Correcting the Landscape

by Marjorie Kowalski Cole

  I’m always dismayed when the Conscious Palate, the vegetarian restaurant next door, pulls in its outdoor furniture for the winter, not only signaling the arrival of winter but also cutting down on space for our editorial meetings. It could get crowded in the Mercury newsroom, especially when tempers were hot. I liked to take drafts over to the Palate or the Wok ’n’ Roll during decent weather, especially when No was on a tear. The outdoor tables in front of the Palate, old spools for mining cable, covered with oilcloth and set about with potted geraniums, made a peaceful setting. People buying bicycles and canoes at the sporting goods store next door wandered past with a news-free lightness in their step.

  My sister Noreen has a temper. She has a good time being angry. Sometimes when she boiled over, she’d lunge for the door, give it a good slam, and suddenly find herself in the midst of traffic, her rage abloom in public. Sometimes when she slammed that door I thought she was going to fall into the traffic, as you’d fall off a cutbank into a river. The road came that close. Noreen was a fierce woman. Her many distractions of the heart saved me, however, from the full force of her wrath; she was often in love, trying to build a new life with one strange character or another. I think she gave all of herself, wholly and immediately, to the man of the hour. Man of the year, to be fair. And I’m sure the whole of Noreen was a little too much for them to take. The relationship would crash or perhaps vanish from her grasp, even as she was consumed with it. And she’d have to rebuild her confidence from scratch.

  That’s how she found herself living for a couple of weeks at a bed-and-breakfast owned by old friends of ours from pipeline days. In recovery from the latest fellow, she took refuge out at Aghadoe B&B, run by Liam and Mary Sheedy, who also owned an equipment rental place and kept a display ad running in the Mercury. Noreen was on hand at Aghadoe the night Felix Heaven arrived in town.

  She wandered into the TV room that night and saw someone new, a pale, redhaired young man who promptly did the strangest thing. He unfolded himself from the reclining chair and put out his hand. He said, “How do you do,” in a soft voice full of the place he’d come from not a week before, a farm in County Leitrim. He drew in his shoulders a bit as if his height embarrassed him and retreated almost immediately, stepping back and looking down like a man who prefers invisibility above all.

  No sat down and put him at his ease. In the midst of heartbreak she could call up an easy rambunctiousness. What more did she have to lose? No has a warm, earthy laugh, a curly sort of laugh; I like it myself.

  He found an Aghadoe brochure at the airport, he said. He couldn’t resist trying it for one night, but it was too expensive. A cabin in the woods, that was more like it.

  “What kind of work do you do?” Noreen asked.

  “I can do anything,” he said, and as they talked his fingertips wandered to his mouth; he touched his lips in a gesture like a shy child’s. They watched a Nova repeat on TV, on the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Workers in slickers hosed oil off the beaches of Prince William Sound.

  “I fault myself,” Felix said. “I should have come over when that happened, instead of waiting.”

  “There’s more important work around here than taking blood money.” No set him straight. “Even though this isn’t the easiest time of year to find work. Summers, of course, everything explodes. The experimental farm on campus hires in March.”

  “Farming,” said Felix, and laughed.

  “Not interested?”

  “It’d be a joke, maybe. Come to Alaska to farm.”

  “Not really. I can think of worse jobs. Farming, working at the large-animal research station, construction, you’d be outside.”

  “Outside.” He chuckled again.

  “Summers here you want to be outside, not cooped up over a newspaper like we are. Even during the winter you have to get outside every day, so as not to go crazy.”

  At that he leaned forward. He rubbed his knees.

  “A newspaper wouldn’t be interested in a newcomer, I expect,” he said. “You’d want to know people. Be a local.”

  “So you’re a writer,” said Noreen.

  “Ah but who isn’t, these days.”

  “That’s what my brother the publisher says.”

  She sat back and smiled, feeling the start-up of that old dysfunctional urge to help people. Felix was too young to incite her romantic feelings, but not too young to help. He gave her a sideways look and a quick smile.

  “What kind of writing do you do?” she asked.

  “I’ve written stories, reviews, the odd essay, a bit of poetry. I’ve work with me.”

  Noreen loved his voice. Her intentions from that moment forged themselves.

  WHEN THEY CAME INTO THE OFFICE THE NEXT MORNING, I WAS on the phone to the New York City publisher of the challenged book at our public library. Photocopies of the offensive drawings and a complaint form were making the rounds at churches. I described the offending pages and the publisher chuckled.

  “That scene is the problem?” he repeated.

  “Pornographic, they’re calling it. I can see why.”

  “There’s no penetration,” he laughed. “We don’t call that porn.”

  “Well, the comic book format…it’s too accessible.”

  “Accessible?” He sounded incredulous. It did seem a nicety. I imagined what he saw on the streets of New York during his daily commute. I made notes while he talked, not just of his words but also another idea that started nudging me. I could hear Noreen and someone rustling in our newsroom. I wrote down the word newsroom and the word accessible, and drew tiny sweat drops all around them.

  Every so often in Fairbanks, like people who have just remembered they’re on a diet, the locals turn on each other. Bizarre squabbles crescendo as if the very identity of the town is at stake; controversy rips the cover off the community, briefly, and we get a look at ourselves. It’s not a pretty sight. You find, for instance, that people don’t argue very well, don’t know how to use the facts, to hear understatement, how to think. How to be together all winter. Accusations that will be forgotten in six months when the snow melts fly back and forth. In my business we have to decide how much to fan these flames—controversy sure does sell papers. Newspaper coverage reinforces the squabble, even becomes the story; there’s an editor’s dilemma right there. Nonetheless, people were getting loud about this book. The whole thorny knot has something to do with that word, I thought: accessible. What am I meant to untangle?

  Noreen came into the office just as I finished my phone call.

  “Have a minute, Gus?”

  “What’s up?”

  She gestured to someone behind her and Felix followed her in. A tilting white skyscraper of a young man with reddish blond hair, who couldn’t quite get the hope out of his face. I recognized a guy who wanted a job. When we shook hands, I found myself leaning into him. He had about him that quality of energy that drew back, which is initially disappointing to me; I’m always up to be entertained by a more aggressive energy than my own. But then I take a second look.

  He handed me a résumé. As we talked, he lifted a paper clip off my desk and worked it into a straight wire. A perfectly good paper clip. But he maintained a cool, relaxed presence and looked right at me.

  “Let’s see what you can do for us,” I said, handing back the résumé.

  “That’s a copy for you,” he said.

  “Where would I file it?” I gestured at the mess of papers all around us in the office. “If I need it again, I’ll ask for it. Start tomorrow? Start today?”

  “He’s still on Irish time,” No protested. “And he hasn’t a place to stay.”

  “Ahadoe’s dear,” Felix murmured.

  No and the Sheedys always said “Aggadoe.” His voice was like an animal’s breath. No and I smiled at each other. A different way of doing things, of looking at things.

  “You’ve landed here in the midst of a few breaking stories. I could use some help,” I said. “There’s a book down at the p
ublic library I’d like you to read. You could do a story on speculation for us. If we like it, we’ll buy it. And I think we probably will like it. You’re welcome to stay at my place for a few nights, while you get settled—I have an extra room. Don’t I, No? Sometimes I forget, I’m there so seldom.”

  “I’ll take you out there,” she said to Felix.

  “Isn’t anybody going to work today?” I said. “We have a paper to get out.”

  “Oh yeah,” said Noreen, as if she were telling Felix where to find the bathroom. “Deadline is Thursday at five. Then the paper goes downtown to press.”

  “Heaven,” I said. “An unusual name.”

  “Think of Evans,” he said. “It’s a local form of Evans.”

  “The perspective of a newcomer would be useful on this book, and the whole controversy. I’d be curious what you think of it, Felix Heaven. Read the book, talk to both sides, stick with other people’s words as much as you can.”

  He touched his mouth with his fingertips. An odd, delicate gesture.

  “So this would be a book one could easily find in most big cities, but not here?” he said.

  “What do you make of that?”

  “We have some experience with censorship back home. In the long run, it makes life hard for young people, I think. So much to catch up with, later on.”

  I felt a certain relief at this mild expression of opinion, and to hear something of a personal nature from this cool young man. As if the initiation into our group was one simple item of personal revelation. Who are you, Felix? I’m a man who can be honest, if not forthcoming. Noreen smiled. Nice to see that, after her recent distress. She hadn’t been too happy with me either, lately.

  Felix looked around at our modest, chaotic office. A messy crib signals much increase, it says in one of the psalms, or something like that; these three small rooms signaled plenty. I heard the thump of a columnist, bringing in his latest tirade. The wooden floors creaked with his approach. My paper, the Mercury, bold and unmistakable.

  “As free and independent as the birds,” said Felix, reading the masthead on an old issue, and looking satisfied.

  I didn’t quiz him about his visa or green card. Writing stories, freelance—that’s not any kind of serious job. Not the best pay either. But second day in America and the kid had work.

  FOUR

  Communities in which controversy does not thrive are dead on their feet.

  —KEN PARKER, BE INDEPENDENT! START YOUR OWN NEWSPAPER

  SOMETIMES WINTER CLOSES DOWN ON FAIRBANKS like a cell door. This was one of those winters, arriving with a bitter Halloween. Poor trick-or-treating kids, feeling real pain under their masks and bedsheets, could hardly see as they stumbled from door to door on frozen feet, their fingers burning with cold, Mom or Dad waiting in the car. My neighbor’s boy wore a battery-operated mask that was supposed to drip blood when you hit a hidden switch. The whole thing broke apart in the cold at the second house he visited.

  People were naturally drawn to the warm firebox of controversy. A challenged book at the library and an extremely provocative timber concessions bill promised halfway decent newspaper sales; the subscription list even grew a bit. You never can predict what will fire up the community. In Anchorage this year, it was breast-feeding in public; their newspaper finally had to put up a stop sign. “We will run no more letters on this subject,” they announced after several months. Who could have guessed such a thing? In Fairbanks, where we make a certain show of self-sufficiency, Christians and hippies alike expected women to breast-feed, and a glimpse of breast in a shopping mall was not the end of the world.

  However, a single frame out of hundreds in this graphic novel did the trick.

  Few people read the novel, but the photocopied page went from hand to hand. Hundreds of petitioners didn’t even see it; they just heard about its existence, and that was enough.

  Felix Heaven interviewed several players in the drama, including librarians, parents, the principal of the Catholic school, and the bishop’s secretary. He guessed correctly when his subjects had plenty to say, kept his accent and his opinions to himself. The young man must have had some experience in keeping most of himself locked away, off-limits, while accepting new information. Except for the bishop’s secretary, who was wild in her rage (“incensed,” Felix wrote; I deleted that) and wanted the book to be burned, most complainants wanted it made “less accessible.”

  That word again.

  Apparently in the old days in Fairbanks, a complaint was always enough to get a dubious or sexy book removed from the shelves and tucked out of harm’s way in the director’s office. People were angry that their disapproval alone wasn’t enough to solve the problem this time. Soft words in a back room got them nothing. The bishop’s letter to the library director, nothing. The subtle mention of the library trust fund, nothing. That was good, I thought, a sign of the library’s maturing; but it was this very neutrality on the library’s part, this refusal to play the old game, that continued to fuel the fire. The word accessible was waved about as if to prove that complainants were not censors so much as housekeepers, merely trying to keep the poisons on the top shelf of the broom closet. Close to half of the complainants’ letters began, “While I do not believe in censoring what others read…”

  It bothered me. There was something so—unread, about this fear of accessibility.

  It was a lie. And somehow, a lie to which you could subscribe.

  The crowd of conservative parents was subscribing to a lie. They really wanted the book gone, but that wasn’t it, either. In truth, to complain about accessibility was to complain about something that did not exist. Literature isn’t accessible. I mean people no longer read that much, and maybe only one person out of fifty who complained about this book had even looked at it, let alone read it cover to cover and judged it as a whole. It’s not that easy.

  The heart isn’t that accessible. It doesn’t end up naked on the page. The truth in our hearts is well hidden. Maybe it only comes out in the story itself—and story isn’t that accessible, when we can’t even agree on what the story is, or where to focus our attention. We are so easily distracted. That’s the scary part.

  People didn’t read the book, so of course they didn’t allow themselves to be disturbed by its hidden story. They didn’t follow the thread of the action all the way into the puzzle at its very center. The sexy pictures were only a distraction from the story, and the hero paid no attention to the sex around him, not even to the naked blonde sitting on him, once he understood that his friend and mentor was in trouble. He throws the girl off his body and runs to his friend’s aid. The complainants didn’t see that happening. Why? Because it wasn’t so accessible, after all.

  My editorial came together into a reasonably coherent whole. I was proud of it. Tad Suliman came by a week later as he did sometimes when he was feeling lonely these days, stuck his head in my office, and said, “Nice editorial, Gus. What we’re paying you for.”

  His soon-to-be-ex-wife Shelley, Realtor of the Year last year and part-time director of the Convention and Visitors Bureau, had her picture in the big daily several times a week, attached to classified ads in the Real Estate section. She was a gregarious woman, not bad looking, with strong features, a wide smile, and bright yellow curls. Once he showed me a picture of her in his wallet from ten years ago—they had been camping. She was thinner, wearing a loose flannel shirt and flirting with the man behind the camera. Her hair was frizzing out of long braids, coming loose after several days of camping and fishing. Her broad smile was directed at only one person. I imagine he missed that woman most of all; with the current Shelley, beaming her can-do grin at the entire city, he was snarling mad.

  I gave Felix a personal check for seventy-five dollars after his first story, which he put toward a used mountain bike, modified for winter riding. He surprised us with a well-written feature story about the bike shop where he found his bike; the owner made a specialty of replacing standard rims with
locally welded wide rims on which a rider could keep going through the snow all winter long. Felix rented a twelve-by-sixteen cabin and rode his bike to and from the office. When he’d peel off his face mask, there were stripes of windburned red skin under his eyes. The bike looked like a torture machine to me, but he was exhilarated. Leaning in the hallway, piled with his gear and helmet, it gave the place life. To see the bike against the wall and Gayle Kenneally’s blue corduroy Eskimo parka on the rack delighted me; the Mercury, I’d think: what a happening place.

  Sometimes Gayle’s son, Jack, walked over after school and waited for her in the newsroom. He was a big, shy twelve-year-old in half-unlaced Sorels, usually reading a copy of Off-Road or, when Gayle scolded him, scowling line by line through his assigned paperback copy of To Kill a Mockingbird. He seemed to spend half an hour on each page. I couldn’t imagine what he made of Atticus and Boo and Dill. Once I walked around him where he slouched at a vacated desk behind a math book, and saw inside it a Garfield comic book. I felt for him. Who wouldn’t? She wouldn’t let him go home alone.

  “You don’t trust him?” I overheard Noreen say once.

  “Why should I?” Gayle said softly. “Teenagers never tell their parents anything. God knows what he’ll get into and he won’t tell me. We never talked to our parents back home. Not about what we were getting into.” She laughed at herself, a kind of snort.

  They lived downtown somewhere, and I noticed they rode the Fairbanks bus home, which meant an uncomfortable wait in the open bus shelter down the road. At thirty below it’s not that much fun. I began to feel my way toward offering them a ride.

  You feel your way, then you grab the chance like you just thought of it that second.

  “If you’re going that way,” said Gayle, after a minute, in response to my offer.

  “Almost always have a reason to head into town,” I said. “I’ll go start my car.”

  And of course, the Honda would not start.