Correcting the Landscape

by Marjorie Kowalski Cole

  “What did you tell her?”

  “Oh, whatever. This and that. I don’t remember. One thing, that land I cleared on the riverbank that you gave me a hard time about. She talked about how Fairbanks looks, and I had to go and confess I’d done my small part to make it look even shabbier around here. Lowered the beauty ratio some all by myself. If someone else had told her those damn stories, maybe it would have been okay, she could have thought she was rescuing me from my past. I guess I didn’t sound repentant enough.”

  “Maybe you aren’t repentant enough.”

  “I try to be. I try to be Mr. Fucking Repentant, every chance I get.”

  “It doesn’t come easy to some people.”

  “No.” He tossed a toothpick.

  The crossing arms went up and traffic began to move, a pipe unblocked, hearts lighter.

  “Time is it?” Tad said. “Maybe I’d feel better if I bought a new table saw. I’m gonna go over to Alaska Hardware, then maybe a couple of beers at the Last Gravel Bar. You?”

  It had been a year or so, maybe longer, since he drank in the afternoon, since he and I sat in a barroom together. I thought he’d given it up, and for good reasons.

  “I’d follow you there for the sake of conversation,” I said, after a few seconds. “But it is a workday.”

  “So it is. Well, Gus, what’s all this money trouble about?”

  “I can eat,” I said. “I have a roof over my head. But the newspaper, I see it changing, Tad. It’s time for us to get deeper into this community. I want to—buy the Highway Sentinel, I mean to merge with it. We’re going to get into every home in Fairbanks.”

  “Jesus.” He stared at me.

  “I don’t see any other way.”

  “What do they say?”

  Of course I hadn’t talked to the Sentinel, or anyone; where had my announcement come from? It surprised no one so much as myself.

  “We’ll see,” I said vaguely. “I can offer content, substance, something to make people hang on to the shopper, and they have a distribution network that might work for us.”

  “I sometimes pitch the Sentinel right there in the post office,” said Tad.

  “But if it had news, opinions, editorial substance, you’d take it home. It’s to their advantage, as well as ours. That’s what a merger’s about. Mutual advantage. Their market saturation, and our, uh, substance. And so forth.”

  “So you want me to spot you something, Gus.” He laid a bare hand on the door of his truck and raised his key to the lock. I stared at his large, plump hands. Which ought to have been callused, scarred, and stained, the work he does, the mishaps he gets into, but they looked more like the hands of a self-indulgent millionaire to me at that moment. Big, pleasure-seeking hands. A guy that in tune with his own whims couldn’t help but understand the urgency of mine. Couldn’t help it.

  “It’s like this,” I said. “Practical opportunities, like for instance say, the funny pages, the crossword, find six things different in these two pictures, shopping. Right now, the Mercury is short on immediate practical ways to take part in the life of your town. Nothing to do, except of course write opinion pieces. But with the shopper, we’ve got a direct connect to one of people’s favorite recreational activities. Bargain hunting. Even if it’s window shopping, ad shopping, daydreaming. People expect it.”

  He looked interested. He was listening.

  “You’re going to go buy a table saw, right?” I said.

  “Makita. On sale.”

  “Practical opportunities. Life goes on.”

  “I get you.”

  “A lot of energy exists at this practical level, this basic, uh, scavenger level. I don’t know, shopping’s not something I do a lot of, but I’ve been neglecting a fundamental something.” I finished my promotion and gasped for air.

  “I guess it is the part of the Sunday paper I read first.”

  “I rest my case.” If we but tip the cup, I thought, it will fill up again, revenue will pour in.

  Tad had settled down in his truck, hitched the seat belt over his shoulder to fool the cops. He flung an elbow out the window. “So come by the Gravel Bar if you want,” he said.

  “I’ll have the figures,” I said, but Tad was on his way. I stared after him a bit spellbound by my own fantastic notion. Merge with the Sentinel? What was wrong with telling him the truth—that we had lost revenue and were now hustling like mad?

  I hesitated at my own truck, not knowing what to make of my latest bombast. What do I believe in next? Well, why not go ahead and do it, join forces with the interior’s most popular throwaway and get the Mercury into every single newspaper rack north of the Alaska Range? Why not believe my own sales pitch?

  A guy in Carhartt coveralls and a trapper’s hat hops off his snowmobile this coming winter to pick up a copy of the Mercury along with his can of Red Man at the Cantwell Bar. A Christian survivalist housewife hikes to the end of a long driveway, carrying a shotgun in case of bears, reaches into her mailbox for her shopper, and finds it wrapped around our secular, liberal opinions. Oh, the penetration!

  MY SISTER NOREEN WAS STANDING AT HER DESK WITH THE phone in her hand when I came into the Mercury’s newsroom, and she whirled toward me. Yes, whirled: put down the telephone and cried out like a little girl, across the room, “Gus? It looks like I got a job!” She walked toward me with her arms out and her face filled with delight and trepidation, both. She was decked out in a salmon pink suit which I had never seen before, and which set off her own coloring real nice. Startling and bright.

  “No,” I said. This time I meant No way I don’t believe it, but fortunately that’s not what she heard. I covered quickly. “Tell me about it.”

  “They just called to say I passed a screen test with flying colors. I’m going to be doing the news on Channel 8! Look at me, Gus, I’m photogenic! Did you know that?”

  “No, you’re very pretty, I’ve always said so.”

  “Not pretty. Photogenic. A whole different ball game. It means something!”

  “No, I am thrilled for you. This is terrific news.”

  “Gus, it’s a salary, and it’s more than I’m going to need. I can help out around here a little bit.” Animated like this, she really was pretty.

  One less mouth to feed.

  “I start next week,” she said. “They had an emergency opening, and I’d applied before. Now I’ve sailed through the screen test, can you believe that? This face, this head?” She pointed a finger at her own head like a gun, as though she were a comedian mocking the idea of Russian roulette, and she made her eyes go in different directions.

  Not only was she pretty but she had a sense of fun. And yet I’d miss her about as much as you miss your very favorite teacher when school is out. Noreen is absolutely terrific and true blue, but right away I knew that things were going to be a little looser, a little more open, around this place. If that’s possible.

  I didn’t tell her right away about joining forces with the Sentinel. She might see something wrong with it, something unworkable. She might say, “How, exactly, Gus, will you sustain a partnership like that?” She might raise an eyebrow, shoot a little cold water at my heroic notion before I even had time to look it over myself.

  I sat down at the nearest chair.

  “This is a lot to get used to,” I said. “Things seemed to be cruising along pretty sweetly at some point, didn’t they? Last winter maybe?”

  “I’m not sure, Gus. I don’t know that we’ve ever been terribly comfortable around here. But I will come around to work in the office, until we get someone else. I’m not letting things drop.”

  I stared over at her. She was my family, my innermost ring.

  Time for an intervention.

  “No,” I said, and stood up. I walked her to the front door with my arm around her and opened it wide. “Look up at that sky, Noreen, what do you see? Do you see one cloud, even one?”

  “Not one.”

  “And not a cloud in your heart, eit
her.” She beamed. “We’ll celebrate this properly one of these days. I’m telling you, go for it, go forward, this newspaper is my baby but it doesn’t have to be yours.”

  “Gus, you do say the right thing sometimes.”

  “Hm, I don’t know about that.”

  Traffic rushing by laid dust on the petunias in the two old, splitting redwood tubs that sat on the front steps. Noreen liked to fuss with them. One thing about summer, I thought, you can work all night. Eighteen-plus years here and I liked the darkness of winter less and less, but the twenty-four-hour-daylight of summer more and more. I could not imagine living in a place where it got dark at night. Summertime there’s no real reason to stop whatever you’re doing until hunger or fatigue drop you in your tracks. Good time to get something done. Get too damn tired even to dream.

  TWELVE

  THEY SAY TO TAKE AN INVENTORY WHEN you’re worried about survival. With Noreen elsewhere I could get creative with these account books. Item number one: I own a house and three acres on Bad Molly Road, a prime neighborhood behind the University. Thanks to pipeline wages I never owed a penny on that house, outside of property taxes.

  Why couldn’t I take out a mortgage?

  Bingo. Cash in hand: I mortgage the place and put myself into a situation no worse than most people are in already. Most people have mortgages, don’t they? One big chunk of money is all I need to walk up to Tad Suliman and say, if you can match this by half, we’re in business.

  I played around with the idea and made a few phone calls, and by six o’clock I was armed with a few figures and more than ready to advance my case with Tad. It was going to work. I peeled out of there and headed over to the Last Gravel Bar, where Tad Suliman would be deep into his afternoon, ready to be pulled back to reality. Ready to be called to a higher purpose.

  A picture came to my mind of a dog driver in the Canadian Arctic. Huskies harnessed like a fan, separate leads shooting out from the sled. Inside that parka hood, the panicky face of Gus Traynor, a dozen leads at once in my hands and me barely in control. No lead dog. They were all fanning out and I kept adding more complications. But I had to take chances, that’s the world of business, and this newspaper is a business, too, not just a noble calling, it’s a business. I wanted to pack a few more inches between me and financial disaster. A few more inches of organic, life-sustaining topsoil between us and the frozen muck. Hell, every third governor in Alaska tells a story of arriving here with thirty-five cents in his pocket, and look at them now, they’re all rich as Croesus, they’re bankers and hoteliers and advisers to presidents. I have a lot more than thirty-five cents. Oh hell, Gus, don’t think so much, you’re not good at it, I said to myself as I skidded over the gravel parking lot of the bar, where I was surprised that I did not see Tad’s truck. Maybe he’d come here by boat.

  And then, to my disbelief, he wasn’t inside.

  The bar was all but empty. Three lone drinkers equally spaced, each of them on their own, hunched over bowls of pretzels and ash trays and bottles of beer. He said he’d be here. When he wasn’t, the ground dropped out beneath me. I wandered toward the back wall where you could look out at the sullen brown river. My face burned with disappointment. The sureness of my ideas suddenly became a hoax.

  I associated his drinking with his handing me large checks. Salivating like a dog at the thought, I was actually counting on my best friend having a very hard time today and tomorrow. He could get out of control. It could last for days. Once, years ago, I met him at a bar downtown about seven P.M., and he confessed to me he’d been there since eleven that morning.

  Hell kind of friendship is this? Did I really want my best friend to fall off the wagon, so that I would know exactly where to find him and even in what psychic state he’d be in? A man I happen to value. Maybe I love him, who knows.

  “Help you?” said the bartender, a woman.

  I put my fingers in a bowl of pretzel sticks, ate three at once.

  “Would you know, has Tad Suliman been in today?”

  “Haven’t seen him in a long time.”

  A diamond-shaped pane of glass in the door was filled with light, a reproach to anyone tucked in this dim watering hole on a summer afternoon. Why are you here, Gus? Well I came to save him. Like hell, you came to save him. You’re as bad as he is.

  Friends don’t let friends drive drunk, vote Republican, eat farmed fish.

  I was fond of those bumper-sticker slogans. They caught something. Not something you could really pull off most of the time, because really friends are out of your control, I know that even if Noreen doesn’t—imagine telling Tad he’d had enough—but those quick-and-dirty mottoes did point to an ideal which I personally found worthwhile. A person ought to have people in his life for whom he’d take a chance on the truth.

  I can’t let you drink any more. I can’t let you vote that way. I can’t let you eat that shit.

  Tad was a scratchy guy. His political sympathies came from sheer obstinacy, in part, a refusal to flow with the mainstream. But not only that, not that alone. He had a conscience. He kept it to himself, kept himself pretty well fed you might say, but wherever Tad came from, they gave a shit about injustice. He didn’t need that much help from the likes of me to be a decent person.

  “How about a club soda?” I asked her.

  I had forgotten how tiny bar glasses are. These few sips would cost me two dollars. I ate more pretzels and watched four people in canoes moving down the brown water. Across the river at a gravel quarry two steel cranes rose above piles of rock, and draglines swooped down from their heights.

  The bartender leaned on the bar and murmured to one of the customers, an old white-haired man. I set down my glass and raised a hand good-bye as I left.

  “Any message for him?” she called out.

  “I’ll find him. No problem.”

  WHEN GAYLE WALKED BACK INTO THE NEWSROOM, ALTHOUGH I warmed up at the sight of her, I also thought, so help me God, All you’ve done lately is go to a funeral.

  In her absence, Gayle had somehow become enshrined in my thoughts—an image of loveliness and, let’s face it, availability. But on her return, things did not go according to my plans—plans I hadn’t even known I was making. She was sad, of course, a little tight about the mouth, and that warm light in her eyes was very far back. Noreen talked to her about the troopers’ investigation, but Gayle resisted the discussion. It was as if she didn’t want to talk about it, about Cathy, the whole sad story. A reserve fell between us—Gus and Noreen on one side, Gayle on the other. What could I do?

  One night I heard her calling a taxi, put a hand on her arm and offered her a ride home. I drove slowly down College Road, rather than shooting over the expressway. I even turned off the radio, trying to encourage conversation. I didn’t want to force it, or force my company on her either, but I couldn’t help myself.

  “Gayle,” I blurted at a stoplight, “how about we have dinner together some night real soon?”

  “Jack and I usually eat in front of reruns of MASH,” she replied, not even looking at me. “He looks forward to it. We’ll be fine.”

  I think my mouth dropped open. It was as if she didn’t hear my true question. She didn’t catch my real intent—or she didn’t want anything to do with it. I looked at her and yes, she was looking out the window, stoic as anything, as if my proposal for a date had been a casual remark that only needed a casual reply.

  Her feelings were elsewhere. For her son, for her family, for her grief-stricken village.

  Asshole, I said to myself. Gus. You asshole.

  “How is Jack? He enjoy going back to the village?”

  “Yeah, boy did he have a great time.” A slight smile; she turned in my direction. Stay with Jack.

  “Playing with cousins and all that?”

  “And being out of school didn’t hurt. School’s not easy for him.”

  “He’s a real smart kid, I can tell.”

  “I tell him that. You don’t have to like school,
I tell him. You just have to be there, day in and day out.”

  I turned down a one-way street that would force me to make a circuit through town. I had chosen this route on purpose. I wished it was longer.

  “Has Jack spent very much time in the village?”

  “Just to visit. I want him to have the best of it, to have the good memories like I have. But daily life there? No, that’s not our home anymore. Oh, I shouldn’t have said that!”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s wrong; it is our home.” She looked my way. “There’s trouble there. But it’s where I came from.”

  “Was Jack born in Allakaket?”

  “Oh, no. Jack’s father’s from Chevak, down on the coast.” Unexpectedly she made a sound like a chuckle, or a snort. “Jack’s father is a story for another time.”

  Now there was a hopeful remark.

  “Okay,” I said promptly.

  “One of my husbands,” she said, “he convinced me to go down to Chevak and live in the old way for three years. That was his way of handling things, and some of those Chupik people down there, they are doing all right. They are intact, we used to say. Chevak is where I got this.” She touched the blue lines on her chin. “I was an Athabascan trying to become an Eskimo. Isn’t that a laugh. That’s what a woman will do, trying to please someone.” I truly did not know what to say to this, but as I heard her warming to the conversation my own heart expanded.

  “I’m talking too much again,” she said, and suddenly looked directly at me with a broad smile. “I do that sometimes. When I’m with you.”

  “I like it,” I said. And after a minute, “So Jack is part Eskimo.”

  “Oh, he wasn’t Jack’s father. Along came Jack’s father and took me away from Chevak, but my ex-husband is still down there. People respect him. At least I think he’s still there. Hard to keep track of them all, my husbands.” When she laughed at her own remark it was with spirit, with genuine amusement. No embarrassment at all. A wealth of husbands—what of it?