Mariela turned away from inhaling the wind and said, “Why don’t we use the electric kicker. I like the quiet.”
“Okay, sure.” Berta slowed down and killed the engine. At once the sound from the outboard escaped into the thick green mountainsides surrounding them. Her ears still rang. “How’s that?”
“Nice,” Mariela said, closing her eyes, “real nice.”
Berta started the electric kicker and it hummed to life. She turned the motor toward the beach, creating hardly a wake behind them. Midafternoon in August, the sun moved over the hilltop. “You keep your eyes out for the white jug. I’ll find the creek,” she said, almost too loud, forgetting the larger engine was shut off.
“Isn’t this bay where, you know, where some of those stories come from?” Mariela asked.
“Where what?”
“You know,” Mariela nodded toward the woods. Then she lowered her voice, “You know.”
“Oh that, them. Yeah, Grandpa told me a story about this bay once …” She had no intention of telling this story out loud, but Mariela liked to scare her. It was annoying sometimes. So turnabout was fair, right?
“Shush,” Mariela said.
Berta smiled. They were always shushing each other. “I think Gramps was full of it ’cause he didn’t actually see anything.”
Mariela looked down at her hands, “Somehow you never do. In those stories, no one ever sees anything.”
Berta turned the skiff closer to the shoreline and began to run the boat parallel to the beach, her eyes scanning. She liked to run the shore in case she saw something interesting to check out; always an overturned skiff, a buoy, a sea-washed board, or an old life jacket. But whenever she saw a life jacket, she wondered if sometime she might find a body attached to it, caught in the seaweed near the tideline.
The sun finally made its way over the treetops. “When we were kids, people used to see lights on top of this mountain,” Berta said. “Some people used to say there was an alien landing strip there. Maybe the government doing some kind of experiment.”
Mariela’s eyes widened, “Maybe it was, you know, them doing something up there. Like their village: the Transparent Village.”
“Mariela, why would they need a landing strip, anyway?”
“I didn’t say anything about a landing strip. You did.”
“Well,” Berta said, “maybe the lights weren’t a landing strip but something else, something that causes people to investigate.” Yeah, right. She would never be brave enough to investigate. Mariela would though. Mariela would always check out the bumps in the night, head out onto their porch with the flashlight. She’d even scared off a bear once.
“The aliens?” Mariela said.
“No, the them. Maybe there is something causing people to go and see if it’s them. You know,” Berta said. “But I don’t know why anybody would want to go and check that kind of thing out.”
Mariela shrugged. “Curiosity, I guess.”
“I suppose,” Berta said. Mariela was more curious than her. She had always done better in school, especially in the sciences and math.
Mariela shifted her weight in the bow, repositioning herself. The skiff rocked a bit. “Aren’t you a bit curious, you know, about them?”
Berta held her hand up and waved it. “Nope, no, absolutely not. Let’s not talk about it anymore, okay?” That was enough talk. Who started this conversation anyway? Mariela was starting to make her mad.
Mariela smiled at Berta. Berta noticed Mariela had taken off her rain hat and now the sun streamed onto her hair, casting it with red highlights. Mariela fidgeted with her life jacket, which was fastened atop her raincoat. “I’m taking all this stuff off. It’s too hot.” Mariela unzipped her life jacket and set it down on the bow and then sat on it. “There, now my butt won’t get sore.” Mariela also removed her raincoat and laid it down beside her. “I don’t see the jug,” she said.
“I don’t think we’re near it yet,” Berta said. “The creek is up the shore a ways.” Berta cocked her head. The birds were lively today. Mariela had been right about using the small electric kicker. The quiet electric motor allowed her mind to keen in to the world around: ravens chortling in the trees, the splash of a jumping salmon, the clack of rocks on the shore. She loved moments like these. Moments when she could almost see clearly, when her sister was right there.
“You know,” Berta said, “I heard about a woman who disappeared out fishing one day. She was by herself and they never found her body, only her skiff. Then one day, three or four years later, she turned up in Seattle walking around on the street. Someone saw her there. A relative, I think. They recognized her and picked her up. She’s in the nuthouse in Anchorage now.”
“So how did she get from Southeast to Seattle? That’s a thousand miles,” Mariela asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe it was them, you know. That’s what they do.”
“Yeah, I know. They make people disappear. Drown. The—”
“Shush,” Berta said. Did she hear it right? Had Mariela said the taboo word out loud? She had. They had broken the taboo. Should she offer something? They were supposed to make an offering. What did they have to give? Rotten bait? That wouldn’t be good. Her lunch was in the small cooler. Peanut butter and jelly on Wonder Bread?
Just then, Berta spotted the creek running down the hillside. “There’s the creek. Follow the creek with your eyes, straight out, and then look for the white jug.” She turned the skiff out from the beach and squinted into the sunlight. She couldn’t see anything.
Marilea pointed, “There it is.”
“I don’t see it.”
“Gee, your eyesight’s getting bad,” Mariela said. “Turn a little more to the left and head that way, toward that log. See the log on the other side.”
“Yeah, I see the log.”
“Stay straight, heading for the big log, and then you’ll come right up on the jug.”
Berta kept the bow pointed toward the log. “Maybe someone pulled it already. This is farther out than I remember where Ole and I set it last.” Finally, she spotted the jug and turned the skiff slightly. “I see it,” she said, heading toward the jug. “I’ll pull aside it, and you grab the jug and pull it in.”
Berta slid the skiff over next to the white jug, but the electric motor didn’t have enough stamina to keep them on course and the current drifted them back a bit.
Mariela leaned over to reach for the jug.
“No, wait till I get a little closer,” Berta said. “The current’s pushing us too strong.” She tried again, making another run at the jug.
Mariela reached out and grabbed the jug and the line attached to it, pulling it into the skiff and started coiling the line. “I think we’ve got a few crabs. It seems heavy.”
Berta smiled. “Good. Crab for dinner.” She cut the engine and went to the port side of the skiff to help Mariela pull the line in. Hand over hand they coiled the rope into the skiff until the large round pot came to the surface. Berta grasped the pot and heaved it into the skiff. Dungies, clicking and clacking atop one another, filled the pot. She smiled, “Whoo hoo, gunalchéesh, thanks.”
Berta stuck her orange-gloved hands into the pot and began to pick out the crabs, throwing away any that were already dead. She put the crabs into a five-gallon bucket.
“I better rebait it. Ole wants me to check this a few times while he’s gone.” She took a plastic bag from the bottom of the skiff, reached in, and grabbed a small halibut head, minus the cheeks, which were good eating—the best part of the halibut. She hooked the head on a small hook inside the pot and then latched the pot door closed.
Berta stood, wobbling in the skiff, and went to the stern again and started up the big motor. It sputtered to life. “I’m going to reset it out a ways from this spot. Try a new spot. Okay?”
“Okay,” Mariela said.
Mariela flung her ponytail from front to back, reminding Berta of herself at that age. She liked having Mariela with her. She liked
it a lot. Berta steered the skiff to the spot. This spot seemed right. There wasn’t a Fathometer on the skiff, but she figured it was about fifty feet or more. She had enough line so that was good. “Throw the pot over,” she said to Mariela.
Mariela stood up in the skiff and threw the line over. The heavy pot flipped out into the green water, splashing and then sinking fast with its own weight.
Berta watched the shore to get her bearings for when she had to come back and retrieve the pot in a few days. Let’s see, out about one hundred yards from the broken spruce, near the large mossy boulder. She turned back to Mariela and her brain registered alarm. What the heck? Don’t! Lean! But Mariela leaned too far to the left. It happened fast. Mariela’s eyes widened, her mouth formed an “O.” Mariela’s red boots caught in the line.
Berta leaped forward, but she caught her own foot on the edge of the bench. The bucket of crabs spilled and the crabs clacked along the floorboards. She continued to fall and hit her chin on the seat-bench in front of her. Blood drops spattered on the aluminum floorboard. She looked up as Mariela plunge into the water. Mariela screamed. Water splashed.
Berta wobbled to her feet. The skiff rocked. She steadied herself and stood up in time to see top of Mariela’s head sinking with the crab pot to the bottom of the bay.
“Mariela! Oh, god, oh Jesus. Jesus Christ!” She leaned over and grabbed the white jug. The jug bobbed madly, as if Mariela struggled below. Then the jug pulled out of her hands.
By itself, the skiff slowly swung around in circles, the pot-line swinging closer to the prop. Berta fumbled to the back of the skiff, grabbed the throttle stick, and maneuvered the skiff to where she could reach the jug again. The jug bounced out of her hands. Then the jug moved farther away as if a halibut, not a crab pot, tugged the other end of the line. She ran the skiff next to the jug on the starboard side, where she could reach it with her right hand. “Mariela! Mariela!” She motored close to the jug again, then got on her knees in the bottom of the skiff, braced herself, and leaned farther and farther, reaching her arm out. Her elbow grazed the cold salt water. Her back arched and stretched. The skiff rocked and she nearly lost her balance.
That’s when she saw it, something red bobbing a few yards away. “Eeyee!” Mariela’s boots. She motored the skiff over to the red object and picked it up out of the water: a small plastic bailing bucket someone had fashioned from a gallon jerry jug floated atop the water. She picked up the bucket and cried. To her left, the white jug still bobbed wildly in the water.
She sat down in the skiff, the sun streaming on her face, tears sticking to the salt spray on her cheeks. The jug bobbed about, and then ceased. She put her hands to her face, wiping away the snot and the crab juice with her orange glove. On the bow Mariela’s life jacket, the one she saw her take off to sit on, wasn’t there. Mariela’s raincoat, the long green one, was no longer lying in the bow either. Where was she? Where was she?
Mariela was gone. That much was sure. She’d been gone a long time. For the past forty years she’d gone to Seattle to look for Mariela, to see if she could see her in the crowds of faces. Maybe Mariela would be sitting on a bench waiting for a bus. Or maybe holding a black umbrella when it flipped inside out in the wind.
They were kids when they had climbed in that crowded skiff—something stupid that kids do—and the skiff tipped over. Why? Had someone laughed at the boat? Did someone brag about how many kids they could fit in the skiff? There were six of them in the small skiff. They were rowing across the other side of the harbor. Had someone dared say the taboo name? They weren’t far from shore. They could have walked. They could have swam, couldn’t they have? Everyone drowned. Everyone. Except one: herself. She was twelve years old, too, like Mariela, her sister. They were ten minutes apart when they were born. Ten fingers, ten toes, ten minutes. She had been born last. She had been saved. Someone had pulled her to safety. All she remembered, though, was afterward she searched the beach with her father, finding only one of Mariela’s red rubber boots. Her father was so distraught he kept calling Berta “Mariela,” turning to her, studying her face, as if he could somehow see Mariela was still alive. Eventually, all the young bodies were found … except Mariela’s.
At first, in Seattle, Berta searched for a young girl about twelve years old. As the years went by, she looked for an older Mariela. Now, after all these years, after Mariela’s drowning, after her cousin Dieter’s drowning, and Uncle Friz and his wife, Netta, had drowned, when Berta searches Seattle for Mariela, Mariela with Berta’s same smile, Berta’s same long, dark hair with reddish highlights, her same brown eyes, Berta knows she’s only searching for herself. But, always, she looks at down at the feet. She searches for red boots flopping on the sidewalk. Red rubber boots dancing in puddles. Red rubber boots stumbling over the sidewalk curb, or boots dripped with vanilla ice cream. Red boots like a small buoy she will always cling to.
Date: 2010s
Recorded by Tooch Waterson
Speaker: Tova Agard
Can I Touch Your Chinese Hair?
Long ago, back in Distant Time, before time was time, before there was a me, before there was a plot and arc, before I discovered I had a spine and a text and illustrations and maps, there was the creation story. When I was in college, I would go walking around at Pikes Place in Seattle and tourists would ask to touch my hair. Just like when I was doing tours in Alaska.
Can I touch your hair?
At first, I let them touch my hair for a dollar, but it didn’t make me rich, it made me poorer, so I decided to trade stories. You can touch my hair if you tell me a story. In the beginning, I got some lame stories, some really bad ones, but not all. Camille was the first person I let touch my hair in exchange for a story. Camille was from Utah and she was Mormon. She’d always wanted to be an Indian, to touch an Indian, to kiss an Indian, and low-and-behold, here one was. I was a girl, but I think that intrigued her. So she told me a story of how her father was an asshole. I know all about asshole fathers. She told me how she had to wear granny-style dresses and how her father had always told her to be submissive to men. She was supposed to have lots of children. One night, at sixteen, she snuck out to go to a party with a friend. Her father caught her and locked her in the hall closet. She hates the smell of boots, she said. For that story I let her touch my hair and when I did, leather scent dusted my pages.
What kind of person are you?
I took a poetry class at UW and the professor asked what ethnicity I was? Actually, she said “What are you?” When I said “Sámi” she gave me a blank stare, and I know she was trying to think of something to say … there was a long pause, even longer than I’m used to. So I said, “You know, indigenous peoples from Scandinavia?” “White Indians?” I didn’t want to say the “L” word and I don’t mean lesbian. I tried talking around the word. I went over the tundra and down to the lake and back up and around again. I stood up and circled that professor a couple of times. I pounded a drum and nearly fell over in a trance and finally I said, “LAPP. Have you ever heard of a Lapp? Laplander? People recognize that name. Yes, I’m a dumb-short-ragged person. That’d be me.” But, you know what? She didn’t know what a Lapp was, either. And I was struck silent. How else was I going to explain who I am, or was, or will be? The conversation pretty much fell off the dock, and I made some kind of an excuse to leave the room. The next day I saw the professor in the hall and she said to me, in fact she blurted it out: “You’re all over the internet.” She was thrilled. I was real. I was true. I wasn’t lying. Google made me real. She was smiling and so excited and I said to her:
“Do you want to touch my Sámi hair?” and she did. I let her touch my hair and when she did, I reached up and held her hand there and she curled her fingers through my hair. It felt good. Very good. I said Let’s go to your office, and she led me down the hall and around the corner. We went inside her office and she locked the door and pulled down the shade, and I said, No, leave the shade up, so she pulled it back up again. An
d she took an Indian weaving off the wall and laid it on the floor. I don’t know if it was an authentic Indian weaving from India or the Americas or if it was from China, but that’s okay because I am all those fibers anyway. And she didn’t let go of my hair the whole time.
Can I see your card?
I think they always mean they want to see my BIA card or my tribal card or maybe my green card, but I always pull out my DNA card. Usually I have to take the card out whenever I cross a border like whenever I go from Southeast Alaska to Anchorage, or when I go to a meeting, or when I have to stand up and say something publicly. Sometimes I take the card when I go into the grocery store. I had it laminated. It’s a custom card created from a study of our Sámi DNA, a diagram that looks like a sun. We are people of the sun. I have the U5b1b proof laminated with my smiling face in the center of its universe. It’s proof I was born from those people. Heck, I’m a born-again Sámi or maybe I’m a Sámi born-again. I hate the church reference. They persecuted us, tried to destroy our culture. The missionaries did the same thing to my Tlingit relatives. You must be born again to enter the KINdom. So maybe Christians need a card, too. Proof they’ve gone down on their knees and checked the box, something about blood-of-Jesus quantum. Check. Check. Check.
What’s a Sámi?
My mom and I learned how to make an oval drum. I’m learning about all the symbols on the drum now. We have to research the information at museums in Scandinavia because when the drums were confiscated, they put them into museums and now we have to ask permission to touch them. We have to use gloves when we touch them. They’re afraid of our oils, our fingerprints, our D … N … A … our Sámi motif: mtDNA haplogroup U5b. Sounds like a punk rock group, eh?
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