Correcting the Landscape

by Marjorie Kowalski Cole

  We watched it struggle on a straight line toward the river. Inch by inch. Just shy of the bank, it came to a stop. There it hung, crushed, the Family with their heads buried inside Tad’s Cat. Just a couple more feet and it would slide over, deliver that statue to the riverbank like someone delivering a four-ton pizza. But the engine died.

  “Oh, geez,” said one of the cops.

  The other one said, “What do you two guys know about this?”

  “It got out of control,” said Tad. “The damn thing got away from me.”

  “Who the hell are you? Were you plowing snow?” said the cop.

  “I think I want to call my lawyer,” said Tad.

  Handcuffs had appeared. I stared at them.

  “Those aren’t necessary,” I said. “What do you want us to do?”

  “Why don’t you-all get inside the patrol car,” the cop said, speaking with some difficulty. I knew how he felt; my mouth, too, was locked open in amazement.

  EIGHTEEN

  And Thou knowest how far Thou hast already changed me,

  who first healedst me of the lust of vindicating myself.

  AUGUSTINE, CONFESSIONS

  NOREEN AND SHELLEY SULIMAN ARRIVED Saturday afternoon to bail us out, speechless for once, the two of them. Then, in the hallway of the court building, walking toward us, I saw Gayle.

  She came down the lime green hallway with a severe look in her face, blue parka unzipped and her head to one side as if struggling to understand something. The sight of her landed in the soft place inside of me, I don’t know how to put it. Like a dog offering its belly to a human hand, I just rotated inside. At that second I entrusted myself to her, just like that. We all stopped in the hallway, facing each other.

  “Gayle.”

  “Hello, Gus.”

  “We got ’em out, Gayle,” said Noreen.

  No one said anything more for a second.

  “Ms. Kenneally, over here, I’m Phil Sloan, and this is Robin Rowe from the public defender’s office.” The rapid voice coming up behind us was unmistakable. It belonged to the fast-talking detective we had interviewed about Cathy Carew.

  “I’m going to be deposed,” Gayle said softly. “I’m going to tell them.”

  “Tell them?” repeated Noreen.

  “What they don’t know about Cathy’s boyfriend. Lucerne and I talked it over. We decided to come out with what we know. I made up my mind.” She let her eyes wander over me. “I can’t live with this on my mind anymore. I can’t live like this.”

  “I’m sure you are doing the right thing,” Noreen said.

  “Well, Gus,” said Gayle. “I’m glad you’re out, at least. Hate to think of you locked up.” Then she stepped around us and went off with Phil Sloan and a lawyer in pinstripes. I could not have been more let down. I was stunned.

  Noreen looked at me with, I thought, a hint of sympathy.

  Shelley and Tad turned politely away from my disappointment. We left the court building in silence. Before Noreen and I climbed into Noreen’s car, I could see Shelley across the parking lot beginning to lay into her ex-husband. She waved her hands vigorously, slicing the air like a salesman. Tad ducked and shrugged and tossed off her blows, happy to be sprung.

  Noreen drove home past the park, where a vast royal blue tarpaulin covered the new hole in the world. Cat and statue had been hauled away. Son of a gun, there it was, all circled around in yellow caution tape: the disputed ground. I had been in a case of mild shock for the past twelve hours. Suddenly I couldn’t help myself. I smiled out the window. And to think no one got hurt!

  I thought of how it had looked the night before. Tad and the cops and me with a front-row seat on the lawn of the Visitors Bureau. And for all its weight, there was a dark hollow within that bronze.

  “Did they find anything inside the statue?” I said, as we drove past the wreckage.

  She gave me a strange look. “Inside the statue, Gus? Is that why you did this?”

  “No. But…did they?”

  She was silent for a moment.

  “You mean like a dead body, a stash of jewels, the Maltese Falcon? No, Gus,” she said, and her lip twisted up in a grin.” It’s a hollow bronze statue just like it is supposed to be. What did you expect?”

  “Nothing important. No, I didn’t expect anything.”

  She chuckled unexpectedly.

  “What’s funny?”

  “Oh, you. Why not laugh? I’m so mad I hate to give you that much, but do we stand here blubbering like babies or do we go to Istanbul? Admit it, that’s what you were going to say next. Why shouldn’t I laugh?”

  “You have the wrong idea,” I said huffily. “I never thought…I never had any such ideas.”

  “Well, you’re not going to Istanbul, Tino. Or anywhere else, for a while.” She laughed again. “Holy cow. I can’t believe it. What got into you guys?”

  I shook my head. There was a laugh inside me, too, inside my confusion. So Gayle was mad at me, so what? Give her that, for Christ’s sake! Where did this hilarity come from? It was over, I survived, everyone survived, and now we were all on the other side. Instead of living with that mockery of an idealized first family, we were stuck with ourselves again—and no one got hurt.

  I didn’t want to go to jail. Incarceration terrified me. Plea bargain, that was the thing. Whatever it took, I sure didn’t want to go to jail. But right now there was a laugh in this, and why the hell deny it?

  “That Robin Rowe,” said Noreen. “Know him?”

  “The public defender?”

  “Shy guy with a ponytail? Did you know I went out with him a couple of times?”

  “No!”

  She sighed at the memory. “Anyway, he’s real good. He actually likes criminals, too. I’ll talk to him. He seems to be organizing Gayle’s deposition today. But I’ll talk to him. He’ll know what to do with you.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “You’re more than I deserve, No.”

  “Don’t I know that.”

  THE HALF-EMPTY BOTTLE OF BEER WHICH I HAD STUCK IN THE cup holder of Tad’s truck worked in our favor, according to Robin Rowe. Although we didn’t seem drunk to the cops, they had pounced on that open container and had ordered alcohol tests. Happy to find an explanation for what they had just witnessed. Tad barely attained the legal limit and I was far below it, but at least drunkenness played a part in the escapade, making it necessary to file certain charges; these actually turned out to weigh slightly in our favor. There was no malicious intent.

  Tad insisted to his own lawyer that I kept trying to stop him, that I was completely innocent. I denied that.

  “I doubt I could have stopped it,” I told Robin, “And I didn’t try. Every second was worth it. The experience, the outcome were worth it. I encouraged him. I played along.”

  “You won’t say that to anyone else,” he returned mildly. “Do me that favor. Let me do all the talking. But, as you know, if you do take some of the blame, and both of you plead no contest, then the prosecutors get two guilty parties—and they might be happy enough with that to lower the charges, do you follow me? Because otherwise, there is a chance that you, Gus, could get off, completely. You maybe could. They’d have Tad, but not you.”

  “I can’t send Tad to jail for giving me the best night I’ve had in a long time,” I said.

  “Oh, yes you can.”

  I thought back.

  “I didn’t have to be there.”

  Robin was not a reactive guy. He studied me quietly.

  “No guarantees,” he said at last. “But obviously, you heard Tad the night you were arrested—taking the blame, taking the credit. If he sticks with that, you have some chance of walking away.”

  “Let’s go with the plea bargain,” I said eagerly. “I’m in. Regardless of what Tad does. I’m in.” And maybe we could both stay out of jail.

  The daily’s headline, BELOVED LANDMARK DESTROYED, above a huge color photo of the Unknown First Family buried headfirst in the Cat, the whole
thing hanging on the edge of the riverbank, was followed in subsequent days by a dozen letters to the editor in hearty agreement, bemoaning the tragedy, and maybe three or four times that many weighing in on the opposite side—Beloved, my left foot! being the gist of most of them. Why not replace the plaza with birch trees, benches, and delphiniums, they asked, a gazebo for musicians, a speaker’s corner, an espresso cart? Students from the university organized a music and poetry fest at the site. Despite the Caution tape, they filled the plaza, passed around Mary Oliver and Gary Snyder, took turns bellowing into a microphone.

  The Anchorage paper published a photo of this event. Our own local paper ignored the living display completely—even though it took place right across the river from their plant, and reporters and photographers crossed the bridge on their lunch hour and partook of the cultural feast like ordinary spectators.

  Making their usual editorial statement, the daily maintained an official silence. No photo, no editorial comment. A few letter-writers commented on this, incensed. In a weird way, I admired the paper’s choice—I wouldn’t have done that, but I admired something about it. It was arrogant, it was blatantly editorial to ignore the kids reciting out there, earnest, impassioned, freezing cold—and maybe that’s why I admired it, ever so slightly. The editor, or more likely the publisher, was owning to an opinion. They were demonstrating that opinion shapes the news, a truth they often denied in print. They knew what they were doing. Actions speak louder than words. Boy, I wished I was running a paper, I wished I was at least teaching journalism that week! I really wanted to be talking to someone about all this. Instead I wrote.

  I wrote every day. My confessions. Tapped away at my laptop for a couple of hours every morning. Went back in time.

  Three years earlier, the Exxon Valdez had run aground in Prince William Sound. The single hull impaled itself on Bligh Reef, and somewhere between eleven million and twenty million gallons of crude oil poured into the wild waters of the Sound. A day after that horrible news broke, as I was walking through a building on campus, someone came out of an office and cried out generally to the people in the hall and specifically to me, when he met my eyes, “The captain was drunk!”

  We were astounded. How could such a trivial, stupid, personal action as raising a fourth gin and tonic to one’s mouth lead to a public disaster on this scale? Nonetheless, in time, we believed it, and we also understood that drunkenness was only part of the cause. Captain Hazelwood somehow was able to share the blame with a multinational corporation.

  The Exxon Valdez loomed in the backdrop of Tad’s case like some kind of weird comparison. The campus newspaper, bless their hearts, picked up on this and responded with a political cartoon. Call that drunk driving? a caricatured Joe Hazelwood asked in the campus paper, studying the Cat with its load of statue. Compared to Hazelwood’s, Tad’s criminal mischief paled, and everyone knew it.

  An unexpected and almost perverse sense of community pride stirred in the public breast, maybe the same sort of pride that led eighteenth-century revolutionaries to sing “Yankee Doodle” or that nerves gay people to call each other queer. Pride that here in Fairbanks, we still handle things in a crude, homemade fashion—a stupid pride, sure, in the very thing that the respectable people wanted to see the last of.

  Robin Rowe told me we were lucky in drawing a good judge, that the humor of the whole sorry episode was not lost on Judge Nona Sticking, “but don’t laugh in court, don’t smile, don’t take any of that away from her,” he warned me. “That’s her purview, the smiling. You smile, you’re dead. You don’t trivialize this. Practice not smiling. Would you do that for me? Practice holding it in.”

  So I did.

  “Again,” he said. “Make your mouth flat. Can you make your eyes go sort of dead? I want you to chill. Got it?”

  AND THE HONORABLE JUDGE STICKING DID SMILE, BUT SHE WAS a bit of an intellectual, too. She drew herself together and delivered a pretty serious admonishment when she passed sentence, even quoting Robert Lowell to us—“some people would say that monument sticks like a fishbone in the city’s throat,” she announced. “But what I find offensive is your reckless disregard of the public process. The legal process that holds our community above casual violence of all kinds.”

  She gave Tad three years’ probation, a gruesome fine, two hundred hours of community service, and mandatory alcoholism evaluation. She acknowledged my accessory role with two hundred hours of community service. As if you know how to do anything else, Tad wrote to me later.

  I called Gayle several times and left messages but didn’t hear from her. So one day I drove over to her house. She let me in with an unnerving calm. At first we avoided meeting each other’s eyes.

  “Come on to the table,” she said. She set out cups and tea bags, a jar of honey.

  “I wonder what you think of all this,” I said at last.

  “I think I almost lost my head over you,” she said. “For a while there.”

  Something did a somersault inside my chest. “I’m the one lost my head.”

  “You doing okay?”

  “A funny thing happened,” I said. “An Anchorage radio station called. They want me to guest-host a talk show once in a while, just once a week—and see how that goes. Unbelievable offer. There’s no steady income at all in that, but it did surprise me, just the same. I think I’ll do it.”

  “You’ll leave town?” She sounded dismayed. My heart leaped again.

  “Oh, no. I’d commute. What’s there to leave for?” Shy, I thought; maybe she’s shy. She’s tongue-tied. That’s all it is. Surely.

  “So I’ll be around,” I continued, feeling pretty shy myself. “Do you know if you…do you, I mean what do you think, Gayle, could we…”

  “Lot of work, getting to know someone,” she said. “I don’t mean you and me especially.” And she sat back in her chair, pushing away from the table a bit, as if the effort of using that phrase, you and me, was causing a physical strain of some kind. “But just about everyone. Lot of work.”

  “It is hard.”

  “Take you, for instance.”

  “Let’s not.”

  “I suppose you’re loyal. You’re loyal to your friend Tad, even loyal to your own past. I mean, you wouldn’t tell stories on yourself, would you?”

  “’Course I tell stories on myself. I’d be crazy not to see the humor in what I’ve done.”

  “That’s not what I mean.” She got up from the table and returned with a hot kettle, poured water into the cups. “What I mean is, you don’t pretend to do an about-face. You own your stories about yourself. You don’t run out on yourself. There’s a connection between Gus of five years ago, ten years ago, and the man here with me.” I thought she lingered on the last part of that sentence. I liked it, too. The man here with me.

  “Well. That’s because I am the same person, Gayle.”

  “I’m trying to say something like you’re fair to yourself. You don’t change horses in midstream. Whatever it is, I like it. It’s a saving grace.”

  That wasn’t so bad.

  “Thank you, I’m not one hundred percent sure for what.”

  “But there’s another loyalty, this loyalty to friends…or to causes…I can’t describe it, but it confuses me. Or frightens me.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I see no inherent value in it.” She lifted a heaping spoonful of honey into her tea. “I’ve been beating my way through that jungle a long time,” she added.

  “I don’t understand you,” I said earnestly. I wanted to add, Tell me. Explain. I want to know.

  “I was so bewildered and lost when I read the paper that morning. When I read about what you guys had done. Just trying to figure that out…Oh, Gus,” she said with some passion and looked directly at me, “isn’t there something worth staying out of trouble for?”

  I rubbed my face. Here was her disappointment. Here it is.

  “Why did you do it?” she said.

  “Not for Tad. I didn�
�t do it for Tad. But it seems wrong, now, dead wrong, to let him take the full blame. Or credit. I did it because—there was something going on that night, and I—decided to go with it, to throw myself in that direction. Any thinking things over, it seemed, had already been done, days earlier. There was no time left to think.”

  “So it had nothing to do with Tad?”

  Was she asking me where my loyalties lay—was she fighting for me, fighting for her own position in my affections? So it seemed, for just a flash of time, and I wanted to savor this unexpected sensation. I looked down at the table and pretended to scratch my chin, so she wouldn’t see me smile a little.

  “I love him, as a friend, sure. Or I wouldn’t have been there. But no. At the last minute, no, it had nothing to do with him. It was like a gap opened in front of me, it seemed like it was the very gap that was separating me from my life, from something vital. And I decided to leap out there. No one made me do it, no one put the least pressure on me. Maybe I’ve ridden on Tad’s coattails when my own have given out, from time to time. And vice versa. But not that night.”

  “When I read the paper I felt so disappointed.”

  “I’ve been out front of things for twenty years,” I said. “My mug and my name in the public eye, a man without guile, a public servant. And yet, that bit of ‘civil disobedience’ as I described it to my lawyer, or ‘stupid mischief’ he called it—Gayle, that was a night when I felt the least like a fugitive in hiding that I’ve ever felt. Riding that Cat toward the statue—I’ll tell you something I haven’t told anybody. It was a raw feeling and I wouldn’t trade it away.”

  She laughed and I blew out the breath I’d been holding. What a relief to find a true thing to say.

  “Don’t expect I’ll do it again, though,” I added.

  She took it in, studying me.

  “In fact, I know I won’t.”

  “Guess I don’t feel so disappointed anymore,” she said.

  “No?”

  “What’s that you said, there’s a gap you just decided to jump across? I know what you mean. At the very last moment, no matter how well you figure things out, there just has to be an impulse to leap. With or without a reason. You try to build a bridge with sensible reasons in favor of one thing or another. But finally it’s just you, some unreasonable but really important part of you, going to jump into space or not.”