Jackie slapped Tara on the butt. “Hoo-ah girl! I knew it from that first day we met. Never seen someone throw a punch like that.”
“I told him. He wouldn’t give me two seconds of peace.”
Jackie dug into her coat, waved an envelope in the air. “Maybe a letter from your boyfriend will calm you down. Don’t worry, I won’t tell Miles. Get some rest while we run south. You deserve it after that performance.”
She took the envelope. Connor’s handwriting.
When they reached the boat she went straight to her berth and closed the door, trying to even out her breath as she unfolded the pages.
June 24, 1999
Dear Tara,
I’m not sure where this letter will find you. By now maybe you’re above the Arctic Circle hunting whales. Or fishing for crab out in the Bering Sea. I guess it’s been a bit, and I wanted to know how you’re doing. And also to tell you about what goes on here . . . wait for it . . . in the thrilling metropolis of Kansas City! (I’m already starting to sound like a New Yorker.)
I actually love it here. I’m interning at this small theater company for the summer. And you’ll never guess what play we’re doing. “The Lovers” by Brian Friel. It’s actually two one-act plays called “Winners” and “Losers,” but we’re doing just the first half (casting it as an island—my idea after thinking of Port Anna).
And guess what? I’m Joe Brennan. The director said he liked my height and sincerity and understated nature. So there you have it. Back on stage I go.
That’s been my life. Living in this little room up above the theater with a mattress and a lamp on top of a box. While you—who knows.
Before jumping in the Mazda and hitting the road for Kansas I went back to Manton Street. The downtown skyline has expanded. People move in from NYC by the truckload—this couple with a greyhound dog the size of a small mule bought a place a few doors down from your pop. Vic and Sal and all the old Italian dudes don’t know what’s going on. People are calling it the “Mexican Market” instead of the Italian Market. Oh and City Council is considering outlawing burn barrels. Crazy. Nicodemo Scarfo got out of jail, so now everyone’s on edge waiting to see if he’ll get revenge for his son being shot up at Dante and Luigi’s. You remember that? Halloween 1989 guy came in with a mask and hit Nikki Jr. nine times but didn’t kill him. (I can’t help but think your pop knows more about such things.)
I’m not really sure why I’m writing you like this. Just want you to know that the city you left still exists. And that I’m out here in Kansas City. Thinking of you.
Love,
Connor
The volume of blood in her veins seemed to have doubled—either from the fight or the letter, she couldn’t be sure. She folded the paper, pinched her fingers, and ran them over the crease. Then unfolded it, read how he had signed, relieved to see it still said the same thing.
She felt emptied out from the fight, but the letter had lifted her spirits. Or maybe it was speaking to her father on the phone, hearing this new gentleness in his voice.
Topside in the galley, Miles and Teague were chomping away on the rest of the cannolis. “Motherfucking Petree Bangheart,” Teague said when she walked in. “That guy’s a myth. And you go and hit him. Un-fucking-believable.”
She set bread on the cutting board and began smearing peanut butter and jelly. Miles gawked at her. “You’re a fucking badass.”
“I was on the phone with my father,” she said, slapping the halves together. “He wouldn’t shut up. What was I supposed to do?”
The two men exchanged glances. “Miles, you be sure to give me a signal if I ever don’t shut the fuck up,” Teague said.
“Yeah, me too.” The two of them broke into laughter.
Sick of the boys, she returned to her berth and sat on the bottom bunk eating her sandwich. For the third time she read the letter. This time she thought of her father slamming the storm door, kicking the television off its stand after Nikki Scarfo got shot up.
She lay back, set the pages on her stomach. Maybe he was signing all his letters these days with love. If only she could see his face. Then she’d know.
66
THE Adriatic repeated the two-week circuit, unloading totes in Port Anna, taking on fresh ice, then turning around and heading out again, north by the cape, waves shattering against the rocks. At Lisianski Inlet they cut up along Yakobi Island, turning southeast to tie up in Pelican, a boardwalk village built into the side of a mountain.
“You’re looking a bit worse for the wear,” Teague told her. “Someone needs to go see Joleen.”
Joleen was the owner of Gem’s, Teague said, the bar known for sponsoring “Teeny Weeny” contests, where fishermen wore white boxers while Joleen sprayed them down with cold water. “She wanders around in her bathrobe hugging people. About the nicest woman you could hope for. No grumpy fishermen you need to flatten.”
Tara was just glad to be off the boat again. At one end of the boardwalk was an abandoned cold storage, held up by barnacle-encrusted pylons. Inside she breathed in the mildewy air, running her palms over the rough-hewn spruce beams, trying to compose a response to Connor in her head.
He was right, she was leading a good life in Port Anna. She had been given a second chance on the tug and intended to make it happen this time. Before returning to Philly she wanted a roof and a bed of her own. And yet, after reading his letter, and hearing her father on the phone, Philly seemed closer. Urbano telling Vic to get a map made her want to cry.
She imagined the flames rising out of the burn barrels at the market, cabbage-scented cardboard boxes broken down and shoved inside to keep the vendors warm. Fires in the refinery fields flickering in the south. Radio towers blinking over the Schuylkill River. Or maybe all of this had changed in the past couple of years. Or—more frighteningly—maybe she had changed, and none of this would move her in the way it once had.
She left the cold storage and continued along the boardwalk, trying to shake the growing feeling that walking here, along these planks, shimmering with rain, in some half-abandoned boardwalk town, she was wasting time. She passed a house built into the hill, heard country music, and pulled open the heavy wooden door. She could use a taste of the raucousness Newt had described at the Frontier, something to take her out of herself. But inside, it was just a few men hunched around the horseshoe-shaped bar, smoking and drinking from Mason jars.
She ordered a shot of whiskey and settled onto a stool to read an outdated Juneau newspaper, ignoring the sidelong glances. At her back the door opened.
“Gotta keep the locals happy, right?” a man said, walking behind the bar and plopping a cleaned salmon into the sink. “Fish tax paid. Where’s my lovely Joleen? I need a hug.”
You’ve got to be kidding, she thought. It was Petree, in his shearling-lined coat, tearing open a ginger chew, looking like some out-of-work Marlboro man. She so wished she had worn her Eagles hat, to pull low over her eyes. As he took a stool beside her she saw the tattoos along his knuckles, and along the broadside of his wrist, one of the Big Dipper, stars connected by barbed wire, the North Star, in the shape of a fishing hook.
“Well, I’ll be goddamned, if it ain’t the fightin’ kangaroo her own self.” He slapped Tara on the back, then rested a finger on his bruised cheek. “Boys, anyone wondering where I picked up this shiner, here’s the left-handed source.”
She looked around the bar, thinking this would end in another fight, one she would certainly lose. Instead he motioned to the bartender, who poured two beers and two tequilas. He pushed a shot glass toward her, raised his own in her direction, ignoring the lemon slices and saltshaker. “Swear you woulda taken my head off if I hadn’t been quick. No hard feelings?” After a pause she threw back her glass. The alcohol bit into her cheeks.
“’Nother round over here!” he said, slapping his palm on the bar. “You like working for that ball-buster of a skipper?”
She shrugged. He focused on the bottom of his empty glass. H
e drank twice as fast as Newt on the breakwater. “So what do the parents think of their pretty little daughter all the way out here in Alaska?”
She pushed away her beer and stood.
“What, did I hit a nerve?” He turned to the guy beside him. “You hear me say something?”
She put a twenty-dollar bill down on the bar. Petree stammered. “Hey! I said it’s on me. Don’t go. I swear I remember you back from somewhere.”
“The ferry,” she said. “We spoke on the ferry, when I first got here.”
She allowed the wooden door to slip shut between them. It was ten P.M. and still light. Cliffs rose on the other side of Lisianski Strait. Even without a night at the bar, she felt better, she decided.
The tops of her hands shined orange in the boardwalk lights as she walked toward the boat. Milled nail heads, like the ones they had used to build the platform, shimmered. Back on the Adriatic she fried bacon, shredded hamburger and dropped it into the grease. The meat burned the roof of her mouth. She spit it on the floor, then found herself holding on to the Hoosier cabinet, laughing until her stomach hurt. At what she wasn’t sure. Maybe Connor in Kansas City, acting. Or how happy his letter had made her.
That night, full and warm, and a little drunk, she fell right asleep.
67
IN EARLY AUGUST, after almost two months on the boat, the Adriatic made tight in Tenakee Inlet, a thirty-five-mile gouge into the east coast of Chichagof Island, just off Chatham Strait.
“About sixty year-round residents,” Teague told her. “Everyone washes in a poured concrete bathhouse built over natural hot springs. Crazy, right? Used to be called Robber’s Roost ’cause it’s where Soapy Smith’s gang settled after Soapy was killed in the Juneau Wharf shootout . . .” She nodded as he spoke, peanut butter and jelly sandwich in one hand, hot cocoa in another, eager for him to shut up so she could return to her bunk and catch up on sleep. Finally he did. She was dressed in her flannel pajamas, zipped inside her sleeping bag when there was a knock on the door.
“Planning on becoming a grease monkey?” Jackie said, poking her head in, nodding at the book, Diesel Boat Engines Made Easy. “I’m going for a soak. Wanna come?”
She heard the snap of cards from the galley as Miles shuffled for a game of cribbage with Teague, the whoosh of the teakettle being filled, the clack of it lowered onto the stove.
“Thanks. I think I’m gonna hang here.”
The door swung fully open. “No thinking allowed on this boat. C’mon. Hop to. Oh, and naked bathing only. Town ordinance.”
It was just after ten—the sun had set behind the crotch of the inlet, and a flinty light covered the water. They walked at a leisurely pace, past the phone booth at the top of the ramp, the playground by the harbor, crossing a wooden bridge to the single gravel road that ran from one end of Tenakee Springs to the other. Jackie’s flip-flops slapped against her heels, flinging up stones. She wore Teague’s black fleece pants with the rip up the backside, which spread as she stooped to inspect clusters of blooms along the edges of the road.
“State flower of Alaska, the forget-me-not,” she said, pinching a small flower. She pulled up a larger, violet-petaled stalk and tucked it behind Tara’s ear. “Nootka lupine, for my hard-driving deckhand.”
The woman, usually so grim and focused, seemed serene, happy, even. “Wouldn’t mind retiring here,” she said, nodding at a black pipe jammed into a stream. “There’s your drinking water. And that”—she looked toward an outhouse built at the end of a pier—“your shitter. See how they do it? Two flushes a day, each at high tide. Way life should be.”
That salty, spruce-tip, tinny ice field smell of Port Anna (at least when the fish weren’t running)—Tenakee Springs was braised in it. Purple light from a television shifted over the windows of a house, mimicking for a moment the color of the sky. The fragrant woods appeared to push the buildings along the coast into the sea. A maze of wooden stairs led up the hill, connecting A-frame cabins, perched among clumps of salmonberry bushes. A generator grumbled. From somewhere came the slap of a nail gun, followed by the pounding of a compressor.
Jackie switched on her headlamp. A gust of rain sent sawtooth alder leaves scurrying through the white light. They quickened their pace, crossed another stream, flowing from the uphill side of town through a culvert to the sea. Then Snyder Mercantile, a ramshackle building with peeling asphalt shingles, its false front lit up by flood lamps. since 1899, the sign read.
“And here we are,” Jackie said. A peeling slab of plywood showed bath hours in black paint: women’s 2–6 P.M. and 10 P.M.–6 A.M., men’s 6 A.M.–2 P.M., 6–10 P.M. Jackie smiled and pushed open the door. A few older men were toweling off. “Boys,” she said, setting down her basket on the bench. Someone grunted. Tara kept her eyes on her boots.
“We’ll just get out of your hair here,” one of the men said in a sarcastic tone. Jackie was already pulling off her thick woolen sweater and stepping out of fleece pants. The men gathered pouches of soap and shaving cream and left, the door knocking shut behind them.
The changing room was sheathed in tongue-and-groove panels. Knots bled through the steam-faded paint. The rusted oil furnace in the center rattled, a gasp of cold air pushing down through the exhaust.
Tara tugged her sweat-stained tank-top over her head, the draft from the furnace pricking her skin. The purple flower fell from her ear. When she reached down to pick it up the world took a heave. Boat brain, that was what Teague called this. She squeezed her eyes shut. When she opened them she glimpsed Jackie’s nipples, the color of dirty pennies. Her body was square-shaped and knobby, as if her arms and legs had been hastily attached to her trunk. She crossed the room, the dimples at the base of her back shifting.
“Shall we?”
Tara forced herself to walk, one foot in front of the other, focusing on the planks pocked with small divots. Jackie held the door open. “Floor looks like a golf ball, doesn’t it? From the caulks of logger’s boots. Old boys coming in here after weeks out in the bush. Now we get to do the same, right? After you.”
A single bulb hung from the ceiling, illuminated the steam. Moonlight gave the corrugated fiberglass on the atrium roof sheeting a toxic glow. Rain sounded like pebbles.
“Town rule,” Jackie said, tossing Tara a bar of soap. “Suds up before you get in.”
Jackie lathered her skin, using a cut-off Clorox container to rinse. Tara did the same, then braced herself on the edge of the bath, lowered her body into the water, and shut her eyes.
“Nice, right?” Jackie said.
Stone pressed into her back, massaging her muscles. Slowly, her stomach evened out. She allowed her body to go limp, her head slipping under. When she came back up, her eyes still closed, she heard Jackie’s slow breathing.
Enough with these letters, she thought. Christmas, she’d go back to Philly. Connor could pick her up from the airport in his Mazda, and she could look at him, watch his expression, and just know.
But first—the Chief. She was making about a thousand dollars a week. If she could survive through September she’d have about twenty-one, then have the remaining four by Christmas. Or maybe Laney would accept a down payment. She’d get the boat, run it a hundred yards, and fly back to Philly. Surprise them all. That was the plan.
She felt a foot on her knee and opened her eyes. Jackie sat across the pool, small shoulders just visible above the water’s surface, arms spread along the ledge of the bath. Her head appeared helmeted, hair dark and wet against her skull, cheeks shiny with moisture. When Jackie’s heel slipped between her legs Tara gripped the ankle, pushed it away. “What are you doing?” she asked.
Jackie stood, resting her hands on Tara’s shoulders. “Kiss me, sweetie.” She pushed a knee between Tara’s thighs. Her muscles wouldn’t fire. Jackie twisted a fist into her hair, bent her head, and ran her tongue over Tara’s lips. Tara turned and vomited over the concrete curb.
“What the fuck!” Jackie yelled, springing back.
Swallowing down the bile, Tara hauled herself out of the bath, taking the stairs by twos. Shivering, she pulled on her pants, thrust her feet into the rubber boots, stumbling as she pushed open the bathhouse door, and emerged into the evening light.
“Hey, T! Hold on! Hey, I’m talking to you.”
Jackie was in the doorway, naked, dripping, small breasts sagging like poached eggs. She crossed the gravel, wincing as stones jabbed into her feet. “Jesus, would you calm down for a second?” Jackie reached out. Instinctively Tara jabbed, hitting the woman just beneath the right eye. She made an oof sound, and stumbled back, falling onto the gravel.
“I told you—keep your hands off me.”
Tara pulled up the hood of her sweatshirt and ran. Past the tarped four-wheeler, the teapot house, the clumps of Nootka lupine and forget-me-nots. A voice from a house asked if she was okay. She kept going, hearing only the rhythmic crunch of stone beneath her boots. She crossed the bridge, passed the playground, and stopped by the phone booth at the top of the ramp.
On deck she could see Miles, back to the wind, face illuminated by orange flame as he relit his cigar. Above his head, a trouble light glowed yellow in its wire cage. Taking a breath, she walked down the ramp, onto the Adriatic, went past him to her bunk, and began packing her things.
68
SHE SLEPT ON THE FLOOR of the library, an open-air shack filled with moldy paperbacks and VHS movies. In the morning Snyder’s Mercantile opened. The cashier, a lavender-scented girl, faded denim apron over her swollen stomach, let her inside and said she’d brew coffee. It was an unusually hot day, the sun alone in the sky.
The girl plugged in a plastic fan, which made a grindy, knocking sound as it tried to turn. Tara stood by the counter as coffee percolated, the smell of grinds waking her.
The Alaskan Laundry Page 19
