Looking for Alaska (15 page)

“I wish there was someone in this boring place that knew how to dance,” she said so everyone could hear.

The boat captain next to her, who smelled like fish, picked her up without any warning, threw her to his shoulder, and ran around the dance floor for half the song. No one, except me, seemed to notice the guy or the woman on his shoulder. I wondered what it would take to get the Hill Bar's attention.

The music man was playing “Sweet Home Alabama” by Lynyrd Skynyrd. I was surprised, this far from the Deep South, to see so many people singing this song as if it were their anthem. Some Alaskans relate to Southerners. Southerners lost their ancestral homes and land to a war with “outside aggressors.” The ones that survived got some of it back, eventually. Alaskans also lost their ancestral homes and land to “outside aggressors,” the Russians, who never bought it or fought a war over it, they just claimed it. Then the Russians sold it to the United States in 1867. The U.S. government could not have bought a home in Vermont at that time without proof of ownership, deed, survey, etc., but they had no problem buying Alaska.

I noticed Jerry was missing from the table and found him standing onstage. His brother-in-law was thumbing through a multipage list on his music stand. He punched in a track, and Jerry, holding the microphone sensitively, began to sing. Jerry is about six feet tall, weighs maybe 190. He was wearing faded jeans, Timberlands, and a navy blue, short-sleeve shirt. Jerry definitely doesn't have the outlaw look; he could be a thousand different people. Put him in the right suit and he could be walking down Wall Street. Put him in Carhart's and cover him with sawdust and he could be a logger. Meet him at the bar and he could be your best friend from high school. He could own your neighborhood hardware store. He could be the state trooper who stopped you for speeding, and you wouldn't get mad at him. He could be teaching your Sunday school class.

And since he is at least half-white, he could pass for a white man, something Sam, Bill, and Al could not do. This might be an advantage. But give Jerry a Haida deerskin drum and he could go to any Native village and beat that drum with intense passion.

First Jerry did “Achy Breaky Heart” by Billy Ray Cyrus, a former number one country hit, then three others. No one paid any special attention; it was just Jerry singing again, the same guy they all grew up with. In the middle of the third song it hit me—this guy, who started with “Achy, Breaky Heart” and is now singing “Celebration” by Kool and the Gang is majority leader of the Alaska Senate. If this were
The Gong Show,
I'm not sure how long Jerry would have lasted. He does not have the moves of Kool or the gang. The whole scene was oddly refreshing.

I thought I heard my name being called above the noise of a couple of women having a shouting match.

“Pete, come up here, now,” Jerry was saying into the microphone.

“Get up there and let us have it,” Sam said. “Tell him I want to hear some Rod Stewart.” Some guy at the next table put a birth control device over his entire head. He didn't have a very big head.

I wove through the crowd on the dance floor and climbed up to stand next to Jerry. I had to dance for a few seconds with the mother of the woman the fisherman had thrown on his shoulder.

“What do you want to do?” Jerry asked, sounding sincere.

“I don't care.”

Jerry said something I couldn't hear to Serafin, and they started the song “Tub Thumping,” with its unforgettable chorus, “I get knocked down, and I get up again,” repeated over and over. I grabbed the tambourine and backed up Jerry.

We got back to the table at close to midnight. The main door of the bar opened, and as they had done all night, people automatically looked to see who it was. In walked a stunning and stylish Native woman, someone who was used to being noticed. She had on a bright red sweater; faded jeans, not too tight; and she had perfectly thick, shoulder-length black hair. She weighed maybe 115, stood about five feet three inches. She looked to see who was at every table—apparently she knew everyone—then came straight to our table. The only empty chair was between me and Jerry. Before she got to us, Jerry whispered to me that this was his sister-in-law, the Haida artist who had done the paintings on the carved cedar paddles. Just while taking the short walk to our table, she lit up the place, many eyes on her. Whom was she here to see, whom would she throw her gaze on, whom would she talk to, and whose turn was it to get warmed by her obvious charisma? No one else in the bar that night had her candlepower.

She talked to Jerry for about five minutes. She had already noticed that I was the only person at the table she didn't know.

“Jerry, who is this guy?” She leaned toward me.

“Oh, that's Peter. He's a writer, he's going to be living in Alaska for a while. He's been fishing with us.”

“He wants to get to know some real live Natives that will be nice to him,” Bill added in an instigating tone.

“How well?” she asked, taking Bill's bait. She leaned into me again, her red sweater brushing against my arm. “Right over there in the Haida corner is about as real a bunch of Natives as you're going to find in Alaska. They are the least known of all Alaskan Natives, yet the most talented, most beautiful, most handsome, and most intelligent.”

Bill coughed.

“Those people are Jerry's and my people. People are afraid of Haidas—are you afraid of Haidas?” She leaned even closer to me.

“I'm sitting next to Jerry, aren't I?”

“You come with me then.” She grabbed my arm and tried to jerk me out of my chair. She was strong but not that strong. I stood up anyway.

Before we got to the corner, three or four people called out to her.

A couple of women, both under thirty and beautiful, jumped up and grabbed two chairs from an empty table nearby. These young ladies' faces showed combinations of genetic influences that I'd never seen before, a mix of Norwegian, Haida, Tlingit.

“Tina,” they both said as they hugged her.

“This is my sister, Jody, and this is my soul sister, Laverne,” Tina said, introducing them to me proudly. No wonder many of the early explorers and traders were quite cheerful about being in Alaska.

They nodded, but kept their arms around her and didn't say anything to me. No one did. I hung around for a half hour or so. They talked of their families and their lives in shorthand I did not understand. There were smiles all around, big two-hundred-watt smiles, loud talking, and dancing. Tina sat shoulder to shoulder with this person and that person, then she was dancing and then she disappeared. I went back and sat with Sam and Bill.

Right before we left, Tina showed up back at our table, as if she'd been around all along and the fog in the room had moved to reveal her.

“How long you going to be on Prince of Wales Island?”

“A few days,” I answered.

“You need to come with me to Hydaburg, you got to know the Haidas.” She winked toward Sam and Bill.

“I'd like to,” I said.

Right then Al asked Sam where he thought we'd be fishing in the morning; after the answer, I looked and Tina was gone again.

*   *   *

We all caught our limit of king salmon the next day and were back at the lodge before lunch. I was sitting with Al, Sam, and Bill at a small table eating snacks when Al looked up at me.

“Hey, shithead, would you get me a coffee, since you're getting up,” Al said aggressively.

Oh, no, what have I done? With these guys I had learned that it wasn't what you said but what you did that they cared about. They judge people the way the first violinist tunes an instrument: their interiors can accurately judge someone's intentions, his or her soul, as precisely as a violinist knows when one string is out of tune. But I must have failed them somehow, or why would Al, such a pleasant man, call me a name like that.

Plus, Al and I had been roommates at the lodge. His side of the room was immaculate, his clothes laid out, all pressed, a different set of clothes for each situation. His shaving-kit stuff was clean and tidy; everything, his tube of toothpaste, his toothbrush, his shaving cream, seemed to be new. I was more the opposite. I had tried to keep my stuff orderly. I felt awful as I walked over to the coffee machine. Besides, how had Al known I was going to get coffee?

Sam must have noticed my shock and disappointment. He got up to get a coffee too.

“Pete, how's it going?” Sam asked.

“Not too well. You heard what Al called me.” I kept my head facing away from Al and Bill so they wouldn't hear.

“Oh, that. That's good. He calls you that, you can consider yourself one of the boys.”

I got the coffees and went back to the table. Al left after lunch, he had some meetings in Anchorage. Before he left, taking with him a huge box filled with vacuum-packed salmon, he handed me his card and told me to call him if I needed anything in Alaska. On the card he had written his home phone number.

5

Tina

The next day, Sam was talking on his cell phone and Bill was telling me some chilling stories from his experiences fighting in the infantry in Vietnam. Bill usually stayed in the background, didn't say much, when Sam and Al were up front, observed the masters at work. I did not hear the door of the lodge open, but then standing in the doorway, like a pure spirit, was Tina. She did not glow quite the same in the light of day.

Everyone stopped talking. Even Sam held his hand over the tiny mike on his cell phone.

“Come on, let's go, we're headed to Hydaburg,” Tina said to me, as if I had no choice. She looked much more vulnerable this morning.

I looked over at Sam; he nodded toward Tina. I took it to mean, go on. I grabbed my JanSport daypack, put my notebooks and cameras in it, and followed her out.

Tina's four-wheel-drive, black and silver Subaru was running outside the lodge. She opened the passenger side door and picked up some glass jars of canned sockeye salmon off the seat and put them in the back of the car. She held one up to the light so I could see it. The skin on the salmon was golden, the meat a dark, dark red.

“This is some of the best food in the world,” she said. I had to remember to get some to send to people.

An Al Green tape was on in the car, playing “I'm Still in Love with You.” Tina was married to Jerry's brother, Jimmy, though they had recently separated. They had four children: twenty-two-year-old Daniel, who was a student at the University of Alaska at Anchorage; sixteen-year-old James; Kari, four; and Nicole, who was eleven months old. Pearl Jam and JJ Cale cassettes lay in the built-in cup holders.

“I need to run by the house real quick, tell the baby-sitter something,” she said. I noticed again that she seemed smaller in the daylight.

We drove up a hill, then down it, and pulled up to a smallish house. Someone had exerted a great deal of effort to plant flowers, wild and otherwise, all around the cute little house. This lot with this view in Seattle would be worth at least a million dollars, maybe two.

“I planted all these flowers, did all this landscaping. I've let it go, lately,” she said. “I love flowers, they are beauty.”

Inside were two adorable, dark-eyed, black-haired girls, very Native, and the baby-sitter, who looked to be about fifteen. A Teletubbies video was on TV, and I could see an extralarge bag of Pampers in the open closet. The four-year-old had obviously been exploring closets and drawers, pulling things out into the middle of the living room floor, which was a beautiful light wood. On the counter—I couldn't miss it since I sat down right next to it—was a large prescription bottle of painkillers. On the walls were all kinds of Haida art.

The view out the picture window was alive with the sea, the islands, the kelp beds, the rocks. Everything in the window frame was constantly changed by the sun, fog, tides, storms, wind, and passing wildlife. I could see pink salmon jumping out of the water. A sea otter was lying on its back, floating, eating something out of a large shell. Tina said the otters ate large quantities of abalone. The otters, she said, competed with her sister's boyfriend, who dove for the abalone too. She told me she resents the sea otters because it is their fur, the most luxurious in the world, that had brought the outside world to Haida country. The sea otter had kept the Russians and the Yankee traders coming back. Then, she said, trying to restrain her anger since I was obviously a white man, then they just took this place, took Alaska.

She pointed, and her four-year-old walked over to us as if she was used to Tina showing her things outside this large picture window.

“There is a pod of killer whales that passes here all the time. It is so beautiful to watch them come through the narrow passes at low tide. I've seen them catch all kinds of stuff right out this window. This window brings me so much. Living on an island means things must come to you, and much of what comes to me, I first see from this window.

“My grandmother was a double-fin killer whale, a high-class killer whale, not many people are that. When she died, the killer whales came to the head of the bay.” In Haida and Tlingit culture, each person belongs to a clan; you are a raven, a killer whale, and so on. The clan you belong to is as important as your last name, your first name. You married outside your clan; a raven married a killer whale, for example. Tina knows her grandmother had a great and power-filled spirit. Tina believes the killer whales came to the head of the bay to pay their respects to her grandmother and to welcome her spirit, which was now gone from her body.

We got in the car and took off, in more ways than one. She began talking to me as if we were best friends who had been apart for fifteen years. Why was she opening up so completely, so quickly? Did she feel that she could trust me because of seeing me with Jerry and Sam? A half-empty baby bottle rolled across the floor and hit my foot as we took a sharp corner. I picked it up and Tina said to put it in the backseat.