crying and starts taking off her clothes and wading into the sound, which is fucking freezing. Jennie tries to get her to come back but she won’t, so Jennie wades out. She said the girl’s feet are all cut up and kelp is t
angled all around her ankles. They get her ashore and the girl sits down on the wet ground and refuses to move, so Jennie gives up. Then the girl begins to sing in Tlingit. An old song about a lost canoe full of young men. As she’s singing, her boyfriend’s fishing boat starts to come back. First the nets wash up. Then the wheel. A few pieces of painted trim float on the tide wrapped in seaweed. The girl starts to walk up and down the beach singing and the broken little boat keeps washing up. She fishes each piece out and drags it up above the waterline so she can put it all back together. Apparently it went that way all night.”
“That’s a really fucked-up story, Jeremy,” said Livy. “Now I’m going to go down and eat a box of powdered mashed potatoes and forget I ever heard it.”
Michael laughed. “Ha! You’re superstitious.”
“I am not but the people around me are so I have to deal with it.”
Jeremy talked through the night then crashed for two days straight. They motored south and west, passing between the abandoned World War II military installations on Kodiak Island and Katmai, land of eruptions. On the other side was Bristol Bay, but between the Jani Lane and fish were moonscapes of pumice with ash flows the color of clotted cream or tan in places like the torched top of a meringue. Livy could not see the flows from her vantage on the deck but knew they were there, otherworldly. She was also aware that with every nautical mile traveled they were actually moving farther away from where they needed to be, not closer.
Hugging the coastline of the Aleutian arc, the land changed. She saw cliffs like a cut cake, rich brown under the green carpet of summer grasses, cotton grass, eelgrass, crowberries and blueberries, volcanoes shrouded in fog. Eventually they came to Unimak Island, the point where they could cut through the chain. They turned into the shallow waters of False Pass, where baleen gray whales escaped the toothed whales, orcas that hunted them in roving packs. It was night when they came through but not dark. On the southern tip of Unimak, where a lighthouse with a Fresnel lens once stood, an automated beacon signaled land to passing ships.
* * *
—
It was two weeks later when they finally arrived at where they were to fish. Looking across the bay, Livy was stunned by the number of vessels. Crowded against the imaginary line in the water demarking the boundary between where they were allowed to take fish and where they weren’t, the boats were so close that from where she was it looked like they were all bobbing into each other, driving across each other’s nets and cutting away the fish. They moved frenetically. A hive. Each attending the queen salmon, her spine whipping S-like beneath them. Set all the nets you want! Pull the purse strings, drop your pots. I owe you nothing, said the sea.
Over the marine radio, announcements came every three hours calling the openings and closings—fish, don’t fish, fish—as officials tracked the shoals beneath the boats. And when a close was called, skippers on the flying bridge yelled for hands to get the nets in, pick the fish faster. Deck load! Drop the fish anywhere. Throw them in the fo’c’sle, stuff them in your pockets. All futures narrowed and grand plans became less grand, as the great mother salmon sounded by the line.
23 The Bed
CHEYENNE STOOD on Jackson’s porch with a plastic sack of lunch meat in her hand and a backpack stuffed so tight it was almost round. She’d fucked up. Again. She’d slept with Jackson the day he came back from vacation. The next morning, after the euphoria of a possible reconciliation wore off, she had to tell him she was leaving. Again. Go back and try that other way. Walk through the doors of an empty house to see if it’s still empty. Close the box that is already closed. Lose a day, lose two—this whole place is a faerie mound. With no better ideas, she called Essex and begged him to come get her. He said he’d be there in three days.
Essex arrived in a ’70s Ford Supervan. Spray-painted white, the red cross from the ambulance company that had originally owned it showed through.
“Wasn’t that in the blackberry bushes at Neighborsbane?”
“Lester rented it to me,” said Essex.
“Will it make it home?”
“Hope so. I have to be back in three days.”
His skin was tan on one side from driving, his brown hair grown to his shoulders, and what remained of the black dye was blue-gray in the overcast day.
“Is Jackson around?” he asked.
Cheyenne laughed, wrecked. “Are you crazy?”
In the month and a half that had passed she’d put on weight, rounding her cheekbones, filling her bra. Anyone who knew her would have known it wasn’t weight from enjoying life. Her skin was newsprint white except for the circles under her eyes.
“I promised to be gone by tonight,” she said. “The bed’s in the basement. Heavy as fuck. Solid brass. Watch your head on the basement stairs.”
Once down, Cheyenne flipped a light switch. Boxes of wine were stacked next to a wicker chair. Triangles of firewood lined a wall. Cheyenne gave the root-cellar door a yank and the smell of wet earth and clay dust filled the air. A single window spared the cellar from total darkness. The brass headboard leaned against the stone cottage wall. Undertones of marigold and sea green flickered in the spindles and castings as the tree branches near the window shivered. Even pulled apart, rails stacked, the bed took up half the room.
“It’s been in his family five generations.” Cheyenne held up her hand, fingers spread apart. “Five. We got it as a wedding gift. Heirloom. Heir. Loom. Did you ever think about that?”
She wrapped her hand around a bed knob, a starfish on a rock.
“Are you sure we should take this?” said Essex.
“His exact words were, ‘Sell it. It’s got to be worth something to someone.’ ”
“Well that’s pretty clear.”
* * *
—
They started with the rails, which banged to the concrete floor like seesaws and struck the rafters, nearly shattering a light fixture and narrowly missing Cheyenne’s cheek. Then the hardware. All out onto the grass by the van next to the sack of lunch meat. The footboard. Navigating the doorways, they had to take breaks.
“This thing must have been huge,” said Essex. “Did you actually sleep in it?”
“We had to rearrange the whole house around it, but it worked. I didn’t even know it was in the root cellar until three days ago, which is some pretty Blackbeard shit.” They stopped to angle the footboard to make the corner. “I just assumed it was in storage somewhere, waiting for a better wife.”
It took twenty minutes to navigate the headboard up the stairs and get it out into the yard. It wasn’t until they leaned it against the Supervan that they realized it would never fit.
Cheyenne tossed the slats she was carrying onto the grass. Stomping back inside she realized she’d locked the door and left the keys on the table. Reaching down she tore a handful of grass out of the yard and threw it as hard as she could.
Tiny green blades fell lightly to the earth.
“We’ll just have to tie it to the roof. It’s that or leave it,” said Essex.
“Fuck no. Leaving this bed on the lawn is the only thing worse than taking it.”
They found a pair of gardening shears and a thick coil of manila rope.
“Will Jackson mind if we take these?” he asked.
“Not if I go with them.”
They hoisted the massive brass headboard onto the roof of the Supervan, laying the footboard in the opposite direction on top. Looping rope around the belly of the van they cinched it tight, but the bed still stuck out an arm’s length on either side. Cheyenne got in and jammed her backpack between the seats and held the lunch meat on her lap. Essex started the van and it rattled to life.
“Fuck, hang on, I’m going to throw up.”
She jumped out and ran to the woods but didn’t make it. After she vomited she tore a few more handfuls of grass out to cov
er the spot so it wasn’t obvious, then stalked back to the van.
“Are you pregnant?” he asked.
“No, I just can’t be here anymore.”
Essex did a three-point turn on the yard.
“You know we’re going to have to stay with the van now or someone will just cut the ropes and take the bed,” said Cheyenne.
“Or take the van.”
As they turned onto the road, Cheyenne kept watch, making sure nothing came undone. Essex saw Cheyenne’s face in the side mirror as she monitored the ropes. Her outgrown bangs whipped across her cheeks in the hot wind. When she was not looking at him, she looked as he had first known her, soft-eyed, unpredictable; she wasn’t particularly affable but he’d rarely met anyone as kind. Most people were kind for show; Cheyenne was kind because she had no choice. The result of a deal struck between her nature and the universe, which she couldn’t escape. Twice they had to pull over and resecure everything. Once, turning off for gas, the bed slipped and she had to lean out of the window to grab the rope to take up the slack until they could stop.
“Do you think it’s better to be left for someone? Or for no one at all?” she asked. “If you had to choose.” She looked over at him. “Oh lord. You’re laughing. Why are you laughing?”
He coughed. “Ask Jackson.” Looking at her face he instantly regretted saying it.
By afternoon she was dizzy from staring backward—forced to keep your eyes fixed on the past to get free of it? That’s funny. Funny like the Greeks. She wished she could wipe the last week away.
* * *
—
They spent the night in a rest area on the Ohio border. Lying on the corrugated metal floor of the van with their clothes for pillows, Essex asked Cheyenne if she was okay. She didn’t move and he thought she might be asleep, but a minute later in a precise voice she said, “I hate the Moosewood Cookbook. I hate educated white people. I hate Emily Dickinson. I hate snow and transcendentalism, and soup.”
The Great Offshore Grounds Page 12
