Still Points North

by Leigh Newman

  I found it a week or so later, facedown, at the bottom of my sock drawer. I stood there, fingering the velvet-covered cardboard on the back of the frame, careful not to flip it over and look at the three of us together, which would only makes the sharp, stabby feeling in my chest worse. I didn’t know who exactly had gone into my room and taken the picture down, but a rule had been established. And if there was one thing Dad didn’t tolerate, it was a rule-breaker.

  After a final nod from Mrs. Geiger, I shut the office door behind me quietly (no slamming, girls!) and walk (no running, girls!) all the way down the hall to the pay phone. My dime jingles down through the machine.

  “Dad?” I say. “My headmistress says I’ll never graduate if I go up to Alaska next year so I can’t go.”

  There’s a crackle of long distance. Then finally Dad’s voice, confused and slow. “Well,” he says. “I was sure excited about you coming back.”

  I put the receiver down on my shoulder. Listening feels too much like looking at his face and the puzzled hurt expression that’s on it. The silence continues, nothing but crackles and lies and nothing.

  “But I understand,” he finally says, his voice getting brighter and phonier and speedier and cheerier with each syllable. “You just keep doing a good job down there!”

  “Yeah, Dad.” I pray for the recorded voice to come on the line and ask me for another dime. I called collect, though, as always. I can talk for as long as I want to—and so can Dad. He has plenty of time to tell me that he’s going to call my headmistress up and tell her what he thinks of her so-called educational system; in fact, now that he’s at it, he’s going to come down there and pull me out of that snot-nosed school himself.

  But he only says, “I’m real proud of you. We’ll get another year together, maybe. Sometime. If we put our minds to it. Right?”

  “Love you,” I say—fast, like ripping off a strip of duct tape. “Bye!”

  “Bye!” he says.

  Then I do what I always do. I listen to the long, hiss-filled silence, waiting to see who hangs up first. It’s me this time, for the very first time ever. It doesn’t feel the way I imagined. There’s no drama or triumph, no angry smash. There are no tears. It’s just an everyday action—receiver, cradle, walk away.

  CHAPTER 7

  Dividing the World

  In the open ocean, most of swimming is just keeping afloat. I don’t have fins or a wet suit, either of which would help my buoyancy. First, I tread water. A ragged wave slops by, then another, and another—each the dense marine navy that in the Galapagos confirms you have left the cozy turquoise shallows of a bay for the cold deep Pacific. I flip over on my back, breathe, and try to relax.

  Above me, nary a seabird, nary a cloud—the sky a sweep of thin, endless blue. The last hour has been one of the moving experiences of my twenty-six-year-old life. And who did I share it with? The passengers on board the rustic ship that I’m writing about for Travel Time magazine, who watched me dive off a small raft and into a pod of dolphins, only to resurface fifty feet away, holding on to a dolphin’s fin, then disappear again, dragged along beside it, a human ribbon in the wake of its speed.

  Dolphins, it turns out, move very, very fast.

  Had it been possible, I would have liked to stop right at the instant I hit the water and scooted, frog-kicking, along the sandy bottom. The dolphins were swimming near a small, rocky reef when they suddenly turned and headed straight toward me. There were four or five, all making clicking noises. I tried to make the same kind of noise. The largest stopped and swam directly at me—stopping only a few feet from my face. He opened his mouth, exposing his tongue. I couldn’t explain why, but I reached over and very slowly, very gingerly put my hand inside his mouth. Then I left it there, my palm on the ridges of his teeth.

  For a few seconds, neither of us moved. Then, suddenly, he swam around me in circles, presenting his fin. I grabbed on, and he surged forward, heading up to the surface. I pulled in a quick breath, and he took us back down. Only then did I see the mother dolphin and her baby swimmingly directly underneath us, another male to my one side, and yet another male on top of us. Some people might think of this as being boxed in. But it didn’t feel that way to me. It felt as if I’d been accepted by a dolphin family.

  Something about this seemed so comforting, and at the same time so disorienting and dreamlike, as if I’d just jumped up on a stage filled with trained dancers and begun to flit through the choreography of a ballet I’d never seen. The dolphin shifted, and so did I, wriggling slightly to keep in his slipstream. We were moving so quickly, and with the froth of the water and bubbles, I couldn’t see above the hump of his body. We just shot forward—faster and faster.

  Until we hit the chop of the Pacific. All of a sudden we were out of the bay, and we weren’t stopping, either. Only then did I begin to ask: Hey, exactly how far am I going to go with this? And by far, I knew I meant more than the distance back to the shore. I had a thing I could do. To other people it often looked like courage or bravado. But it was really the ability to turn my mind off completely and act—without thinking, without planning or making decisions or considering the future, sometimes to the point of what should have been bodily harm or unpleasant consequences, save for the fact that I generally came to at the last second and wriggled out of it.

  As if on cue, a wave slapped me hard and flat in the face. I pulled my head above the surface. There was no island up ahead, no boat. I let go of the dolphin. He and the others circled around me, butting my legs with their snouts before, finally, swimming away.

  Two weeks later, I’m sitting in my New York cubicle. A few desks away glints a window with a view of the city’s Midtown forty-three floors below: black asphalt roofs, the white rectangles of passing buses, the occasional pink flash of day-dulled neon. My own desk is scrupulously clear of signs of life, save for certain key items: computer, half-eaten burrito, hula doll.

  The hula doll is our magazine mascot. She’s a brown, curvaceous piece of plastic. I continue pulling out blades of cellophane grass from her skirt. She smiles on—a human pineapple.

  My article about the Galapagos is due in eight hours. And though Travel Time is not exactly the hottest-selling publication in the country—it’s not displayed on the newsstand, for example, has lost over a third of its ad pages, and is teetering on the verge of bankruptcy—I’m supposed to do my job: write a fun, peppy piece about three different ways to see this archipelago of fourteen islands so crucial to the theory of evolution. Why not kick it off with my own experience? It’s an adventure story with a joyful, life-affirming ending. The driver of the raft found me a few minutes after the pod took off, scooped me back into the boat, and hugged me.

  Everybody—no matter how experienced with the animal or jaded by the turquoise rings and new-age dreamcatchers made in its image—loves a dolphin.

  But the whole episode is suddenly acutely embarrassing. First off, even though I don’t live in Alaska anymore, I’m still from there—right?—and I’m supposed to know better. In the bush, you don’t mess with the wildlife. You don’t pretend an undomesticated animal is your dog or your friend. You don’t offer a depressed-looking grizzly bear a lick off your soft-serve double dip. What happens when people do this is that they get mauled or eaten and, if that happens, the animal that killed them has to be killed by Fish and Game.

  True, the dolphins probably weren’t going to kill me, and the wildlife there—sea lions to penguins to sharks—has little fear of man, due to the isolation of the islands. But by swimming with one, by putting my hand in its mouth, I didn’t exactly set the best precedent for the animals, who might just think the next band of poachers who show up—looking for specimens for their new dolphin show at Funtime Ocean Prison Park—just want to be buddies and hang out.

  Then there’s the whole reasoning problem. The moment in my mind happened so quickly, a mental sneeze. But it did happen. In the water, I’d thought, I’m being accepted by a dolphin family, when I
hadn’t been accepted at all. Joining the dolphins isn’t like joining the circus. They’re dolphins, and I’m a human. In the ocean, the lack of a dorsal fin, not to mention a blowhole to refill your lungs with oxygen in a fifth of a second, is a serious barrier to intimacy.

  Even worse, while discussing the matter with myself, I’d used the word family, when the correct word, so obviously, is pod.

  At this point in my adult life, I don’t see a lot of my far-flung but completely land-bound family. Mom still lives in Baltimore. On Thanksgiving, we get together at a hotel and eat fading turkey off a buffet basked in heat lamps. Dad still lives in Alaska, where he and Abbie now have two kids of their own, boys, ages eleven and fourteen. I see them up in Anchorage for Christmas.

  I think a lot about Dad’s kids, though. They aren’t teenagers in my mind or even children. They’re still babies, my little brothers. The “half” part of our relationship never really stuck. Even now, I still don’t know how this came to pass. I was twelve when Daniel, the elder, was born. I had dark, elaborate plans. I was going to hate that baby or ignore that baby or at least dislike him a lot, while somehow hiding it enough to keep Dad and Abbie from realizing. I came up for the summer of 1983, sullen and terrified on the inside, smiling like the fourth runner-up for Junior Miss Anchorage on the outside.

  In August, via salad tongs and a lot of screaming, the baby arrived. Dad took me to the hospital. Abbie was sitting up in the remote-control bed, straight out of a Renaissance painting—all glowing skin and intricate, folded sheets. Even after twenty-four hours of straight, unmedicated labor, she looked fresher and more put-together than me. And the baby in her arms was so little, so bony, so ugly and helpless. What was with his forehead? It seemed to have extended off his face into a long, gruesome skull funnel.

  “You can hold him,” Abbie said.

  I stepped back. If I were a mom, I’d be thinking, Get away from my delicate, deformed-headed baby! And by the way, I know you never wash your hands after you go number one!

  But to my surprise, she held him out, still wrapped in a blanket. It was like holding a fluffy human chick. Don’t squeeze him, I told myself. Don’t drop him, either. He was so warm. How did babies get so warm? I held him really close. I looked into his eyes—two little blue yawns in the middle of his face.

  He looked back, blinked.

  “Hello,” I said, but in my secret voice, the tiny, squeaky one I used with sleeping dogs, to make them thump their tails on the carpet with dreamy contentment—but without waking up.

  One year later, Daniel was a lot better looking. He had blond hair, baby chub, and an acceptable-shaped head. Strange new grown-ups were always coming over with presents for him. These were Dad and Abbie’s new friends—lawyers, accountants, neighbors who arrived with bottles of Hansen’s Natural boysenberry juice instead of a six-pack of Oly Gold. They wore khakis instead of jeans and hip boots, not to mention plush, outdoorsy Patagonia pullovers. When in town, they played tennis instead of tied flies, and talked about weekend camping trips where they had charted Arctic stars and cooked Asian noodles over the fire.

  Not one of them carried a Roman candle in a pocket, much less an electric-shock remote control for their duck-hunting dog, should it attempt to hump our living room sofa. This was because they left their dogs at home—in favor of their babies, which they wore, slung like canteens, in quilted bags around their chests. There was Jill with the seven-month-old and Russ with the toddler and Dee-Dee with the fraternal twins.

  All of them said the same thing, as soon as they saw me at the front door: “Jim, I didn’t know you had a daughter!” They said this in the nicest voice, as if it were a wonderful surprise—cake with candles, on no one’s birthday. Sometimes they even patted me on the head.

  I smiled. I admired their babies. Then I went upstairs and stared at the crack in my bedroom wall that squiggled down from the window to the start of the carpet. Dad had sat me down the first week of summer to explain a few things: He was trying to make some positive changes in his life. He was trying to be less angry, to talk more. He was seeing a therapist. The new friends had something to do with this. Still, he could have told them that I existed.

  Maybe I didn’t come up in the course of conversation. And I could see why I wouldn’t, not just in professional chitchat but in Dad’s head. I was the last thing left over from before all his positive changes. Everything else negative and old was gone: our house, our dogs, our blue plane, even wrinkled, red-haired Pam, our housekeeper, who had come over in secret once after Dad and Abbie had “let her go.” She’d brought me the Christmas candies she used to make, the ones that looked like pieces of broken colored glass dusted with sugar. I went out to the porch to cram them in my mouth and whisper that I loved her. Then she hugged me—and went away.

  Unfortunately, I was unable to blame all these events on Daniel. I tried really hard. I blamed him just fine as long as I was in my room alone. But then he’d barge in and touch my face, sticking his fat baby fingers in my ears or up my nose with such experimentation, as if he were deeply curious, both about the sinus cavity in general and the depth of my nostril in particular. Love rolled in, in huge gulping waves that compelled me to spin him by his feet, around and around until he staggered over to the dog bed, laughed, and puked out whole tortellini.

  Great Alaskan Babies, apparently, took a lot of work—just to keep them from not eating shot powder in the garage or toddling through the backyard and into the lake. Dad didn’t have much time for hunting or hiking or fishing. This should have been liberating. I was thirteen. I was supposed to spend my time shoplifting eye shadow at Longs Drugs or trying to meet boys who went to nearby Dimond Junior High. I, however, had a humiliating outdoor secret. I was the only Alaskan I knew who hadn’t caught a king.

  Kings are the salmon that made the state famous, the fish that embody exactly what their name implies. They are the great, the glorious, the royal inheritors of the kingdom of all fish, gleaming with a scaled, green-speckled brilliance, soaring up from the water with grace and authority that makes you hear trumpets and bugles in the rush of rapids.

  And yet it is not that difficult to catch one. Tourists do it all the time, plunked by their thousand-dollar-a-day fishing guides into rivers rife with other tourists. Even my mother did it, a woman who first waved “hello!” to a grizzly bear before it roared into her face on the Kodiak River, then and only then remembering to jump back in the raft and escape.

  Dad had caught hundreds of kings. But then he could catch anything. Back in town, that’s all the adults ever had to say about him. When I met a friend’s parents or a neighbor, they never mentioned that my dad was a doctor or a pilot. They said, “Your father’s Jim Newman? Why, he’s a pretty good fisherman.” Or, “Your dad sure can fish.” Which is the most fawning compliment that any Alaskan fisherman can give another, fish praise being perhaps the only exception to the statewide love of overstatement.

  Dad wasn’t the first in our family to become so obsessed. The Newmans had moved west from Kentucky after the Civil War (where they had been spies for the Confederacy), eventually giving birth to Walter Martin Sterling, my great-great-great-uncle, who, according to my nana, was “an ardent outdoorsman, trout fisherman, hunter, skier, and picnicker,” and my great-great-great-grandfather the Reverend Abiathar Newman, a Presbyterian minister, who begot four grim, starched-looking children and took off into the wilderness to catch rainbows, and “was never heard from again.” All this I knew from a little homemade book that Nana wrote for me about Newman outdoor lore.

  I, on the other hand, had yet to live up to my fishing potential. While supposedly casting, I spent a lot of time on the bank flicking water off my line to watch it sparkle in the sun or building mermaid houses out of yellow froth from the stream. And ever since Mom and I had left for Baltimore, I no longer ice fished or spent the winters with Dad tying flies to get ready for the summer ahead.

  That July, I realized I needed help. Actually, I needed everyb
ody’s undivided attention. In particular, my dad’s attention. All of it. Right now. Even if that particular morning, Daniel was sitting in his high chair, throwing lumps of scrambled egg at the dining room window—thunk, thunk, thunk.

  “Is this formula?” Dad said bleakly, looking down at his mug. “Did I just pour formula into my coffee?”

  “You ate dog food once,” said Abbie. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “Dad?” I said, kicking his chair. “I want to catch a king.”

  The kitchen went silent. Dad sat up and casually sipped at whatever it was in his mug. “That sounds like fun, Leifer. We’ll try Deep Creek this weekend.” Which was exactly what we did. Abbie packed up Daniel and a garbage bag full of his spit-up-coated toys. Dad threw the car seat into the back of the plane. And we were off.

  The whole weekend, Daniel gurgled in the playpen while I worked the bank. Dad stood a few yards downriver, flinging over suggestions, lures, roars of approval. All of which resulted in … no king. On Monday morning, we moved on to Theodore Creek, then Bear Creek, Lake Creek, the weeks and weekends completely dedicated to king catching. We fished on logs and on beaches and in the water, up to our armpits. We fished with Pixies, teaspoons, Mepps No. 4 spinners, No. 5 spinners, rooster tails, and tadpole plugs. We fished with canned salmon eggs, fresh salmon eggs, fresh salmon eggs on a hot-pink yarn fly that Dad designed and tied for spin rods.

  No king. The season was ending. With Dad’s help, I began hitting the river at 4 A.M., when the water was still and the bugs were hatching and fish were supposedly starving. No king. I stayed until the midnight sunset, when the water was still, the bugs hatching, the fish also supposedly starving. No king. I watched Dad catch kings and approximated happiness for him. I watched Abbie catch kings and tried not to openly cry. I fished with lead weights, dragging my lure along the bottom of the river, then fished off the edge of our inflatable raft, trolling through deep fast water. I even fished on the banks of the village of King Salmon, right off the dock like some jerky tourist. No king.