by John Straley
Todd’s berth took some cajoling and the rest of my fee. This would have been the second extended trip of his entire life, the first being a trip to Centralia, Washington, which involved an aborted bus trip and a string of bizarre rides on Todd’s first-ever hitchhiking experience. But we couldn’t leave him alone, mostly because he was rather indiscriminate on who he would invite home, and we couldn’t trust that the house wouldn’t be overrun with strangers upon our return. During one lunch hour this summer, I came home to find a church group from Indiana having lunch on our wobbly deck out over the channel. Then there was a Filipino gambling society that had to be asked to leave. No, Todd would be making the trip with us. So my fee was forfeited but there was still the bar tab, the midnight buffets, and the moonlight cuddling on the aft deck, tucked in a blanket with a hot toddy and a wedge of Brie on a cracker. Here was the summer of my discontent being made glorious by this Sonny Walters.
Of course, I knew he was lying to me. I figured the ship’s doctor had probably maimed one of the passengers in some sort of blatant malpractice. The company wanted to fire him. But firing any doctor is problematic, especially one with a sweet gig. The company wanted to know how bad the news was. They needed some ammunition to either fire the doctor or cover the whole thing up. They just wanted a read on it before they had to act. This was fine with me. I’d just try and figure out what they wanted to hear, and give it to them. Anything to get me off the island. Anything to forget this summer.
We had two days to pack and make excuses for unexpectedly putting our real lives on hold for two weeks. Vernon Welsh, who ran the landscaping business, was so tickled with the thought of Todd on a cruise ship, he not only gave Todd the time off, he gave him some extra cash to spend on the boat. Then Vernon did something which seemed out of character until just after he had done it. He slipped me a check for three hundred dollars, pulled me aside and whispered: “For Christ’s sakes get him something decent to wear. It wouldn’t be right to have old Todd stick out on that ship like some goddamn retard.” I took the money and Vernon slapped me on the shoulder as if he knew I could keep a secret.
Of course, I’m sure Vernon assumed that Todd was a goddamn retard. In fact, once when Todd put diesel fuel into the riding mower, Vernon had used the words himself. But it was in character that Vernon would want Todd to be dignified if he were going on the ship. Dignity is what a tourist town needs most: Dignity is often the first to go.
We were to be tourists in our own country. Sitka, Alaska, had been the capital of Russian America, and we like to remember that when San Francisco was a tiny mud-rutted Spanish village, Sitka, Alaska, was the European capital of the Pacific, with nobility, chamber music, and the imperialist’s naive sense that with enough guns and whiskey one could make anywhere home. There is a long tradition of tourism and adventure in Russian America. Some of the aristocrats I’m sure felt they needed to escape the Old World and thought of this Alaska as a chance to see their philosophies writ large. Everything a traveler sees or does generally confirms this belief that God is with them . . . again, as long as the guns and whiskey hold out.
From the era of the sail to the age of steam, European visitors would walk the boardwalks of Sitka and buy trinkets from the Tlingit Indian women who crouched against the log buildings and sold their baskets and decorated bottles. Small white children would cut their hair and sell their curls to rich widows from Philadelphia who thought it odd that such curly-haired angels could live in these far reaches of rock and ice. The kids would take their money, then add to it by crawling under the boardwalk out in front of the bar where coins fell through the cracks into the mud. Then, dirty and happy, they’d buy hard candies or peppermint sticks from the package goods store. With their money, the Indian women bought fishing gear or fabric or canning jars. But whatever it was, it always seemed a good trade and both sides seemed satisfied.
Today, Sitka is caught in the transition from the timber industry into something else. And the supply of people who want to see God in the landscape appears to be almost limitless. Apparently, we no longer need guns and whiskey to survive in the wilderness. Well, we like guns and whiskey, but apparently we need computers, cable TV, reliable power, modern schools, better guns, stronger whiskey, and more wilderness to make room for our new thirst for strangeness.
Jane Marie had students working on her humpback whale data and she had the ever reliable Mr. Meagles to take care of The Playing Around Review. She now had a mailing list of twelve hundred subscribers. She was publishing articles by writers from all over the north and even some flossy poets who liked her take on the world. The review came out monthly now, and her ad revenue was starting to pay almost all of the larger bills. The letters from readers were always lively and on target. Jane Marie says that if you asked readers directly to talk about a subject like sex or power between men all you would get is weird retreads of other people’s opinions. But have them talk about games, in detail, and you get it all: faith, luck, randomness, and love. She continually ran articles on games that men should play with women and vice versa.
Mr. Meagles was at work on laying out the next newsletter and Jane Marie had hired a couple of kids to help with the mailings. Meagles was working on an article on Charades and the considerations when inviting friends to play it. This had been sparked by letters to the newsletter describing people’s recent frustration at how hard it was to get a group together who even had heard of the same books and movies. This had caused some serious arguments and hurt feelings up in Barrow with a group of teachers who had huddled together to keep themselves entertained. This situation was just what Jane Marie loved to delve into. She had written the teachers back and asked for more details, ages, education, ethnic origins, and sex of the people in the prospective “Charades Pool” of Barrow.
On the way to the airport we stopped by her little office headquarters which was in a float house down near the float plane dock. Jane Marie had drafted out the Charades article, but Mr. Meagles was fiddling with the draft. Jane Marie stood behind him and looked into the computer screen. Mr. Meagles had been a venerable barfly in Juneau until Jane Marie placed him solidly in the party-gaming industry. He had been up most of the night working on this article. His hair was standing up on top of his head and he was chewing on the end of a pencil. In her earlier columns Jane Marie had already included the advice on limiting alcohol, including children in all the teams, and suggested having theme nights that the players could prepare for ahead of time. But the fights had apparently kept happening and the letters kept pouring in. “All of our friends are so dissimilar!” the letters kept calling out. “We don’t know the same things” was what they said in one way or another.
Jane Marie put her hand on Mr. Meagles’s shoulder and let out a long sigh. She said, “There is more to it. My guess is there will be a divorce by spring and the game will be moved. Just tell them to get along, for Christ’s sakes. I’m going on a cruise.”
Mr. Meagles waved to us as we left. He had a wild sentimental smile on his face and it looked as if he were holding on to one end of a very long streamer thrown from the deck of a boat.
I didn’t have any loose ends to tie up. We’d eaten the chicken. I told my friend the lawyer that a big goofy white dog was killing her poultry. Luckily, this lawyer was a dog person too, and was not of the Alaskan mind-set to either kill or poison the offending interloper. She’d called up the dog’s owner and talked to him about rehabilitation prospects as well as sharing the cost of a new fence. She paid me two hundred dollars. I spent five dollars of that on a sports coat at the White Elephant shop, and the rest of the money on film for Todd’s camera.
Todd took pictures through the window of the jet until I told him to stop. Todd is very compliant, but the problem with telling him to stop doing something is that he doesn’t stop wanting. He sat in the window seat nervously eating honey-roasted peanuts, one nut at a time, rocking ever so s
lightly back and forth, then he would lift the camera to his eyes for just a second, then set it hurriedly down on his lap. All he wanted to do was take another picture but we had done a roll and a half just getting from Sitka to Ketchikan. Todd would be out of film before we boarded the ship.
I tried to tell Todd about Ansel Adams and about how he might travel for days and never take one exposure. Todd was not impressed. Todd had become fixated on photography after his last run-in with language. And I think this fits with a particular long-running theme in Todd’s life. I think Todd wants to make contact. He’d spoken to his mother after her death and he assumed that all communication came from heaven in the form of words, but he had become frustrated with that. Now he was onto images. Not that he thought he could send his photographs to heaven or anything. “That’s crazy,” he said when I tried to weasel around the subject. “Cecil, my mother is deceased. I mean how could she possibly hold a photograph close enough to her eyes to see it?” He looked at me with considerable pity.
No, Todd now was transfixed by the idea of capturing images. It was more a question of time travel for him than the transference of forms. He loved the idea of snipping out something now and seeing it later. I discovered this quite by accident when I was going through the mail and found letters Todd was sending to himself. Address Sitka, return address Sitka. In them Todd wrote letters to his future self. Always very upbeat, with hopes for good things. Always very polite. And he would include pictures. Pictures of Wendell the dog. Pictures of our street or the house. Some of ravens sitting on the roof line of the old hotel down the block. Common images. And then I noticed that in many of them he had somehow managed to put in the time. The clock on the cathedral, or a reflection of someone eating lunch by the fish plant. In one, Todd had laid an old pocket watch in the corner of the steps. This was time Todd was documenting. It wasn’t the images.
We arrived in Seattle and ran to catch our commuter flight to Vancouver, British Columbia. We got stuck in Customs when Todd tried to have a long conversation with the customs official. This was not a shakedown or anything; I think the Canadian customs agent was just too polite not to answer all of Todd’s questions. We loaded our duffel bags on a wobbly handcart, let the drug dogs sniff them, and headed out to the bus stop. The Great Circle Lines had provided a limousine service to the ship but the limo had stopped running because we were late, so we took a taxi across town with a Pakistani driver who also was quite happy to talk to Todd for every minute of the drive.
Vancouver in the summer seemed so urbane to me. There was concrete everywhere and the warm scent of curried food in the air. There were oil paintings in a shop window. And on one corner there was a film crew with light scaffolds and blue boxes on wheels. I think I saw more people on the taxi ride across town than I had in the last six months in Sitka. Todd asked our driver about everything. Todd spoke slowly and probably too loudly, because he figured the driver didn’t speak English all that well.
We arrived at the dock with only ten minutes to spare before the gangway was to go up. The cab driver let us off in the covered area inside the port building. Two buses pulled away and porters in red vests darted out to open the cab doors. One offered to carry the book I was holding. Todd grabbed his camera back and held it to his chest. Jane Marie walked around the front of the cab and began talking to the most senior of the porters, explaining to him which ship we were to be on and her position on the education staff. In the wall to my left was an oval window. I looked through it and toward the sky to check on the weather and my vision was filled with the Westward.
Of course I had seen cruise ships all my life, but knowing I was about to board this one gave it a romantic eminence I had never experienced. The summer of rain and dead chickens, of Grant and his girlfriend, of the endless debriefings by the police about his suicide, of my friends avoiding me at the coffee shop—all of these things were small now in comparison to the clean white hull of my life’s new adventure.
The three of us walked up an escalator and through a long lobby covered in red carpet. At the far end of the lobby was a dais and a woman in a ruffled blouse and a steward’s jacket. She was chatting with a young black man in a white shirt and tan trousers. They were laughing at some private joke as a family of four hurried with their own bags toward the entryway.
The father was clutching the tickets and the mother carried a large travel satchel stuffed with books and games. One young child dawdled behind, swinging her feet and spinning on the thin stems of her legs. She was humming a meandering tuneless rhyme and curling her long brown hair with her index fingers. The bigger girl walked with a pronounced stoop to her gait, and she shuffled her feet on the red carpet. The mother turned and snapped at the girls, and as the big sister turned I could make out her wide-set features, features I associated with Down’s syndrome. This girl repeated her mother’s words.
“Come on, Alicia, we’ll miss the boat,” she said in a flat monotone.
“All right, Carol,” the mother said. “We’ll take care of it now.” And the mother put her hand on Carol’s arm as the whole family eased to a stop at the ticket taker’s dais.
The father fumbled in the pockets of his blue blazer, clearly agitated, and the woman scowled down at a manifest list. Carol started to stand up and down on her tiptoes. Looking anxiously over the ticket taker’s shoulder, the mother held both of Carol’s hands. Carol looked through the entryway toward the gangplank bridge to the Westward’s salon deck. Her eyes were wide with some growing concern.
The father was having some trouble finding the last of his paperwork as several other people lined up behind us. Todd tried to take a picture of the ship from where we stood, even though all that could be seen was the edge of the aluminum gangway. Alicia stood by her mother and kicked at the back of her father’s shoe.
“Stop it now . . . please,” the man said as he put on his glasses and re-patted his pants pocket.
Carol said, “Too high!” and jumped up and down more vigorously. Carol could have been eighteen years old. She was a good two feet taller than Alicia. Alicia called out, “Mommmmm!” just as the father found the last of his paperwork and everyone smiled.
Everyone except Carol, who pulled back and bumped into Jane Marie. “Too high,” Carol said, looking out to the gangplank that spanned twenty feet from the port building to the ship. The gangplank was approximately forty feet above the dock.
The father stepped aside and ushered little Alicia past him and she cantered past him toward the gangway. Passing me, Carol stepped on Todd’s foot. Todd said “Ow,” a little too loudly, I thought.
“God dammit now,” the father muttered and the mother kept repeating, “Carol . . . it’s going to be fine . . . excuse me I’m sorry . . . Carol, it’s going to be fine.”
But Carol bellowed “No!” Her voice echoed off the walls. Everyone in the terminal was watching. I stepped back to give them room and Carol twisted to get away from her mother’s arm and the father lunged forward to grab her. “Now, we’ll have none of that!” he said with building resolve in each syllable. As Carol twisted away, she lifted her shirt up, exposing the white flesh of her belly and her breasts. “No!” she declared and continued to pull back like a horse might, fighting with a fury that was not hysterical but beyond reasoning.
The woman from the cruise line waved to us and her voice tinkled over the commotion like a music box. “Why don’t you folks come on aboard and we’ll let them take their time?” We walked on through.
Both parents were holding Carol and the mother called for Alicia to come back but even I could see there was no chance of that. The mother turned back to Carol and held the frightened girl’s face in both her hands and spoke slowly and urgently to her. The father breathed deeply and purposely did not look at any of the other passengers who filed past staring or trying not to stare.
Jane Marie took care of the paperwork. We were che
cked off the manifest in a moment and walking toward the gangplank.
But now there was something wrong. For some crazy reason I wanted to stay behind with Carol. Even though I wasn’t afraid of crossing this bridge, I didn’t want to go. I hated the gangplank; I hated the designers of the ship; I hated the cute girl in the steward’s jacket. But mostly I supposed I hated Carol’s father. I hated the resolve in his voice. His assurance which left no real question that we who had come so far would all be crossing that bridge no matter what we thought we wanted or didn’t want. I hated the authority he had over Carol’s life and for a moment I wanted to sit down like a burro just to show him that he didn’t have that authority in mine. But of course I didn’t, and when I saw Todd’s grin as he stepped off into the carpeted main salon my vague anger dissolved instantly into sadness, because I knew with some intuitive sense that no one loved Carol more than her parents. Her father was harried and anxious about catching the boat, but still, no man loved this damaged girl with any more conviction than he did. Certainly I didn’t.
So, when I saw them leading Carol across the gangplank with her eyes squeezed tight, I offered her mother my hand. But I was turned aside by four crew members who were smiling and joking as they helped the family down the final steps. As they pushed past me the mother smiled and raised her eyebrows to express both her embarrassment and her readiness for whatever was to come next. Carol opened her eyes and looked at the mirrored ball glimmering in a spotlight above the parquet dance floor situated in the middle of the main salon. Alicia was standing underneath it spinning on her heels, calling out, “Look, Carol, look . . . Stars, right here on our boat!” Carol put her hands to her face and laughed out loud.
The band on the back deck started playing a fanfare and a few people threw long streamers down to the dock. The tugs sounded their whistles and the Westward pulled slowly from the dock as I stopped crying and asked a black man in a white jacket if the bar was open yet.
