Between Men

by Richard Canning

  As soon as we got back to shore, the two extra passengers scrambled to the deck and hopped onto the dock, sprinting toward the street until they disappeared. It was as if they hadn’t existed; the thickness of tension suddenly broke, and the driver of our boat resumed his corny, homey banter. Aamu began chattering in her croaky voice about celebrating her great-grandson’s first successful run by taking him back to the Labor Temple and Café for a few more drinks. She commanded me to meet them there in an hour. “You just got to,” she bid me severely.

  “Delilah,” I managed to croak out, “who were those other two men?”

  She let out a raucous peal of laughter, as if my question were absurd, and Johnny turned away to gaze at the street. “You know,” she said offhandedly, avoiding my eyes, “sailors used to have a ball when they finally got to port. It made up for all those dreary days at sea. Nowadays, with the terrorist threat and all, most of ’em are confined to the ship.”

  “But who were they?”

  A note of exasperation crept into her voice. “Silly man from another land, there’s still a lot of solidarity among people of the sea.” And with that, she waved good-bye, but not until her great-grandson, to my astonishment, had given me a playful slap on the ass.

  It was growing dark as I trudged back up the hill to Stapler’s house. Now the setting sun had become powerful enough to inject strong shafts of rose through the watery sky, which seemed to writhe with the pleasure of it. Then the play of light deepened into a lid that weighed heavily on the city, congealing into a black viscosity that made it hard to see my feet below me. The house, which I’d left set at 72 degrees, was toasty, as I liked it; and as was my wont when I was indoors, I kicked off my shoes and stripped down to my underwear. My memory of what had just happened seemed to crawl over me like an insect, or was it like the feeling of colliding with a spiderweb in the dark: invisible sticky strands that are impossible to remove and cling in places that are difficult to pinpoint? For the first time, a terrible sense of confinement began to close in, the feeling of becoming a pawn in someone else’s diabolic game; and the fact that I seemed to be the last to know suddenly filled me with an impotent rage. But I certainly didn’t plan to show up at the Labor Temple and Café; they could find another East Coast imbecile to use as their patsy.

  I stalked back and forth in my underwear in the dark house, windmilling my arms at invisible fears, then hurried to my luggage to extract another tablet of morphine and threw open the door of the walnut cabinet of the bar, which struck the wall, chipping the plaster. Grabbing what was left of the scotch, I swilled it down, then doubled over coughing, letting the bottle crash to the floor.

  It was in this tortured position that I noticed the seashell on the floor below the couch, and something metallic gleaming from it. The shell held a large key, the classic type that had been used over eighty years ago. That’s when I realized I hadn’t yet bothered to examine the house.

  Muttering and with head bowed, I walked up the stairs in the dark until my forehead collided painfully against a door. At first the key didn’t seem to fit, but after jiggling the handle and key at the same time, I felt the door give and pushed it open. Behind it was a narrow, very steep flight of more stairs, almost vertical, of a type I’d seen only in the cramped houses lining the canals of Amsterdam, leading to the attic. In my inebriated state of bewilderment and rage, it was all I could do to pull myself up them, sputtering for breath. At the top, I fumbled for a light switch and flipped it on, which illuminated only half of the immense space. Beneath the sloping walls of the attic was a single gigantic room, which looked almost like an army barracks, mostly because of the rows of about thirty cots that filled the center. The walls were lined with books, and stooping under the sloping sides of the roof to examine them, I began scanning the titles. Everything was impeccably arranged, in alphabetical order: from Bakunin, Bey, and Goldman to Debord and Zerzan; but pop marginals were there, as well, such as McVeigh and Manson. Stacks of clippings recounting attacks and arrests that went all the way back to the Symbionese Liberation Movement and the Panthers had been carefully paper-clipped together in folders.

  At the far end of the room, which was still plunged into gloom, was a large, white board on a wooden stand, blocking the triangular window, the kind of board used in kindergartens on which you could write with a felt-tip pen and then erase by wiping off. On it, in the semidarkness, was a childishly drawn multicolored drawing. I stumbled toward the light switch on the opposite wall and flipped it on. A brass Revere chandelier, hanging precariously from the ceiling and outfitted with flame-shaped bulbs, illuminated the room with a wan glow. On the whiteboard was a felt-tip map of the Oregon coast; it was obvious that it had been painstakingly but rather inaccurately copied and enlarged from a smaller map in a book in an artless attempt to reproduce the many inlets and tiny peninsulas that jutted from the shore. Red dots had been used to indicate the cities, and blue lines depicted the highways connecting them.

  It took me a moment to realize that the green line running north/south was a visual rendering of my itinerary. There it was, beginning at a little asterisk next to the city of Seattle, advancing down along the Washington and Oregon coasts to Portland, then dropping further down to Eugene and back up to Portland, zigzagging west to Astoria and then across the bridge to Washington State on toward Canada.

  Through the numbness of alcohol and morphine, I stared dazedly at it, mouthing the strange words in brackets next to each stop on the itinerary:1. Pre-Assignment: New York—Background Investigation

  2. Seattle: Brush Contact with Target—Cold Approach

  3. Portland: Maintain Cover—Plant Drugs If Necessary

  4. Eugene: First Contact, with Cell—Begin Biographic Leverage

  5. Portland: Honey Trap (Use Raven for Co-option)

  6. Astoria: Employ Usual Stringer; Contact Is to Maintain Deep Cover; Some Disinformation Could Prove Helpful; Raven May Use Pressure

  7. Aberdeen: Continue Attempt at Reeducation

  8. Vancouver: Target Should Be Ready for Enlistment (Employ Multiple Ravens Again, If Necessary); If Recruitment Negative, Burn2

  But why should anyone believe me? Why should I believe myself when I know my blood was saturated with more alcohol and morphine than even I was used to imbibing, when I found myself lying in my underwear among shards of glass from the broken scotch bottle in the middle of the downstairs living room floor the next morning, without any memory of getting back down there, if I had, indeed, ever gone up?

  Moments later, as I was loading the rest of Stapler’s liquor supply into my duffle bag, I felt a large, rough hand with a strangely sensitive touch gently caressing the back of my neck with its big knuckles. Then the hand grasped my neck and turned me around, after which I saw enormous, wild blue eyes staring into mine. They were, I decided, the eyes of Delilah/Aamu’s great-grandson, Jukka, if you’ll allow me to use his Finnish name, and they pulled me toward him with a strange magnetism, until my lips were crushed against his, tasting the flavor of the licorice snus he kept in his mouth between cheek and gums, then opening to the plunge of his tongue.

  After we pulled away, the look on his face was in no way in accordance with the amorous gesture he’d just completed. His features were hardened into a blank, militaristic impassivity, and the blue eyes had dulled into the impenetrable color of tin. “I’ve received instructions,” he said. “I don’t believe his car can make it all the way to Vancouver, so you’ll be leaving it here and riding with me in my Jeep for the rest of the itinerary.”

  Without answering, I took a step to the side so that I was in line with the open door behind him, through which the first truly sunny day of my visit glared; but he rapidly shifted his position, forming a barrier between me and that portal of freedom.

  “Get your bag,” he required in a flat, staccato voice that bordered on the sullen, then folded his arms over a puffy chest and stood blocking the door with legs astride. I’ll never forget the image of his backlit
, unmoving, booted body, in its khaki green clothing, transformed into a two-dimensional dark silhouette by the constriction of my pupils to the harsh light outside the door. It changed everything around it into a fable, within which he became the central golem.

  “You should have showed up at the Labor Temple and Café last night,” was all he said. “We were expecting you.” The severity of his tone was enough to make me follow wordlessly with my bag to the Jeep.

  The Jeep rattled down the steep incline toward the water and then swerved left toward the bridge. Jukka had lapsed into a stony silence, which complemented my emerging sense of being held prisoner. He answered my few questions in monosyllables or short sentences, almost the way a superior briefs a petty officer. In such a situation, others might have been fixated on the possibilities for escaping, or at least be trying to unravel the web of manipulation that had put them in this perplexing position. But amazingly, my entire mind was occupied by the notions with which I’d arrived in this region and how artlessly “off” every impression that I’d had was.

  This was all I thought about as we drove over the Astoria Bridge toward Washington State, not so very far above the steel-gray, thrashing waves of the mouth of the Columbia River below. It was a thrilling experience, almost like driving across the surface of the water itself, because of the relative thinness and astonishing length of this truss bridge. We were headed, Jukka informed me, for the eastern end of Grays Harbor, on the banks of the Chehalis and Wishkah rivers, to pick up a “shipment” (human, I suspected) before continuing on to Vancouver; and as the spray stung my face through the open windows of the Jeep, as well as after, I had the impression that I was finally understanding this region for the very first time. It was neither an Edenic natural paradise nor a smug, opportunist hub of commerce; but actually an accidental, brilliantly grotesque collision between the two. Again and again in the fine mist of sea and rain, huge stretches of forest and water would hypnotize me into a state of awed surrender, whether I saw the gloom-ridden, totalitarian majesty of a stand of old Douglas firs or waves slashing a desolate, pebbly shore; and then all this would be interrupted suddenly by the baldness of a clear-cut hill or the sinister smoke-spewing stacks and tangled juggernaut of a power plant. Unlike the East, where, in many places, such sights had long ago tamed and supplanted nature, here the struggle aggressively raged in all its blatant and elemental vulgarity. Everything seemed accidental and random, and at moments I chastised myself for my naïveté in thinking that I’d been assigned to an insipid territory that was energetically working in an orderly manner to spread the commodified North American dream. No, by some accident I’d fallen upon another form of chaos—I, the critic who had always lauded the chaotic adventure of the Eastern urban scene. This was a place—I finally had to admit—of violence and struggle, a thrillingly ugly battle between the land and humans that produced a rich, stupefying sensory experience. Here there would never be a chance for genuine order; only the snarl of nature echoed by the discontent of the human condition—and all of it hiding under a featureless mask of progressivism because the people here were well aware that their struggle could never be completely expressed in words.

  Having read a fair amount of literature about the next stop on my itinerary, I knew what to expect of Aberdeen, the small city at the eastern end of Grays Harbor: a drab southern Washington mill town not many miles from the other side of the Astoria Bridge, population approximately seventeen thousand, a good amount of whom, after losing their jobs in the declining lumber industry, must have declined into alcoholism, which the surprising number of taverns and bars in the nearly deserted downtown area clearly confirmed.

  Jukka parked the Jeep on the main street, informing me that we were about to “make our choices from the shipment.” He led me into the only establishment in downtown Aberdeen that seemed to have any activity: a pool-hall-cum-newsstand in which a collection of savage male adolescents, fated for dereliction and homelessness, loitered, playing pool, bumming cigarettes, and breaking into occasional scuffles until the proprietor, a pallid, middle-aged blond woman with ringed eyes, bellowed at them over the sound of The Doors’ “People Are Strange.”

  Never before, even in the ghettos of the East, had I seen such ebullient desperation. Scraggly haired and scrawny, jittery with rageful anxiety, the shoulders of their shirts and their cigarettes drenched by the rain outside, they marched up and down the length of the pool table, often hitting the ball with such force that it went flying off to strike a wall, an event that produced catcalls of perverse jubilation. Others stared glumly with slackened mouths at the “game” in process, calling out acidic insults every time someone missed a shot. The majority had the habit of rubbing their crotches during an idle moment, not in any gesture of sexuality but in the bored spirit of passing time evoked by a cat licking its fur. They were speed freaks, I assumed; but they were also casualties of a failing economy, more than likely to have been abused at home by working-class parents who were victims of the new service economy, wore sweatshirts calling for the frying of the spotted owl, and spent the endless rainy season unemployed paging through copies of Soldier of Fortune magazine, which one of the youths sat perusing at that very moment.

  Jukka picked several of them, drew them into a corner of the pool hall, and whispered an inaudible proposition into their ears. I sat across the room studying them, interrupted regularly by one or another bumming a cigarette, until my pack was depleted, while I continued my meditation on my journey in a new, demoralized way. Once again, I was seized by the impulse to escape the subversive activities of this outfit, which now seemed to have become increasingly apparent at each stage in the journey. Yes, I was through with my “research.” There had to be a moment when Jukka would forget his vigilance.

  Jukka’s new recruits, he informed me, would meet us the following morning at the garish motel he’d chosen for us, with neon signs promising pleasures that ranged from waterbeds and mini-gyms to cable TV. It was less than a block from the local casino, and Jukka specified that it be booked in my name, traveling as he undoubtedly was under cover.

  It was very early evening when we checked in, even too soon for dinner. Despite the orangey light of the bedside lamp, Jukka’s perky features—which included a small, regular nose, dimpled chin, blue, enormously lidded eyes, and pink, sinuous lips—suddenly took on an exhausted pallor. Then a strange gleam of compassion crept into his formerly opaque irises, and he gently motioned me to him on the bed. Quite rapidly, his entire face was contaminated by this new delicate emotion; he took my head in both enormous callused hands and stared into my face with a disturbing frankness. The words that followed astounded me, because despite their liberal use of euphemisms, they contained an uncanny awareness of my own mental processes. I seemed to be, he said, about to fail at the accomplishment of the project for which I’d been drafted. This, he had to admit, was causing him an uncustomary feeling of consternation; it was not often the case that he developed a sense of protectiveness about his “targets.” It was in fact downright unprofessional of him; nevertheless, the task he’d have to perform if I did not swiftly progress in my “reeducation” was one that he now dreaded.

  Taking a different tack, he made some references to the prejudices with which I had arrived but said he wanted to make it clear that he was, in fact, quite impressed by my intelligence. However, I seemed to have a tendency for a certain kind of emotionality that the “drafters” hadn’t considered. I wouldn’t call the tone that followed “pleading,” but the tiny tremor in his voice rather closely resembled it. All I had to do, he explained, was open myself to the struggle of the people of this region. Then his voice darkened, returning to its robotic frigidity, as he added, with a strange casualness, “Otherwise you’re finished.”

  I suppose that the gesture that came next was an attempt to color what he’d said as convincing, and I will not describe it in detail because none of this really has much relevance to my story. I won’t dwell on every feature o
f his deliriously silken, wiry body, nor the two hard melons of his buttocks, which tightened into steel with each thrust into me as we lay together on the still-made bed, because I doubt anyone would believe me, and because my state of confusion at the time would not make me a very reliable narrator. I will admit, however, that despite the swooning surrender necessary to accommodate such maneuvers, I did not lapse completely into the manipulated subject that was the intended goal because, shortly after he fell asleep, I crept to retrieve his olive khakis on the floor and gently extracted the key to the Jeep. Then, with no idea of where it would take me, I sped up East Market Street and northwest on East Second, where I found myself in a lower-class residential neighborhood and a frustrating cul-de-sac.

  I threw the Jeep into park and sat anxiously staring through the dirty windshield at the eternal drizzle, wondering about the easiest way to find egress. Those thoughts were quickly interrupted by the sight in my rearview mirror of an approaching taxi, quite far off, but driving much too fast for the transportation of a normal client. Fearing that it was indeed Jukka in the backseat of the cab, in search of me, I leaped out of the Jeep and looked around wildly. For lack of a better idea, I crept under the small overpass bridge at the end of the street, happy that the drizzle had turned into an angry torrent and might keep anyone from spying me.