The Dead Go to Seattle

by Vivian Faith Prescott

  She laughed, and then a frown crossed her face. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to laugh. I … I don’t know why I laughed. Jeez.” She reached over toward his hands, but he pulled them away.

  “No, it might be catchy.”

  “Oh? What is it?”

  “I don’t know. Can you look it up?” He meant in their encyclopedia set.

  Liv got up from the table. “I’ll do it now.”

  He pushed his second helping aside. She hadn’t finished her dinner, either. He followed her to the small desk in the corner of the living room. From a nearby bookshelf she pulled out her Home Medical Encyclopedia and set it on the desk. She sat down and thumbed through to the skin section. Isak stood behind her, as she touched a photo of a dark skinned man holding up his blotchy forearm. In another photo, a white spotted hand splayed out with fingers wide.

  Now, he stood behind Liv as she typed into the search engine the words: skin turning white. She clicked the word “image.” Immediately, photos filled the screen—people with blotchy skin.

  “Wow,” he said.

  Liv clicked on an image: a man leaned toward the camera, his forearms white, the rest of him brown. She clicked on another photo of the dead pop star Michael Jackson. They stared at it for a minute or so. And in another photo, a hand splayed out, with a body of water in the background. He splayed his hand out like the one in the photo and turned his white fingers around. Liv twisted around to look up at him. As he rotated his hand, the white spot spread up his arm. He felt it moving up to his elbow. He wanted to tear his shirt off, to rub and wash and wipe. It wouldn’t do any good. Tomorrow he’d go see old Doc Heggan. Maybe Doc Heggan would have a pill? Or a shot. Something.

  Isak stared at the people and the limbs on the screen: the unsmiling faces, the shoulders and feet exposed. He felt the white spot spreading now to his groin, down his thighs. He wiggled his toes, pigment moving over his whole body like a creation story. He held up his hand again, turning it around, and imagined his body now looked like the nautical charts on his boat, reforming itself at mean low water: 150 fathoms, 121 fathoms, Stikine Strait, Mud Bay, Wrangell Island: a snow goose flying to the river flats.

  Date: 1990s

  Recorded by John Swanton

  Assisted by Tooch Waterson

  The Switching Season

  This year’s switching seasons flared when the cottonwood was especially sweet, when the salmon swam thick at Babbler Point. This year’s season caught Rikka up in it. Every three years or so, the season floats down the Stikine River along with downy cottonwood seeds, resting like dust on windowsills and settling on the rims of open beer bottles. During the season, cousins marry cousins, best friends sleep with best friends, older women leave husbands for younger men and, on occasion, a man leaves his wife for a man or a wife leaves her husband for another man’s wife.

  With her only child in public school all day, Rikka had found work at Dr. Modon’s as his dental secretary. The first spring she’d worked for Doc, he’d invited her and her husband, Sven, out on his boat. Several years before, Doc Modon had purchased a forty-foot troller, the Ocean Maiden. The Ocean Maiden, built in Seattle in the 1950s, had a steel hull and was painted white with a fine blue strip licking her stern. A marine oil stove and a small table warmed the pilothouse, a couple of bunks snugged down in her bow. She was rigged for salmon trolling and halibut long-lining. She was beautiful. She was perfect.

  Doc had taken them for a ride around Woronofski Island. The Ocean Maiden handled the small chop well. Like rocking a baby, her bow went up and down. Near Elephants Nose, the northern point of the island, Doc let Rikka steer while Sven and Doc tried their hand at trolling. She steered and sketched the landscape in her drawing book. She sketched sea creatures, the Ocean Maiden, life on Wrangell Island.

  Rikka had spent most of her life around boats. Her father, Isak Laukonen, was a fisherman. She’d nearly grown up on the Miss Janet. He’d told her that boats were like women and you had to treat them right: paint yearly, maintain the engine, and keep the hull clean from barnacles.

  Now she sat in the dentist office going over the day’s appointments: an amalgam filling, a crown. She opened the window to enjoy the cottonwood scent. The scent reminded her of the day Doc had tilted her backward in his state-of-the-art Sting dental chair and rubbed her shoulders. At first, she thought it was a mistake, but he kept talking of fitting snap-ons to longline gear.

  It wouldn’t happen again, she’d told herself. So it surprised her, really, when she found herself packing a bag, a note tucked into her jeans from Doc that said, “Meet me after work down at Reliance Harbor.” Doc closed the dental office for three months every summer so he could commercial fish. This time, he’d invited Rikka along. He told her he wanted her bad. She wasn’t falling for that line, but she couldn’t resist the thought of spending the entire summer with salmon scales stuck to her XtraTufs. Her sister promised to watch her kid for the summer, and she figured Sven and the rest of the family would pick up the slack.

  As soon as the Ocean Maiden slipped out of the harbor, Rikka stripped down to her bra and panties and lay on a blanket on the bow, the Cummins diesel rumbling beneath her. It was the end of May and the whales were bubble-feeding in front of town. She filled a whole sketchbook that summer, but when she returned home from the fishing season, she found Sven had filed for a divorce.

  Three years later, Doc set a photo on Rikka’s desk. “What’s this?” she asked, picking up a photo of a large house on a beach.

  “It’s your dream home,” Doc said.

  “You bought this?” She wasn’t really asking. How could he have done this without asking her first?

  “Done deal,” Doc replied, leaning over the counter to kiss her.

  Rikka turned her head so his kiss planted on her cheek.

  He looked confused. “It’s a surprise. I bought a house and property on Orcas Island in the San Juans, Washington State.”

  “You did?” Of course he did. He was impulsive. But why wouldn’t he buy something in Wrangell?

  “Yeah, it’s your house on the beach.”

  “Ah … ah …” She didn’t know what to say. Really? She would rather live on the water in a float-house, a live-aboard, or a house on pilings. Actually, she’d always thought one day she’d live on the Ocean Maiden.

  The phone rang. Good, an interruption. She had to figure out what to say to him. She answered the phone. Mrs. Ingram cancelled her appointment. She hung up.

  Doc tilted his head sideways. “Is there something the matter?”

  “No,” she said, standing up. She walked around the counter and stood near the window overlooking the harbor. She rubbed her finger on the soft white fuzz along the windowsill and inhaled the sweet cottonwood scent wafting inside the room.

  Doc walked over to her and set his hand on her shoulder. “I’m retiring April 1. I’ve sold the Ocean Maiden to the new postmaster, Willy Lundgren.”

  She turned. “You did what?”

  “I got a good price for the boat and permits. There are two docs coming to town to look at my practice. They’re very interested.”

  She shrugged his hand off and walked back to her desk. “You never talked to me about this.” She took a deep breath and sat down. How could he have done this without asking? I’m not going anywhere. Ever.

  “You told me how you want to live on the water,” he said, almost pleading.

  “On the water and here in Wrangell.” She shook her head. What was he thinking? She’d told him her dreams. She’d shared her drawings with him. She’d sketched girdies and running lights, and had told him how she felt when she first stepped on board the Ocean Maiden, how her body swayed with the sea. “Why would you sell her?”

  “Who?”

  “Ocean, the Ocean Maiden.”

  “I wanted to surprise you. I thought … we can retire and be together. You’ll have everything.”

  “Everything?” No, that wasn’t true. She would have nothing. Nothing at al
l. She would have no contour lines, or vanishing points. Her canvas would be blank.

  Rikka handed her job application to Colleen at the post office window. It had all happened so quickly: Doc Modon retired, sold his practice, and left town. Now she could see Willy Lundgren stacking boxes on a back shelf. He didn’t look so bad. His middle-age paunch didn’t seem too big. He still had most of his hair.

  “Willy,” Colleen called back to him. “Rikka is applying for the job.”

  Willy came over to the counter. He grinned at her at the same time he adjusted the collar on his postal uniform.

  “I need the job,” she half smiled at him. She knew how to do this: a shy smile, look directly into his eyes. Then be confident. Make him guess.

  “Don’t you work for Doc?” he asked.

  She sighed. “He sold his business. I don’t want to work for the new dentist and I also heard you need a deckhand on the Ocean Maiden.” She’d heard no one wanted to work for him. He was a greenhorn captain: the worse kind. The kind where the deckhands had to do all the work, especially if they were experienced and wanted to make money.

  Willy looked her over. “You have experience with boats?”

  “Oh, yes. Lots,” she smiled, recalling the tang of diesel-soaked wood and salt spray, salmon scent on her rubber gloves, bright silver salmon slapping at her feet. There was nothing like porpoise free-riding the Ocean Maiden’s bow and the rigging-chime clanking her to sleep at night. There was nothing like her in the whole wide world.

  Date: early 1990s

  Recorded by Tooch Waterson

  52-Hertz

  Scientists have been unable to identify the species of the 52-Hertz whale, which was discovered by a team of oceanographers in 1989. As of 2004 the whale has been detected every year since. It travels as far north as the Aleutian and Kodiak Islands. Scientists call it “the Loneliest Whale in the world.” They speculate it could be malformed or a hybrid of a blue whale and another species.—Wikipedia

  Stories are moon jellyfish. Stories are wormwood, old-man’s-beard moss, a timeworn gravestone. Tova traced the outline of driftwood in the palm of her hand. This, too, was a story. How far did the driftwood float to get to the beach where she found it? Was it lonely out there on the sea? She turned to her grandfather, Isak, who sat beside her on the porch overlooking the ocean. The fishcamp had been in their family for five generations. Only twelve years old and she knew how to live off the land. At fishcamp, every summer, her mother’s family fished, picked berries, and harvested crabs and shrimp. Every fall they put up deer and moose. This was Tlingit land, originally, but for generations this had been Isak’s Fishcamp, named after her grandfather and great-grandfather. Did her Tlingit ancestors fish and hunt here? They probably did. But her dad never talked about it. Sometimes he told her he was a “good Indian,” but she didn’t know what that meant. Did he mean he knew how to fish and hunt? Or did it mean he didn’t like the taste of seal meat, that he liked hamburger from the store better?

  Grandpa Isak ate seal meat whenever his friends gave him some. Now he sat behind a small card table. A bald eagle feasted on the beach beyond their porch. On the table, several chunks of red cedar formed a small pile and a tackle box filled with tools sat near the table’s edge. Grandpa Isak picked up a small block of red cedar. He sliced off a chunk. “Do you want to make pegs?”

  “Sure.” Tova stood up and put the driftwood she’d been holding on top of the porch railing. She could make herring pegs. She’d seen Grandpa make them before. A lost art, he’d told her. She had seen how he inserted the narrow, pencil-like object in his herring, bending the herring into the right arch. Salmon like the scent of cedar, he’d said. Probably true. A lot of things happened in the ocean she didn’t understand but still believed.

  Tova sat back down in the lawn chair. She loved hanging out with elders, although Grandpa Isak wouldn’t like it if she called him an elder. He’d just laugh. He laughed a lot. Every summer she’d spent as much time as she could at fishcamp. Already, her mom, rather than staying all summer at camp, had taken a job at the deli back in Wrangell, on another island four miles across the strait. Her grandmother, Liv, worked in town and traveled out to camp once in a while. All her aunties had town jobs now, too. And lately, her dad had been talking about how she was old enough for a summer job. By “getting a job” he meant doing something stupid like working in a relative’s garden or learning to mow lawns, maybe even babysitting. This should be her job: listening to Grandpa Isak’s stories, remembering them. Grandpa Isak’s friends had good stories too. Often a troller or two would anchor in the bay out front for the night. The fishermen would get in their skiffs and row to the cabin to join them for coffee and a story: one of the best times of the day.

  She’d decided if she could, she’d be a storyteller when she grew up. But was there such a thing? Did people make a living telling stories? She loved stories and it seemed stories loved her too. They were everywhere. Once, she lifted a patch of seaweed on a rock and a story lay beneath it, stuck to the rock like a gumboot. Another time, a bald eagle rose up to glide on the air current with a story entangled beneath its wings. Stories dangled in the blueberry bushes, were heaped in piles at the local garbage dump, and even slept at Cousin Cory’s HUD house.

  Now, Grandpa Isak handed her a knife and a small piece of red cedar. “Cut a chunk off like this,” he said, demonstrating.

  Tova hesitated then sliced a thin piece from the cedar. The best stories, though, were discovered while doing camp work. The problem was never about getting Grandpa to talk, it was to getting him to tell a different story, one she hadn’t heard before.

  “Grandpa, did you ever hear of people who can call whales to shore? Our people, I mean.”

  “Our people? Which ones, the Irish, Norwegians, Finnish? Lapps?”

  “Yes, Lapps.” She’d hesitated when she said the word Lapps. Mom had told her not to say that word. “Mom says we’re Sámi. She is and you are too.”

  Grandpa didn’t respond. He sat there whittling on the cedar. She was used to silence, how her elders paused and thought about things before they spoke. Sometimes she’d ask a question and wouldn’t get the answer for a day, maybe more.

  “Are we?” she asked again.

  “Yes.”

  “So how come you never told me.”

  He shrugged. “I didn’t think I had to. We just are.”

  “Oh.” She’d heard her mom’s stories, the stories had come to her bedroom from down the hall in the early morning hours. Those stories, the ones she wasn’t supposed to know, smelled like coffee. Her aunties and mom would tell them, never Grandpa Isak. The stories floated like jellyfish migrating down to her room. She slept with the door open because she liked the sliver of light from the bathroom to be her nightlight. She hated dark bedrooms. Often a word in the story like spank, hit, and cry would jar her from her early morning sleep. Her bones would ache as if the stories had gone down stinging through her pajamas and into her bones.

  Sure, she could shut the door so she couldn’t hear about a great-grandmother who wasn’t allowed to cry in her own language. Or a great-grandfather who was mean to everyone around him. That grandfather, when he was a kid, beat up other kids. And when he grew up, he beat up other men, and even beat up his wife and kids. Then there was an uncle who killed himself, an aunt who drank, another aunt who gave her baby away, or maybe the story was someone took the baby. Maybe the same aunt who drank was the one who gave up her baby? She didn’t know. But what she did know was someone had to remember the baby was last seen wrapped in a small yellow blanket. And someone had to remember the baby’s name was Heidi. That was all she knew. The name and an image of a yellow blanket was all she would ever have.

  Grandpa Isak showed her how to hold the piece of red cedar, slice it thin, and then form it into a peg. He was careful but fast. She took in every detail. Remember. Remember. Remember. Remember how he holds the knife. Remember how slow he moves it on the edge of the wood.


  Tova held the cedar chunk in her hand, shaped more like an old barge, the kind tugs towed back and forth among the islands. She held it up to the sky. The light wood could lift up and fly away if she carved it like a bird. But maybe Grandpa would let her carve it like a boat. The cedar would float on the ocean for sure. Her driftwood piece, though, still lying on the railing, she wasn’t sure about. Would it float? It had floated in to the beach, hadn’t it? Grandpa had taught her how to tell the difference between a spruce, a hemlock, and a cedar in the forest, and recently he’d been teaching her how to tell what tree a piece of driftwood originated from. This driftwood was heavier than the cedar, likely made from spruce. She’d placed the driftwood on the porch rail, balancing it ten feet above the ocean below. She closed one eye. From that perspective the driftwood looked like a whale. She raised herself up in her chair, nearly standing, until the tideline beyond matched up with the porch rail. In her line of sight, the driftwood appeared to float right on the water.

  She sat back down in her chair. “Can we call whales to shore?”

  Grandpa Isak sighed. “I don’t know about the ‘we’ part. Shamans used to do that kind of thing.”

  Shaman? She’d heard that word before. Her aunties and her mom had talked about a healer who was burned. What had he done? She couldn’t remember. That was probably important. How was she going to be a storyteller if she couldn’t remember?

  Grandpa Isak suddenly made a crying sound. She jumped. She’d heard that sound a hundred times. It sounded like a whale. She held her own breath, afraid she’d make the same sound if she exhaled too.

  “Like that?” he finally said, taking a deep breath in.

  Tova nodded and then she laughed. “I guess. Yes … like that.”

  Grandpa laughed too. Grandpa Isak set another finished peg down onto a pile of pegs. “I think the chowder is done. Ready for dinner?”