All the Winters After
Page 2
• • •
After a stop in Seattle, another three and a half hours and countless thickly frosted mountain ranges later, the plane landed in Anchorage, which Snag and Lettie grumpily called North Los Angeles. Nevertheless, it was their destination for frequent shopping trips, and they didn’t hesitate to get their Costco membership when the store first opened there. The in-flight magazine said that just over six hundred thousand people lived in the state, and two-fifths of them resided in Anchorage. So even though it was Alaska’s biggest city, it had over three million to go before catching up with LA.
He caught the puddle jumper to Caboose. During the short flight, he spotted a total of eight moose down through the bare birch and cottonwood trees on the Kenai Peninsula, along with gray-green spruce forests, snow-splotched brown meadows, and turquoise lakes. The plane banked where the Cook Inlet met Kachemak Bay, whose name he bore. Across it, the Kenai mountain range, home to nesting glaciers, rose mightily and stretched beyond sight.
From the other side of the inlet, Mount Iliamna, Mount Redoubt, and Mount Augustine loomed solid and strong and steady. But looks deceive—Redoubt and Augustine frequently let off steam and took turns blowing their tops every decade or so, spreading thick volcanic ash as far as Anchorage and beyond, darkening the sky with soot. Kache’s mom used to say Alaska didn’t forgive mistakes. As a boy, he wondered if those volcanic eruptions were symptoms of its pent-up rage.
There was the Caboose Spit, lined with fishing boats, a finger of land jutting out into the bay where the old railroad tracks ended, the rusty red caboose still there.
“See that?” his mom had shouted over the Cessna’s engine that first day they’d all flown together, his dad finally realizing his dream of owning a bush plane. “The long finger with the red fingernail pointing to the mountains? I bet the earth is so proud of those mountains. Wants to make sure we don’t miss seeing them.” She tucked one of Kache’s curls under his cap, her smile so big. “As if we could! Aren’t they amazing?”
It had always been a breathtaking view, the kind that made him inhale and forget to exhale, especially when the clouds took off, as they just had, and left the sea every shade of sparkling blue and green against the purest white of the mountains. He had to admit he’d never seen anything anywhere—even now during the spring breakup, Alaska’s ugliest time of year—that came close to this height or depth of wild beauty.
But the view was doing more than taking his breath away. Maybe his mom had been wrong. Maybe that strip of land was the world’s middle finger, telling him to fuck off, saying, Who you calling flat? Today that red spot of caboose looked more like a smear of blood on the tip of a knife than a fingernail. Either way, the view stabbed its way into his chest, as if it were trying to finish him off before he even landed.
CHAPTER
THREE
Snag hadn’t stopped maneuvering through her small house since Kache’s call. Kache. Finally agreeing to come home. In the wee hours of that morning, she’d mistaken the ringing phone for the alarm and kept hitting the snooze button until she sat up in a panic. It’s about Mom. But no, it was Kache, calling back from Austin. Ever since they’d hung up, she’d been bathing every surface with buckets of Zoom cleaner, suctioning up the cat hair and the spilled-over cat food with the vacuum, stuffing the fridge with a ready-to-bake casserole, moose pot roast, and rhubarb crunch, wrapping the bed in clean sheets.
Snag thought she resembled a well-made bed. Polishing every last streak off the mirror, she saw her chenille robe creased under her breasts as if it were a bedspread tucked around two down pillows. They rose and fell with her deep breaths. She moved fast despite her size, wiping the counter, putting away a pepper grinder and a bottle of salad dressing with Paul Newman’s mug on it. She closed the refrigerator door.
There was the memory of Kache, sitting on the kitchen stool, dark, curly head bent over his guitar, opening that same door and standing in front of the assortment of cold food like the refrigerator was some god requiring homage. How many times had she swatted him, told him to close the damn door? “A million? A billion?”
Since the day she had to put her mom into the home, Snag had been talking to herself. Before that, sometimes all Lettie had added to the conversation was, “Is that right, Eleanor?” But it was something.
No one but her mom still called her Eleanor. Around age nine, she came home from fishing the river alone for the first time, holding up a decent-size salmon. “Look, Daddy. I caught a fish all by myself.”
Her daddy laughed and pulled the hook out of the side of the poor fish. “Eleanor,” he said, “what you did was snagged yourself a fish.” Glenn, jealous that he was the same age and had yet to catch or even snag anything, started calling her Snag. The name took hold and never let go. Most of the town’s newcomers thought the name came from the fact that she had a gift for selling. It was true. Whether someone needed Mary Kay or Jafra cosmetics, Amway detergent, or a new house, Snag was the person to call.
Real estate had been particularly good to her. She preferred to live in her simple home, but she waxed poetic about the benefits of a sunken tub or a granite countertop. Lately, she’d stepped back from showing houses. She’d made enough money, and she wanted to give the newbies a shot. The one element in life that had come easily to Snag was money, and she didn’t need to be piggy about it. She still sold products for the pyramid businesses but more as a service to the citizens of Caboose than out of her own need. The only thing she couldn’t sell anyone on was the idea of getting the town mascot, the old caboose parked at the end of the spit, moving again. But she didn’t have time to dwell on that.
She climbed into the car and took a deep breath. Kache. “He’s going to want to kill me, and I can’t blame him one bit.” She wiped her eyes with the sleeve of her rain jacket, surprised to see a black smear across it. She wore the mascara for the first time in years in honor of Kache’s homecoming. It was the brand she’d demonstrated at kitchen tables, rubbing it on a page of paper, dropping water on it, holding the paper up so the drop ran down clear as gin. Now she smoothed her fingers under her eyes: more black. She licked her fingers, ran them over and over her face, took the balled-up tissue from under her sleeve, and wiped more. She adjusted the rearview mirror to check herself. “Way to go, woman.” It looked like someone had struck oil on her face. With all her finesse for cleaning, Snag sometimes felt that her biggest contribution to humankind was making a mess of things.
CHAPTER
FOUR
At the small Caboose airport, Kache recognized Snag before she turned around to face him. You couldn’t miss her height, a half inch shy of six feet. Long-limbed like he was, hair cropped short, with much more salt than pepper now. She was his father’s twin, and they bore a strong resemblance—the deep dimples, the large gray eyes. Maybe that’s why Kache had always thought of her as a handsome woman. Her back expanded. Her shoulders hung limp in her hooded jacket. She fidgeted with her sleeves, touched her face. Many times that sad spring before he’d left, Kache had seen her cry with her back to him, as if she might protect him from all the grief.
He sighed and kept standing there, observing her broad back. How was it that you could leave a place for twenty years, stay away for twenty years, and walk right smack into the very center of what you left behind, like it was some bull’s-eye for which you were trained to aim?
“Aunt Snag?” He touched her arm and she jumped.
“Kache! Of course it’s you.” As tall as she was, she still had to stand on her tiptoes to swing her chubby arms around him. “Oh, hon, look at you. Your mom and dad would be so proud.”
He held her soft face, wrinkled a bit more, though not as much as he’d expected, but a little…dirty? Streaked with something. With Snag, it was more likely mud than makeup. He smiled. Their eyes stayed on each other for a long minute. There was a lot to say, but all he got out was, “Let’s go see Gram.”
He nodded. He’d packed the few warm clothes he still owned, along with the old, holey green T-shirt he would never throw out, the one that said, No, I don’t play basketball. Denny had it printed up for him, because at six-foot-six, Kache had gotten tired of being asked. And he’d packed the only item of his mom’s he’d taken—her favorite silk scarf, which had smelled of her perfume for years after she died. Snag asked him where his guitar was, but he shrugged, as he had whenever she’d asked him in Austin. She raised her eyebrows and opened her mouth but let the question go, just as she had before.
Even in the middle of winter, Austin didn’t get this cold. In the car, he rubbed his hands together and felt the pull and release of resistance and surrender. The place lured him back in. Then it yanked him hard with long lines of memories: Denny buying him beer at that very liquor store, which still sported the same flashing orange sign; his mom rushing him into that very emergency room when he was nine and had split his knee open; that same hardware and tackle shop his dad got lost in for hours while Kache waited in the truck, writing lyrics on the backs of old envelopes his mom kept in the glove compartment for blotting her lipstick. Kache had written around the red blooms of her lip prints.
Some things had changed, sure, and yet not enough to keep away a hollow, emanating ache.
But it was breakup. Here, early spring was the depressing time of year, when the snow and ice gave way—cracking, breaking, oozing—as if the earth bawled, spewing mud everywhere, running into the darkest lumpy blue of Cook Inlet and Kachemak Bay.
“Thought we might get to see Janie. Couldn’t get away from work?” Snag asked, glancing at Kache. He shrugged. “You’re awfully quiet. For you.” She fiddled with the radio while she drove and then turned it off. It was true that Kache’s dad had dubbed him Chatty Kachey, but that was a long, long time ago. “Ah, a break from the rain.”
“We don’t get enough in Austin. I’d like a good watering.”
“In a few weeks, you’ll be soaked through to the bone, I’m betting. Fingers crossed we’ll have a decent summer. Since you don’t…you know…have to get back to work. Or, apparently, Janie? You’re staying a while, aren’t you, hon?”
“I’m thinking a few weeks.” That was the goal anyway, if he could stick it out. It would get easier in a day or two. He wanted to hang out with Snag and Lettie. Face the things he needed to face, get out to the homestead. Snag had said a nice family was renting it. He’d try to fix whatever out there needed fixing, do whatever needed to be done for Lettie and Snag, hold it together, be strong enough to look it all in the face so he could get on with his life. Janie was right. It was way past time.
Snag pulled the car into the parking lot of the low brick-and-concrete building. “Gram’s a lot weaker, Kache. She asks about you still though. It depends. Some days she’s clearer than most of us, and some days she’s cloudy, and some days she’s plain snowed in.”
He got out and held open the glass door. The walls of the lobby were covered in flowery pink-and-green wallpaper and paintings of otters, puffins, and bears. He nodded approval. “Not bad, considering.”
“Believe me, it’s much better than the third-world prison camp they call a nursing home down in Spruce.” She smiled wide. “Hello there, Gilly.”
“So this is Kache.” A woman, probably a little younger than Snag, reached out and shook his hand. “Not a mere figment of Snag’s and Lettie’s imaginations after all.” She wore a name tag printed in oversize letters pinned on a cheery smock and had blue eyes with nicely placed crow’s feet, the kind that told you she’d spent a lot of time laughing. “If I’d known last month you were coming up, I might have been able to talk my daughter into staying. I told her we have a boatload of single men up here, but she only lasted a couple of weeks. She said, ‘Mom, I’m going back to Colorado where at least the men shave.’ Plus, she heard that folks regularly get their eyebrows and noses pierced by hooks while combat-fishing the Kenai. It all fairly crushed her fantasy version of Alaska.”
Snag touched Kache’s face. “Five o’clock shadow.”
Kache said, “Can’t help that. But it’ll be gone by morning.”
“See, Gilly? Your daughter missed out.”
Kache rubbed his chin. “It won’t be long before I start forgetting how to shave, I suppose.”
Even though the place was not-bad-considering, as he followed Snag down the hall, so did the faint scent of urine, medicine, and decay, with a hint of boiled root vegetables.
The TV shouted an old black-and-white film he didn’t recognize, wheelchairs facing it like church pews. Grandma Lettie sat off to the side with her head in a book. Almost literally. The book lay open on her lap, her head drooping to practically touch it. She wore her hair in the same braid she always had, but it was as thin and wispy as a goose feather. In the photos of her as a young woman, it had been a thick, dark rope coiling down to her waist.
Kache knelt in front of her. A thin line of drool hung from the center of her top lip down to the page. He wiped it with his sleeve while Snag handed him one of her crumpled tissues. “Gram?”
She looked up, peering, and then her mouth opened in a smile.
“Kachemak Winkel!” The smile slipped down. “Where have you been?”
“I’ve been in Texas, Gram.”
She shook her head. “Where’ve you been?”
“Working, Gram.” His answers sounded feeble.
“No.” She started to whimper and turned to Snag, whispering loudly. “Does he know about the crash?”
“Yes, Mom, he was here. Remember?”
“But he didn’t die.”
“That’s right.”
She whispered again, enunciating slowly, her eyes wide. “He was supposed to go on that plane.”
Kache swallowed hard. Snag held his elbow and moved a lock of white hair from Gram’s vein-mapped forehead. “Mom, Kache has been away. Just away. From here.”
Gram raised her eyebrows, nodding, and rubbed Kache’s long hand between her two bony, speckled ones. “Of course you have, dear. Oh, but…” She looked over her shoulder and then back at him. Her voice raised higher, almost a child’s. “It was like all four of you were dead. Now at least we have you back.” She picked up his hand in hers, moving it up and down to the beat of each word: “And that is a very good thing.”
“Thanks, Gram.” How had he stayed away so long? How had he come back? He was tempted to grab himself a wheelchair and steal the remote from the guy in the Hawaiian shirt and cardigan, flip the channel to the DIY Network, and let a few more decades go flickering past.
Instead, he drove with Snag over to her place. He braced himself for the onslaught of mementos, but surprisingly, Snag didn’t have one piece of furniture or even a knickknack or painting of his mother’s. Sentimental Aunt Snag, who loved her brother and adored her sister-in-law. Where was all their stuff? It didn’t make sense to sell or give away every single thing. And when Kache asked about heading out to the homestead, she changed the subject. Earlier she’d said she’d rented it. She wouldn’t have sold it, would she? He knew she’d sold his dad’s fishing boat to Don Haley, but all four hundred acres, without saying a word to Kache? It was true that Kache had given her power of attorney, back when he was eighteen and didn’t want to deal. But she wouldn’t have sold it without telling him. No way.
Later that afternoon, he went to the Safeway for her and bumped into an old friend of his father’s, Duncan Clemsky. Duncan clapped him on the back, kept shaking his hand while he talked. “Look at you, Mr. City Slicker. I still think of you
when I have to drive by the road to your daddy’s land. Only time I get out that far is when I make a delivery to the Russian village.”
“The Old Believers are accepting deliveries these days? Progressive of them.”
“Some of them at Ural even have satellite dishes. Going soft. Won’t be long until they’re wearing useless, pretty boots like those.” He nodded toward Kache’s feet. “Change eventually gets ahold of everyone, I suppose.”
“Suppose so,” Kache said, his face heating up. Nothing like a lifelong Alaskan to put you in your place. He wanted to ask Duncan if Snag had sold the land, but he wasn’t about to let on that he didn’t know, if it was even true. No need to get a rumor heading through town that would end up like one of the salmon on the conveyor belt down at the cannery, the head and tail of the story cut off and the middle butchered up until it became something unrecognizable.
“You’re gonna need to get some real boots before folks start mistaking you for a tourist from California. Thought you were at least in Texas, my man.” Duncan shook his head and winked. “You tell your aunt and grandma I said hello, will you?”
“Will do, Duncan. Same goes for Nancy and the kids.”
That opened up another conversation, with ten minutes of Duncan Clemsky filling Kache in on every one of his five kids and sixteen grandchildren and seven seconds of Kache filling Duncan in on the little that he had been up to for the last twenty years. “Yeah, you know…working a lot.”
On the way back to Snag’s, Kache decided that if she didn’t bring up the homestead that evening, he would just come out and ask her if she’d sold it. Part of him hoped she had; the other part hoped to God she hadn’t.