by Building Fires in the Snow- A Collection of Alaska LGBTQ Short Fiction
from the place they imagined it was.
A crowd looked on as you
lit wireless lamps, made metal discs revolve
at considerable distance
from a spinning field like moons looping
round a planet. It wasn’t for anyone
in particular to see when you grasped
the live terminal and tentacles of light
streamed from your spine. Yet something
like a curl of hair, or a woman’s earring,
you found too distressing to touch.
Twilight grows between thin branches,
pools above the Arm like smoke.
We crank the radio for cheering
voices, snap on lights, set water to boil,
each of us quiet, roving
privately. I drop a fist of
pasta in the pot, and listen
to the news: another hunter
stranded, cut adrift by shifting
ice. The fracture shot between
an uncle and nephew stalking seals
in Hudson Bay. I pour two mugs of
wine and rest one at her elbow,
wondering what the hunters did when
one had no way back—the moment
they became aware. I crack
the stove door, turn the flue for air
on coals. The uncle might have
thrown some dry meat or an extra sleeping bag
across the rift. They may have
yelled encouragement, instructions.
There came a time when the only thing
to do was watch
each other’s features fade in hooded parkas,
see how small his shadow looks on the floe,
and how, at such a distance,
he could be anyone.
Hemispheres
His half is smaller,
his yellow wing
darker on its leading edge.
Her wing splays large,
also yellow,
a small triangular tear
in its trailing rim.
Both wings veined
like a river delta,
both misted with
black ovals as if someone
flicked ink on them
as they flapped by.
Their brown is the brown
of an overripe banana—
camouflage for fall leaves.
His antenna fans,
eyebrow-like,
hers a smooth, penciled arch.
Say the letter
“p” into your palm and that
whisper is how their body
feels, perched
on your hand.
Their fleeced head, thorax,
abdomen fuse
them together:
male on left, female on right.
Two sovereign hemispheres
operate a moth body.
This never happens
to us, our hormones
make other
mistakes. Even if it could,
we’re crosswired:
female brain would flex
male thigh, male brain
would extend female bicep.
The man with mincing
walk, the woman with
cocky shoulders would then
somehow negotiate
to walk themselves
as a single person,
to the store, at first, for oranges
that they take home,
peel at the kitchen table
and feed to each other,
sticky juice
dripping
down their chin.
Tired, I Lie Down in the Parking Garage
Last night I dreamed you set our truck on fire
in a parking space next to the elevator. It burned a blue
alcohol flame and you opened the passenger door
as if I would drive us somewhere before it
exploded. Today I float on stolen time,
not awake and not asleep though it’s nice
and quiet here in the chasm
between a crew cab pickup and a meat
delivery van with the window rolled down.
You drove us out of town once with no window,
past the lake with fat swans kicking
air with black feet, heads
dabbling underwater. Haze—we wondered
was it smoke or dust—made the road
converge on itself early, as if the Earth was curled
into a tighter ball.
Driver’s window stuck open, we drove
out the delta anyway, wearing parkas
in late October, past the last highway sign as more
silt—yes, silt blown from riverbeds—filled the air,
the car, the spaces between our teeth. The mountains
vanished in a fog of their own sediment, so thick
your shape blurred next to me. When I can’t love you
I want to make this a romantic moment,
when we crossed the main channel, grit
hailing in on us until we bent double
to hide from the window’s stinging gape.
You managed to turn back
over silt dunes and bridges, our tracks erased, the next thing
unforeseeable as if we had never
passed that way. The last highway sign read,
“Travel Beyond This Point Not Recommended,” to which
someone added, “FOR PUSSIES”.
Protected by the passenger’s window, we yodeled
with Hank Williams tunes, substituting
the word, “pussy,” every chance we got.
Eve of the Apocalypse
Last month the city barred ravens from citizenship. The birds
agitated, strutting on dumpsters with picket signs: “Garbage
Collectors $60k/yr., Ravens $0” and,
“SILENT NEVERMORE!”
The issue divided families. Skeptical fathers found
red paint and black chicken feathers on their pillows
after commenting that, next, nuthatches will demand
Medicaid. The ravens have skipped town—
people say the moon owes corvids a favor
for liberating her from a giant. But who believes in giants?
Birdfeeders are deserted in a show of avian independence.
One jogger reported puncture wounds from a startled
flock of waxwings. Church membership, insomnia,
and canned good sales are up.
Now’s when the story of a young raven’s rise from dumpsters
to famous wealth,—and the ensuing big-budget film—
could win a conciliatory victory for ravens,
yet make townspeople feel secure and big-hearted.
Contrary to expectations, our garbage is not tidier.
It’s been three weeks, five days, and ten hours.
We wake to the same darkness, we drive the same routes to work, drink
at the same bars. Everyone talks about ravens now
that they’re gone—as if
we wonder how they got to leave. Or we wish
that we resembled our own shadows more.
LUCIAN CHILDS
Lucian Childs is a recipient of a 2013 Rasmuson Foundation Individual Artist Award. He has been awarded residencies at Byrdcliffe Arts Colony and at Artscape Gibraltar Point and was a Peter Taylor Fellow at the 2015 Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. He is the winner of the 2013 Prism Review Short Story Prize. His stories have appeared in a number of literary journals, including Grain, Sanskrit, The Puritan, Jelly Bucket, Quiddity, Rougarou, and Cirque.
The Go-Between
1.
It is hard to believe that I was so wild then. But in Anchorage in 1981, that’s what was done: dirty bookstores, all-night bars, downers, poppers, coke, sex. Was I going to say no to that? Throw a wet blanket on the zeitgeist just because it made me uncomfortable?
Besides, that’s how I met Jacques—that summer, stripped to his shorts, doing pirouettes on the dance floor at the Village Disco—sweat spinning off his muscular body like a lawn sprinkler. (I’d probably wedged myself into the standard uniform: 501s and a white T-shirt.) Jacques tore through the dance floor that night like he tore through men. They loved to hear him talk dirty in French-Canadian while he fucked.
I was one of them. For that night and for a while after, he was my sexy Quebecker and I his blond bon ami. We banged around downtown Anchorage like Astérix and Obélix—hitting the 5th Avenue bars, drinking martinis (a habit Jacques acquired at his home in Montreal from his père), doing lines of coke off the counter with shirtless bartenders.
It was the post-pipeline boom, money and men flowing like the oil, back and forth from Anchorage to the North Slope. Guys came off three weeks of twelve-hour days, seven days a week, to party and get their rocks off.
As for myself, I was just out of college, determined in this place of reinvention and mystery to shake up my boring self. I adopted the motto of the moment: so many men, so little time. Still, I panicked when Jacques no longer wished to bed his blond, mustachioed little buddy and moved to the next in line, Stephen Traynor. I doubled my efforts to ingratiate myself with them and their friends, a hard-partying bunch who, like Jacques, never seemed to work. Drug dealing was the rumor, though if that were true for Jacques, he sheltered me from it. I ran into those friends of theirs everywhere—at the Raven, at the Jade Room. I’d chat them up at the health clinic when we were being treated for clap. I even played with some in dirty bookstore stalls and bragged to Jacques about it after. I thought it was a way in.
This was my last-ditch attempt at fabulousness, the monumental failure at which Jacques was mercifully amused. He valued me for being stalwart, as ballast for his ever-shifting Ship of Fools. It was he, in fact, who suggested I renounce la débauche and take up my studies in engineering, his father’s profession and one he knew I held in high regard.
Also, the plague was among us, which put that crazy time in closed parenthesis.
2.
A few weeks ago, I was invited to a midsummer garden party. The host is a refugee from those Glory Hole days as well. He accompanies me now to the opera and the symphony, which is about as crazy as we ever get. His garden retains a touch of wildness, though: fireweed, cow parsnip, and devil’s club. Plants of the forest or the side of the road.
At the garden party I filled my plate and went out to the deck to search for a place to sit. Though it was almost eight o’clock in the evening, the sun was high and cast shimmery circles through the leaves of an ash tree onto the white tablecloths. There was that particular smell of an arctic summer: under the profusion of new green, the moldy-leafed decay of years past. I took a seat at a table among some fellows I know and, to my surprise, who should be across from me but Stephen Traynor. I hadn’t seen or heard from him since the mid-80s. I recognized him instantly, though. His complexion was like rose alabaster—no doubt from his old habit, a rigorous application of facial cream—and he was handsome still, deep-set eyes and a dimpled chin. His face had become jowly, though, and his belly overhung his belt. (I’ve fared better since I retain my slavish devotion to the gym.) Back in the day, we were forced into an accommodation because of our mutual friendship with Jacques, but, try as I might, we never became friends. In fact, his catty remarks about my stodginess, though cloaked in humor, had often seemed excessively barbed. We had all shared many cheerful moments, nonetheless, and through several helpings of prime rib, he and I joked and reminisced.
The party was festive and it was after midnight by the time I drove Stephen to his budget hotel in mid-Anchorage. The Chugach Mountains, the green wall emblazoned with patches of snow that borders the back of the city, were ruddy with alpenglow. For old times’ sake, we stopped along the way at the Kodiak, formerly our old haunt, the Village Disco. Though the place had greatly changed, in tenor it remained the same. It was the middle of the week, and there was only a smattering of regulars, but if I squinted, the scene before me was from almost thirty years ago. There was José, the three-hundred-pound drag queen, seated at his spot at the corner; Sugar Bear, down in his cups on his night off from bartending at the Jade Room; and a couple of twinks on the dance floor grinding in time with the music.
I thought Stephen and I might walk down Memory Lane a bit more. But his usually jolly face grew hard, his eyes squinty and mean. He showed little interest in talking further about old times, or in my subsequent accomplishments, but seemed principally motivated to grill me about Jacques. Had I seen him? When had we last spoken? How could he be reached?
Jacques had been Stephen’s first great love, and he had breathed in the Quebecker the way a drowning man gasps for air. Except for its urgency, I would have attributed the inquiry that night to a middle-aged man’s nostalgia for lost love. On our second drink, the urgency was in part explained when he filled in details of a story which I knew only in broad strokes.
In 1983, Jacques started up an import business—high-end furniture and accessories for the newly minted rich in their big homes on the hillside. He had tired of partying and threw himself into the enterprise. He was determined not to take advantage of his family’s fortune and connections in doing this. He didn’t want to provide his father with even the slightest consolation.
As it happened, Stephen became an entrepreneur himself. With money inherited from his grandfather, he participated in the general real estate frenzy overheating the Anchorage economy. Over the next two years, he became one of the city’s condo kings, riding the wave of oil.
He and Jacques moved in together in Stephen’s own large house on the hillside. The view from their deck was spectacular: Denali, Foraker, and Hunter (the huge mountains visible in the distance to the north), the Alaska Range trailing eastward down the Inlet, sugar-frosted and spiky. They hosted fabulous parties, like a couple of Jay Gatsbys. In the summer light that ran without interruption from dusk straight into dawn, bearded men draped off deck rails, played in a foamy hot tub, popped pills from a fishbowl on the kitchen’s Carrara countertop.
All this I knew mostly from hearsay. What I had not heard was the account of their affair’s abrupt end. One day, Stephen said, then paused for effect. One day, he said, Jacques disappeared, not to be heard from since.
3.
I tried to put all this together as I made my way up the hillside to my house, a sprawling affair not far from the one that had formerly been Stephen’s. After the real estate crash of the mid-80s, people left Anchorage by the thousands. So in that, Jacques’ disappearance wasn’t extraordinary. But the urgency of Stephen’s inquiry and the dramatic manner in which he delivered his news, led me to believe there was something he was hiding.
All this dredging up of the past unleashed a torrent and memories of Jacques flooded my thoughts. I recalled the weekend he and I traveled to Montreal. (This was his way of softening the blow for having recently thrown me over for Stephen.) He promised to introduce me to his père, a force in provincial politics and a noted engineer. I was soon entering the program at the University of Alaska and Jacques thought I might benefit from a confab with his father. The meeting never took place; they’d taken up their spat again by the time we arrived. The old man wanted Jacques to leave off wasting time in our frontier town and return to his studies in Montreal. Jacques refused, and not in a nice way. Though my French is creaky, I believe what Jacques yelled into the phone means “leave the country” but is usually translated “fuck-off.”
Our hotel reservations extended through a long weekend, so Jacques decided we’d make the best of it and tour the city. When he stood me up for the second time at the Musée des Beaux-Arts, I realized I’d had enough. All the missed appointments throughout our friendship, the late entrances, the feeble apologies (or none at all) and me at a restaurant with ice cubes melted in my glass. No amount of Gaulish charme could make up for that. I rebooked my flight, and though Jacque
s protested in that passionate Quebecker way of his, I don’t think he minded. I had the feeling he’d rather smoke dope and hang with his high school pals, his copains.
I remember the lights on the St. Lawrence the last night, like undulating neon, below the bulk of Mont-Royal and, from the plane, the city twinkling through the clouds.
Back in Anchorage, over the following year my friendship with Jacques and Stephen lingered, grew tepid, invitations to their parties far between. At last, it fizzled. University was demanding. I lectured myself: eliminate unnecessary distractions! I lost touch. I could no longer stave off the inevitable: we were simply not a good fit.
4.
At my friend’s garden party, I had exchanged contact info with Stephen and I emailed the next day, saying how glad I was to have run into him. That those heady days of our youth, though fraught, were nevertheless grand, and I was happy our visit had allowed me the occasion to remember them.
His reply, though somewhat chilly, was impeccably polite. He added this unusual postscript which delivered the aha I had been seeking. Back in 1983, Stephen had taken loans on his properties to jumpstart Jacques’ import business. Jacques was out of his depth, and immediately the concern began to sour. Bills unpaid to manufacturers, customs fees stranding inventory in Seattle on the docks. No inventory, no business.
As a result, when the Anchorage boom went bust and Stephen was unable to make his loan payments, all his properties perished in the equation. He recouped not one centime, a setback from which it had taken him decades to recover.
He started from scratch in San Francisco: an assortment of jobs (clothing salesman, timeshare purveyor, assistant to a real estate developer). Finally, with the easy money available in the early aughts, he began developing properties on his own.
Although unstated, his urgency to find Jacques now became clear. It’s 2009, and while we Alaskans suck happily at the pap of Big Oil, the rest of the world teeters at the abyss, in the throes of the Great Recession. Stephen needed money.
After one boomtown disaster, you could hardly find fault with his desperation at the prospect of another. I sent him a short condolatory reply, then deleted his email, as I did not expect or wish to hear from him again.
5.
