Contents May Have Shifted

by Pam Houston

  ALSO BY PAM HOUSTON

  Sight Hound

  A Little More About Me

  Waltzing the Cat

  Cowboys Are My Weakness

  For Carol Houck Smith,

  who loved books, and the places they took her

  I turn everywhere,

  I see shapes by which

  a holiness declares itself more

  and more, as if to be noticed

  were all it wants of me.

  —Carl Phillips, from Armed, Luminous

  Theologians . . .

  They don’t know nothing,

  About my soul.

  —Jeff Tweedy, Mikael Jorgensen,

  and Chris Girard, from Theologians

  CONTENTS

  Begin Reading

  UA #368

  WE ARE TWO HOURS out of Sydney when the pilot’s voice comes over the PA system. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he begins, “I’m sorry to tell you this, but our instruments up here are indicating fuel system failure. We’re on the phone with central in Chicago—they are advising us—and we’ve contacted Sydney air traffic to let them know we’re headed back. You can probably tell we’re making a big turn right now, and we’re going to get you on the ground just as quickly as we can.”

  I pull my headphones out of the seat pocket to listen to the tower communications. I hear the words “747-400 heavy” right before the channel goes dead.

  All around me people are turning back to their conversations and their magazines, rolling their eyes and shaking their heads like, Oh those crazy airlines. I listen for a shift in the tone of conversation and do not hear one. I ring my call button. Am I the only person on board who has experienced fuel pump failure in a car?

  “The problem isn’t that we don’t have enough fuel,” the handsome-in-a-rangy, greyhoundesque-way flight attendant says, “the problem is we’ve got too much. Our max landing weight is 630,000 pounds and we’re probably over that by 200,000. We’ve got two giant overwing fuel tanks, and the captain can’t tell which tank the fuel is coming from. If it’s all coming from one side it won’t take long before we have a serious balance problem.”

  “Not to mention if it stops altogether,” I say.

  “Right,” he says.

  I tell him I’m feeling a little panicked, and when I’m feeling a little panicked information usually helps.

  “When we get close to Sydney we’ll circle once to dump fuel,” he says. “Then I’m betting he’ll put us in crash position.”

  I know how to get into crash position. I have been in crash position an inordinate number of times.

  We roar back to Sydney like a bat out of hell. The next time the pilot’s voice comes over the speaker there is less apology, more bravado. “Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We are getting ready to land this airplane about 170,000 pounds heavier and about 60 miles per hour faster than regulations allow. The Sydney 240 A runway is the longest in the world, and we are about to use every square foot of it. In a few minutes the flight attendants will demonstrate modified crash position . . .”

  I watch my friend the greyhound cross his arms over his head and brace against the imaginary seat in front of him. When the demonstration is over he stops in the aisle next to me.

  “There’s a good chance we’re going to blow a tire,” he says. “It might be uncomfortable for a few minutes, but generally speaking, when a tire blows, nobody dies,” and then he is off.

  We are getting close enough to the ground now to feel how unnaturally fast we are going.

  “I thought we were going to dump fuel,” I say, to no one.

  “Not the bankrupt airline,” says the Aussie next to me who is supposed to be going to his sister’s wedding in San Francisco. “Do you have any idea how much 60,000 gallons of jet fuel costs? Not to mention the EPA fines. That’s the Great Fucking Barrier Reef out there.”

  Not to mention, I think, if they pick the wrong wing to dump the fuel from we are all of a sudden upside down.

  Never has a plane felt so heavy and sounded so loud. We hit the runway hard, and unimaginably fast, but we don’t bounce and we don’t swerve, and we come to a complete stop beyond the white lines, beyond the navigation lights, just before the blacktop turns to dirt. A cheer goes up inside the cabin. This time the captain’s voice is softer.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” he says, “Welcome back to Sydney. Your patience and cooperation is greatly appreciated. As you might imagine, our brakes are a bit overheated at the moment. We will sit out here for something just under an hour to let them cool, and then a technician will come out and inspect them, to see if they have enough grab left to stop us at our designated gate. At that point you’ll disembark and you’ll be directed to buses that will take you to a hotel for the evening. We’ll get a good night’s sleep and try this thing again tomorrow.”

  When we get off the plane in the golden light of late afernoon, the terminal is deserted. All the grates are pulled down over all the snack bars and newsstands and duty-free shops. There is no one to greet us at customs or passport control and we breeze right through like it’s the end of the world and there are no more countries. Once we are on the bus, a lone customs official boards and puts a big red stamp in our passports that says DID NOT DEPART, which gives me pause.

  If we never left Sydney, then who were the people on the plane they were so sure was going to explode on impact with the ground that they evacuated the entire terminal? Who were the people they had already assumed would be reduced to fuel dust and ash?

  1. Georgetown, Great Exuma

  Two o’clock on a Sunday afternoon in the Chat ’N’ Chill bar on Stocking Island. KB, the Bahamian who owns the place, is looking for an argument and can’t find one. Mandela versus Buthelezi, University of Chicago versus Harvard, chanterelles versus portobellos. Even Mushroom John, who brought his wife Sandy down here from their tuber farm in Pennsylvania for their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, says the rule is, To each his own.

  Down the beach Junior is making the best conch salad on the island, conch so fresh it is still wiggling when he puts it down in front of us. I drink two Goombay Smashes to Ethan’s five Kalik beers and after some critical mass of mosquito bites we tumble outside to hit the blue, blue water. I told Ethan there is no blue like Exuma blue before we came and now he says, “It’s so pretty, it’s corny.”

  They call this archipelago the friendly islands—365 Exumas, one, they like to say, for every day of the year—and it’s true, even the teenage boys with their skullcaps and their hooded eyes feel compelled to say hello when they pass us on the street. At the Peace & Plenty hotel Kaliks cost three dollars, but there is a reggae band at Eddie’s Edgewater club on Fridays, and if you go to the kitchen door and smile politely, old Mrs. Beatrice Goodnight will sell you fried chicken, and peas and rice wrapped in the Sunday paper with salt.

  For ten years, ending ten years ago, I came here with my friend Henry. We would sail his boat, whose name was Parmenides, down from Fort Lauderdale in November and spend the dangerous weeks between Thanksgiving and New Year’s drinking rum, eating grouper, listening to “Son of a Son of a Sailor,” sleeping in the open cockpit, and watching the Christmas lights called the Pleiades spin across the midnight sky. Henry is the only man I’ve known in my life that I knew how to love well, and as luck would have it, we were never lovers. I was the only woman in his life who knew that when he said, Do you want to go to Paris? Do you want to go to Cuba? Do you want to take the mast off Parmenides and take her through the canals of Burgundy? the answer was always yes.

  Henry always paid for everything, which makes it seem only right that I pay for everything on this trip. Ethan has a PhD in poli sci and vacillating political am
bitions. He lost a tight race for county commissioner on the Green Party ticket when he was barely out of grad school and now practices civil disobedience semiprofessionally, which, he often reminds me, is not the most lucrative use of his degree but yields many other rewards. I talked him into squeezing this trip in between a Rumsfeld resignation rally and a remembrance vigil for the miners in West Virginia.

  Every Sunday at the Chat ’N’ Chill, KB roasts a pig. Ethan and I can smell it where we’re floating, you can smell it all over the island when the wind is onshore. A stingray floats across the white sand below our floating bodies, and a little school of sergeant majors mistake the yellow in my bathing suit for one of their own.

  The floating is so effortless, the sun so soft and warm, I’m almost asleep when Junior hollers that the conch fritters are ready, and we swim to shore and eat them, roll them around in the red sauce that has just the right amount of kick to it, get in one more swim before it’s time to eat the pig.

  2. Davis, California

  Early morning on the greenbelt. Walking with Sadie, while Helen leaps between furrowed, fallow fields. Everyone we know calls Sadie Helen and Helen Sadie, which is strange, since Sadie is a thirty-five-year-old woman, and Helen is a German short-haired pointer, but when you see the way they look at each other, you begin to understand.

  Sadie has her sister’s name—Annabelle—tattooed across her bicep. Last month, Annabelle tried to kill herself; succeeded, temporarily, was gone, in almost every way that counts, for more than two whole days. Then she came back from the dead.

  Last night I heard a mockingbird imitating a car alarm in a jacaranda tree. This morning, a white heron teases Helen with a touch-and-go pattern along the creek.

  I remember the day last fall when the grad students and I walked on Limatour Beach after the storm and watched the pelicans. The storm had brought out all the animals, tule elk, fallow deer, and three coyotes who ran and leapt and did the kinds of things coyotes do in Native American sand paintings, while we watched, openmouthed, from the side of the road.

  We saw so much wildlife that day Noah finally asked if I’d sent a guy ahead of us to push animals out of boxes. We were each locked inside our individual sorrows, didn’t know each other well enough to share, but we agreed, out loud, that like moose, pelicans were surely put on earth to act as suicide preventers, agreed we’d never kill ourselves within the sight of one.

  3. Ozona, Texas

  Nine o’clock on a Thursday night, the bar full of Halliburton guys in their red all-in-one suits, roughnecks in from the oil fields for preseason football, hunting stories, and beer. It is just dumb luck that I’ve worn my camo miniskirt, and I take the best seat in the house for watching the Patriots beat up on the Redskins, until the bartender comes over and tells us we’ve entered a private club.

  Ethan rises to leave. He recognizes enemy territory, knows that environmentalists and Halliburton guys shouldn’t drink together, especially not in Texas.

  “In that case,” I say, “I’ll take two memberships and two double shots of Patron Silver and a Coca-Cola back.”

  We can mark this down as my last fearless moment, because even though I’ve already seen the photo of the sad-eyed Romanian in Ethan’s glove compartment, I haven’t really let her sink in. She’s married to a high-ranking political official. Every time Ethan goes over there to visit her someone comes up to him in a trench coat and says, “You know the price of a man in Bucharest is one hundred dollars U.S.”

  I tell Ethan with a straight face that the Romanian’s essential unavailability denies me all my magical qualities, then I ask him for money for the jukebox. He gives me three dollars and I play every antiwar song I can find wedged in between Clint Black and the If You Don’t Believe in Freedom We’ll Kick Your Fuckin’ Ass Quintet: “Who’ll Stop the Rain,” and “Imagine” and “War,” Good God, y’all, what is it good for, absolutely nothing, say it again.

  By the third round of Silver we’ve won the bartender over, we can tell because the tequila starts coming in tumblers.

  Ethan says, “You might be the first woman to ever drink in this bar,” and I say, “You might be the first conscientious objector.” Later, in the parking lot of the Best Western, I pick up both our heavy suitcases and make a beeline for the stairs.

  Ethan says, “No! Pam, no!” which makes me lift the bags higher and run for it, and when I get to the top I laugh so hard I pee.

  4. Juneau, Alaska

  They said we wouldn’t see any orcas. They said the humpbacks were in and when the humpbacks were in you didn’t see the orcas, because the orcas are predators and the humpbacks are prey.

  It’s been a long day. We’ve been all the way up Tracy Arm to the glaciers and everyone but the captain and I are sleeping when word comes over the radio: Orcas in Shearwater Cove.

  By the time we get there there’s nothing stirring. A couple of lazy humpbacks out in the main channel a sure sign that the orcas are gone. The captain is worried about the hour, worried about the fuel he’s got left, worried about his daughter, who’s got magenta hair and a T-shirt that says THIS is what a feminist looks like, who is back from somewhere like Reed College working on his boat this summer, selling sodas to the tourists through a permanent scowl.

  There’s a fin flash on the far side of the channel, distant but unmistakable. Orca. Male.

  The captain says, “That’s four miles across this channel, minimum.”

  I show him the silver charm around my neck, remind him that it’s my last day in Alaska, promise to swim for shore if we run out of gas.

  “Don’t lose that fin,” he says, turning the bow into the sunset, but I couldn’t lose it if I tried, the water of Stephen’s Passage backlit, a million diamonds rushing toward me in the sun, and one black fin, impossibly tall, absurdly geometric, the accompanying blast of whale breath above it, superimposed onto the patterns of light.

  Spotting whales at sea is not so different from spotting deer in the woods. For hours you see nothing, and then you see one, and suddenly you realize you are surrounded. This pod has twenty-five, by my best counting, the one male, who keeps his distance, and twenty-four females, all of them running steadily west.

  We get out in front and the captain shuts down the engines. Every time the big male’s fin turns itself up and over and back down under the surface of the water, I can’t help myself, I gasp. We are directly in the path of one of the females. Every time she surfaces we can hear her breathing, every time she surfaces I can see the spot of white at her heart. Twenty years ago, on my first trip to Alaska, I bought a string of white-heart trade beads, and for this trip I tore the house apart to find them.

  In three more dives she’ll be under the boat. I touch the beads at my neck and try to guess which side of the boat will get me the closest. The others are stirring, crowding the port side, watching her approach. I choose starboard. She dives one last time and I start counting, at five she rises right under my hand. The breath from her blowhole is cold on my face. If I dared I could reach down and touch her on her white spot. Someone behind me screams, maybe the captain’s daughter, but the whale is already diving, already resurfacing a few yards farther on.

  I listen to the sweep of her fin, the puff of her breathing until she disappears into the disappearing diamonds. When the male’s big fin is the only thing visible—a speck on the horizon, we turn the boat north and head for home.

  5. Good Hope, Jamaica

  The sun is high above the Cockpit Country, and Jude and I are getting stoned at the pool. I am way too old to smoke pot, but Jude isn’t and he convinces me, you wouldn’t go to Italy and not drink the coffee, you don’t go to Jamaica without smoking the weed. And he’s right. This pot is so potent that every time the sun reemerges from behind the cotton-ball clouds I think a cartoon character I’ve invented called Big Mr. Sunshine is caressing my arms with baby-powdered hands.

  Jude’s brother died in a car accident when Jude was eighteen. Four months later Jude was t
he one to walk in on the body of his mother. Four months later his father went to jail. For the five years after that Jude played Division I hockey, turned his entire focus toward dodging the pucks that were continually flying at his head. Then his goalie knees gave out and the next logical thing was to try to become a writer.

  Good Hope is a papaya plantation that for a few weeks each year turns itself over to the making of art. Last night the ceramicists pulled an all-nighter to fire up the big wooden kiln and the writers decided to stay up with them. It was quite a party, writers throwing pots, potters writing pantoums, the big clay figures glowing crimson inside the house-sized kiln like bodies, the oncologist from Santa Fe unable to resist a recitation of “The Cremation of Sam McGee.”

  Jude’s been on a tear around the world this year: Iceland, Finland, Amsterdam, Jamaica. After this he is supposed to go see his brother’s grave for the first time since his family blew up—his expression—and even to talk about it makes him shake in his chair.

  “You don’t have to do that if you aren’t ready,” I tell him. “Your brother is with you every second; it doesn’t make any difference to him whether or not you stand at his grave.”

  I am thinking, as I say this, about Henry, about how every time I drive over Kenosha Pass late at night on the way from the Denver airport to Creede, he seems to want to have a conversation, which makes no sense whatsoever because when he was alive he was an urban guy and a warm-weather fan to boot.

  The sun moves out of the clouds again, turning the flowers a purple I thought existed only in coral reefs and crayons. “You’re right,” Jude says, “thank you,” though we don’t fool each other for a second, and that’s how we know we are friends.

  6. Creede, Colorado

  The first snow fell on the peaks today. An edgy wind brought clouds that looked like thunderheads, but when they cleared, just before sunset, everything above 11,000 feet was blanketed, not in white, but in chrome.