And She Was (19 page)

After ten minutes with Steve, I was shell-shocked. Thad had meandered off to check on a part for Bill after informing me that we all had a dinner engagement with the crew on the boat tied behind us. So I was all alone—with Steve’s dreams and the assurance that this evening was going to go on and on. I was blinking spasmodically and could feel my smile muscles tiring. Nothing worse than listening to someone go on about a future he is actually sure of and working toward.

“Don’t know if the Aleut half of me can stand living inland,” Steve was saying, “but Holly says we’ll find a place close enough to drive to the ocean. It’s so cool you came out here. Thad really missed you. I
wish Holly would have come up and seen this place. But she didn’t want anything to do with fishing. Too dangerous.”

I lifted my slacking smile muscles. Blinked.

“More deaths commercial fishing than any other occupation in the U.S. Alaska fisheries are the worst. It’s the water. Go overboard in this stuff, and you’ve got like five minutes before you can’t move and fifteen before you’re dead.

“We’re pretty careful though. You don’t have to worry about Thad. Hey you guys should come down and visit us after the season ends. Holly would love you. Maybe we’ll have our spread by then. You guys could stay awhile.”

I was beginning to see that Steve, thanks to Holly, was one of those men with a true blue sense of romance and an unflinching belief that it could be nurtured and nudged into love. Such people are dangerous.

“Well, Thad and I haven’t really made plans yet,” I said. Thad and I. Made plans. Using both phrases in one sentence sent my lids into another spasm. But that’s what people did, right? They paired off; they made plans. Together. An image of Thad and me at Steve and Holly’s farm flashed, all green hills and red barns, through my head. We’d be holding hands, of course, walking through thigh-high hay, smiling without tiring our facial muscles. I’d know how his brother had hit him with a snowball when he was six and left that little dent in his forehead. How his mother had instilled the lifelong belief that glassware always belonged in the cabinet to the right of the sink. I’d know what his fourth grade teacher’s name was and that she’d been his first crush. I held on to the image for all of ten seconds. About as long as I’d held on to the image of me as a history professor with a worn wooden podium under my palms and a coliseum of eager faces in front of me. Or me as a new mother, lifting the corner of a yellow blanket to play peek-a-boo with my baby.

“I’ll have to think about that,” I told Steve and let my smile go slack.

“Hey. What’s going on?” a guy yelled from the deck as we jumped down onto another boat. His name was Loren.

“Not much,” Thad and Steve said in unison.

Loren’s wife, Amanda, and another deckhand stepped out of the cabin. “Come on in,” Amanda called. “I got dinner ready.” She had curly brown hair down to her shoulders, seemed in her late thirties, and thin as the tip from a table of schoolteachers.

She took my hand and squeezed as we stepped into the galley. “Damn, it’s good to see another woman. I’ve been listening to these peckerheads for seven weeks straight. Promise me you won’t talk about boats or fishing or your cousin’s hunting cabin, please.”

I raised my right hand. “Promise.”

Amanda had piled seven steaks on a platter in the center of the galley table. A big bowl of mashed potatoes, straight from the box, steamed next to them.

We barely squeezed in around the horseshoe table. Thad’s thigh lay along the length of mine. His arm slid around my back as he pulled my upper body close as well. I caught myself wanting to jerk away, from his arm, from his pride in me and this cozy little scene. Who was he trying to impress? I stiffened, and his arm dropped.

Amanda and Loren lived in Renton, which is Seattle if you’re not from the area. The other guy was called Smoker. We all smoked, but Smoker had a habit of lighting cigarettes, forgetting about them, and lighting more. During the course of the night, he would have as many as four burning at once.

“How much you get this trip?” Thad asked Loren.

“Slow at first, maybe hundred thousand tons the first month. Then we headed up off the Pribilofs and took in another hundred in a week.”

“We did pretty good up there too,” Steve said.

Amanda shot me a rolled-eye look.

I returned a such-is-life look.

The steaks were tough, the potatoes runny, the beer cold. In fifteen minutes, we’d scarfed up all we could. Smoker stabbed his first afterdinner cigarette into his remaining potatoes. It stuck there like a little soldier mired in quicksand. Soon an entire regiment struggled in the goo.

Squeezing herself from the table, Amanda grabbed his plate and slammed an ashtray in front of him. She piled the rest of the dishes
into the sink. Thad’s arm snaked around me again, and I shrugged it off to get up and help with the cleanup.

“How’d you end up out here?” Amanda asked as she scrubbed dried grease from the steak pan.

“I hooked up with Thad a few months ago,” I said, settling the pan into a flimsy plastic drying rack. “When he headed out here, I thought it would be fun to see what it was like at the end of the world. How about you?”

“End of the world. Ha. Loren’s been fishing the last ten years. I started cooking three years ago. Loren said he didn’t like leaving me back home, spending money and flirting with his brothers.”

“What’s cooking like?”

“Most the time it’s not bad. But shit, when the waves start slapping you around, try flipping hotcakes while the deck is rolling and you’re barfing in the sink. I lose twenty pounds every trip.”

“The Barfing Sea Diet.”

She laughed.

Loren got up and came back with the coke, and Amanda and I returned to the table. The conversation finally left fishing and found its way to the best driving roads.

“Highway 101 in a Camaro,” Thad said. “Cliffs on both sides, second-gear turns. That’s a road.”

“You don’t have to drop below third in a Jag,” I said.

“When did you drive a Jag?” Thad asked.

“Guy I knew had one. He let me drive from San Francisco to Crescent City. Took four hours.”

Thad looked at me a long minute. I’d made a mistake. Never let on that a previous boyfriend had a hotter car. “The car was hot; the guy was not,” I said to restore myself.

“Yeah, 101’s nice, except for all the damn RVs,” Loren said.

“I drove this two-lane through the Ozarks down in Arkansas in a Spitfire my brother had,” Steve said. “Holly was screaming the whole way, ‘Oh, my God, you’re going to kill us.’ That was cool.”

“Anybody ever driven the Haul Road up to Prudhoe Bay?” Bill asked. “I hear you got to carry your own fuckin’ gas. Shit, it’s like five hundred miles of nothing.”

Amanda handed me a coke-laced cigarette and turned her shoulders
toward me to create a conversation alcove. “Your hair’s so natural-looking. I’ve tried going blond a few times. Loren says I look like I’ve got Rice Krispies pasted on my head. Do you get it done professionally?”

“It’s natural.”

“Uh-huh.”

“It is. I don’t do anything.” I felt the lifting rush of the coke hit my bloodstream. This is what I liked about coke—I get gabby and can keep up with the extroverts.

“Fine, be that way. I just wondered what shade that’s called. I used to have really white hair when I was a kid. It was like your color. I think if I found that same color, it would look natural.”

Ah, the tired when-I-was-a-child line. I think brown-haired women who once long ago were blond children feel they aren’t so much dyeing their hair as reclaiming its true state of nature. Perfectly justified. Even my mother, true blond until her late thirties, had succumbed as she watched her platinum blond shade to gold then honey; then she’d gone on the offensive.

I remember her inspecting my hair, mashing a handful of it between her fingers. “Same color mine used to be,” she said, turning to her vanity mirror, reflecting our blondness back to us. “Now, Brandy, listen. I may not be around when you need this advice. Everyone wants hair like we’ve got, and you’ve got to keep it that way, know what I mean? I’m still all blonde and nothing but a blonde, but at a certain age, you’ll need to help it along some. I don’t think of it as bleaching so much as brightening something that’s going dull.”

Brighten. Brighten.

So far I hadn’t detected any dullness and could still claim bleach virginity so I bent my head toward Amanda and separated my hair at the top. “See. No dark roots.”

“You probably just got it done.”

“Out here? I haven’t seen a salon within five hundred miles.”

Amanda blew a jet of smoke into my unsullied-by-dark-roots blondness. “Only one way to prove it. Dare to bare the bush.”

The male conversation stopped as it will when certain words filter into their consciousness. Amanda had given them three—
dare, bare,
and
bush
.

This was not much of a dare. I had uncovered the evidence to larger
groups than this. I took another drag of the laced cigarette and handed it to Amanda. Bill started banging his palms on the table in some rendition of a drumroll.

I stood up, popped the row of buttons on my 501s with one yank, and nudged my purple panties down far enough to reveal a line of peaking blond hairs.

When the hoots subsided and my jeans were well buttoned again, I glanced at Thad. He wasn’t smiling; he wasn’t recovering from a hooting spree. He was simply looking at me, not with desire but the blankness of confusion. I shot him a what-the-fuck look.

Amanda leaned toward me. “How do I know you didn’t dye that too?”

I lit a cigarette. “Sometimes we just have to live with uncertainty.”

Amanda laughed. Real blonde or fake, at least I was willing to talk about something other than boats, cars, and fishing.

Thad, however, wouldn’t look at me.

Two hours later, all the coke had been snorted and smoked. The conversation faltered. Someone said he knew someone who had some more. Loren’s boat had just bought a used truck with two jump seats, so it was decided, I’m not sure how, that everyone would go.

How many times had this same scenario played out? You’re with a bunch of people, doing coke, drinking, thinking you’re having great conversation, when someone announces you have to make a coke run. Now logic would have it that one or two of you slip out to hunt down a connection. But this rarely happens. Instead, exactly three people more than will fit in the available vehicle must go. The first connection is never home, so the quest continues. You may have to try several possibilities, all the time crammed in a truck or an El Camino with a bunch of people who are quickly losing their buzz.

Bill and Steve took the jump seats. Loren, Smoker, and Thad sandwiched thigh by thigh on the front bench seat. Amanda and I took the laps. Riding on a lap in a truck cab at night over Dutch roads is an awkward thing. You have to keep your head scrunched down, hang on to the dash with at least one hand, and try to keep your ass mostly on your own boyfriend’s lap, especially after you’ve shown everyone your pubic hair.

Thad’s hands remained on the sides of my thighs. Even when I
slid one of them front and center, pressing my crotch into his palm, he didn’t respond. He waited until I let go, then moved his hand back to the outside of my thigh. He wasn’t going to be easy, and the challenge excited me. These were the kind of skirmishes I knew how to win.

No one was home at the first house. But Smoker knew someone else, so our search party continued through puddled streets. I never wanted more coke once the first batch ran dry, but I was often in the company of people who did. There are two kinds of drug users—those who take it when it’s offered, smoke it, snort it, forget it, and those who seek it, long for it, sell for it. I felt very much apart and superior as my ass bounced on Thad’s knees.

We pulled up to a house and Amanda and I climbed out to free everybody else. That’s when I noticed the dog. A black lab-cross stood on the wheel well in the bed, leaning most of his body over the side. He panted happily and gave an eager body shake when I stroked his smooth head.

“Whose dog?”

Loren stretched himself out of the truck. “Guy we bought the truck from. We try to drive off, and this dog jumps in the back like he’s coming along. So the guy pulls him out. Next morning, I go to make a town run, and this dog’s in the truck again. He just keeps coming back.”

I scratched the dog behind the ear. I would later learn this was the way it worked in Dutch. The dogs took a liking not so much to their owners but their owners’ trucks. If a truck changed hands, the dog did too. Half the trucks in Dutch had an ugly mutt in the back, stretching his nose into the wind. And with this truck he bonded for life.

Rubbing the dog under the chin, I wondered if Cowboy felt this way about Dad’s car. It wasn’t a truck, but it did have a missing rear window he could lean out. Cowboy would be over a year old now. He’d probably grown into those tremendous paws. He’d rest his head on Dad’s leg at night, keep him from being alone.

Smoker came back from the house. “The guy’s at the HiTide.”

We piled back into the cab for the trip back over the channel and parked next to another truck with another dog in the back.

Our dog barked once—What’s going on?

He cocked his ears at the other dog’s reply—Not much.

The exchange of dogs taking a ride on an island so small they clearly aren’t going anywhere they haven’t been before.

At the HiTide, Smoker scored, and we returned to the boat with enough coke to finish off the night. The dog whined softly and curled up in the truck bed when the motor shut down.

“What happened to the bike?” Thad asked when he saw my phosphorescent 150 in the parking lot late that night.

“I traded it in for something I could pick up. It also starts.”

Thad threw his leg over the seat and kicked the starter down. Sure enough it started. It looked ridiculously small under him with his oilskin obscuring most of it.

“I feel funny on it,” he said.

I hurled myself behind him and pressed my chest against his back. “Who gives a shit. Get me to the cabana.”