Caribou Island (6 page)

Okay, he said. A platform, I need a platform. And he could see this was true. A wooden platform, a floor, raised up about six inches off the ground, leveled out. Then he’d build his walls around this.

So he stood up and decided to go for a hike. It was too late today to get materials for the platform, so he might as well explore the island a little.

He tromped up to the birch trees at the back of his property and continued on until he found a path. Much easier to follow this, a game trail, the ground more level. Birch and spruce all through here, no view of the water, and he came upon an empty cabin. A log cabin, like what he had imagined, their logs much bigger than his, about a foot thick. He wondered where they had found those. He came up close to examine, tried to figure out how they got the logs to fit so well. Something in the gaps, but he couldn’t tell what it was. Covered in moss now and cobwebs. He peered in a small window and could see a white basin, a dark wood-burning stove. He walked around back, a big cabin, two other rooms, and peered in more windows, tried to see the floor. Looked like boards. Then he knelt down all around the edges, tried to find a clue for how the walls met the floor, but there were no gaps in the walls, nothing to see.

Well, he said, and stood back up. This will be good for a reference. And he wondered why anyone would build here. No water view, just an outpost in the trees. No wonder it was empty. He could do better than this.

Irene waited alone all day, lying in bed, looking at the boards of the ceiling. Her husband out on that island, her children working, the Vicodin making her nauseated and weak, clammy. The room too bright in the sun, but she didn’t have the energy to get up and close the curtains. No one cared what happened to her here. She might as well die.

Self-pity, she said aloud. Not a pretty thing. And this felt too close to the years after her mother was gone, after her father was gone. Moving from one distant family member to the next, shuffled around in Canada and then California, unwanted, too often alone.

She popped another Vicodin, the pain mounting to a breaking point again, and she didn’t feel anything at first, but after fifteen or twenty minutes, she could feel the cold, prickly slide into nausea and oblivion, a welcome relief. Her head went away, or her awareness of it, and she was left pooling in the rest of her body. She’d gone heavy, sinking deep into the mattress.

Almost like diving when she closed her eyes, the surface far away above. An ocean with a heartbeat, slow waves of pressure, water compacting but no edge to it. No contact with the surface. The world of air a world of myth only, storms and lightning and sun. The only reality the density of the water, the coolness of it, the pressure and weight of it.

Irene awoke hours later. The pain returned, sharp and jagged, slicing through her head.

Gary, she called out, and this time she heard a response. A rustling in the kitchen, and he opened the bedroom door.

How are you feeling? he asked.

I need another Vicodin. I’m really scared. The pain is something else.

I think you should wait a while if you can. You’re not supposed to have more than four of those per day, according to Rhoda. And the doctor didn’t think you needed them.

The pain is too much, Gary.

Maybe some hot food. Maybe some food and water and that will help a bit. What would you like?

Irene couldn’t breathe. She turned on her side, and that only made the pain and breathing worse. I can try, she said. I just want this to end.

I’ve been thawing out some venison. I’ll cook that up with mashed potatoes. You need to eat more.

Okay, she said, closing her eyes again, and heard him close the door. She tried to breathe away the pain, let it go away on each exhale. Tried not to panic for air. But her ears were ringing, a high buzz, the frequency of the pain, and it would not be ignored. She could think of nothing else. She took another Vicodin. It didn’t matter what Gary or anyone else thought.

The wait for relief was longer than before, fifteen minutes an extraordinary length of time, and then she faded away for some easier length and Gary opened the door again.

Ready, he said. How you doing?

I had to take another pill.

Irene.

You don’t know. You have no idea what this is like. If someone had told me, I wouldn’t have believed them.

Well I have dinner ready.

Irene sat up slowly at the edge of the bed, feeling dizzy. My slippers and robe. Can you help me with those?

Do you really need help?

Yes I do.

Okay. He helped her and they were sitting soon enough at the table, a fire going. Breaded venison steaks, from a kill last fall in Kodiak. High up on the flank of a mountain, and her arrow had punctured both lungs. Irene hunched over her food, cut a small piece of meat, and it tasted delicious. She was starving. But she also felt on the verge of throwing up. The meal would be an odd walk of that line.

Thanks, Gary, she said.

I’m sorry, he said. I’m really sorry for taking us out in that storm. And I’ll do whatever I can to help you get better. But I’m worried about the painkillers. You could get hooked on those. You may already be hooked.

That’s not what I’m worried about. What I’m worried about is that the painkillers may not be enough. Even now, they’re not cutting all the way through the pain. And what if that gets worse? What do I do then?

I think you’re panicking.

Damn right.

* * *

Jim and Monique checked into a suite in the nicest hotel in Seward. Fake carved ivory on side tables, bad watercolors of fishing boats. A giant and inviting bed, though, which was where Jim’s gaze went. Jacuzzi tub, also, big enough for two.

Let’s have lunch, Monique said. And then a boat tour.

Okay, Jim said, trying to keep the sadness and longing out of his voice. They were out the door and walking along the wharf.

Other tourists here today also, the sidewalks full. An Alaskan ferry had pulled up. So Jim waited in line at one of the tour companies while Monique went into the shops. A nice day, and Monique, gorgeous and long and thin, was turning every head, and Jim thought he should have felt happy. But he felt used, pissed off, and guilty. Get over it, he mumbled to himself. You’re in this far already. He certainly didn’t want to miss the payoff.

He had never taken Rhoda on a vacation like this, even for a day or two. They hadn’t gone anywhere.

Jim made it to the front of the line, finally, two tickets for a three-hour tour of Resurrection Bay and Kenai Fjords National Park. A three-hour tour, he sang quietly, from the
Gilligan’s Island
theme, but the woman had heard this about a million times, so no response.

Jim found Monique marveling at black velvet posters of bears and bald eagles. These are amazing, she said. This has to be as low as art goes. I have to have one.

Okay, Jim said, and bought a four-foot velvet poster of a brown bear catching a salmon.

This is a cultural archive you’re preserving, Monique said. Nothing less. She took his arm, laughing at Alaska and tourists, and they walked toward lunch.

Just the touch of her on his arm got Jim hard. He realized he wanted her more than he had ever wanted anyone else. Even high school and junior high crushes hadn’t felt this urgent, and he was forty-one. He hadn’t thought he was capable of feeling this anymore. Sex with Rhoda every few days was as much as he could usually muster. He wondered again at Monique’s age. He was guessing early twenties, but he didn’t know. She seemed a lot younger than Rhoda, who was thirty.

They found a table on the wharf, ordered oysters and halibut and champagne. Jim didn’t eat oysters usually, because of the stomach sacks. He tried not to eat anything with a stomach sack. But Monique made him try one, and really it wasn’t so bad. He tasted the butter, mostly, and the Tabasco burned his lips. He didn’t chew much. More of a swallow.

Delight me with tales of Alaska, Monique said. Maybe start with your closest call with a bear.

What about you? Jim asked. I know almost nothing about you.

I’m boring, Monique said. D.C., impressive parents, good schools, no vision or sense of purpose.

How old are you? he asked.

Old enough, she said, and if you want to fuck me, you have to quit asking that question.

Sorry, he said.

Now tell me about the bear.

It was on a river. The same river where I caught my first king salmon, when I was about ten or maybe even younger. I just remember that the fish was taller than me. I was forty-eight inches, and the fish was forty-nine and a half. I played that thing for almost an hour, getting pulled down the river, trying to stay in the shallower water along the bank. I was wearing hip waders, afraid of going under, but my dad was holding on to me.

Ah, Monique said. I bet you were a cute little boy.

Blond hair, blue eyes, full of charm, Jim said.

Monique smiled.

So it was on this same river years later, Jim said. I was in my early twenties, going back for nostalgia, fishing the same spot, but I was by myself, which is a no-no, and it was late in the season, when the bears are a bit more desperate, and when I caught a salmon, I gutted it and then hung it off my backpack as I kept fishing.

No, Monique said.

Yeah, I had it hanging there on my back, about three feet of shiny, smelly, gutted salmon, swinging around on my back while I fished. I was like a lure for bears.

Monique was shaking her head.

So I heard something behind me, heavy splashing, and I turn to see this huge brown bear. A grizzly. The kind that eat people. Crashing through the water at me, and then it stopped. And I realized the salmon was on my back hidden from the bear now, like I was trying to keep food away from it.

What did you do?

I’ll tell you the rest later, Jim said.

Monique punched his arm. She had good reach from across the table. Fucker, she said quietly, so no one would hear.

In Alaska, you have to earn your stories, he said and grinned.

We’ll see about that.

We have an hour before the cruise, he said, checking his watch.

Let’s go shopping. I’d like a pair of heels, and maybe a tie. She had a wicked smile when she said this, and Jim thought he might faint.

He paid and they left, walked along the waterfront looking for a shop, and Monique found a pair of black pumps she was happy with. You like? she asked.

Sure, he said. Kind of sexy with jeans. Unexpected.

I won’t be wearing them with jeans.

Then it was time to look for a tie. They had only twenty minutes until the cruise, but they found a place that had ties with salmon and halibut and king crab and fishing boats and also a few more conservative ties. Monique went for a simple dark blue silk.

We’ll have to run for the cruise, Jim said.

Do they have a cruise later today? Monique asked.

So they rebooked for four o’clock, which gave them two hours. Walking back to the room, Monique took Jim’s hand. They didn’t say anything. Jim afraid to speak, afraid he’d somehow ruin this.

Take a quick shower first, Monique said, so Jim did as he was told. When he emerged in a towel, she looked him over. You have a muffin top, she said.

A muffin top?

Just the beginnings of one. She smiled. Don’t feel hurt.

But what’s a muffin top?

That little pouch on your belly, for hanging over your belt. It comes down at that weird angle.

Hm, he said.

It’s all right, she said. I’ve never been with a muffin top, but I’ll adjust.

Then Monique went into the shower, and Jim lay back on the bed feeling old and disgusting. A muffin top. If you had any self-respect at all, he told himself out loud, you’d walk out of here right now. He opened his towel, and his limp little penis lying there just seemed like another target for mockery. She was going to tease him and laugh at him. That was all.

Jim groaned and decided to get under the covers. He’d hide himself. He threw the towel over a chair and settled in, used both of the pillows.

Monique turned the water off, and there was a long wait. Jim thinking of Rhoda, feeling guilty, because here he was, about to cheat. It was inevitable now. Everything until this moment could be passed off, perhaps, but not after this moment.

And then Monique appeared, walking toward him slowly in her tie and heels, nothing else.

She was very tall, especially in the heels, and she had that slim definition only youth can have, the soft lines of her ribs and collar bone, belly and thighs. Her hair still wet, her face angular.

I shaved for you, she said.

She was entirely smooth. She came to the side of the bed, turned around slowly, bent over in her heels, her tie hanging down, her young breasts, and looked at him from between her legs.

No more teasing, she said. Now you can have whatever you want.

Mark invited Carl on the boat. This was out of pity, since Carl was moping around without Monique. She had taken off somewhere.

So Carl, plastic bag of bagels and veggie-burger patties in hand, shivering in his raingear, waited at 3:30 a.m. under a dull yellow light at the end of the Pacific Salmon Fisheries pier. He looked at boats anchored in pairs in the channel of the Kenai River. The boats and water were twenty feet below him, the river lined by mud banks. He was supposed to get to Mark’s boat and climb aboard. Mark and the owner had come the evening before and slept out there. But Mark had omitted the part about how Carl would get to the boat or even find the right one. The boat was the
Slippery Jay
, but Carl didn’t know where it was parked.

So he stood under the pier light another twenty minutes until some of the boats in the channel switched on their cabin lights and several started their diesel engines and idled. An aluminum skiff, some kind of tender for unloading salmon, it looked like, since it carried three large aluminum bins, came from upriver. About twenty feet long, with a huge outboard, 200 horsepower, it really ripped along, leaving a wake that glowed white and slapped at the sides of the anchored boats and set them rocking. The sky just beginning to lighten at the horizon under drizzling clouds, and Carl clueless what he should do. He couldn’t just jump in and swim around. He was going to be left behind. He would spend his day here on the pier in the drizzle and eat his veggie burgers around noon, then walk or hitchhike back to the campsite.

Then a young Indian-American woman, as in parents from India, wearing fish boots and dark green rain gear, tromped past and went over the side of the pier down a long narrow ladder toward the skiffs bobbing below.

Excuse me, Carl said when she was about ten feet down.

No answer, so he said it again, louder this time, and cleared his throat.

Yes? she asked, looking up.

I’m supposed to get out to the
Slippery Jay
somehow. Do you know where it is or how I can get there?

That’s one of our boats, she said. I can take you.

She smiled as she said this, smiled only briefly, but Carl was encouraged and thinking Monique was not such a great find anyway. She was a bit inconsiderate, was the truth.

Carl was grinning, therefore, as he stepped into the skiff. And he made a comic little fuss about getting his last foot over the gunwale. Thanks, he said heartily, standing up straight before her.

Hold on, she said. She fired up the outboard, gunned it, and they shot into the river. Carl, seated just in time, nearly fell into the bottom of the boat, but she remained standing.

Wow, he said, but even he could hardly hear this amid the roar. The young woman kept her eyes ahead on the water. She made a tight turn upriver, zigzagged between several boats, and came to rest suddenly, the motor cut to neutral, inches from the
Slippery Jay
.

Carl climbed out awkwardly, having to straddle the side of the taller boat and getting rocked in opposite directions. But he did make it without falling in or dropping his lunch.

Thanks, he said.

Sure, she said, then gunned it and was gone.

Why was he here? He stood on the back deck and looked vaguely at the horizon. The question seemed larger somehow than just this boat or this sunrise or Monique or even Alaska. Something about his life, something impossible and dimly urgent, but this effect was probably only from lack of sleep.

Carl yawned hugely at the horizon, then turned around and crept into the cabin area. He put his lunch on the bench in the upper cockpit or steering area or whatever they called it. Bridge? But on a boat this small? Down a few steps was a cooking and eating area, with a small table, some cubbyhole shelves, and an old iron stove with metal rails. In front of this, through another small door, was the sleeping area. He could hear breathing in there.

So Carl sat at the galley table next to his lunch, his booted feet dangling, looked through scratched Plexiglas windows at the sky turning lighter blue then yellowish white, and waited until a watch alarm went off.

Mark said a gruff hello, then Carl said hello also to Dora, the owner, who waved her hand and fixed coffee and had a doughnut. The doughnuts looked suddenly very good to Carl, and he wondered whether he’d get through the day without sneaking one on the side. Other people’s food had always looked better to him than his own.

Soon they were under way, churning out through the channel. Mud flats and eroding cliff banks. The air through here cool and the low clouds in the distance turning orange at their edges.

Carl rode on the upper deck, above the cabin. A steering wheel and controls up here, too. Dora shared the bench seat with Carl and drove in a resigned and preoccupied way that didn’t invite conversation. She called down occasionally to Mark through a hole in the floor and asked for the depth.

Once they cleared the channel and made the inlet, they turned southwest toward open ocean, and several aluminum boats, drift-netters with one large net reel on the back, sped past. Their engines powerful, throaty over the sound of the
Slippery Jay
. One swooped in close, the pilot waved, Dora waved back, and then it shot ahead.

Gasoline, Dora said. They can do over twenty knots. But if one of their sniffers goes, they blow up.

Sniffers? Carl asked.

Sensors for the buildup of gas fumes in their engine housing. They can pump that air out before they start, flush it with fresh air, but still, if any fumes remain, the whole boat turns into a grenade.

And we have diesel? Carl was only trying to continue the conversation, trying to learn more, but he realized this question sounded pretty obvious and dumb.

Yep. That’s about what we have.

Carl nodded. An entire fleet of drift-netters all around them, at least fifty boats he could see heading mostly in a similar direction but some going north into other parts of the inlet.

How many boats are out here? he asked.

On the Cook Inlet? Almost six hundred, probably, and most of them are out today. Have you steered a boat before?

Little outboards, canoes and stuff.

Well take the wheel, Dora said, getting up. See this compass? Keep us going between this mark and this mark, she said, pointing. The steering’s a little slow, so don’t overcompensate. I’m going down for a while.

Okay, Carl said. Thanks.

So Dora went below and Carl watched the compass and the horizon. He never went straight exactly. He’d drift a little too far one way, turn the wheel and drift too far the other way, then overcorrect again. Turning constantly. The waves only slow, small rolls, the surface smooth, and the only wind of their own creation, and he was high up, with good visibility, the bow below him, so it should have been easy, but there was some kind of current, it seemed, underneath. It did feel like a river, the entire inlet. He tried to watch for logs, also, figuring he was not supposed to run over those.

How you doing up there? Mark called after a while through the hole.

Fine, Carl said.

Good. Just let it have a little play. Then Carl was on his own again, for a long time. He wondered whether he was still going the right direction, and he wondered whether the two of them were taking naps. There didn’t seem to be anything else to do. They could be playing cards.

Almost two hours passed before Mark appeared wearing the bottom half of his rain gear, held up by suspenders. The gear dark green, same as the woman’s had been, and he was wearing the same dark rubber fish boots.

Mark pointed off to the right and slightly ahead. Pukers, he said.

What? Carl asked.

Pukers. Sport fishermen. The cabin cruiser drifting up there, though they probably think they’ve stopped. Going for halibut.

Nice name, Carl said. Does everyone call them that? If I lived here, and I went out sport fishing, would I be a puker?

Mark grinned. Do you cook?

Sure.

Mind fixing breakfast?

So as they reached the fishing grounds, finally, Carl was down in the kitchen cracking eggs. They stopped for some reason, started up and stopped again, then called back and forth, and Carl caught a glimpse of Mark on the back deck letting out the net. The boat rocked tremendously from side to side, far more than the low waves seemed to warrant, so Carl couldn’t afford more than a glimpse.

Mark had wanted all twelve eggs scrambled, and the only bowl was small. As Carl braced himself against one of the counters and avoided falling onto the stove, he tried to keep the bowl full of eggs level in midair, and he scrambled these eggs when he could with his other hand.

Then he realized he had to fry the bacon first, so he held this bowl and kept it rocking level with one hand while he bent down to get the bacon out of the small fridge.

Carl ripped the package open with his teeth then flopped it down onto the counter, where it slid back and forth as he went for a pan. The boat rocked suddenly much harder, and he banged his head against a cabinet. Some of the scrambled egg sloshed over yellow and goopy onto his jeans, where it oozed slowly downward and sank in.

Very nice, Carl said over the roar of the diesel. He held the back of his head with his free hand while he watched the remaining eggs, a little lower now, and kept them rocking.

When Carl had finally gotten a pan on the stovetop, the burner lit, and a few pieces of bacon in the pan, Mark ducked his head into the cabin and yelled, Get up here. I need you to throw fish. Then he was gone.

Carl stood rocking in place for a moment, trying to figure out what to do. Then he dumped the eggs into the pan with the raw bacon, turned off the gas, and hauled out onto the deck.

Jesus, he said. There were salmon everywhere, all over the deck and a few even getting wrapped up with the net in the reel.

Get over here! Mark yelled. He was between the reel and the stern, picking the salmon. This didn’t look easy. As the net came up over the edge, he untangled a salmon until it hung only by its gills, then yanked down hard until it fell out and hit the deck. Salmon all around his feet, silvery and gasping, flopping and sliding in their own froth of slime, blood, and sea water.

Throw these into the side bins! Mark yelled. The engine and the hydraulic reel combined made a lot of noise.

So Carl grabbed fish and threw. But he kept dropping or threw too low, the salmon thudding against the side of the bins and sliding back, and then he slipped and fell onto them.

Mark grabbed him by his collar and yanked him to his feet. Grab ’em by the gills! he yelled. And get out of my way!

Carl moved a few steps and scooped by the gills, which was easier unless they were clamped closed. But most were gasping, their dark red gills exposed and crenellated like seaweed. Their backs darker, greenish blue, like the ocean itself, then silver on their sides becoming white on their bellies. Their eyes large and roving, bewildered-looking. Carl threw as fast as he could. They were cutting his fingers, something sharp in there.