Cold Storage, Alaska

by John Straley

  “I’m going to buy this place,” said Clive, “and I’m going to open up my own bar slash church.”

  “A what?”

  Clive explained. He had looked into getting a liquor license when he first came to town, but the town council, which met on a semi-regular basis, had discovered an old ordinance that allowed only as many liquor licenses as there were churches. The hardware store had a liquor license and sold beer and hard liquor, mostly by the case, to people in town and on the fishing boats; there was one church that allowed the town Catholics, Lutherans, and Unitarians to hold Sunday services, in that order. When Ellie’s bar had closed down last time, so many people had moved out of town that the second church had closed. In order for Clive’s new bar to receive a liquor license, there needed to be another church in town.

  Of course Clive could have asked the town council to change the ordinance, but since there hadn’t been a quorum at any of the last two dozen council meetings, this seemed a poor option. But the idea of closing down for drinking on Sunday and opening up for worship instead didn’t seem like a bad one to him.

  “I’ve seen you studying the Bible,” Miles said. “Do you mind if I ask you, are you a Christian now that you got out of jail?”

  Everyone at the fallen down old bar leaned in. Most of them had expectant smiles on their faces.

  “Brother. I’ll tell you,” Clive said. “I love Jesus the way Mouse loved Kelly. Unabashedly. I love Jesus like I love Duke Ellington and the great Satchmo, like I love the music of Bonnie Raitt and Joni Mitchell. I love Jesus like I love the opening paragraph of One Hundred Years of Solitude and all the books of P.G. Wodehouse. I love Jesus like Elvis loved his momma. For in Jesus is forgiveness, love, joy, and happiness.” Clive lifted his beer as if to toast them all. “That love will always be unrequited for the gift has already been given, and we just have to get used to it. So one more time to the great Mouse Miller, to his love, the beautiful and unattainable Kelly, and to Ellie Hobbes, the anarchist mother of us all!”

  The beers went up and a loud cheer could be heard far back up the hill into the forest.

  MILES WAS OF two minds about his brother’s attempt to buy Ellie’s bar. It was a good idea, and he knew that Clive would do a fine job of running a bar. But the money still bothered him. Miles knew that somehow or another the cash sewn into the jacket would eventually bring a storm of bad luck down on all their heads.

  But Clive had no such concern. For some reason the conversation with Lester and the finding of Mouse Miller had put Clive’s life in a new perspective. He was either suffering from some new psychosis or he had developed a superpower, one that allowed him to hear animals speak. And neither possibility frightened him, as long as the animals didn’t start telling him to kill people or to start picking random numbers for a distant lotto. So three days after Mouse Miller’s wake he flew to Juneau and found the current owner of Ellie’s bar sitting in the Triangle Club downtown. He spoke to him about a price, and when the owner said he was asking four hundred thousand dollars, Clive held up an envelope with twenty-five thousand dollars in cash and a contract to take over all payments and liabilities (which included several tax liens and a potential disastrous environmental clean-up necessitated by the fuel oil spill under the building). The owner took the cash, signed the contract, and ordered a round for the house.

  Clive had already contacted Ellie’s former legal representative. She was living down in Lewiston, Oregon. He proposed that he begin making payments on the property where the former buyer had left off, and she agreed, figuring some money coming in was better than no money, lawyer fees, and a rotting bar a thousand miles away.

  MILES TOOK THE news of this new venture with a mixture of strong emotions. The thought of his ex-con brother in a legitimate business, most likely a very lucrative business, created in him a kind of giddiness that only other worried siblings may know. But on the other side of the emotional color wheel there was the rising of a kind of sharply focused dread. Clive was spreading the money around the region with equanimity, which was sure to attract attention: the attention of the police and eventually the attention of the original owner of all the parka money.

  Clive continued with his project, showing little concern for his brother’s fears. He began work down at the site in early June. He had rough-cut yellow cedar brought in by a young boat builder down the inlet, and he bought new pilings to shore up the foundation. He had an engineer come and give an estimate for cleaning up the spilled oil, and he paid a couple of local kids to dig out the contaminated soil with shovels for less than half the estimated cost.

  Clive patched the roof, and any afternoon that had more than an hour of sunshine, he scraped and painted the outside of the building. He painted it white, added red trim, and hung a new sign over the door. The sign was much larger than the old one, and it hung prominently over the boardwalk. Clive called the new bar Mouse Miller’s Love Nest.

  BILLY ENDED UP enjoying life on the Universe. He was given a room in the crew quarters right next to where the members of the orchestra bunked, and he was allowed to eat in the dining hall with the passengers. After being fished out of the north Pacific, Billy seemed to have developed a large appetite. He ate as if he could end all suffering at the three offered meals and lined up for every midnight buffet and sundae bar.

  Bonnie had never saved anyone’s life before, and she wasn’t quite sure of the protocol. The captain was horrified that she had gone into the water and threatened to fire every member of the lifeboat crew. But the cruise director eventually convinced him of the public relations value of declaring them all “heroes” and even agreed to have Bonnie and Billy sit at his table two evenings in a row, nodding and making a show to each of the passengers who passed and stared, some of them being bold enough to come and shake Bonnie’s hand and marvel at her courage.

  Both Bonnie and Billy were dumbfounded. Billy was mostly overwhelmed by rich food and sat at the captain’s table in a caloric haze. Bonnie meanwhile was on new emotional ground, having saved someone’s life. After coming out of the ocean, her old life, her old melancholy, seemed to have been left behind somewhere in the wake of the lumbering ship.

  She liked this new feeling, but she couldn’t quite give words to it. She couldn’t describe it to her mother when she talked to her on the ship’s satellite phone. She could not describe the feeling to herself.

  And so, she fell in love with Billy, thinking that since he was the most tangible evidence of her adventure, she had to keep hold of him if she were going to preserve this new life in its current form.

  She moved out of her room for the rest of the cruise and bunked down in the crew quarters with Billy.

  “It’s not like love,” she said to him as she squeezed into the narrow metal bunk bolted to the bulkhead, “it’s more like waking up from a dream.”

  She kissed him, and they took each other’s warm breath into their own lungs, and their hands felt the warmth of skin created by their bodies’ burning calories. They were alive again, together, and this was something Billy enjoyed. Looking back on it, he saw that he enjoyed eating crab cakes and fresh asparagus. He enjoyed making love to a beautiful woman who had saved his life.

  The four noble truths taught that life was suffering, and suffering could be overcome by overcoming desire. But he had to admit to himself that he didn’t simply enjoy this new life, he craved it now, all the more so because he had spent his entire life not knowing that there was such pleasure possible on this earth. He craved the feeling of his own warm body after he had been taken out of the Pacific. He suspected all the more now that he was a crappy Buddhist. He still wanted to meet the Dalai Lama, but there was no getting off the Universe until it came into port. So he kissed Bonnie and lay in that narrow bed beside her as if he had fallen out of the sky from a jet airplane and had landed safely beside her. So they drank and ate and slathered their skins against each other’s in the narrow bunk. At night they clattered up the metal stairs in borrowed forma
l clothes and danced to the ship’s little orchestra.

  The kids in the band were all music students from Oberlin. There were only seven of them, but the ship insisted on referring to them as “the orchestra” even though they were clearly a band. Rick was the tenor sax player and had put the band together after the Christmas break the year before. He had cajoled, and sometimes bullied, his friends into joining him on this northern gig. Rick looked a bit like Bono, and he knew how to work any room made up of any age group. Earl was the drummer. He was black and had a wispy goatee and horn-rimmed glasses. Nix was a young white girl who played the bass as if she were dancing with it. She had short brown hair and multiple piercings, all of which she had to either hide or allow to heal up while she worked on the ship. Rick had explained that you simply couldn’t play Cole Porter while wearing a goat head stud through your tongue. Nix had rolled her eyes but took the stud out. The rest of the band reminded Billy of children attending a wedding, faces flushed from their ill-fitted formal shirts.

  But they loved to play. They performed three sets a night and then backed up various solo performers. They played ’40s music at seven, ’50s music at nine, and something called “contemporary” music at eleven. Every other night they played for the cabaret singer or did the Broadway medleys for the operatic duo from San Francisco.

  The band was intensely interested in Billy. The idea of him paddling through the dark of the north Pacific struck them as something almost mythic. Late at night, they would pile into the tiny room and hunch onto the floor to eat junk food (which the band seemed to prefer over the ship’s cuisine), smoke pot, and talk about Alaska. Billy held court during these sessions, and he relished the role of the storyteller pulled from the sea.

  Nix, particularly, was interested in the stories about Cold Storage. She liked hearing about Lester and Clive. She tried to imagine a community clinging to the side of the mountains with no roads, no cars, and virtually no sense of the outer world. She ate handfuls of greasy cocktail peanuts and leaned her head against the hard bulkhead and tried to imagine such a place.

  Nix had a boyfriend in Portland. He was a fiddle player, and sometimes he would fill in on guitar. He would play anywhere but preferred traditional Irish music. There was a big Irish scene in Portland, and Nix had sat in on many of the all-night sessions in one of the three pubs that hosted them. She liked the sessions but was getting tired of her boyfriend, who was in danger of becoming an IRA-style Catholic. Nix had taken the Alaskan gig with her old schoolmates as an easy out from the situation. She had moved all of her things out of their apartment and into storage before her boyfriend had noticed anything was wrong. She had said goodbye over the phone from a booth in Vancouver.

  Billy would sometimes tell stories well into the early morning. He’d talk about whales rubbing their backs on the bottom of his fishing boat, and about the fights in the movie club, and the time a brown bear got into the café and had actually crawled into the chest freezer. He told about Mouse Miller being in love with the barmaid and disappearing from sight, and he told about the time a fisherman was beaten to death by a giant halibut that had landed in his boat, and how they had served the same halibut at his wake.

  The band from Oberlin listened and snacked and dreamed their own Disneyfied version of Billy’s adventures. Earl beat his sticks against his thighs. Nix practiced her finger exercises. Bonnie sat up on one elbow with a blanket covering her bare body and played with the ends of Billy’s hair as Billy told story after story about the world he had left behind.

  The boat put into Vancouver on the last day of the cruise. Billy found out that afternoon that the Dalai Lama had canceled his appearance in Seattle after some security issues were discovered, and Billy breathed a sigh of relief. He knew he wasn’t worthy. He hadn’t been meditating, he hadn’t finished his journey, and he had lost all the money, anyway. He felt a certain sense of peace when he learned the Dalai Lama’s plans had also changed.

  So Billy decided to stay on the Universe. The band hired him on as a percussionist and backup vocalist. There was not much of a problem getting on the band’s roster, because they had sailed with one musician short when the original trombone player broke his leg skateboarding the week before the first sailing. Billy just had to fill out a few pieces of paperwork, and he was on.

  Bonnie got a job in the ship’s library. This job was a little harder to get, but Bonnie had dropped a couple of hints that she might have suffered a back injury as a result of her rescue from the water. The ship’s lawyers claimed not to be concerned about any liability, but when an assistant librarian quit because of seasickness, Bonnie was offered the job.

  On that afternoon the Universe sailed from the dock at Vancouver with Bonnie and Billy as staff members, the sun was glittering off the water, and a few people waved from the dock. Bonnie stood out on the deck and waved to her mother, who had flown to Vancouver to try and take her daughter home. Bonnie waved and blew kisses while her mother wept. Billy was looking resplendent in his new black pants, white shirt and formal red bow tie. He was knocking on a wood block as the quartet played a samba on the back deck. And so the Universe moved slowly away from the dock for its trip back toward Alaska.

  CHAPTER TEN

  IT WAS THE second week of June, and Jake Shoemaker was sitting at his breakfast table in Seattle harassing Miss Peel over the telephone. Miss Peel was upset; Jake was trying to calm her down. The police had been around again. They’d raided the warehouse and hadn’t found anything incriminating, but they kept coming around trying to bully everyone into snitching off their boss, and Jake was having to do a lot of hand-holding.

  Clive had been right about one thing: Miss Peel needed to be kept happy. She knew so much that she could put Jake away for a very long time. He also knew that she was smart enough to have hidden copies of everything in some safety deposit box somewhere. Miss Peel had many admirers—sports stars, several of them, famous men who were in the papers nearly every week. One of them clearly loved her and sent her flowers as often as he was in the paper. If anything bad were to happen to Miss Peel, it would be noticed. It would be investigated vigorously. Also, Jake was sure there were portions in her will and testament that read, “If anything of a suspicious nature should happen upon my death …” At least she could be trusted. The ballplayers were insurance both ways; she wouldn’t want her gangster connections coming out while she was still in play.

  Jake had been riding a seesaw with his fortunes. On one hand, it turned out to be a good thing that Clive had cleared the money out of the unit; if he hadn’t, it would be sitting in some evidence room right now and Jake would have no hope of ever seeing it again. On the other hand, it was a bit of bad luck that he had shot Oscar in the knee because it had pissed the man off and sent him running. He suspected Oscar had snitched him off; the cops kept asking about a gun and about Oscar’s whereabouts.

  Jake said that he’d be happy to talk with the police and get all of this mess cleared up; they just needed to set up an appointment with his lawyer; and the cops took that and walked away, lumbered down the steps leaving Jake smiling at their back. They’d soon discover that his lawyer would no more set up an interview to talk with the police than waive his fee.

  Life in Seattle was heating up. Real estate was looking good. Banks for some reason were loving to lend him money. But the computer kids were total pains in the asses. When they weren’t sulky about not having a basketball court in their office suites, they would complain about the coffee, for Christ’s sake. Jake was ready to drown the whole lot of them like kittens.

  Adding to his peevishness was the fact that Jake’s lawyer had started hinting around that he should be putting together cash for bail money, and had flat-out advised that it might be a good time to go on a long fishing trip in Mexico. But Jake didn’t want to leg it; start running and you have to be ready to keep running, and he wasn’t ready. He had to be somewhere his agent could find him; he had to be somewhere where he could entertain producers and
money men if they ever became interested in one of his scripts. So he smoothed Miss Peel’s feathers and helped her get the bail money together from his various interests.

  He was focusing most of his creative energy into Till Death Do Us Part. He’d decided to make it a bit more topical by making the lead roles—a couple who worked together as covert CIA operatives—Jewish, while their therapist would be Arab-American. He’d already drafted the early scenes where the husband and wife go to the marriage counselor for the first time, and it was funny—or it would be as soon as he smoothed it out. He could see any number of stars fighting over it. He just had to get away from the cops, lawyers, and the cokeheads for a few months. And if he could just get that money back from Clive he could solve all his problems in one fell swoop. But no one knew where Clive was.

  Jake put out feelers. His lawyer’s investigator had contacts at McNeil, where Clive had been inside. No one had a line on him. The investigator had run records and talked to the usual jailhouse snitches but had come up dry. Jake had received a report from the investigator, along with his last outrageously inflated bill. The only information in the report was from a cabdriver who had given someone who matched Clive’s description a place to stay for the night, someone who called himself Stilton Cheesewright, which was no doubt Clive. The cabbie mentioned something about this Cheesewright going to pick up his dog. Jake snorted and tried to rub the sleep from his eyes. He knew for a fact that Clive’s fleabag of a dog was dead, and the ugly new guard dog was missing.

  Jake was angry. It wasn’t easy to find someone who had no home, no car, and no mailbox or email address; it was even harder to find someone who was traveling on cash. The investigator had worked a source in the probation department but had come to a dead end. They wouldn’t give up any addresses, just told the investigator that Clive had family in Alaska. But unfortunately Alaska covered a lot of fucking real estate.