Kingdoms in the Air

by Bob Shacochis

There was a quick, sharp exchange between her and the gnome, and the next I knew I was threading my way, alone and free, down the bluff through the darkening slope of stone birches. The air was warm, but when you inhaled it was the river you breathed, its mountain coldness, and I felt transcendently refreshed. Then we were all in the boat, sans Marguerite, shoving off into the main current of this perfect river, the Plotnikova, clean and fast and wild enough for any harried soul.

  We were carried forward on a swift flow of silver light, stars brightening in the deep blue overhead. Then the light died on the river too, just as the tayozhnik beached the bow on the top end of a long gravel bar, bellying out into the stream. It was too late, too dark, to forge on to the hunter’s camp, and I said fine. Sergei begged off again, said he’d be back to pick us up tomorrow, and I said fine to that too. Rinat and I threw our gear ashore, and I pushed the skiff back into the current and then stood there, the black cold water swirling around my waders, singing praise on high for the incredible fact of my deliverance. This river made noise; this river sang.

  We dug out our flashlights and dragged our packs about a hundred yards up from the water’s edge to the trunk of a huge tree ripped from the riverbank and washed onto the bar. Rinat collected wood for a campfire, and soon we squatted in a private dome of firelight, watching a pot of water boil for tea. I hadn’t eaten all day, and my stomach growled.

  “Rinat, where’s the food?”

  He cleared his throat and confessed he’d given everything to the Mafiya, mumbling some ridiculous explanation about the code of the wilderness.

  “Where’s my candy?”

  “I gave it to the criminals.”

  “You gave the Mafiya my candy! They had their own candy.”

  “It was the least we could do,” said Rinat, “since, you know, they didn’t kill us when you hurt their ears with bad words.”

  We rocked into each other with laughter, howling at the absurdities we had endured together. Our assorted adventures, supernaturally screwed up and filled with hazard, were over but for one true and honest day of fishing, out on the sheer edge of a magnificent world, in a nation going to hell. I patted my pocket for cigarettes and discovered a tin of Marguerite’s caviar, Rinat produced a hunk of brown bread, and we ate. He rolled out his sleeping mat and bag and tucked himself under the tree trunk. “Let me apologize in advance,” I said, “if the bears come to eat you.”

  And in the morning, the fish—like the trees and the gravel bar, like the screaming birds and humming bottle flies, like the sun and its petticoat of mists and everything else to be found in its rightful place—the fish were there. I had never seen anything remotely like it, the last days of an immense salmon run. What first struck me, as it hadn’t last night, was the profound stench. The gravel island was carpeted with the carcasses of pink salmon—humpbacks—from the height of the run, one of the most concentrated runs in recent years, as if so many fish within its banks had made the river overflow. Now the slightest low spot on the island was pooled with rotting eggs where fish had spawned. Maggots were everywhere, a sprinkle of filthy snow across the rocks and mud and weeds, and dead fish everywhere, rimed with a crust of maggots. I slipped into my waders, walked down to the river through shoals of decomposing fish, and entered the water. Humpback salmon nosed my boots as they struggled wearily upstream; like the prows of sinking ships, the gasping jaws of debilitated male humpies poked out of the water as the fish drifted by, their milt spent, their energy spent, the last glimmer of life fading into the sweep of current. In the shallows, gulls sat atop spawned but still-living fish, tearing holes into the rosy flesh. Fish still fresh with purpose threw themselves into the air, I don’t know why, but what I did know was that the salmon were bringing the infinite energy of the sea upriver, an intravenous delivery of nutrients funneling into the land, the animals, the insects and birdlife and the very trees.

  Here, in a salmon, nature compressed the full breath of its expression, the terrible magnificence of its assault, and I stood in the current, mesmerized. On the far bank at the mouth of a tributary there were poachers. At first glance it seemed that they had built low bonfires on the opposite shore, the red flames licking and twisting, but where was the smoke? I wondered, and as I looked more deliberately I saw my mistake: The writhing flames were actually fish. One poacher worked at the base of the tall bank, poised like a heron above the stream, using a long staff to gaff salmon—females, hens—as they swam past and then flipping the fish overhead to a pile on the top of the bank, where his partner crouched, gutting out the roe.

  When the spell broke, I sat down on a log and finally accomplished the one thing I had passionately desired to do for days, months, all my life: I rigged my fly rod for salmon fishing.

  I decided to head down the bar to where the currents rejoined at the rapids below its downstream point, an eddy splitting off to create slack water. The island was probed by wayward, dead-end channels, trickling into basins where the sand had flooded out, and as I waded through the biggest pool scores of humpback salmon, coalesced into orgies of spawning, scurried before me in the foot-deep shallows like finned rats. In the deeper holes the season’s last reds cruised lethargically in their scarlet and olive-green “wedding dresses,” as the Kamchatkans call a fish’s spawning colors. I sloshed onward to dry land, the fish gasping, the birds screaming, and everywhere the reek of creation.

  On the tail of the bar I planted my feet in the muck and cast into a deep turquoise body of water that resembled nothing so much as an aquarium, waiting for the connection, that singular, ineffable tug that hooks a fisherman’s hungry heart into whatever you want to call it—the spirit of the fish, the bigness of life or even the smallness, the euphoric, crazed brutality of existence, or simply a fight: the drama of the battle between man and his world. Not every cast, but most, ended with a fish on my hook, a glorious humpback, three to five pounds each, the hens painted in swaths of mulberry, green, and rose, the males beautifully grotesque with keel-like dorsal humps and hooked jaws like the beak of a raptor.

  A day of humpies landed on flies here on this grand river was enough to quench my deepest craving for the sport, but then my rod bent from the pressure, the reel sang its lovely shrill song as the line escaped, and here came the silvers, big and angry, like bolts of electricity, filled with the power of the sea. Rinat finally joined me in this dance, and by the late afternoon, when Sergei and the tayozhnik returned, we had two fish apiece, the limit, silvers as long and fat as our thighs.

  We gathered more wood, Rinat started the fire, and Sergei brought his cook pot from the boat. “I’m going to show you how to make a poachers’ ukhž,” said Sergei, cutting off the salmon heads and tails and sliding them into the boiling pot with diced potatoes and onion and dill. I had caught dozens of pinks but kept only one, a female, and Sergei slit her belly to make instant caviar, unsacking the eggs into a bowl of heavily salted water.

  We sat in the gravel with our backs propped against the fallen tree and gazed lazily out at the fast blue dazzle of the river, slurping our fish soup. A raft floated down from around the bend, paddled by two RIVOD officers. The poachers on the opposite shore vanished into the forest, the wardens paddled furiously into the tributary, and we listened as the crack of gunshots resonated over the river, here in the Wild East.

  Sergei, waxing philosophical, quoted a poet: “It’s impossible to understand Russia, only to believe in it.” Then he lifted a spoon of caviar to my lips, and I recalled the last fish I had caught that day, a hen, which had no business hitting my fly, ripe as she was. When I brought her from the water she sprayed a stream of roe, an arc in the air like a chain of ruby moons, splashing over my feet onto this most eternal, unsettled world of the river.

  (1998)

  Huevos Fritos

  This is a small story, inhumanly cruel, and it ends with a terrible howl.

  It takes place in a dark forest on the Kamchatka Penin
sula in the Russian Far East, a place where parents in St. Petersburg threaten to send children if they misbehave, an inhospitable place known for exploding volcanoes, mosquitoes that swarm like hornets, and, most fearsomely, its bears. The story itself contains a cosmonaut, more grizzlies than anywhere else on earth, a criminally amused wife, and the unimaginable horror that befell its narrator, a hapless, pitiable soul named Poor me.

  So. Let’s get it over with.

  I would make two long trips to Kamchatka to connect with the Russian mafia, who had, in their ever-inspiring entrepreneurial spirit, begun stealing entire rivers, netting runs of wild salmon, shipping tons of illegal caviar back to their associates in Moscow. Anyway, I took my wife along on the first trip though not the second. She was obsessed with catching one of Kamchatka’s legendary monster rainbow trouts, something in the twenty-two-pound range. Which she did, a bona fide Grade Two worst-case scenario, which is why she was forbidden to go along with me on the second trip. Too much bragging.

  She and I and Rinat, our local fixer, had an idle day before our expedition launched into the distant wild, so we decided to pile into Rinat’s pickup truck for a day trip about an hour’s ride north of Petropavlovsk, the capital city, to a national park at the base of the Mount Fuji–like volcano that towered above the city. We had read about this park in a government-produced tourist brochure I had been given at the airport.

  The road ended at a small cluster of clapboard dachas along the banks of a frothing river. The park headquarters, clearly marked on the brochure’s map, did not exist, and the park itself, on the far side of the river, was what it had always been—a vast, dense spruce and birch forest, accessed by a shabby cable-and-plank footbridge or a shallow crossing for four-wheel-drive vehicles. Across the river we could see a few mushroom hunters prowling among the trees.

  “Let’s cross over and go for a hike,” I suggested and my wife said sure and Rinat said absolutely not.

  “We will absolutely be eaten by bears,” Rinat declared, and settled into the truck to await the eventual recovery of our chewed-upon corpses.

  Because this story also contains a six-ounce can of pepper spray stuffed into the left-front pocket of my jeans, I felt it was not irrational to be respectfully nonchalant about the bears.

  My wife and I clambered across the rickety bridge and followed a path past a group of picnickers until we came to a primitive road leading deep into the sun-dappled forest. We hiked ahead, alone in the woods, enjoying the pristine solitude, until suddenly a rusty blue Soviet-era van appeared on the track behind us and stopped as it came alongside. The driver, a lean, blond-haired man, wagged his head at us, frowning, and said something in Russian that had the tone of an admonition. His wife and teenage son nodded their heads gravely, confirming the seriousness of whatever the man was saying.

  We don’t speak Russian, I said, shrugging, and the man switched to English.

  Go back, he said. What are you doing here? Are you crazy? The bears will absolutely eat you. You cannot walk here without big gun, eh?

  It’s okay, I said. I have pepper spray.

  You have pepper spray? he snorted. What for? To make bear cry before he absolutely eat you? Turn back now.

  Thanks for the advice, I said, waving good-bye as they drove out of sight, shaking their heads in disbelief at our stupidity. Ten minutes later we came upon them again, parked in a glade off the side of the track, each with a carbine strapped on their shoulders, each carrying a bucket. The family stared at us as if we were the most foolish people they had ever had the misfortune to behold. Again, a lecture from the driver about our recklessness. Then he sighed and said, Okay, as long as you are here, come with us. They were cutting through the woods, crossing a river, then climbing up a short rise to a meadow where they were going to pick berries.

  From this place, the driver said, you have excellent nice good view of volcano. I asked him where he learned English and he revealed he was a cosmonaut on vacation with his family.

  We followed them through the forest for a few minutes until we came to a raging river spanned by a fallen tree, its wet trunk just wide enough to walk across, slowly, carefully, single-file. My wife looked at the white-water rapids below the log and said she wasn’t doing it. The cosmonaut said, Come on, just up the top of bank you can see volcano. I said to my wife that I’d be right back.

  On the opposite shore, I scrambled fifteen feet up the bank to a treeless plateau overgrown with brush so high it was impossible to see anything at all. Just ten more minutes, said the cosmonaut, but I knew I couldn’t abandon my defenseless wife back on the other side of the river. I thanked the cosmonaut and his family for their hospitality and started back down the steep bank, checking my speed to keep from tumbling into the water. When I took a couple of steps out onto the log, I felt off balance and instinctively crouched to use my hands to steady myself. I have a permanent visual image branded into my memory that accompanies what happened next—my wife waiting for me on the far bank, her quizzical expression turning to wide-eyed, jaw-dropping astonishment as she watched me, poised above the river, rear up from my crouch in a roar, digging frantically into my pants pocket, pulling out an object that resembled a smoke grenade, and hurling it into the rapids.

  Bending down to gain my balance as I had stepped onto the log, I had triggered the can of pepper spray in my pocket, its aerosol blast locked into an open position aimed direct at my crotch. Imagine a tiny jet engine in your boxer shorts. Imagine that engine throttled up to its white-hot after-burn. How to minister to such a grievous, potentially life-altering injury, how to relieve the suffering? Only the kindest, most generous and selfless nurse would have a clue.

  When I finally stopped howling, my wife had trouble keeping a straight face, eyeing my wincing, bow-legged gait back through the forest. Perhaps something about watching a guy self-immolate his nuts brings out the mirth in women. I felt like I had just ridden a rhino bare-assed for thirty miles. My wife kept reminding me that the after-scent of pepper spray, once its stinging properties have faded, is a bear attractant, smelling much like an order from Taco Bell.

  That would be one overcooked burrito with a side of huevos fritos.

  (2010)

  Greetings from

  the Big Pineapple

  Beyond the rooftops of the mansions of Miramar—once an aristocratic neighborhood and still an elite address—storm clouds scrape low over Havana. Columns of purple rain march through silenced barrios. Banks of steam erupt from the streets, wisps like puffs of smoke snagging in the treetops. It’s the end of May, Cuba’s rainy season has begun, and the ribs are showing on the emaciated body of the island’s not-yet-middle-aged revolution. From the balcony of my hotel room, the first impression is hard to shake: Havana is a city at war, a city on a dire countdown, a city that understands it’s about to be invaded.

  Of course, it isn’t, and won’t be, not really—armed conflict is a chimera employed to focus the attention of revolution’s children. But there are other kinds of invasions. Forsaken by his sugar daddy, the Soviet Union, Fidel Castro has singled out tourism for no-holds-barred development, dispatching a fun-in-the-sun strike force to bandage Cuba’s hemorrhaging economy with hard currency stripped from a relatively toxic source: Western consumerist culture. WE DEFEND SOCIALISM BY DEVELOPING TOURISM, say the billboards. We need a miracle, says El Jefe, but what is he thinking, rolling out the red carpet for the capitalist hordes?

  Even before we boarded the Ilyushin-18 in Cancún, I was experiencing a mild case of apprehension not entirely associated with being lifted into the air by a Soviet hand-me-down. Miami’s Cuban-expatriate community had led us to expect the very worst: a cowed and sullen population, suspicious of one another, their lips glued by fear. An infrastructure in accelerating collapse. Overt loathing for yanqui imperialists, who had used the Gulf War as a dress rehearsal for satisfying Washington’s longest-running grudge, the Cuba problem. Sinc
e the first of January, more than six hundred men and women had flung themselves into the Gulf Stream off Cuba’s northern coast on inner tubes and makeshift rafts, the largest exodus of refugees since the Mariel boatlift in 1980. Word on the street in Havana had it that only one out of every hundred who attempted this desperate adventure made it to the shopping malls of southern Florida alive. The Cuban word for these people was escoria, “scum.”

  Cuba, always forced by its two-crop economy of sugar and tobacco to export everything it produced, could no longer afford to import the basics. The twenty-eight-year-old US trade embargo was squeezing the island harder than ever, causing already short supplies of food and medicine to dwindle. In Miami, scholars who had traveled to Havana for an academic conference advised me to pack soap and coffee as gifts. Don’t plan on renting a car, they warned—the gas pumps had run dry, and Fidel had proclaimed 1991 the Year of the Bicycle. As dictated by the US State Department in its paradoxical wisdom, American tourists were free to travel to Cuba, but spending money while there was illegal, good for a $250,000 fine and up to twelve repentant years in jail.

  Cuba, the Big Pineapple, seemed a Dantesque hellhole, and I couldn’t imagine what sort of reception awaited us at Havana’s José Martí International Airport, especially considering that we—the Professor, Caputo the paparazzo, and I—had tired of waiting for Havana to grant us proper visas and decided to slip into the country by way of the back door, Mexico. The State Department would no doubt have taken exception to our plan, but there was no time to waste. We were on our way to observe the forty-first Ernest Hemingway International Billfish Tournament—one of the oldest billfishing competitions in the world. North American anglers, for the first time in years, had found a way to participate in this most prestigious event, dropping bait into the socialist sea. We figured to wet a line, then travel the length of the island from Havana eastward to the beaches and freshly painted facades of the turista archipelago of the north coast, then to the mountains, the Sierra Maestra, where it had all started, where a young university student/gang member/lawyer/baseball pitcher had decided that it was time to take paradise off the market, choosing instead the course of ultimate adventure, the Everest of political endeavor, revolution.