Cold Storage, Alaska

by John Straley

  Miles didn’t think any of these topics would be of particular help with his family problems, so he got back in the tub, submerged his head in the hot water, and stayed there as long as he could.

  When he came up, Weasel was speaking as if he’d never stopped. “Hey, you wanna hear something really wild? You know your mom? She came by the boat today and asked me if she could have some pot.”

  “You’re kidding,” Miles floated away from the edge of the tub. “No way.”

  Weasel went on. “She said she had cancer, and she wanted some pot. I didn’t know she had cancer, man. That sucks.”

  “I don’t think she knows for sure.” Miles tried to be professional, to keep what he felt was confidential information to himself. “Did you give her any?” he asked.

  “I kind of felt bad but you know, I thought she might be setting me up or something. I told her I didn’t know what she was talking about. She looked sad.” Weasel’s hands were white and wrinkled from the water now, and he inspected them as he kept talking about Miles’s mother. “I almost gave her some after that; she looked so bummed, you know? That sucks big time. Cancer … shit!”

  “Yeah.” Miles looked up into the gloomy steam rising up the concrete walls. “Yeah, it sucks all right.”

  Weasel dunked his head in the hot water and came sputtering out. “Hey, Miles, have you asked Mouse’s ex-wife about him? I bet she might know something.”

  “Who’s his ex-wife?”

  “Come on, man,” Weasel said. “Mrs. Cera down at the fish plant. She was married to Mouse for years. You know, she dumped him because of his drinking, but she always kind of looked out for him.”

  “Thanks, Weaz.”

  The only light came from the cracked skylight above the tub. They both sat silently for a few moments. Fat drops from around the edge of the skylight plopped noisily in the pool.

  “Hey, Miles?” he asked.

  “Yeah?” Miles reached for his towel.

  “Let me know when your brother shows up, man. I’d like to meet him.”

  “I’ll do that, Weaz,” he said, toweled off his hair and stretched.

  AT THE NORTHERN end of the boardwalk sat the old plant, a collection of buildings covered with green and white wooden siding that looked like they’d grown up out of the ground. The old people in town always referred to the color as “oil company green.” The main building was built like a barn with large sliding doors on the ocean side where fishing boats tied up to unload their catch.

  In 1952, Old Country Seafoods had built a cannery on the site of what had been the fishermen’s bathhouse and recreational camp. The old detective was hired as the manager, and the battered-up logger ran a fishing boat. Over the years, the founders’ children stayed on, tinkered with their lives on the inlet. The cannery was changed over to a cold storage when the market for fresh and frozen fish overpowered the canned market. When the fresh fish market became the most lucrative, fishermen started keeping fish on their boats, selling directly to towns like Sitka and Juneau that had airports and jet service. The result was that Cold Storage had been born, thrived and started to wither, almost all within the lifetime of her oldest citizens. That their children lived to see the decline in their parents’ paradise gave the town a melancholy atmosphere.

  In front of the main building was a small store where you could buy bait and milk and canned stew along with a few belts for your diesel engine. There were a couple of bins of apples and a stack of newspapers by the door. In the main part of the plant, bright lights lit up the stainless steel slides, bins, and work tables; the air held the wet smell of disinfectant and cold fish; generators and compressors hummed, but all Miles heard as he walked in was the guttural throbbing of a boom box.

  The cold storage had a skeleton crew of workers who bought fish from a few boats. Recently there’d been some black cod. The crew cleaned and headed the fish, and then sent the commercial meat on a packer down to Sitka.

  The matriarch of the large Filipino family was Mrs. Cera. She ran this branch of her family like a crew boss, although that title was technically her nephew’s. Her current husband worked for the State Department of Corrections in Juneau as a cook at the Lemon Creek prison; he got good pay and benefits. Her son had been living with his dad and going to high school in Juneau, but three weeks ago he’d got into trouble and Mrs. Cera had made him come out to Cold Storage to go to school even though he was a football player and a wrestler with a statewide ranking. If Anthony worked hard and stayed out of trouble for the spring and summer, she’d let him go back to Juneau in the fall in time to tryout for the team. He’d tried to argue with his dad before being flown out, but he did not bother to try that with his mom.

  Mrs. Cera was having a work party. The black cod collars, thin lines of dense meat between the most forward fins and the gills, had to be cut off the heads. The meat was rich with oil, and even though the strips of meat were too small for the commercial plants, they made a good meal if you had enough fish heads and enough time to cut the collars out.

  A couple of teachers, Ed and Tina, who were married to each other, stood around a high white table carving up the reptilian-looking heads. Miles’s neighbor Lester, the silver carver, was cleaning some of the fish collars while Anthony sulked and smoked a cigarette by an open window in the back of the plant. He considered himself an urban boy now, which made his internment here painful. Mrs. Cera filled out paper work in the office. Three others were stripping out of their work clothes to go rest and eat some dinner; maybe they’d cut cod collars later again, after their Auntie’s guests were done.

  Tina and Ed had been in Cold Storage for three years, the first teachers to last so long and the first husband-and-wife team at the school. They split all the teaching for the thirty students, dividing kids into classes not so much by age but by temperament. Tina was good with mathematics at any grade level, kindergarten to grade twelve, but lost her patience with the sloppiness of little kids and their endless art projects. She wasn’t a finger paint kind of teacher. Ed was. He’d take classes out to trap bugs and make clay models; he’d get them on fishing boats to study the environment; he loved traipsing through the tide pools and didn’t mind getting water in his boots to give a third grader a chance to hold a crab or watch the blowing scarves of sea anemones. Tina stayed dry and took field notes. She loved watching her husband, though, loved seeing him in this wild and incalculable classroom. She loved his ability to rekindle wonder in these drowsy kids.

  They had been cutting up black cod heads for half an hour when Ed reached into the box beside the table and held up a red fish with a massive round belly. The head alone was almost the size of a football helmet; it had a scary looking snout.

  “Isn’t this a beautiful thing?” Ed’s voice held wonder. “It’s a short raker rockfish, a red snapper. This very animal was swimming around before airplanes crossed the oceans. He was alive when Amelia Earhart disappeared in the South Pacific and when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. He might even be older than that. Some people think they could get to be two hundred years old.”

  Miles and Lester looked at the strange fish Ed was holding up close to his face. Miles thought of Annabelle. He thought of Ellie Hobbes, who had raised Annabelle. Ellie had loved Amelia Earhart.

  “Did they ever find Amelia’s plane? I thought I saw something on cable TV about that.”

  “I don’t know.” Lester shrugged. “I don’t have a TV.”

  Mrs. Cera walked out of the office. A tiny woman, still in her apron and work clothes and her short hair in a net, she smiled broadly at her friends working at the table. She scowled, though, at Anthony in the corner and the music stopped, as if by magic.

  “You go on.” She gestured to her son. “Go get clean and have dinner. Yes?” Her voice was soft but direct.

  Anthony picked up the folder of CDs and walked up the stairs to the workers’ cottages on the edge of the woods. Mrs. Cera walked over to Miles and pulled him toward the door of her office.
>
  “Miles,” she said quietly, “people been saying that policeman is giving you trouble. I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s not a problem.”

  “I’m sorry I called him, but I’m worried about Mouse. I really think his drinking might have killed him. I was hoping that policeman could find out where Mouse is.” She finished in almost a whisper. “But I didn’t want him to make trouble for you or your mother.”

  “Forget about it,” he said. “When was the last time you saw him?”

  “Ten days ago. He looked bad, you know. He looked skinny, and his face was white.”

  “Did Mouse say anything to give you any idea where he might go? Did he mention any friends or anything?”

  “Miles, Mouse has got no friends on this side of the grave. You know? Mouse doesn’t have anymore real friends. Will you keep an eye out for him, Miles?”

  “We’ll find him.” Miles stood up straight. “Don’t worry about it.”

  He glanced toward the door, but she said, “No. You stay. Get some collars. Get some collars.” She gestured toward the cutting tables and raised her voice so everyone could hear her. “Take what you want,” she called and pointed to the fish tote of black cod heads next to the table. “We’ve got some already. Just come up to the house when you’re done so somebody can come back over to lock up, okay?” She closed the door.

  Miles put on an apron and grabbed a knife.

  It was quiet in the old plant. The compressors had cycled off, and all Miles could hear was the hum of the lamps above the table and the rain hitting the tin roof. They worked in silence for several minutes, cutting into the fish heads for the oily strips of meat, each lost in their own thoughts.

  Ed’s knife slipped off a tough piece of cartilage, and the blade slid down through his rubber gloves. He jerked his hand back and held on to his thumb, afraid to look. Gently, Tina took his hand, opened it and smiled. The blade had only scraped the skin, not even drawing blood.

  It was a little miracle, Miles thought. Evidence of the surfeit of good fortune here in Cold Storage. If he had been in Oakland, Ed would have sawn his thumb off, and Miles would be packing the severed digit into an ice bag right now.

  He started working on another fish head, smiling to himself.

  After a while, Ed spoke. “Holy cow, Miles, that policeman doesn’t like your brother.”

  “I heard.”

  “Is he really going to come here?” Trepidation hovered in Tina’s voice.

  “I don’t know,” Miles said, “but it’s not like he’s rabid or anything.”

  “Oh, I didn’t mean it like that, Miles. I think it’s wonderful that you have a brother.” She flipped a chunk of flesh into her plastic bag. “I don’t know; that policeman made him sound kind of scary is all.”

  “Clive’s not scary,” Miles said. “He’s … intense and maybe kind of odd, that’s all.”

  “Nobody like that around here.” Lester wiped a bit of gill material off his knife.

  “Not to change the subject, but,” Ed’s tone of voice sounded like he wanted to change the subject, “I heard Clint Eastwood was going to come here on his yacht.”

  “No way,” said Tina.

  This new kind of gossip had almost become the default setting for conversation around town. The international yachting set had discovered the outside coast, and every summer there were more and more reports of movie stars being seen in unlikely places: Russell Crowe in a fly-fishing shop in Sitka, Minnie Driver at the health club in Juneau. There had been a persistent rumor that Clint Eastwood was scouting locations for some future project from the decks of a yacht; someone mentioned that he’d bought a fishing lodge in south Chatham Strait.

  “Well, the truth is my brother is coming to town.” Miles hadn’t left the first conversation. “He’s coming to town and I’ll be responsible for him, so you don’t have to worry. It will be all right.” His voice was more stern than he wanted it to be.

  Tina scowled and brushed a strand of hair from her eyes; she looked for a moment at Miles. Ed stopped his work, took his gloves off, and tucked his wife’s hair back into her beret.

  “It’s all going to be fine,” Tina finally said by way of not saying much of anything at all.

  Miles tried to think of something to say, but Lester beat him.

  “I hear Annabelle has cancer.”

  “She’s got a lot of things,” Miles replied.

  “Weasel is telling everybody in town about it.” Lester kept working on his fish.

  “Is it true she bought some pot from him?” whispered Ed.

  “Well, if she has cancer it makes sense,” Tina broke in. “I say good for her.”

  Miles didn’t say anything. He didn’t feel like gossiping about cancer, and he didn’t know if his mother had cancer. But he knew better than to try to fight the tide of gossip, particularly considering his own ignorance. In Cold Storage, gossip was a semi-official medium of exchange; residents looked to gossip for social context, if not necessarily literal truth. Weasel had become the expert on his own mother’s sickness, and Miles had nothing to offer, no expertise, no direct experience to counter Weasel’s claim.

  “To hell with it,” Lester said, and he put down his knife. “I’m going home for dinner. I’ll feed any three white people who want to come, but that’s it. I’m cooking up a few of these collars—just a few, you understand. It’s not the first Thanksgiving or anything.” And with that he picked up his bucket of collars and left. The rest of them nodded and kept cutting.

  “Thank you for the invitation, Lester, but we’ve got rice on already,” Tina called after him.

  “I’ll be by later with some shiny trade objects,” Miles said, and Lester grunted as he shut the door.

  THE RAIN WAS falling again, but not hard. The inlet was dark, and Miles could hear a stream rattling down a rocky chute on the black hillside; he heard the wind pushing the trees around and the faint threads of someone’s FM radio leaking through a cracked window.

  He turned from the boardwalk and started up the steps. How had Annabelle made her way up and down these last few weeks? He had seen her almost pulling herself up the rail, but the one time he offered to help, she brushed him away as if he were trying to snatch her purse. Miles was going to talk to her one more time about going into Sitka, but if she had enough vitality to climb these stairs, if she had enough vitality to go down to Weasel’s float house to buy some pot, maybe she wasn’t that sick after all.

  Miles had been considering leaving Cold Storage in the last few months. The lack of age-appropriate single women, his bad luck at catching fish, and increasingly, this sense of responsibility for the health of a town that gloried in their bad habits, all of these things made him watch the big blue ferry boat coming in and leaving each month. But each month came and went, and he was never ready to buy a ticket. He was from here. His people were from here and truth be told he didn’t feel as good anywhere else in the world. There was no sense in ever loving or hating the place. It was who he was, and that would change only in its own good time.

  He walked and thought. Maybe all she needed was an adjustment in her medications and a change of diet. Maybe she was simply out of compliance with her heart medicine and felt depressed. Maybe a lot of things.

  But one thing was certain: going to Weasel for drugs was not going to lengthen her life span or even help her with her symptoms if she really had cancer. Miles was going to be firm with her. He went over all the things he wanted to say. He wasn’t going to leave with some vague promise from her to “give it some thought.” He was going to get her in for some tests.

  He rapped on her door, let himself in, and rounded the corner of the kitchen. The tea kettle was sitting on a lit burner, all the water boiled out and the bottom burning black. He turned the burner off. The room was hot, and there was no steam on the windows. He could just see his mother’s mouse slippers propped up on the end of the recliner.

  “Ma?” he whispered, worried about waking her.
>
  He put the black cod collars in the refrigerator and walked into the front room. His mother sat in her recliner, the remote control for the television resting in her right hand. Her eyes were open, and her mouth gaped wide as if gasping for breath. She was dead.

  Miles felt for a pulse, but her flesh had already cooled to a stiff clay. So he sat for several minutes, trying to decide what to do.

  He turned on the VCR. There was James Stewart running through the snowy streets of Bedford Falls; there was the front door of his drafty old house, already filling with friends.

  The phone rang on the counter in Annabelle’s kitchen, but Miles did not move to pick it up. It rang eleven times, but still he did not answer.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE PLANE DIPPED into the clouds, rocking from side to side so hard that the seats in the first-class cabin creaked in their moorings. Clive looked out the window and saw a grey world of stone and water below. The waves foamed white on the rocks. Small boats tugged on their anchor lines. The plane buffeted through the wind shear, curling up from the peaks. It shook, banked several times, and landed with a gentle thump. Clive opened his eyes, grateful but regretting that he now had to transfer to a smaller plane.

  In the Juneau airport, Clive sat, drank espresso, pushed some muffins through the bars of the kennel. Little Brother’s lurid, pink tongue licked up the crumbs, swept across his fingers. All the while, Clive talked to him in a calm, almost confessional tone:

  “You are going to like Alaska. The climate is a bit standoffish at first, but you are going to like it.”

  The ugly earless dog lifted his head and stared at him. Clive leaned in close, listening, but all he heard was his snuffling breath. The dog’s silence was irritating to Clive, like a manhole in the dark with the cover taken off by vandals.

  “And I expect you to be wildly popular,” he finally said.