Correcting the Landscape

by Marjorie Kowalski Cole

  The heater had died some time ago, and in the cold, everything plastic inside had started to break and fall off in my hand. The speedometer needle was stuck at 80 mph; the dashboard was basically gutted of knobs and controls. The emergency brake was a chunk of six-by-six post, a leftover from mounting my newspaper box out on Bad Molly. I sat there alone in the frozen shoebox of my car and pounded my forehead once or twice on the steering wheel. Then I thought, It’s just as well. This would be a mighty unpleasant ride. What would they think of me, the two of them.

  “I spoke too soon, Gayle,” I announced. “That car is not going anywhere tonight. I’m getting the message. It’s time for a new buggy. I’m really sorry.”

  “Whatever for?” said Gayle. “I’m sorry about your car. We’re hunky-dory, Jack and I, we have an agreement. If we’re getting home after six we stop in at KFC on the way. He likes those mashed potatoes.”

  I watched her get into her parka, while Jack tumbled toward us in his big, loose boots, grinding someone’s loose pages underfoot. He knocked into the light table; a canister of pens tumbled off. Gayle turned him around to clean up the mess. She did seem content, after all; she seemed just fine, heading out into that version of hell that is a Fairbanks street at thirty below. Car exhaust freezes in front of you, so you have balls of fire and burning cold in your face at the same time. And no visibility.

  I brought the battery inside for the night, and the next day it started up, but it was only a matter of time. I didn’t have the ready funds to replace my car, but I couldn’t tolerate being without ready wheels. Without a dependable car I was stuck inside the office all day and my own head as well. My thinking was boxed in. Ideas for interviews, field trips, hands-on experiences weren’t possible anymore. I don’t have to do that sort of thing every day, but I have to believe that it’s possible. Without a car I couldn’t escape myself. Tad Suliman came by, cheerful for once, which surprised me, and made a recommendation.

  “Let’s go out to Unity Auto Parts,” he said. “I know the guy owns the place, and they got a totaled truck last week that isn’t totaled by a long shot. Might be just the thing.”

  I took a look at the Mercury’s account book. Perhaps I could justify purchasing a truck with Mercury funds, if it was dirt cheap and if I took on a chunk of the delivery route, which I’d been planning to do for some time. Fresh stacks of the Mercury hitched a ride with the Friday edition of the daily to Nenana, Delta Junction, Haystack, and Coffee Dome, communities at the borough’s perimeter, but if I could handle delivery to other locations around town, we’d save a few bucks a week. And I could consider the truck a business expense.

  On a sunny, warmish afternoon—five below—I arranged to meet Tad at Unity Auto Parts. I parked just outside the fence of stakes, peels of log with the bark still on, which I took to be sawmill refuse. At the driveway into the yard a sign had been propped against an old deuce-and-a-half The sign consisted of the detached hood of a truck. The word OPEN had been cut into the metal with a torch. Four elongated letters let daylight through like movie credits cut into celluloid. The whole thing had been spray-painted a weird metallic blue. I braced myself for a lunge from some huge chained junkyard dog as I walked past the sign and up to the usual ATCO unit, a portable building the size of a trailer, left over from pipeline days. Over the door was a sign: OFFICE. It might as well have said, ABANDON ALL HOPE.

  Unity was a godless place. The office was dark, the walls black and grimy, and twists of metal hung from chains strung across the ceiling. A plastic bucket with Red Vines in it shared a windowsill with an empty heart-shaped box that had once held candy. The box and the red licorice were the only touches of color. What got to me was that chain strung across the ceiling. At new auto parts stores you get those bright lights and colorful boxes piled high, but here at Unity a homemade system prevailed. They were parts salvaged from collisions, I guess, hanging naked from the chains, each tagged with an identifying number.

  Without any sound except the scratch of his claws on the floor, a black Lab wandered up to me and put his square head forward to be rubbed. There was something human about him. I massaged his skull and tried to get the hang of the place, its remorseless lack of color and the coating of grime on everything. A youngish fellow behind the counter watched a small TV and didn’t look up.

  That’s when Tad Suliman and, to my surprise, a small blond woman in ski clothes, a puffy down jumpsuit, came in. She pulled off a fuchsia helmet and golden hair leaped out, floating wild and thick around her face. It glinted like polished metal.

  “Gus,” said Tad. “Judy Finch, Gus Traynor.”

  Perhaps she was the reason for the cheer in his voice.

  She turned to me with remarkable blue eyes. Her square, mannish hand rested in mine for a few seconds. Then she looked around and took a good survey of the place. She took in the complete absence, I guess you’d say, of a woman’s touch. Except for the warm, persistent head of the black Lab and the cardboard box on the windowsill, the interior of Unity Auto Parts held out no hope that women, or beauty, or softness even existed in this world. Not even a swimsuit calendar in sight, though I doubted she would find that a comfort.

  “So this is what cars are made of,” she said at last. I laughed.

  “It’s a guy place,” said Tad with some uncertainty. Judy smiled, as if she liked his discomfort. The dog shoved its head between her legs. She took its temples in both hands and gave it a good scratch, smoothing back its ears.

  “What are you doing here, puppy?” she said. “Have you been bewitched?”

  “So Gus, see the truck yet?” Tad said.

  “How do you know so much about what’s on the market?” I said. “I thought it was boats you drove.”

  “Those were the days. But you know it’s been a while since I pulled a stunt like that. Gus, I’m a new man.”

  “You found God?”

  “I found art. Art heals. Judy’s in town to teach ice carving. I’ve been moving blocks of ice from the pond to the Ice Park this past week.” His soft, heavy voice took on a reverent tone. “I’ve never seen people work so hard. Jesus.”

  Turns out she had come to Fairbanks to teach a course and to compete in the World Ice Art Championship contest, held annually during our winter carnival, which starts in February. This competition was becoming world famous. Carvers show up from Kazakhstan, Russia, Japan, Europe. Judy had come from Montana. This work explained the jumpsuit, with its wide fuchsia belt and the fuchsia stripes down the arms and legs. She needed to keep warm out there and look good at the same time.

  “Let’s look at your truck,” Tad said.

  We spoke to the counterman, who swiveled in his chair and consulted a computer I hadn’t noticed before. He moved a chunky, blackened finger across the screen like a second-grade teacher following a line of print, then stood up and came out from behind the counter. He led us to the back door.

  “End of that row, near the east corner of the lot,” he grunted. “Blue-green Ford Ranger. It’s got no front left.”

  “No front?” I repeated, stunned.

  “Front left,” he said. “Driver’s side headlight’s gone and all.” He handed me a key wired to a cardboard tag. “Go ahead and start her up and what all, but come back if you want to drive it off the lot.”

  Tad held out a hand to Judy and said, “Okay if we look a minute?”

  She gave her approval. We set out across the hardpacked weeks-old snow, and the dog trotted along.

  With all the foot traffic over it and the lack of fresh snowfall, this snowpack had turned hard as concrete. It was fouled with frozen dog shit. I felt nervous, as if I was going to meet a long-lost relative. It was something about the dazzling woman on Tad’s arm that upset me. The afternoon’s mission had heightened from mundane errand to test of my very existence—I mean, the lens was on me. Did she do all that? Yet I was being forced to account for myself, forced to mount some kind of performance.

  I know now it’s because Judy Finch w
as one of those people who always saw herself at center stage. So if you were next to her, then that’s where you stood, too—exposed, accountable in a new way.

  We walked past silent, frightening wrecks, crumpled hatchbacks and the remains of a Sidekick. We stopped all of a sudden, the three of us, at a silver van with its driver’s side crushed in. Turns out the passenger side was crushed as well, as if the van had been caught between two semitrailers, like a soda can you crushed between your hands.

  “Jesus,” grunted Tad. Judy seemed to be making the Sign of the Cross; her fingers in huge, puffy astronaut’s gloves touched her forehead and maybe her lips.

  That wreck gave me pause. It seemed almost certain that someone would have been killed. What a place this was! Maybe I didn’t want to buy a car here.

  We were still subdued when we finally found the Ranger, but after a few minutes of inspection I began to cheer up. The Ranger was a winsome little truck. Its cheap paint glittered like a Christmas tree ball. It had been sideswiped by a Suburban, and the metal driven into itself on one corner, but the engine started right up. Not bad for five below.

  “Climb in,” I said.

  Judy slid over, Tad followed, and the Lab leaped into the bed. I got squared away with the gearshift, then we rocked forward and took off on a circuit of the salvage yard.

  “Five hundred, maybe,” Tad said.

  “You do a lot of business here?” I asked.

  “I’ve tried salvage. There’s money in it, but it’s a grim business. I don’t like to keep taking advantage of other people’s bad luck—believe it or not, Gus—which is what you have to do in this racket. And it’s so easy to do.” He smiled as if sometimes it was fun, too. “Whoa, see that there? Looka that.” We stopped at a Caterpillar D9 with a cancerous rust eating its way toward the cab. I wouldn’t have taken a second look, but Tad’s antenna zinged.

  “Hold on a sec,” he said. “I’ve been wanting one of these.” He climbed out and set off on a hike around the huge machine. Judy and I watched him.

  Tad was a big, good-looking man, black haired with an overlong mustache and slightly bulging, dark eyes. He moved in a slow, deliberate way that held your attention. People who set their own pace: it’s as if they know they belong here, on this earth, it’s territorial. Despite all of Tad’s misdemeanors he’ll always have a home to come back to, his own physical self. I envy that self-possession. It compensated, with him, for the wildness inside.

  He and the Cat appeared to be sizing each other up. I suppose Cats are to Alaska what, oh, barbed wire was to the plains, something on that scale. Cats put the means of reshaping the land into the hands of any ordinary man. D9s to D6s, maybe a certain type lusts to drive them. Not a type of man you’d spot right away, not necessarily a man’s man at all; it could be anyone. Poets, pencil pushers, engineers, the guy at the natural foods store, the guy who remodeled your bathroom. They love Cats.

  This size, the D9, is used by miners. Maybe that’s why they become miners—in order to drive one of these. In order to remake the landscape out in the roadless country where they don’t have to worry about buried power lines or weight limits. It’s the Eros story. Some of these guys have been pierced by the arrow, and they lust to handle machines. Not yours truly, as we know.

  The spectacular woman next to me turned and said, “What do you do, Gus?”

  “It’s what I need the truck for,” I explained. “Delivering papers.”

  “Oh, you deliver papers. You’re between jobs?”

  “No, I deliver my paper. The Fairbanks Mercury. I’m editor and publisher.”

  “Terrific. Alternative press?”

  She didn’t let up. And she didn’t care, either. I looked into her blazing blue eyes. In that bleak setting, Unity Auto Parts in the middle of a short February day, you wanted to be with those eyes. Was she going to keep putting words in my mouth until by process of elimination she got it right?

  I gave her a description of the Mercury in the few sentences I knew I’d be allowed before she rushed in.

  “And are you solvent?” she asked. Christ, how did she know?

  “Well, I—”

  “It’s an important task. We must do the important tasks and let the universe provide.”

  “Or not.”

  “It will, if it’s the right task.”

  “Ice carving brings you up here? And it’s your first trip?”

  “Ice Art,” she said, and waited for an acknowledgment.

  “Yes, ice art,” I repeated.

  “Most of the year I do metal sculpture. The universe called me here, perhaps to meet Thaddeus.”

  Anyone else, I might have laughed. You didn’t laugh when she spoke, but your mouth dropped open. I watched Thaddeus climb up into the frozen Cat, take the seat, reach for the controls.

  “I always felt he had untapped qualities,” I said.

  She was silent for a moment, and when I looked at her, she looked different. Younger. As if she had plumped up, lost five years, gained five pounds. Her skin: despite the cold, it looked dewy. She was thinking about Tad’s untapped qualities, I guess.

  “He ever tell you about the airboat?” I asked.

  “No,” she said.

  I debated briefly; should I be the one? No, there was no good reason.

  “He’s good with machines,” I said finally, “and lumber. And money.”

  “The physical side of life,” she said, as if she liked saying it.

  “Yep. That’s right. And more besides,” I said. I imagine she felt that she provided the missing spiritual side. What a collision the two of them must have made.

  While Tad was driving heavy equipment on the North Slope in the seventies, the lumber yard he co-owned in Fairbanks did a million dollars’ worth of business in three months. For several years he couldn’t not make money. He bought some land and sold it at the right time, and ventured into the subdivision game, skinning more land of its spruce trees, staking the ground, selling it off to contractors.

  He was good at the physical side, all right, but not immune from those proddings of the heart and soul that drive you to do some crazy things. We spent several R&Rs together in Fairbanks. I was not a drinker, but I enjoyed being in a bar, for some reason that I cannot explain. Tad got quiet when he drank. He was a dreamy fellow, in his way, but then he would get up from his bar stool and act on his impulses. That was the dangerous part, but some of them were good impulses.

  Putting the Mercury partnership together, years ago, I tracked him down to Lucky’s Last Gravel Bar for the final sell. I had been nagging him for weeks on the subject, and he encouraged me, with a nod here and there, a good question or two. We sat at Lucky’s for an hour with my handwritten business plan in front of us. I went over and over it; he read, he nodded, he looked out the window, he carried on an argument with some friends at the next table. I realized he had a bet going with them, on the qualities of various watercraft, but I was more interested in my own proposal and his obvious willingness to consider playing a large part.

  About midnight he took a worn, hard-used checkbook out of his breast pocket and wrote me a check for ten thousand dollars.

  “Christ almighty,” I said, studying it.

  “It’s not like I wasn’t going to help out,” he said, standing up. I stared at the check in delight and pure pleasure, feeling the floor drop from under me like I’d just stepped into an express elevator. It was really going to happen.

  At the same time people were leaving the bar. When I heard the sound of an airplane engine and noticed people leaving, and joined the exodus, it was too late to stop him.

  Tad lived on the river and owned a few boats, and tonight he had shown up at the bar in his airboat—a shallow-water craft powered by an above-board airplane engine and propeller. Just now he had persuaded his two betting buddies to help him haul the boat out to the highway. It turns out they had been debating how much water an airboat needs; Tad held out for none at all. Now he brought his engine to full pow
er and set off up Airport Way on the skin of the hull while his fellow drinkers cheered. Then we all fell silent in amazement as Tad progressed steadily toward the airport in a horrific gale of sound.

  As the powerful engine roared up behind him, a trucker thought a small plane was actually landing on the road and called the police. By the time they stopped Tad, he had ruined the boat but won a thousand dollars. The troopers charged him with drunk driving and confiscated his license and the remains of the boat, but Tad later won his case in court, too. His lawyer, the appealing and offbeat Robin Rowe, came up with the astounding argument that a driver’s license is not required in order to operate a watercraft on land. Therefore drunk driving statutes did not apply. Tad got off scot-free, although the statutes were later revised to prevent such a thing from ever happening again.

  “What we’re paying you for,” I imagine he told his attorney. Once he won the case, Tad quit drinking, mostly. Today, at Unity Auto Parts with Judy at his side, he seemed on good behavior to me, restored to himself and then some. The influence of the ice artist.

  This would be a good day to touch him for help, if I needed help.

  He opened the door of the Ranger and climbed back in next to Judy.

  “I think that’s the Cat the fellow drove into a settling pond up at the mine on Coffee Dome,” he said. “Last year—look at the rust on it. Remember that fellow? Problem is with D9s, it’s hard to feel what you’re doing. A D7 or D6 is dandy for most things, you can feel the ground. Plus I can haul mine from place to place. I can’t justify one of those. But Jesus, I’d like one, someday. That’s a formidable machine.”

  His hand in a mustard yellow work glove rested on Judy’s snowsuited leg. He looked at her and they grinned at each other.

  We drove around the yard a bit more and then opened the hood to contemplate the Ranger’s engine. It meant nothing to me, of course; I already wanted this truck. It was the color of a hummingbird.

  “Should I have a logo painted on the door? You do that sort of thing, Judy?”

  “You absolutely must,” she said.