No place in particular, he’d say. No place in particular, coming and going. How about yourself? A woman like you shouldn’t be knocking around these parts alone.
I can handle it, I’d say. I can handle most things.
Tough, eh? Come to Nome with me, where men wear guns on their hips, like the old West, and the sidewalks are built of boards, and everyone’s running from something. Come to Kotzebue or Disaster Creek. Ever drive the Alcan when the gravel runs out? Ever camp on pack ice at minus thirty? You can be just as tough as you want to be.
Excuse me, I’d say. I have to make a phone call.
I got off the ferry in Petersburg the next morning. Petersburg was this fishing town founded by Norwegians. I heard some tourists complaining that it was not as Norwegian and picturesque as they had been led to believe, and you couldn’t buy anything Norwegian. There was a blond here and there, and a few of the downtown buildings were painted with hearts and birds and flowers. That was all. There were a lot of big fish factories and canneries in Petersburg and now, in the summer, crews of kids worked there, living in campsites outside of town. On their day off they all hiked into the Laundromat to wash the fish guts out of their clothes. The tourists contemplated them glumly, their cameras sagging around their necks.
I got sick in Petersburg, a fever and a cough. For three days I stayed in a hotel room drinking a bottle of cheap brandy and trying to call Mac. No one bothered me. It was the weekend so I called him at home, but his wife always answered. Once when I called I was an old woman who had reached a wrong number. Once, and this was the best or worst one, I said I was the hometown paper, and did she want to subscribe. I thought she’d say no, because I always did when I got calls like that, but when she said yes, I had to go ahead and pretend to sign her up.
Mac’s wife was a tiny girl with long limp hair falling into her eyes. The one time I met her, at a party, she made absolutely no impression on me. That was before Mac and I began anything, so I didn’t have to feel melodramatic about her. At the party Mac’s wife drank diet soda and got into a lengthy conversation with the host about the merits of electric bug zappers. Of course I wondered what Mac saw in her. For a long time I wondered what hidden charms or powers she possessed, but I finally figured it out. She was his advertisement to other women: I am available for screwing around.
I thought I could handle it. I thought I was tough and reckless and wild, a real old sourdough. I had handled it pretty well while it was going on, but not now, when it was over, coughing up snot and brandy into a dead phone. I was losing track of who I was pretending to be. I packed up my bag and tottered down to the ferry terminal to wait for the next boat.
I’d missed the scheduled ferry while I was sick and no one knew when one would come through again. Things were like that in Alaska, hit or miss, as if they were too far away from the rest of the country to be bothered by the usual urgencies. I sat in the weeds outside the terminal, waiting. The fever made the sun blare down too hard and everything tilt in odd directions. I talked to a man waiting for a ride back into town. I was talking to him because he was short, though I didn’t tell him that. I figured short men were safer, if you had to talk to someone.
I traded him the telephone credit card number for some dope, and we sat in the weeds, smoking companionably. He had a cheery, handsome face, and he wore a plaid shirt and khakis. He looked out of place, like a fraternity rush chairman gone wrong. He’d been bear watching at the town dump, him and a friend, and they’d spotted two. I asked him what the bears looked like.
“Disgusting. Like anything looks when it’s going through garbage.”
His name was Willy and he was from Connecticut. He was going to Denali, Mount McKinley, hitching the Alcan. He wanted to see Eskimos and glaciers and whales. He wanted to see everything. When he’d used up half his money, he’d turn back. He thought. “Sometimes I’m afraid if I go too far I’ll just keep going. End up in Japan or somewhere, you know?”
Willy had been camping out with the fish factory workers, but that was getting old. Those jokers thought it was great to cook fish over a campfire and eat it with their bare hands. As bad as the goddamn bears. If I ever came to Connecticut, I should look him up. If he was there, that is. He knew some pretty nice restaurants. We’d have ourselves a real dinner.
I said I’d do that. It seemed like a good-enough plan to me. When his ride came he hiked off with a jaunty wave. I was trying to get used to people coming and going, popping up and disappearing so fast.
The ferry came at dusk. I stood on the deck and looked around me. It was like no place I’d ever seen. The sky was a bowl of stars held in by the black shapes of the mountains, and the harbor was a pool of the last sunset, and the lights of the little town glittered. I was thinking it didn’t have to be so bad, being here. That was a new thought for me. I went down to the ship’s purser and bought a bed for the night.
What you could buy cheaply was called dorm space, one bunk in a four-bunk cabin. There were only three of us, me, Vivian, and Rose. Vivian was getting off at Haines Junction and driving a pickup truck to Valdez to meet her husband, who worked on the pipeline. Vivian said it VAL-dez, which I guess is how it’s supposed to be pronounced. She said she hadn’t seen her husband in eight months. I said she must be pretty excited about seeing him.
Vivian shook her head. “Eight months. What kind of marriage is that? I don’t know anymore. You ever been to Valdez? They had them this big earthquake. Everything got smashed and they built it up again all trailers. I’m going to drive seven hundred miles to live in a trailer with what’s-his-name. I just don’t know.”
I liked Vivian. She told me all this about five minutes after she met me. She had red hair done up in one of those curly, architectural styles. I was thinking about the photographer, who had a wife but didn’t see her much because he was always away taking pictures of mountains and deserts and jungles. I thought about Mac and his wife, and what kind of a marriage was that?
The other woman, Rose, was a lot older. She had white hair cut straight across her forehead, Buster Brown fashion, and she wore plaids and heavy shoes and spent a lot of time brushing her teeth. She had an accent I thought was German, but it was really Scottish. This was a terrible boat, she said. The engines were noisy. The lounges were too crowded. Last night in the cafeteria they had served a really unspeakable piece of veal.
And so on. When she marched off to take her evening promenade of the decks, I asked Vivian if Rose always had this many complaints.
“Since Seattle,” said Vivian. “Every blessed day.”
“Where is it she’s going?”
“Nowhere. She got on in Seattle. She’s going to the end of the line, then turning around and coming back. I don’t think she’s been off the boat for two hours total.”
I said it was a shame that Rose wasn’t having a better trip.
“Are you kidding?” said Vivian. “She’s having a ball. The time of her life. Some people just got weird ways of enjoying themselves.”
I climbed into a top bunk and slept like the dead. Except I had a dream about Mac. I dreamed he was someone I didn’t recognize. That is, he came up to me on the street and said, Hello, it’s me, I love you. But I didn’t know his face; he could have been anybody. It’s me, Mac, he kept insisting, and I was embarrassed, the way you are when you can’t remember people. I love you too, I said, but he could tell I was only being polite. There was a horrible jarring noise. Oh, that’s the earthquake, said Mac, or the fake Mac, conversationally. I opened my eyes. Rose was thumping from the bottom bunk, telling me we were in Juneau.
I said good-bye to them both. Rose warned me about taxi drivers and unclean restaurants. Vivian said, “I wish I was going with you. You know what they say about Alaska. Ten good men for every woman.”
“Vivian, you’re married, remember?”
“Sure. I got this great memory.”
The first thing I did in Juneau was try and call Mac. The dream confused me. I thought I had
it backward, that if anything, Mac would be forgetting me. I thought something must be horribly wrong and the dream was a psychic signal. I called Mac at work and the secretary answered. Of course he wasn’t in.
“This is Dr. Valdez’s office,” I said. “When could I reach him?”
The line crackled. I imagined the secretary squinting through clouds of cigarette smoke, like a dragon guarding the telephone. The secretary smoked cigarettes that came in long pastel boxes and had snazzy, upbeat women in their ads, the kind of women neither of us would ever be. Look, I wanted to tell her. It’s me. You got me. I give up.
The secretary said she thought Mac would be in at three o’clock. That was something to go on. Maybe I fooled her and she figured a doctor, she could listen in and hear something personal and embarrassing.
Juneau was a real city, the capital, with buses and office buildings and even a four-lane highway. It made you feel like Daniel Boone coming into town after a long tramp through the territories. I had some time to kill before I called Mac again, so I took a bus to the glacier. You could do that here. They called it the drive-in glacier and it was just a few miles out of town. I thought I would phone Mac from the visitors’ center there. Where are you? he’d ask, and I’d say, On a glacier.
But the bus took a lot longer than I’d thought it would. We passed a shopping center, houses, a used car lot. It was like a bus ride anywhere, except we crossed a stream so thick with salmon they looked like a wallpaper pattern. When the bus let me out there was still about a mile to walk, and you were still nowhere. All I was thinking about was calling Mac. I could see the glacier up ahead in the notch of two mountains. It looked like dirty snow. I had half an hour to find a phone, I figured.
But when I got to the glacier there wasn’t any phone. The visitors’ center was the rustic kind, with plaques talking about eskers and lateral moraines and outwash plains. There was a nature trail and a telescope. I was really upset about the phone, like, who ever heard of a glacier without a phone? Right outside was the glacier, like the screen of a drive-in movie a mile and a half wide. The ice was gray and black and crumpled. It reminded you of an old sheet of aluminum foil. The glacier wasn’t doing anything at all. It was just one of those things you were supposed to go see, like the Eiffel Tower in Paris. I turned back the way I’d come and stood by the side of the road with my thumb out.
An old man in a big clean car picked me up. I said I had to call my doctor before he left the office, and he could drop me off at the shopping center.
The old man said he always hated to see a girl out there hitchhiking. It was dangerous, there was no telling who you might run into. “I live just down the road a little ways. Not even five minutes. Come home with me, you can call from there.”
I looked at him. He wasn’t ancient old. He was maybe sixty. He had a wedge of crimped, sandy hair and a pink face collapsing in on itself, and he was dressed like a sporty old man, in checked trousers and a knit shirt. He could have been anybody.
“No thank you,” I said. “I could be on the phone for a while.”
“I’ll be there a while. I go home for lunch. Every day, that’s what I do. You hungry? Ham sandwiches.”
“The shopping center’s fine.”
“Five minutes away,” he said. “Then I’ll take you back to town. Drop you anywhere. I run an upholstery business right downtown.”
I thought of calling Mac from the old man’s house. Where are you? he’d ask, and I’d say, At an upholsterer’s. “It’s long distance,” I said.
“Talk all you want. What’s a few phone calls, what does that cost anybody? Sometimes people just need to talk to each other.”
“Turn here,” I told him. I had my hand on the door. I figured if I had to, I would open it and kick my way out.
“You girls,” he said, sighing, making the turn, coasting up to the shopping center. “One of these days you’ll end up trusting the wrong person.”
Mac’s phone was busy for twenty minutes. When the line was clear the secretary told me he’d gone for the day.
I saw the Solitary Traveler again in Juneau. He was down by the waterfront smoking his pipe, just like before. I was still too shy to talk to him. Where have you been? I’d ask him, and he’d say, Prospecting. On Gold Creek, halfway up the mountain. I’m staking a claim.
But the gold’s gone. It’s been gone for years and years.
Just because you can’t see something doesn’t mean it’s not there.
The mines closed down, I said. The prospectors went broke.
He shook his head. There’s times that people ignore things right under their own noses.
Like what? I said. What things? But he was blowing blue pipe smoke. I couldn’t get him to say any more.
There was a place in Juneau where you could buy phone calls, a store that sold phone calls. You paid them to dial the number for you and you sat in a little booth and talked. Travelers used it, and the Mexicans and Filipinos who worked on the big cruise ships, lining up to call home. Two young guys ran the phone call store. I told one of them that I wanted to talk to my ex-husband but I didn’t want to talk to his wife. Could he place a person-to-person call for him, and if he was there, let me talk?
The phone call guy got into it. “What name should I use?”
“It doesn’t matter. Anybody.”
“I’ll be Bruce Wayne,” he said. “You know, Batman. We’ll flash him the old Bat-Signal.” He was really into it, and he seemed like a nice guy. I felt sort of bad about telling him the ex-husband story.
So Bruce Wayne called Mac at home, but Mac had just gone out. Mrs. Mac didn’t know when he’d be back. No, he couldn’t be reached at the office and she didn’t know when he’d get the message.
“She’s a real sweetheart,” said the phone call guy. “What’s she got going for her, she rich or something?”
“Something,” I said. I liked him. I thought I would have liked to get to know him better, if it wasn’t for the effort of being in love.
I took a southbound ferry to Sitka. The boat was almost empty and I sneaked into a cabin, one with a real bed. Nobody seemed to mind. I still had the brandy bottle. I drank a big slog from it. I wondered what Mac was doing right then, right that minute. I thought if I tried hard enough to see him, I could. It seemed you ought to be able to aim desire like a lens, and pass your longing straight through it. Maybe I was simply out of range.
I put the cap back on the bottle. It seemed like a good idea to save some for later and besides, no one would know or care how drunk I got.
Sitka had been the Russian capital of Alaska. It had a fort with cannons, and a Russian cathedral, and women who dressed up in costumes to do Russian dances for tourists. I took a limo van from the ferry into town, and I asked the driver if the Russians had made much difference. He shrugged and said not so you’d notice, but they had killed a lot of Indians.
The hotel this time was sort of creepy. Nobody seemed to be staying there except me, and a couple of old men watching TV on a plastic-covered couch in the lobby. A sign by the front desk said that showers could be rented by the public.
But the room did have a phone. I called Mac’s house. I hadn’t figured out what to say this time. I was tired of having to make everything up. When Mac’s wife answered I didn’t say anything at all.
“Hello,” she said. “Hello?”
The line whooped and crackled. I couldn’t think of one thing to say. If I’d opened my mouth the only thing that would have come out would have been some kind of animal noise, like a dog baying at the moon.
“If this is Sheila,” Mac’s wife announced, “you don’t have to bother calling anymore. He told me all about you. I found the apartment key. It’s all over and we’re going on with our lives. I think you’re pathetic. Plus a few other things.”
I put the phone back quietly. My name wasn’t Sheila, and I didn’t have an apartment.
I walked outside. It was raining, the misty, constant rain that people in the Pan
handle called liquid sunshine. I had a fold-up rubber poncho that came down low over my forehead and smelled like the inside of a shoe. I went to see all the Russian things. I went to see all the Indian things. There were still plenty of Indians around, the Tlingits. They were pretty much like everybody else now, after having been beat up by so many white armies. There was even an Indian center set up to teach them how to be Indians again and do things like beadwork and wood carving.
I walked down to the waterfront. The sun was coming out behind the veils of rain. The light came through in rainbow smears. Little islands like separate countries dotted the harbor, and at one end was the extinct volcano, Mount Edgecumbe. This was the Pacific Ocean, I told myself. This was beautiful. I was trying to make myself feel the right way about something for once.
Someone tapped me on the shoulder. I had to fight my way past the poncho to turn around and see. It was Willy from Connecticut. He said, “You know what’s out there? Japan. It’s a straight shot.”
“I’m leaving tomorrow,” I said. I’d just made up my mind.
“Leaving? For where?”
“Home. The Lower Forty-eight. The Outside.”
“So we’ll go out tonight,” said Willy. “Live it up. See the sights. This is like fate, you know? We were fated to have dinner.”
I told Willy I’d meet him later. I went to the airline office and got a flight to Seattle the next morning. Everything was really over now, I told myself. But it didn’t feel over yet. I went back and forth calling Mac names and calling myself names. Chump. Stupid idiot. Prick.
I met Willy in a bar where you could watch the sunset over the harbor. “You shouldn’t be going into bars by yourself all the time,” said Willy. “I worry when girls do that.”
“Chivalry is horseshit,” I said.
“Aren’t you sweet.”
“I can’t help it. I’m in love. I’m in love with a jerk.”
“Is that what’s eating you? Listen, love is horseshit. Back in Connecticut is this girl. Talk about love, you can’t imagine two people more in love than we are. I mean, it’s perfect.”
Throw Like A Girl Page 12
