by John Straley
“Come on. You know I never ordered a book on Etruscan art. For Christ’s sakes, I don’t even know where Etrusca is.” She’d been trying to sell me the book all summer. I tried to skirt past her to the coffee shop.
“Cecil, come on, this is an expensive book. You don’t know what these guys are like. We’ll get killed on the shipping alone if we try to send it back.”
“Hold it for me. I’ll take a look at it when I get back from vacation.”
Marilyn stood in front of me. She had red hair and flaming yellow fingernails. Her necklace looked as if it had been made out of miniature car parts.
“What do you mean . . . back?” she demanded.
“I mean back. I’m taking a cruise, if you must know. I’m here as a visitor, so be nice, or I’ll turn you in to the Chamber of Commerce.”
“No way!” Marilyn screeched with delight and she turned to yell into the back room. “Hey, Don! Cecil is in off of one of the ships!”
So, there was nothing to be done after that. The usual layabouts and underemployed denizens of the Back Door coffee shop came pouring out of their booths and gathered around me as if I were giving out gold coins. Several noticed the glove on my right hand but they easily accepted my “bad paper cut” explanation, having seen me through so much damage in the past.
Now I was a tourist and I had been “made.” But I took some comfort in the fact that this time I had been made as something I was halfway trying to be.
Todd walked through the door with a new ball cap and I swear a creased T-shirt on over his usual sweater. He snapped shots and tried to get a group photo together but that soon disbanded after everyone became bored with the waiting.
I told everyone that I was just invited along aboard ship as Jane Marie’s guest and that she was working hard as a naturalist. I told them wild stories of champagne brunches and hot crab cakes at dawn: Wanton revelry at sea with rich widows and days of overindulgence. Of course, these were all lies and everyone knew they were lies as soon as the words tripped my lips, but such is the pleasure of irony: It’s the only way we can ever really have it, however briefly, both ways.
Finally, the small crowd cleared and I went back to the coffee shop. I drink coffee here because the people I owe money to rarely set foot in here. I mostly borrow money from people with some to spare and the people who frequent the Back Door rarely have any extra. So I’m usually safe.
Todd sat with me briefly but said that he couldn’t stay. He said that he was going to go run to the vet’s and see how his dog Wendell was doing. He said he needed to “get a shot” and I assumed that meant he was going to get a picture. Todd was slumped in one of the straight-backed chairs, with his camera around his neck and his T-shirt bunched up around his stomach. The duct tape on the bridge of his glasses was frayed and it looked as if he had run to the tender before shaving this morning. Apparently he was saving his new glasses only for shipboard gatherings. He let out a long sigh.
“I think travel is an immensely broadening experience. Don’t you, Cecil?”
I said that I had to agree and watched as Todd walked out the door at the same time as Dr. Edwards came in it.
Edwards saw me and nodded, then stood in the line beside the baked goods to place an order. Behind him came an extremely slender man who was probably young except that his age was hard to pinpoint because of the ravenous thinness of his frame. He walked with a cane and slowly took the table next to mine. He eased himself down into a chair with a great effort and then, breathing deeply, gazed around the room as if only now was he at liberty to take in the view. The doctor joined him and while setting his coffee cup down asked the thin man, “Would you like something to drink, Paul? Something hot?” Paul closed his eyes in careful thought.
“Chamomile tea, I think. Thank you,” he said softly.
I could hardly take my eyes off Paul for he seemed a ghost already. Impossibly thin, with wispy hair. His face and his eyes were overshadowed by the skull pressing tightly on his skin. Paul turned to me.
“I understand they have a wonderful bookstore here. Is that true?”
Yes, I said, it was, and I pointed rather stupidly to the door where the bookstore began.
“Do they carry much poetry?” Paul asked as the doctor set down the tea and sat in the bench seat against the wall.
“Yes. I think they do have a very good selection,” I said.
“I’ve been thinking of a poem. It’s very weird. I can’t get it out of my head. It starts, ‘Lay your sleeping head, my love, faithless in my waiting arms . . .’ Then I can’t remember the rest.” Paul closed his eyes again. “I want to say ‘In it wait till judgement break excellent and fair.’ But that’s not it. Dickinson, that’s what that is. Oh God, that movie with Meryl Streep.” Paul opened his eyes. He laughed and stirred his tea. “My mind can take some trips,” he added, laughing.
“The poem you want is by W. H. Auden,” the doctor said. “It will be in his collected works.”
“Auden. Yes. That is it.” Paul looked at me comically. “It’s a good thing there’s a doctor in the house. The motherfuckers know everything.” There was an edge to his voice, an anger that was so opposite from his countenance that I pushed back in my chair a little. Dr. Edwards smiled and sipped his coffee.
“I had a friend who loved that poem,” Paul told me. “He read it all the time. I was thinking if I could find it, I’d read it to my dad tonight.”
“You’re traveling with your dad?” I asked.
“Oh yeah,” Paul said and he puffed out his chest with a little self-mockery. “He’s getting on, you know. So we’re doing our father-son adventure. I never made it as a Boy Scout, you see.” Paul looked at the doctor again. “No merit badge, but maybe some chamber music on the quarterdeck will do.” He used his cane to stand up, slowly. He fumbled in the pocket of his tentlike coat and threw a five-dollar bill down on the table. “I’ll see you on board, then.” And Paul walked into the bookstore.
I said nothing for several moments. Dr. Edwards looked down into his coffee cup. Finally, he took a breath and said, “Paul thinks I hover.”
I said nothing.
“So, how’s the hand?” The doctor shrugged off his mood and lifted my hand. I had covered it with a loose-fitting glove liner I used inside my winter boating mitts. He took the mitt off and looked carefully at the bandage.
“Keep this clean. Soap and water should do. I got most of that tar off but God knows I don’t think I got it all. Keep the wound clean and keep it open to the air as much as possible. Are you going to be continuing on this trip?”
He asked the question with such intensity that I gave a start and jerked my hand away from him.
“I expect so. My friends are on the trip. And I’ve never been told otherwise by the all-powerful Mr. Walters. I think I’ll just hang around and wait to see how many people you kill and mutilate.”
I don’t know why I said it. The sentiment just sort of snuck up on me. The doctor shook his head sadly. At first, he looked irritated; then he looked profoundly tired. Not as tired as Paul, I must say, but tired nonetheless.
“It’s all very easy for you, isn’t it? No one comes to you in pain, do they? Have you ever fixed anything, Mr. Younger? Did you ever ease anyone’s pain, even for a moment?”
A tiny girl with short black pigtails came over to our table and held up her library book. “Snow White,” she said proudly.
“I see that, Sarah. It’s beautiful,” I said to her. Sarah’s mom owned the coffee shop. Sarah had been very understanding about the whole mess with Grant McGowan’s suicide, but then she was three years old.
“I’m sorry, I don’t know why I said it,” I told Dr. Edwards.
He reached over and touched my forearm. “We all want to forget that we are mortal. I don’t blame you really. I didn’t ask for this . . . this situation, either. They come
to me, more and more of them. They want to avoid the kind of industrial fading away that is waiting for them in the hospitals. More and more of them and I don’t know what to do . . .”
His hand was shaking on my arm and his head was bowed down so that I could not see his eyes.
“Have you ever seen a botched suicide?” he said, still looking at the floor.
I had, in fact, but I didn’t want to interrupt.
He labored on. “Brain damage. Disfigurement. Pain and permanent dysfunction. People will do these things to themselves.”
“Why are they botched?” I asked. “The suicides?”
He stared up at me now with a coldness I wasn’t expecting. “Ignorance, mostly. They don’t understand the biology of it. The mechanics.” He sat back, looking more composed. Looking almost professorial. “Ignorance and ambivalence, I suppose.”
“Ambivalence,” I echoed and Sarah, who had veered away to another table, sat on the floor by my feet and opened her book, calling out made-up words in a singsong voice, pretending to read.
The doctor brushed aside his last sentence, as if it were an annoyance. “And about that mutilation. The hand. You know, I had nothing to do with that. Someone else is responsible. And I think you know who.”
I spread my hands wide and spoke slowly. “Why did you do nothing to bring the problem to anyone’s attention? In the coroner’s report, you listed the hand as a medical artifact. Now why is that?”
The saxophone player from Margie & the Navigators walked into the coffee shop. He looked at the doctor and me, then quickly turned away as if he were hurt by the sight of others off the ship. He ordered a cup of espresso in one of those tiny little cups and sat at the table opposite from us and unfolded a New York Times.
The doctor leaned his head close to mine. “I have very specific instructions, advanced protocols on file for each one of my patients. I am committed to carrying out those instructions.” He took a deep breath and looked over at the saxophone player, who was now flicking his fingers on the edges of the pages of the newspaper. “In this instance . . .” the doctor went on “. . . the patient had made it explicit. She wanted to be cremated before the sun set. It was her very specific wish. She told me that was one of the reasons she chose Alaska. The long summer days. I could not hold up everything for some kind of rinky-dink investigation of what should be a shipboard matter anyway. It would have been a disaster. It would have disrupted the schedule, for God’s sake. The captain would have never stood for that.”
“The captain knows nothing of your . . . practices?”
“The captain runs the ship. He handles problems. We have had no problems so far. If there are problems, Empire Shipping handles them.” The doctor played with the handle of Paul’s cooling cup of tea.
“What was the girl’s name?” I asked him suddenly.
The doctor slumped as if unexpectedly winded. “Oh,” he groaned and ran his hands through his hair. “Her name was Beverly. She had no family. At least no family she wanted to claim.”
He looked at me and I saw again how tired he was. I was vaguely aware of the saxophone player’s newspaper trembling ever so slightly.
“Why was her name changed on the death certificate?” I pressed on.
“I had nothing to do with that.” The doctor stood up and left abruptly. The saxophone player’s eyes followed him out, then went slowly back to the paper.
I didn’t have the money for the book on Etruscan art and neither did I have any for coffee. I left the coffee shop and walked back toward the ship.
The afternoon had worn on and the mountains behind town were starting to lighten with the slanting of the long sunset. The snowfields were small this time of year, but the forests were a vivid textured green up the slopes. Blue sky rimmed the gray rock, and the clouds held a glow that seemed about to survive the setting sun. As I crossed the street I looked over to the Russian Cathedral. Paul was walking painfully up the stairs. He had a thick book in his hand and he lugged it as if it were a steamer trunk. I turned through the alley where a garbage can had spilled. The ravens were hopping in and out of shadow, bickering over the scraps left in the plastic dishes from someone’s box lunch. One very large bird sat on the lip of the can and lectured the others in full voice, but none of them seemed to pay any mind.
I had made Dr. Edwards nervous, and defensive, and this could only be a good thing, if I was really going to make some headway for the all-powerful Sonny Walters. I was assuming that Cyril had stolen the hand and had used it as a graphic illustration of what awaited me if I snitched on him about his little love tryst in Acapulco 800. This was old business as far as I was concerned. I had no real beef with Cyril. He was scared and I couldn’t blame him.
I made it to the public dock for the second-to-the-last tender of the day. I stood with tired fishermen and whale watchers. There had been humpbacks out in Eastern Channel not far from where the Westward was anchored, and the passengers were ecstatic. Once we made it on board I had a snack from the sandwich buffet and went to our room. Jane Marie had been there. Her books had been rearranged and her rain gear was gone from the closet. I walked to the boat deck and made sure that Todd had signed in and then went to the observation deck above the Horizon Deck. As I walked the stairs I heard the anchor chain drumming against the steel hull and the engines shuddered under foot.
On deck, Jane Marie was standing with her old Zeiss binoculars around her neck. People were bundled up against the cold; some held their faces to that thin northern sunlight. Several held drinks in their hands. The ship eased away from its anchorage and we moved gradually out of the western passage toward Saint Lazaria Island and the outside coast. The sun was going lower in the west and the mountains behind us flared red and then purple. Paul was on a deck lower than us, sitting with a blanket over his lap, reading to an older gentleman at his side. As Paul read, the old man awkwardly reached over and lightly touched the young man’s knee. Paul stopped reading for a moment, then touched his father’s hand. He let his hand linger there for a moment.
Rosalind came on deck and stood next to Jane Marie and asked questions as they both scanned the water for mammals. Mr. Brenner smoked the great log of one of his cigars.
The first blow came to our port side and the crowd gave a noisy cheer as if the first pitch had been thrown in the World Series. The whales dove and lunged, breaking the surface with their great rubbery flippers. People from Detroit toasted them with their martinis and a couple from Denmark yelled “Bravo!”
I walked over to Jane Marie and put my arm through hers. She squeezed close against me. “I heard you cut your hand. Are you okay?” she asked me as she continued to scan the water.
“I’m beginning to think there are no real secrets on this boat. I have no idea why they need a private snoop.”
Jane Marie laughed and pulled me closer. Rosalind shrieked and pointed. As everyone turned, a whale breached completely out of the water, spinning as it did so that its huge flippers twisted around its pleated belly. It seemed in slow motion, this forty-ton animal, as it crashed down with a thud, sending breakers rolling in every direction.
People on deck cheered. Some of them hugged and laughed; others just leaned against the rail with that far-off expression that seemed to look both inward and outward at the same time.
As we passed the basalt upwelling of Saint Lazaria Island, the volcanic ash of the cone of Mount Edgecumbe glowed a deep red. Auklets and tufted puffins labored by on their inefficient little wings and a peregrine falcon cut tight, fast circles down from the black-faced cliffs. We came within a hundred yards of the island, and inside of the basalt caves, cormorants held up their wings to dry, as if posing for a photograph.
Jane Marie answered questions as fast as she could. People shouted them out. Wanting to know. Needing to know, and she told them. Sometimes in plain language, and sometimes by admitting she didn�
�t know the answer, but always giving them more to fill out their images. More information to flesh out their memories and the stories they would tell of their one great trip to the northern Pacific.
I looked back for one last look at my tiny little town. It was a strange feeling, for I knew that I was neither away nor at home. Looking at my home as the passengers must be seeing it: A fairyland, a place where fish always bite, and whales always gambol, and where strangers always welcome you in. Of course, this was not completely true, but on this mild evening no one wanted complete truth. Least of all me.
9
The Hubbard Glacier
That night the Westward worked its way north, staying well offshore until daylight when the captain planned to be entering the tidewaters of the Hubbard Glacier. The swell was moderate from the southwest. The weather was turning northeast, a high-pressure front pushing down from the northern interior. In the lounges of the ship the parties were in full cry, with a keening abandonment as if time were running out all over the world.
In the Terra Nova Lounge there was a dating game for the singles on board, where the young Master of Ceremonies from Sonny’s social staff was asking embarrassing questions. The Whipping Post had a Caribbean beach party with a steel-drum band and a limbo contest with everyone dressed in parkas and straw hats. The Fiddler’s Green lounge featured an operatic tenor singing bawdy sea songs, while there was an all-request sing-along in the Compass Room. In the Great Circle Lounge, a jitterbug contest and costume revue took place under the mirrored ball.
When I peeked in, Mr. Brenner had paid Margie & the Navigators to play “Hava Nagila” for the second time. I was guessing this by the bills that were stuffed down into the bell of the saxophone and into the top of Margie’s hot pink sequined bust. Mr. Brenner had his shirt unbuttoned and was dancing alone in the middle of the floor; in a circle around him the other passengers in their spangled headbands and short fringed dance costumes were clapping and stomping their feet. Mr. Brenner was dancing with his arms spread wide. He danced and spun, then knelt down on one knee to reach a bottle of brandy on the floor with his mouth. To the cheers of the crowd he clamped the bottle in his teeth and hefted it above his head; brandy streamed down the side of his face and throat. I closed the door and went back out on deck.
