“Yesterday,” he said, “I heard about a dealer in New York who’ll pay four hundred and fifty dollars for an intact wolf skin.”
“They’re not endangered?” Miranda asked.
Jason snorted. “Are you kidding? F and G will pay you to shoot them.” He must have seen Miranda’s perplexed expression. “Fish and Game. Wolves eat the caribou. And anything else. I’ve been in this house three weeks and they’ve already tried to eat the dogs twice. I tried to shoot them but they’re too smart. A buddy of mine lost an ear last year trying to trap one. He would have lost more than that if his friend hadn’t shot the wolf in the head, which was too bad, because it’s hard to skin a wolf with a shot-off head.”
It was the most Jason had spoken since Miranda arrived, but every thing he said had made her feel queasy. “You have a gun here?”
Jason smiled. “We don’t shoot people in Alaska, Miranda. Except for that guy in McCarthy.”
“Who?”
“Some guy went completely crazy in the middle of the winter and shot half the town. When the mail plane came, he went running out to meet it shouting ‘There’s a crazy person shooting people!’ The pilot told him to jump in. He almost got away with it, but as the plane was taking off, the rest of the town came out of hiding and started chasing the plane. I always thought that would make a good scene in a movie.”
He finished his coffee. “You want to help feed the dogs?”
On the ride in, she’d heard the dogs before she’d seen them.
“What’s that?” she’d yelled into Jason’s ears.
“Dogs,” he’d answered.
She’d wanted to hit him.
When they got to the house, the dogs hurled themselves the length of the chain staked to the ground, then whimpered when the collars jerked them back. Miranda, who was used to the domesticated dogs of Los Angeles, was shocked by their feral aggressiveness.
“They’re just saying hello,” Jason had said, patting one on the head.
A lazy orange light was beginning to bleed into the gray dawn like a watercolor painted in slow motion. The dogs leaped to their feet and began a low-pitched whine when they saw Jason. “These aren’t my dogs,” he said over his shoulder. “Half belong to my dad and the other half belong to a buddy of his. They’re not used to working together, so it’s been a little rough on the trail. When I have better control, I’ll bring you with me.”
Miranda found the dogs’ ice blue eyes haughty and uncannily knowing, as if they had taken a mea sure of her worth and found her severely lacking, a position she would be hard put to argue against. But still. She didn’t want to see that in a dog’s eyes.
“I’m surprised wolves want to eat them,” she said. “They look like close cousins.”
Jason filled a bowl with chum salmon and handed it to her.
“Fancy for a dog,” Miranda said, looking down at the bright orange fish.
“Would you eat six-month-old fish?”
She edged toward a large gray-and-white female who seemed slightly more calm than the others. The dog’s eyes were fixed on the bowl. Saliva was dripping from her mouth.
“That’s Mathilda,” Jason said. “She’s the lead.”
Mathilda’s black nose twitched as she lowered her head toward the bowl. Miranda put a hand on the white fur of her head while she ate. It was coarse, like the bristle of a brush. The animal glanced blankly at Miranda and went back to eating.
“Take me with you,” Miranda said.
Jason slipped a blue harness over Mathilda’s head. “It’s cold out there.”
“I don’t mind.”
“You’re shaking like a leaf.”
“I could get dressed in five minutes.”
Jason didn’t answer.
“What am I going to do here?” she asked.
“You could finish chopping the wood. You could boil those conibears on the table in the shed and get them waxed for tomorrow. You could make bread.”
Miranda’s eyes widened.
“I’m kidding,” Jason said, and laughed. “It’s your first day. Relax. Read a book.”
Miranda nodded. She’d brought a lot of those. Novels. Biographies. A history of Alaska. Standing in the snow, watching the vaporized breath of the huskies in the cold air, she knew the books would be useless. Ever since Helen’s accident, the minute she tried to read anything, even the newspaper, her thoughts would wander to her sister. It was as if her mind refused to accept any new information for fear of displacing some important memory of her sister. Already, the Helen most readily in her head was not the Helen who argued with her the morning of the accident, a Helen filled with the vibrant promise of life. The Helen she saw when she closed her eyes was sick Helen. Helen in the hospital. Helen in a coma. Pale, bloated, vacant. Nothing like her sister. Jason had been like a tonic to the problem. When she was with him, she didn’t think about her sister at all. Maybe that was the reason she’d come to Alaska. And now he was going to leave her alone.
One dog refused to stay still for the harness over his neck. Jason pressed his full weight against the animal. At first, the dog struggled to get free, but when it realized Jason wasn’t giving in, it went limp. Jason tightened the straps around its chest.
“Do the traps kill the animals?” she asked.
“Not always.” Jason stood. The dog looked up at him with an expression resembling love.
“You shoot it,” Miranda said flatly. The thought of Jason pointing a gun at a defenseless animal was appalling.
“No, Miranda, that’s called hunting. I’m trapping. Look, you’ll be fine here alone. The wolves don’t come to the door dressed up as granny.”
Miranda looked up at the house. The exaggerated, upside-down V of the roof did look like something out of a Grimm’s fairy tale. “What’s with the A-frame?”
“It makes the snow fall off the roof.”
“I’m afraid,” she blurted out. Always, before, when Miranda alluded, however vaguely, to Helen and the accident, Jason had been sympathetic. This time, she saw a flicker of irritation in his face. It made her step away from him and throw her shoulders back. He was right. She was being weak. Bad things happened to people all the time. Look at Jason and his mother. He survived. That was what one did.
“Being alone is part of life,” Jason said, more softly.
“Oh, I know.” She looked up into the sky. It was eleven in the morning. Would the sun ever appear? “I’ll be fine.”
Jason looked uncertainly at the dogs, all connected to one another by two straps running up the middle of the formation. “I guess I could skip another day.”
“No,” she said firmly.
He looked relieved. “If I catch a rabbit”—he kissed her on the forehead—“we’ll have stew for dinner.” He stepped onto the sled, yelled, “Hike!” and took off into the white woods, a swirl of snow in his wake. She shivered and realized she had no idea when he would be back. Two hours? Ten? In California, she could have picked up the cell phone and asked. Here, she would just have to wait and see.
27
sophia stood at her bedroom window, trying to commit to memory all that she had taken for granted for so long. In one hour, a cab was arriving to take her to the airport, where she was going to catch a plane for New York City. Tomorrow, Darius was bringing Helen home. Almost six months to the day since the accident. She studied the splay of the pin oak branch, the orange tile of the neighbor’s roof, the hedge of euonymus marking the end of the yard. How often had she felt stifled by the predictability of her life, but now, preparing to leave it, she felt suffused with unanticipated sorrow for the past. Nothing but nostalgia, she scolded herself. Suddenly, her eye was drawn to movement at the bottom of the driveway. A woman, neither young nor old, and a young man filled with the jaunty spirit of life were walking toward the house. For a second, she wondered if she had somehow conjured their presence by her concentration, but as they drew closer she realized it was Maria, her cleaning lady. Observing the young man’s long
saturnine jaw, close-shaved head, goatee, white T-shirt and wide blue jeans hanging loosely off his body, Sophia thought of a phrase her mother used about young men who intimidated her. Rough trade. Then again, raising teenagers in the first decade of the twenty-first century had taught Sophia that looks mean nothing. A kid could dress like him and be a choirboy. A girl could dress like the biggest whore on Hollywood Boulevard and be a virgin. Everything was topsy-turvy. She went down the front staircase to greet them.
“Maria?” Sophia smiled. Damn it. All those years and she couldn’t remember her last name. The checks were always made out to cash.
“Mrs. McMartin.” Maria bowed her head shyly and introduced the boy. “José, mi hijo. My son.”
José held out his hand. His grip was firm and his smile was open, friendly, filled with healthy white teeth.
“Come in,” Sophia said. She had called Maria two days earlier to tell her that she was leaving and that Mr. McMartin would be moving back into the house with Helen. She thought Darius might need an extra day of help. Maria had seemed nervous but amenable. Had she changed her mind since then? Or had Sophia bounced her last check in the confusion of closing old bank accounts and opening new ones? “Let’s go to the living room.”
“No, no, the kitchen is mejor,” Maria said.
Once they were seated, Sophia noticed that Maria was nervously bobbing her head up and down, like a Torah scholar davening. “Is every thing all right?” she asked.
Maria raised a trembling finger and pointed to José, who had put a small leather satchel on the middle of the table and was now staring at it.
“Yes, ma’am.” José moved around in his seat as if he were trying to get comfortable. “We’re here because…well, you remember a month ago, when you told my mami to throw out a bag of sugar?”
Sophia nodded.
“Well, she doesn’t like to throw anything away.” José smiled affectionately at his mother. “So she took it home with her instead.”
“I’m sorry, Mrs. McMartin. I should have asked,” Maria interrupted.
“Don’t be silly,” Sophia answered. “Better it not go to waste.” A hard round ball of anxiety was beginning to form and grow in her belly. It was the size of a giant gumball, the kind the girls used to buy from vending machines for twenty-five cents, and seemed to be ricocheting throughout her upper intestines, like a pinball in a kid’s game.
“That’s what I said,” José nodded. “Anyhow, a few days later she was making some cookies for a bake sale at the church, and found what she thought was candy in the bag.” He snickered at this, as if it were a joke.
Sophia realized that Maria was watching her closely, as if to gauge her reaction. “I’m sorry?” Sophia asked, puzzled.
“Little pink-and-green pills with the Nike swoop on them? Rollis, Mitsubishis, whatever you want to call them.”
“José.” Maria looked relieved. “I told you she don’t know.”
“No,” Sophia said, shaking her head. “I have no idea.”
José leaned forward, unzipped the satchel, and took out a handful of small pink, green, and orange pills and put them on the table. Each one was enclosed in a tiny plastic Ziploc bag, a doll’s version of the bags she used for the girls’ sandwiches at school.
She leaned forward and picked one up. It was stamped with a flower, a zinnia if she’d had to guess. “Drugs?” she asked.
“X, Ecstasy, or MDMA, if you want to get technical.” José nodded.
“Wow.” Sophia shook her head. Drugs in the sugar. Not bad, Bobby, né Virgil, whoever you were. Even with it staring him in the face, Detective Louis Carone hadn’t been able to figure that one out. But then, he wasn’t the brightest light on the Christmas tree. Had Helen known? Sophia didn’t think so. Through no particular efforts by her or Darius, the girls seemed to think drugs were uncool. Even Sophia had been surprised by Helen’s lack of sympathy when Roy Beaudell’s father got busted for pot. “What a loser,” she’d said, and rolled her eyes at dinner one night.
“Two thousand hits,” José said. “That’s big. I don’t know where you got it, but the quality is good, too. No caffeine or aspirin or all that other shit—excuse me.” He glanced apologetically toward his mother.
“How do you know?” Sophia asked.
“There’s a website. You send a sample with a hundred and fifteen dollars, and they post the results. When people want to buy, they can check the quality first.”
Sophia nodded, impressed by the confluence of the free market, the Internet, and illegal drugs.
“My mami thinks X is bad because it’s a drug, but it’s not like other drugs. Nobody gets addicted. People just take it to relax, have fun. It’s like a once-in-a-while thing. Right?”
Sophia shrugged. “I really wouldn’t know.” She tried to remember what she knew about the drug from hearing the girls talk, but drew a blank.
José leaned forward, suddenly businesslike. “Do you know the street value of this?”
“No,” Sophia answered.
“Fifty thousand dollars.”
“Well,” Sophia replied, just slightly embarrassed by how prim she sounded.
The largeness of the number hung for a moment in the air.
“Do you know how long it would take my mother to make that?” José asked.
“Hijo,” Maria said sharply.
Sophia had always congratulated herself for paying more than double the minimum wage but said nothing. She could see José leading her somewhere. She waited to see what it was.
“I mean, is somebody going to come looking for this?” he asked.
“I already took it to the police. They weren’t interested.”
José looked relieved. “Because if that is true, I know somebody who would be willing to buy the whole thing. Cash only. No paper, no nothing to link us to anything. I figure we split it fifty-fifty.”
Sophia shook her head. “No.”
José looked disappointed. “Okay.” He twisted his lips. “Sixty-forty, but, remember, we didn’t have to come back here. We could have sold it on our own.”
“No.” Sophia shook her head. “I mean, I can’t sell drugs. I’m a…” She hesitated, what was she? “I’m an arts administrator.” She laughed—risible but true.
“Well”—José spread his hands—“I’m a college student but I could use some paper to help on my tuition. And my mom is a cleaning lady but she could use a car that didn’t break down every three months. And my cousins in Chihuahua could use some help getting to America and my sister, Reina, could use some diapers.”
A few years earlier, Sophia had been at one of the endless faculty dinner parties she was required to attend as a professor’s wife, when a visiting scholar from Tel Aviv had suddenly turned and looked at her. “When you come to a red light in the middle of night,” he asked, “what do you do?”
“What do you mean?” she’d asked, nonplussed by his dark, distrustful eyes.
“I mean, no one is around. Do you stop?”
“Of course.” She looked down at his hand to avoid his eyes. His knuckles were covered with wiry black hairs.
He seemed both pleased and disgusted by her answer. “Only in America. I ask this question all over the world. Israel. Lebanon. El Salvador. Everyone says, ‘I go. Of course.’ Not in America. You are a country of sheep.”
She’d kept her eyes on his knuckles, trying to ignore the insult.
“You know why?” He leaned in. “You haven’t seen war in almost two hundred years. You believe laws can contain man’s evil.”
“Well”—she’d taken a sip of white wine—“maybe if people stopped at the light, there wouldn’t be war.”
“Baa,” he’d answered.
Sophia took another sip of wine and looked away. Asshole.
“I guess this means you’re not going to sleep with me,” he’d said. “Too bad. I asked Ken to seat me next to a live prospect.”
Sophia had stayed offended for weeks. Was she a sheep? Was she, a married
woman, really considered a “prospect”? The worst part of it was, for months afterward, the image that kept coming to her mind during sex with Darius, the image, in fact, that could always push her over the edge to an orgasm was not Darius’s face looming over her or his naked ass in the bedroom mirror, it was that man’s hairy knuckles on her own treacherous flesh.
It wasn’t just the idea of breaking the law that kept Sophia from agreeing to José’s plan. Profiting from anything to do with Bobby Goralnick was unthinkable. Nor could she permit José, who seemed like a fine young man, to put himself at that kind of risk.
“José,” Sophia tried to explain, “if you got caught and ended up in jail, I would never forgive myself.”
“I won’t get caught,” he said.
“How can you know that?”
“I know.” He half laughed.
“What about you, Maria?” Sophia asked. “What do you think?”
Maria looked surprised to be asked. After twenty years of cleaning other people ’s homes, Maria Rodriguez was used to never being asked anything. It had taken her a few years, but eventually she had come to understand that the American dream the politicians talked about so freely on the TV around election time would never happen for her, despite the green card that had arrived in an official envelope marked Special Delivery from the U.S. government five years before. Even the nice clients, the ones like Sophia McMartin, who picked up their dirty underwear before she came and paid her a big tip at Christmas, had no interest in seeing her as anything but the person who scrubbed their sink. No matter how many night classes in English she took or the citizenship test she passed. What is the capital of Massachusetts? Name three signers of the Constitution. She would begin her working life in America cleaning floors and she would end it cleaning floors. But for her son, it would be different. If the children of the rich people wanted to take drugs and ruin their minds, what was it to her?
“I think what José says is okay,” she answered.
Sophia sighed. Her flight to New York was leaving in three hours. She thought about the policeman Carone and his lack of curiosity. José was right. The police would never catch him. If it was a onetime thing and it changed their lives so dramatically, where was the harm? More important, how could she stop him? He had the drugs. “Do what you want,” she said to José. “But I can’t take any money.”
And Sometimes Why Page 27
