Correcting the Landscape

by Marjorie Kowalski Cole

  I noticed Willie Nelson on the cover of People. He’s an individual I happen to resemble, minus the braids and musical genius. Couple of grinning codgers, Willie and me, though he owes Uncle Sam millions of dollars in back taxes and I owe a much smaller sum to an assortment of friends and neighbors. People I knew appeared at the end of the aisle, looked my way. I picked up the People and sank my face into it. Something to hide, Gus? You bet.

  To lose your grubstake, let’s call it, is the kiss of death in Alaska. The do-it-yourself imperative of this community elevates that one thing above all others, competence. You don’t even have to be that good at anything. Merely competent. But I’m kind of afraid, these days, that old Gus Traynor is not quite the sailor he thought he was.

  “Grin and bear it, Gus.”

  I knew Gayle’s voice right away. She was browsing nearby, and looked at me over the head of her own magazine, Mirabella. Blue jeans, a flowered cotton parka, a wide smile. Different turf than the newsroom: outside of the Mercury offices, Gayle was more confident, more talkative. It was confusing to me, but in a pleasant way.

  “Gayle. How’s that writing class?”

  “Kind of fun. Not sure about the teacher.” She smiled and looked down, then took a step closer. Decided to talk. “I’m working on character description right now. Take for instance, that thing you said once. I won’t be kept inside any building I don’t want to be in.”

  “Did Noreen tell you that? Shame on her.”

  “It’s a description of someone, don’t you see? It really works. You could say, he’s the kind of man who once said—”

  “Okay, okay, enough of that. What are you working on that you need descriptions?”

  “Fiction. You can tell the truth in a way, with fiction.”

  “Is that right.”

  She smiled, a lovely, coy, woman’s smile, that smile when they have secrets, or want you to think they do.

  “Yup,” she said.

  “Mom, can I get this?” Jack appeared at her elbow with a copy of Off-Road.

  “Yes,” she said promptly, and “No,” when he also brought forth a can of Planter’s Cheese Balls. “Absolutely not this time. Say hello to Mr. Traynor.”

  “Hello, Jack. Do you think we’re going to have a new president?”

  “I don’t know. Some people do. Mom wants a new president.”

  “Me too,” I said. He ducked his head, looked agonizedly at his mother, and sidled away.

  “I gotta go,” she said.

  “Gayle.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good luck with that story you’re writing. I want to read it.”

  This time her smile was surprised, touched, flattered.

  “I can’t believe how much it helps,” she said, “writing stuff down…only the teacher doesn’t quite get it. I don’t think life is real to her yet. She’s very young, and like, you know, she carries on some. How many ways are there to describe the blue of a person’s eyes? And so on. What does she know about it, I think, but she will someday.”

  “How do you describe a person’s eyes, Gayle?”

  “Well, I suspect there’s one right way—describe them as they are, the exact way that one person looks to another person. You want to give other people that shiver.” She paused. “Or whatever it might be.”

  I liked the way her words were spilling out. I leaned against the magazines, determined to keep her here. Didn’t matter what I said. We were sinking fast to a new level. “What else are you doing these days?”

  “Well, Gus, you know. The usual.”

  “Eating dinner.”

  “Yes.”

  “Um, seeing any movies?”

  “No. No movies. But sometimes, I take a steam bath.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. Well Street baths. I love that. We used to take steam baths in Chevak. I love that ritual. Feel so blessed wonderful. So good.”

  “I’ve never done that.”

  “Oh you’d love it. You have running water where you live?”

  “It’s delivered. No well.”

  “So, yeah, you’re probably pretty careful with water. That’s the great thing about the steam baths, the heat and all the time in the world to get really deep clean. People who don’t have city water really like them.”

  “Well I’m going to try it then.”

  “They have men’s and women’s.”

  “The same time?”

  “Yeah, same time, same building, but not the same room. So not together.”

  “But both can be accommodated. At the same time.”

  “Yes, that’s exactly right.”

  “So maybe I’ll see if you want to come along, when I do this,” I stammered.

  “Yes. It’s possible. It might be possible.”

  “Well okay then.”

  “Then I’m going to go,” she said. “Gotta find Jack. What else he wants to buy. He’s probably got the cart loaded with soda and chips by now.”

  “I’ll see you soon,” I said.

  And she lifted a hand, smiled again.

  Steam baths; not together, but simultaneous. I was transformed. This is it. We just now talked about a date. I’m pretty sure that’s what we talked about. I looked down at Willie Nelson. He seemed to have reddish brown eyes, but mine are blue. How did she put it—that shiver, she said. This was wonderful. Where did that leaden anxiety go?

  FOURTEEN

  TAD SULIMAN LIFTED A PILE OF IMPORTANT papers out of a chair in my office, set them on the floor, and slid down into the chair without asking. He groaned and adjusted his bulk as if trying to find a favorite vertebra to rest on. Go away, I thought. I want to get this work done and be alone with my daydreams. Plan my date with Gayle. I don’t have time for your grouch. Go away.

  “I went to Montana,” he said. Back to his Judy-bird.

  “No luck?”

  A few minutes passed. “I understand it’s not my business,” he said. “But I don’t know what to think. Crazy woman. She had an abortion.”

  “Tad, I’m sorry.” I didn’t know if those were the right words.

  “It’s her life, I understand that,” he said, “but I never came close before to all that, I hadn’t come so close, as far as I know. I mean, life…” He trailed off, frowning.

  “I know it’s a shock.”

  “I don’t know how to say it.” He touched his fingertips to his shirt. “I didn’t know it could be like that. What I’m missing. There’s no getting away from it. Something so amazing, held out to you for just a second and then withdrawn, like a…like a planet swimming by. Women, they just seem to have a lock on these things. You got a minute?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Perimenopause. Ever heard of it?”

  “What about it?”

  “Women have cornered the market on transitional phases,” he said. “They’ve got them all. Childbearing years, biological-clock-ticking years, perimenopause, menopause, and also that post-menopause when-I-grow-old-I-shall-wear-purple thing, ever think about this?”

  I had not. I tried to consider the phenomenon. I could hear Judy talking about her life’s journey. Noreen, desperate for change, not giving up, making her move to the TV station.

  “So all right, women like to make maps,” I said. “Without any help from us. It’s good that they uh, they…do what they have to do.”

  “I never paid attention to anything like that. Have you? I figure I’ll do as much as I can, until the back gives out or something, and then start to do less and less, and that’s it. But women have a name for every year of their lives just about.”

  “And?”

  “And it wasn’t the right time, she says. It was not the right time.”

  “She’s not a real young woman. It is asking a lot.”

  “I would help.”

  “There’s that, too. Maybe she didn’t want your help.”

  We sat there for several minutes. He stared ahead, up at the ceiling, then at me. “I think I have to live with t
hat,” he said at last.

  “Yeah.”

  He touched his shirt again, like there was a secret inside. “I don’t regret a thing I’ve done in my life, not much anyway, but things left undone—ah, Jesus.”

  Something better than him, better than any of us. Maybe one of the best ideas anyone has ever had. Barely glimpsed and then withdrawn. Now what do you do with yourself?

  I remembered what he said last year: Art heals. You’re looking at a man who loves art.

  “Speaking of public art,” I said, although we hadn’t been, “what do you think of this new poem Felix wrote? Now damn, where’d I put that?” A literary magazine in New York had just published a selection of Felix’s poems. He had insisted on giving me one of his precious contributor’s copies. I tried to beg off, but thank God, noticed in time that he had to share this thing completely. The enchantment wasn’t as real if it did not claim readers.

  I stood up and moved papers until I found the slender journal, opened it to my favorite, handed it to Tad.

  CORRECTING THE LANDSCAPE

  by Felix Heaven

  Down to the waterfront at three A.M.

  watching the dark streets

  we hacked away at the bronze nose

  of Alexander Baranof, who fought the Tlingit,

  sent a fortune in otter pelts home to Russia.

  He was no worse than many others

  but sometimes tributes to dead heroes

  need a little editing.

  Take Juan de Onate, who brought the crucifix

  to New Mexico in 1580 and in its name

  ordered the right foot of every rebellious Acoma cut off.

  We corrected his bronze replica on his anniversary.

  Now his right spur no longer gores

  the horse’s flank.

  A necessary correction to this very public record.

  In Scotland the Duke of Sutherland

  atop an obelisk surveys the highlands which, in life,

  he cleared of men and women, homes

  and families, in order to raise sheep.

  His monument erected by involuntary subscription:

  a shilling from every household.

  Descendants of evicted farmers

  can’t make up their minds to bring him down.

  The lonely figure’s handy for navigation.

  Who owns the view, after all,

  and who owns history

  if not those who survive?

  1966, Nelson’s pillar blown to smithereens in Dublin,

  not a soul was hurt

  but the streets weren’t empty three days later

  when the army cleaned up the shards

  and a few thousand people sang A nation once again.

  Maybe history’s in the freedom

  to pitch the bastards out.

  Tad read silently and then grinned. “Interesting attitude. Is he IRA or something?”

  “It’s only a poem. It’s not a call to arms.”

  “He’s got something, though. Statues! Ever travel through civil war battlefields? There’s this statue of Stonewall Jackson that I remember, it’s like the guy and his horse, both, have swallowed helium balloons. Their muscles are swelling out like they’re wearing space suits under their skin. No, I agree with Judy on that score, most of these public monuments do not, as she put it, delight the soul. They oppress you.” He winced at the thought of her. “Well, Gus, I’m a fly on a windowpane, getting nowhere. Better haul my sorry self along. What’s new around here?”

  He reached for the current Mercury at the edge of my desk and began to turn the pages. I watched while he scanned the issue hunting for something to read, a little meat in the salady fluff of advertisements. It seemed to take a long time before he found something he wanted to scrutinize. He gave me a look.

  “Things going okay around here?”

  “It’s tough sometimes, keeping the newsroom running. Tougher than I expected things to be, by now.”

  “About three years, isn’t it, since you took over?”

  “Since we all took over, yeah.”

  “Hard to get writers?”

  “No trouble there. Writers are like ravens, there’s always a few hovering. But it is hard to pay ‘em, and the goddamn press bill, and the utilities on this place. You don’t need to hear this; you’ve done a lot.”

  He considered the paper for a minute.

  “You know that split with Shelley,” he said at last. “It drove me crazy. I knew I’d have to give her fifty percent of everything I owned. I wondered if it might be smart to cut my losses. I even looked into this thing called Chapter Seven. I learned a little bit.”

  I stared at him.

  “I’m just saying. Now I have a low threshold for the pain of parting involuntarily with my money, but it does turn out after talking with a lawyer, there are ways down the road to walk away from some of this.”

  “You skinned that riverbank to spite her, as I recall.”

  “Maybe I did, and took a loss and maybe she ended up getting a lot less because that sale went through on my terms, not hers. Shelley didn’t touch a dime of profit off that land.”

  “Shelley’s a good scout.”

  “Oh, no question. Shelley’s who she is. My point is, I was crazy at the time, but I used the whole fracas to get a little bit of an education. Met this lawyer. Polly Swisher. The angel of debt forgiveness. Knows her stuff.”

  He was telling me that I was free to do whatever I had to do. Even though his thousands had brought us this far.

  What about his own investment? He could walk away from that?

  Tad, I realized, was close to his best self all the time, and just as close to his worst. Close to crazy all the time, and it didn’t bother him.

  “What are you suggesting, that I not rule out bankruptcy?”

  “No, I’m suggesting you consider getting a bit of advice. Talk to someone. If you want to, that is. Hell, I love this paper of yours. Of ours. What would we do without it? But my experience, there’s more than one way to do things. Just saying.”

  “You feel better now?”

  “Don’t get sore. I’m telling you, sometimes things get worse before they get better.”

  “I’ve noticed that part.”

  “What else is cooking?”

  “Felix is giving a poetry reading over at the Aardvark Coffeehouse this weekend. Want to come along?”

  “Well, I don’t know, poetry readings…They serve wine?”

  “Lattes. Tea. Biscotti.”

  He sat up and shivered. “I feel more like clearing land. Even though it looks like our Felix is an anarchist, I sometimes get this trapped feeling at shindigs like that. Indoor things. Judy…well, never mind, enough of that. But Judy—she turned the inside out, she brought trees inside and filled up a gallery or she set up her stuff outside. But, never mind. That’s that.”

  I was pleased, because I wanted to take Gayle to the reading. Be alone at a table with her. Before or after our steam bath? And when do I feed her those New York steaks?

  Tad didn’t leave right away; he hung in the doorway reading the rest of Felix’s poetry. “Felix is doing pretty well, then,” he said, handing it back.

  “A little trouble over the lack of a green card. Seems the INS is breathing down his neck these days.”

  “Uh-oh. What happened?”

  “Somehow he came to their attention.”

  “Because of working here?”

  “No, no, we’re still on a freelance basis.” When we pay him at all, I thought. “No reason the IRS needs to know of his existence. INS is a different story. Giving him a hard time.” Maybe they latched onto him because of this poem, I had suggested to Felix. He had beamed at me. I was joking, but the notion delighted him just the same—to be read, to be feared!

  “Maybe you’re on a list at the FBI,” I told him. “Allen Ginsberg was. Probably still is. You aren’t a Fenian I hope and trust.”

  He chuckled.

  “Mayb
e I ought to get married,” he said.

  It was hard to recommend that one. But people could work things out.

  “How do you meet girls?” he asked me.

  “At the grocery store. Hell, Felix, I wouldn’t know the first thing about it.” But inside, I was thinking, no that’s not true. Something is working out. There’s a pretty lake glinting through the trees.

  Felix studied me. He knew a little bit more of the truth than he let on.

  “Why don’t you autograph this for me,” I said, giving him a pen and the journal to change the subject. “I’ll be at your reading.”

  OCTOBER AND SNOWING. THAT TIME OF YEAR WHEN THE WEATHER plays a big part in your plans. The bald tires on my truck weren’t going to haul me up Coffee Dome in the snow, or keep me from sliding all over the expressway. How could I have overlooked this expense in my planning? Once again the Mercury’s account came to my aid; a set of used snow tires were an expense essential for circulation and delivery. It took me a few days to locate studded tires and get them mounted. And after all that, Gayle wouldn’t let me pick her up for Felix’s reading.

  “I have Tai Chi that night,” she said, “so I’ll be borrowing Lucerne’s car. I’ll just drive to the coffeehouse right after Tai Chi. I’ll be about, oh, five minutes late. Is that okay?”

  “Of course, they start late anyway.” I thought of what we used to say in the camps when things were late—“are we on Alaska Native time?”—and smiled to myself at the craziness of it. My own experience of so many ways to insult her, a person that I would never want to offend, I never want even to give her pause. But Tai Chi? What about eating dinner with Jack and watching MASH reruns?

  Let’s face it, Gus. Gayle does what she wants. Leave it be. Maybe that MASH reruns thing was more about grieving for Cathy. Tai Chi is good. What is Tai Chi, anyway—a martial art? Self-defense? She’s going to be strong and sage and able to protect herself? Oh, darn, I said to myself cheerfully.

  THE AARDVARK COFFEEHOUSE-BOOKSHOP WAS IN OUR NEIGHBORHOOD, another of the old log cabins on College Road. This one was set even farther back into those black spruce woods, a spectral shadowy mass reaching toward the cabin like something out of Grimm or pagan mythology. Woods inhabited by trapped spirits. Made you think of stories where someone would notice their skin turning to bark, hair into leaves.