by Mary Emerick
“What were they like when they were young?” I asked. “What was it like, that last summer and the winter after that?”
Isaiah lit up his wooden pipe, inhaling deeply. “It was like dodging lighting, being around those two boys,” he said. “Stop your heart or make you high, one. Dean and Roy, they were electric together. One would dare the other to jump bare ass into that cold water, nothing between them and the Lord but a smile. Climb the red cliffs without a rope. Sleep when you’re dead, Roy used to say. There was always competition between them. Had been since they were boys, I gathered. Their father favored Dean, and Roy kept trying to prove he was as good. You could feel it when you were around the two of them, but still, that summer, until she came, was the best I’ve ever had.”
“What do you mean, until she came?”
“Ah,” Isaiah said. “Let me paint you a picture of that summer. I think of it often. It was scary dry, hardly rained at all, and you know how we catch the clouds on this side of the island. No frog stranglers that summer, hardly a drop. Blue skies every day, and it seemed like all of our plans were going to work out. But Roy got restless, took off on the barge for town and the Hell and Gone, to stir up some trouble, he said. He wasn’t one for quiet. It made him too nervous just sitting with his thoughts, he said. Life was too damn long to be sweet and innocent, he said. He was gone two weeks and when he came back, she was with him.”
“Where did he find her?” I asked, remembering the story my mother had told me, a sweet story, a tale I had always thought might end up being something like my own love story someday.
“The Hell and Gone, that bar in town, is where you find the losers and the drifters and the people who need saving. All of the people who come to Alaska thinking they can turn into someone else, leave the old person behind. It doesn’t work that way, a lot of us have learned. Whatever you’re looking for here, you might as well bring it with you, because you’re going to be the same damn soul you were when you hopped on that ferry in Bellingham.”
His eyes went far away the way they did sometimes, and I knew he was talking about more than just my mother and father.
“When Roy found Althea at the Hell and Gone across the island and brought her here, it changed everything,” Isaiah said finally. “You could feel it, a cut to the air. Like winter coming.
“The story she gave us was that she came to Alaska following a no-good asshat who left her with no cash and no place to go. That’s when the trouble started. Both of the boys, so in love with her that they did crazy things to try to get her attention. Cannonballing off cliffs in the dark. Walking up salmon streams thick with bears, no flashlight. In the end she chose Roy. Dean, he was so used to winning, didn’t know how to lose. ‘My brother, the golden boy,’ Roy used to call him. Roy always thought he never measured up to Dean. This time he had, and he let Dean know it.”
He stowed his pipe and picked up his share of the traps. A cough began deep in his belly and worked its way out through the length of his body. Finally he spat out a glob of phlegm onto the ground. “Dean was the best damn pilot in southeast Alaska, at least that was the word up and down the coast. He would land where none of the other pilots would even spit out the window. Flew like a guy with nothing to lose. I can’t help but think that she put some kind of wrench to his heart. Half the time he flew like he didn’t care if he would make it back.”
The story did not fit. “My father said Dean went through women like Kleenex,” I recalled. “Living in town, he had his pick of all of those girls working the slime line.”
Isaiah shrugged. “Don’t know about cannery girls. Just know what I saw. I know that nothing fazed him. It could be the crappiest day out there, fog down to the deck, and he would fly anyway. ‘Just about took the mast off a sailboat, I was flying so low,’ he used to say. And laugh about it. We all waited for that day, the one when he never showed back up at the float dock.”
A silence as thick as fog spread between us. Most of us never spoke much of the dead; they were too much of a reminder of the thin line we all walked. Here, there were no safety nets like you had in the Lower 48, my father used to like to say. Talking about the people who had never made it back brought us too close to that edge. Here, my father had said, you made your own luck.
“One thing he said, the last day,” I told Isaiah, remembering. “We had a topographic map out for some reason, maybe because there were some clients hanging around asking about what it was like above the bay. My uncle pointed at a little lake and told us that if he never came back, that was where we should look for him. Lake of the Fallen Moon, it was called. He said that he would be kicking back in the blueberry patch. No clients with a million duffels, no fighting the weather in a piece of flimsy aluminum with floats. Living the dream, he said. Then he took off into the storm and we never saw him again.”
“Lake of the Fallen Moon. Pretty name. They looked there, didn’t they? The Civil Air Patrol, Search and Rescue?”
“They looked everywhere.” Uncle Dean had just vanished as if he had never been.
A pair of does that had been bedded down jumped up on legs as slender as pencils and bounded away from us as Isaiah and I began to walk. A few steps into the muskeg and they stopped to look, freezing into place as though, motionless, they could not be seen. I watched them, so sure of their invisibility.
I was not sure of anything, even the spongy ground beneath my boots. The past felt as murky and bottomless as the sinkholes we skirted. At the same time it dawned on me that there in Isaiah’s memory could be the answers to the puzzle that was Never Summer Bay. If I could learn enough, I could figure out where to go next from Floathouse Bay.
“The trouble, you said,” I reminded Isaiah. “What trouble?”
“Oh, the trouble,” he answered. “Well, I’ve got to tell you some backstory. How much of this do you know? Nothing? Roy and Dean showed up a couple years after we did. People were just starting to come to the coast then. Hippies, runaways, strays of all kinds. Birdman and I had bribed Ernie with a few dollars to tow this old floathouse into a bay where we wouldn’t be run out right away. We were scraping away at things, not really making much of a go at it. Ernie told Roy and Dean to look us up, that there were a couple of vets living rough out there who might be able to teach them a thing or two.”
The wind shifted imperceptibly, carrying the scent of something only the deer could smell. They dashed away from us and slipped into the valley beyond.
Isaiah watched the deer run long past where I could see them, shading a hand over his eyes. “Fat ones. Good eating,” he said. “Dean and Roy being out here, it felt like Birdman and I weren’t as alone. Between the two of them, they scratched up enough money to buy the private chunk of ground in Never Summer. Land went for pennies then, not like now. They lived here though, on the sailboat, while they drew up the plans and got the materials. It was going to be their place, and they seemed to agree on something for once. A dozen guys had tried it and gave up, driven out by the rain and the gales. I knew I had to stick it out. This was the end of the line for Birdman and me. I wasn’t so sure about the boys. Roy seemed to think he could bully his way in to the country, make it adapt to him rather than the other way around. I tried to tell him different, but he never listened. My way or the highway, he said. He’s just that kind of man.”
He motioned for a nail. “After they came, we hatched up this plan to trap some, share a greenhouse, sell some vegetables to the store in town. Dean would do the milk run for the rest of the folks living out here, he just had to get certified on floats, already had his pilot’s license from down south. Birdman and I got checks from Uncle Sam, we would get by. Ernie was in on it, he got his cut when we bought supplies from him. But once Althea showed up, Roy decided that Dean was out. Didn’t want him around her, he said, Dean wanted to steal her away from him. He was flat convinced. Roy said that Dean could still bring in the clients, but he couldn’t live there. It would be him and her living there, just them, nobody else, an
d he would get a broker, advertise in hunting magazines. Bring in rich men from Outside to hunt bears. Once he started up, he made it look easy, and a hundred other guys thought they could do it too. Southeast was full of guys who didn’t know a thing about this place and didn’t care neither.”
He sighed. “Didn’t feel right to me. Eat what you kill, I told him, and the bears are our grandfathers, we need them more than they need us. Roy might have liked bears well enough, but he was always out for himself. Said there were plenty of bears as long as he chose the right ones. We almost came to blows over it, except I don’t fight anymore. Instead we split the coast in two. Birdman and I would stay south, and he would stay north.”
I didn’t understand how you could love a thing and still hurt it, and I told Isaiah so. “How do you mean?” he asked.
He hunched down on his heels, nails rimming his mouth, and listened as if he had all the time in the world. That was one of the things I liked about him. He gave a person time to come up with words, to make sense of the thoughts wrestling in her head.
Finishing up with the last trap, we worked our way down country, heading for the sea. Clear plates of ice lined the stream we were following. Only the busy movement of the water kept it from freezing entirely. Soon even that would not be enough and this stream would be encased in a solid cocoon. The water that I scooped into my canteen came with shards of ice that slid down my throat, making my head throb. Fingers of frost lay etched on the meadow, winter’s breath on the landscape.
Our feet crunched in the grass. “If he loved her so much, why did he hurt her?” I asked finally. “She forgave him, every time.”
Looking back, I could see where we had been, patches of green in the white, Isaiah’s feet turning out wide in his duct-taped boots, my tracks marching small and determined beside his. “Ah, Winnie,” Isaiah said. “I’ve lived a long time, and I still don’t have all the answers. I just know that something is broken in Roy. Maybe it was trying to step out of Dean’s shadow, maybe it was something else, but together, both of them, Althea and Roy, are like oil and fire. They stir something up in each other that’s best left alone. They should never have met in the first place.” He glanced at me. “But then there wouldn’t be you. So there is that one good thing.”
A small smile spread across my face and I ducked my head. “I mean it, girl,” he said. “When you drove in here, I turned to Birdman and said, that’s their daughter. I knew it right off. Her silver hair and his courage, driving that boat alone in that big ocean. I want no part of this, I told Birdman. She’s on the next barge out of here. But he said, just give her a chance. This surprised me, it being Birdman. He doesn’t trust anybody. But now I see that you’re the best parts of both of them. His spark and her sweet.”
We had come out onto the shore, and the stew of kelp and fish filled my lungs. “Spin the dial with Roy and you either landed on brilliant or crazy,” he continued. “Never knew which one to expect. That’s what made it a hard go. Loved the brilliant, hated the crazy. Althea, well, she never said much about her past. She’d clam up when you asked her, mouth like she was sucking on lemons. All I gathered was that she came from someplace in Ohio, Indiana, one of those flyover states, never fit in with her parents’ plans for her, and then she followed a man to Alaska, one of those types that promises the world and then leaves you behind when he chances on something better. The only time I saw her crack, one night when we all got into the whiskey pretty heavy, was when she said, ‘Any story I tell you would be better than my real life.’ Then she shut right up and acted like she had never said a word.”
I thought about all the stories my mother had given me. Whales singing the same song through the ocean. James Tucker, dead of some misfortunate that changed every time we went to his grave. She had spun a story of our lives too, but she had left out the weak parts. “She told me that she met him on the barge in a storm. Both of them nomads, looking for a better life. He held her hand while the boat wallowed in the troughs below a steep sea. That it was meant to be, like a fairytale. By the time they reached Never Summer Bay they knew they would be together forever. That’s what she told me. And I believed it.” I felt the sting of betrayal. She had not trusted me with the truth.
“That must have been how she wanted it to have been,” Isaiah said. “Plenty of people living on this coast under the names they weren’t born with. Plenty of people with different stories than the ones they lived. Noses so high in the air they would drown in a rainstorm, as if they never did anybody wrong. Who is ever going to know different if stories don’t match up?”
We walked the shoreline, our feet slipping in the kelp and rocks. Somewhere above us a floatplane droned, moving in and out of the clouds, en route to the fish weir or the field camp.
“I can guess what it was like in Never Summer,” Isaiah said. He looked troubled. “Roy was always a quick trigger. The man could start an argument in an empty house, but it seemed to get worse after she came. Birdman and I should have done something sooner, but what could we do? We let the years slip by, tucked up in this bay. We knew if we left it things would change. We’ve got old bones and we thought we deserved a little peace.”
I thought about the way they lived, barely denting the bay, not cutting or burning or building the way my family had. If they ever left, the floathouse would eventually tumble into the sea. The greenhouse would collapse into a pile of old boards. There would be no trace of them left behind. Isaiah was right: they deserved peace.
We dropped the traps we hadn’t used in a clatter on the dock. Back in the floathouse, the ropes strained and creaked at their moorings. Candles flickered like passing thoughts. We sat like old people in our chairs, watching the night.
In Floathouse Bay there were hours and hours to think, unlike where I had come from. In Never Summer the tasks piled up. There was wavering under the weight of the fully loaded cart, bringing shotguns in their yellow dry bags and boxes of food and camouflage gear down to the boat while the clients watched, not helping. There were the freshwater tanks to fill and fuel to pump from the barrels. There were the wives, who sometimes stayed behind, who we had to placate with fat-free muffins and Jane Fonda videos. Only when the clients left and the rooms were clean was there time to think about something other than if there was enough hot water for the wives’ endless showers, how their blow dryers were draining the solar, and if the men would go home puffed up with importance and a glossy brown hide.
In Floathouse Bay I had time to think about years and love and how one changed the other. “Were you ever married?” I asked. “Either of you?”
“Sure,” Isaiah said. “Just never took. Always wanted a woman as sweet as young fiddleheads but ended up with the bitter. And Birdman had three successful marriages, didn’t you, buddy?”
Birdman nodded without moving his eyes from the book he was holding. He had a daughter somewhere in the world, a girl my age with cinnamon hair. He kept a picture of her hanging in the greenhouse, its edges warped by the humid air. She was long gone, vanished into some corn-fed state down south, Isaiah had told me, taken away by one of the women Birdman had once loved.
“Someday you are going to have someone who will hang on you like a Christmas ornament,” Isaiah said. “Believe it.”
I wanted to believe it. I had only read about the starburst of fear and longing as a boy leaned in for a first kiss. But the only boys I knew about on our coast lived at the fish weir, separated from me by miles of open water. I heard their squeaky voices sometimes on the radiophone, half men, half children, but we had never met. I had once dreamed about Sam, but now I wondered if the look in his eyes had been the same as what I saw in Isaiah’s. I feared that I had mistaken Sam’s kindness for something deeper.
“What happened?” I asked, and what I really meant was this: how do people change? How had the boys my uncle and father had been, skin bronzed by summer, two laughing daredevils, turned into the two men I had known later in their lives? Those men had been like this:
one who was always leaving us wanting more as he hopped on his plane with a wave and the other an uneasy mixture of sun and rain.
I had watched tightly woven kelp rafts outside our bay slowly dissolve, the driftwood and opaque Japanese fishing floats captured within suddenly set free to bash upon the red cliffs. Were people the same, their tiny cracks widening without realizing until it was too late, until they were different people entirely? Could you ever go back to the way you had been?
“Never loved anyone as much as I loved being out alone in the wilderness,” Birdman said.
Birdman rarely spoke. When he did, it was with a rasp of rusty hinges. He rolled words around in his mouth like marbles before letting them go. In the war, Isaiah told me, he had been the one their platoon had counted on to cut sign. Cutting sign, he said, was finding and determining who or what had passed. Birdman could tell everything about you from the way your feet pressed into wet sand, Isaiah said. What you carried, if you were in a hurry, even what was on your mind. That was why Birdman did all the hunting. When I asked if I could go, Birdman nodded. “Free country,” he said.
Five
All along the coast, cedar trees were dying. They had been dying for as long as I could remember. One summer when I was eight, without any warning, two scientists had chartered a plane and flown into Never Summer Bay, their packs bristling with tubes and measuring sticks.
“We’re here to study cedar decline,” the older one said loudly when my father rushed to meet them at the dock. When he heard the plane, he warned me to stay back, but I followed him anyway, zigzagging down the dock from the pile of crab pots to the boat shed, strangers who weren’t clients an unusual occurrence in our bay. To me it was worth the risk of being discovered.
