Throw Like A Girl (14 page)

“How could you let this happen?”

“Nobody let it. It just did.”

“She did it on purpose.”

“You don't know that.”

“I know I'd never do this to you. Make you be with me because of a baby.”

Because I knew he was going to do the upright thing, take her on as an obligation if nothing else. I was crying by then. “You should have met me first.”

He didn't speak. We both knew there was no point in wishing or unwishing things, but I said, “It should be me you can't leave.”

“Yes. It should be you.”

He walked back down my stairs and I covered my ears so I wouldn't have to hear the exact moment when he wasn't there anymore.

I had to get to work only a little while later and so I wrung out a cold washcloth for my eyes and put on my counter girl clothes and walked downtown. When I opened the door the owner put on his annoyed face, ready to start in on me. The owner was a middle-aged man who limped from childhood polio. He was short and rat-nosed and bald except for a slick of rat-colored hair, and when he was angry about something, which was most of the time, his upper lip would draw back and twitch in a way that could scare you. He said, “Let's check that attitude at the door.”

“What attitude?”

“None of your backtalk, missy. How about you quit the princess act and get to work now.”

“Don't call me missy.”

He stopped shuffling his way toward the back room and turned around. “What's that?”

“Don't call me princess either.”

He limped over to me and his lip was doing that twitching thing again and he wasn't any taller than me so our eyes were dead level. And because he was ugly and unlovable and in pain, all the things I felt myself to be, I said, “This is a crap job to begin with and your nasty mouth's the worst part.”

He was shaking so hard I expected to see parts of him spin off, his smeared glasses, maybe, or his percolating forehead. I wanted him to hit me so I could hit him back, but he just told me to get out, and I did, and there I was back on the sidewalk, not two minutes since I'd gone in, and a job was one more thing I didn't have anymore.

School was done for the term, and although I could have found somewhere else to work, there didn't seem much reason to do so. My rent was month to month. There was nobody to tell me not to leave town. I decided I would move back home to my parents' house, take whatever dose of disapproval they'd dish out—as long as I was in school they'd been able to tell themselves I still had potential—and find another crap job that might pay a little better. Out of my group of friends, I was probably the first to give up on all that vague, splendid ambition.

I was leaving town in two weeks, and then it was one, and then it was down to days. I'd already told him I was moving and I watched him say that maybe it was for the best, and I agreed, and that was our story and we were sticking to it. But the night before I left town I called and begged him to come see me one more time, and if there's a more abject word than
beg
, that's what I did. Please, I said, and he said he wanted to as bad as ever but it couldn't happen, the baby changed everything, and Please, I kept saying, and finally we knew who we were. Me who put nothing above the wanting, him and his soldier's honor.

I used to have an album with a picture of him in it but I lost it somewhere. It was a picture I took of him standing next to the motorcycle in his beat-up boots and jeans. His arms were crossed and his chin was up in a tough-guy stare and he wasn't smiling but the second after I snapped the shutter he did, and that's what I remember now. The smile, not the picture.

The blonde girl never did have the baby—it was another thing lost—though I didn't ever learn the whole story. Time went on and he married someone else and then unmarried them, just as I married and unmarried. He had his kids and I had mine. He was married again when he died, yes died, in one of those stupid freak accidents that you think nobody ever dies from, like a giant wave sweeping you off a cliff, or getting struck by lightning. He'd moved to another state so the news didn't reach me right away, and because there was the wife I couldn't be part of any official mourning. He went fast. His heart stopped speaking and I imagine he didn't even know he was dead.

Over the years I'd heard from him now and then, a card or a letter. It was nice that he did that, kept in touch in a friendly way. Once he wrote and told me he was going to be visiting the city where I lived. But he had one of the wives in tow and she was funny about old girlfriends, who could blame her, and he didn't know if he could get away. There was a night when the phone rang late—I was already in bed—and I listened but nobody spoke into the machine and I didn't get up to answer. He told me later that was him. Now if a phone rings late at night when the house is dark, he's who I think of, although I know the dead don't make calls, at least not in that way.

I'm older now than he was when he died. Things happen to the body over time that are God's practical joke, and I don't much like this face I've got now. My life turned out pretty ordinary. Not great, not awful, I'm not complaining. Nobody looking at me now would guess there had ever been anything wild in me, anything as desperate as that loving. I know we're meant to grow from experience, like a tree, send out roots and branches of wisdom and patience and understanding. But my best and truest self was a tree in blossom. All those years since, there's a sense in which they count for less, even as they take up space, crowd out the past. That quick, there goes your life, like a black-haired boy on a motorcycle, looking back until he's out of sight.

Y
ou
had to be ready for the bears, the photographer said. You had to be sharp. He pointed to a spit of sand at one end of the cove. They would camp there, he said, out in the open. Sleep away from the cook fire and seal the food. Use a rattle along the trails so the bears knew you were coming. That wasn't all you needed; they had a rifle strapped in with the rest of their gear. The rifle didn't look real to me, although I knew it was. It could have been a child's toy. If I ever saw a bear it probably wouldn't look real to me either. It would eat me up while I was still thinking none of this was happening.

The boat's engines slowed to an idle. I looked around me and I thought, this was wilderness. The water snaked between gray cliffs five hundred feet high, sheer rock at their tops, spruce and hemlock around their knees. Glacier country, not so long ago. Small waterfalls fell over the cliff face like knots of lace. I said they were “spectacular.” Oh yes, said the photographer knowledgeably, but the trick was to make each shot different. After a while, a waterfall was a waterfall. He had done this sort of thing many times before. He was a famous photographer, I could tell that, even though I'd never heard of him before. He and his assistant would spend four days in the wilderness, camping and taking pictures. They wore orange Gore-Tex jackets and pants, and they carried tents, maps, a first aid kit, freeze-dried food, a cookstove, and of course the cameras and lenses and tripods and film, all trussed up in waterproof packs. I liked the idea of carrying everything with you, of not needing anything you couldn't carry.

The captain of the boat helped them launch their yellow rubber raft. The water was dark green and glossy, like a polished stone. The boat reversed course and, looking back, you saw the colors, orange and yellow. Then a shoulder of rock cut them off. I was only in the wilderness on a day trip, a few hours out from town. A part of me would have liked to stay there with them. It was the closest you could come to being nowhere at all.

Back in Ketchikan I tried to call Mac from the hotel lobby. I called his office. Both his wife and his secretary knew who I was, but the office seemed safer. I used someone else's credit card number. It was not the sort of thing I usually did. Mac was not the sort of thing I usually did either. I'd overheard an old woman giving the number to an operator two days ago. She said it extra loud for the operator to hear, like it never occurred to her there were people like me in the world.

The connection was clear. Sometimes you got a good connection, sometimes it was pocked with static and echoes and odd metallic whooping, as if you really were calling from nowhere at all. The secretary answered. I pinched my voice through my nose. “Mr. Mackenzie please.”

She asked who was calling. I said, “Northwestern Mutual Insurance.” I was proud of that one. I figured I could be an insurance company a few more times at least.

The secretary said she was sorry, but Mr. Mackenzie wasn't in. The secretary was nobody's fool. She didn't like me. She was a fifty-two-year-old divorcée with daffodil hair and poison green eye shadow. She had two daughters, also divorced, who lived with her. I guess there was no real reason for her to like anyone. I hung up the phone. I thought the secretary would know it was me and wouldn't put my call through. I had to tell Mac I had run away to Alaska. It wasn't any good being here if he didn't know.

I walked outside, down along the waterfront. Everywhere you looked was water and spruce-covered peaks. Tiny floatplanes took off and landed in the channel. They looked too small and wobbly, like something out of an old Buck Rogers movie. I had never been to Alaska before. I'd come here because I had the luxury of going somewhere exotic to be miserable. I was going to take the ferry on the Inside Passage, from island to island up and down the Panhandle to see what I could see.

Ketchikan was the first stop. So far I'd seen totem poles, and the old whorehouses, restored and prettied up for tourists, and a stream full of enormous black salmon, grazing in the water like a herd of cows in a pasture, and the lumberjack bars that filled up by nine a.m. I hadn't really met anyone, unless you counted the photographer. I was trying to get used to solitude. I allowed myself two or three conversations a day, the same way I allowed myself meals.

The next morning the police came to my hotel room. It was another thing that was not usual for me. There were two of them, a ladycop and a man, standing in the hall. She did all the talking. There had been an armed robbery across the street and the robber had run into the hotel. Was anyone staying in the room with me?

None of this was really happening. Oh no, I said. It was just me. A robber in the hotel? Was it safe here? Good gracious.

Yes, they hoped it was safe, said the ladycop. They were here to make it safe. She was young, with her hair screwed up in a twist, and a tough little face. She reminded me of Mac's secretary. Was I sure no one was staying with me?

The night before I'd met a man in a bar who said he had cocaine. He came up to the room, and when he kissed me I tried to tell myself that it was like waterfalls, after a while a man was a man and there wasn't any difference between them. But what had come out of my mouth was No, and he went away. Now I thought someone had seen him, or maybe he was the one who sent the police here to get back at me. I was thinking about the phone calls too, the way you think about things like that when the police come. I said, Mercy me, a robber. I surely hoped they would catch him and bring him to justice. No, no one else was here.

The ladycop was losing patience with me. Maybe I was over-doing it. She would have liked to arrest me for something, I could tell. The other cop hung back, as if he were bored or embarrassed or maybe just trying to get the right angle to look inside the room. They could only see a little ways behind me. There was plenty of space to hide a man, if I'd had one.

When she asked me a third time if I was staying here alone, I affected a look of shocked prissiness and said, Heavens to Betsy, I certainly hoped they caught that fellow. They went away then. I sat on the bed for a long time. I guess a woman alone is always suspect, always an adjunct to some man. I would have liked to tell someone how well I'd handled things. I wondered how close I could get to trouble, bears, cops, men, without actually being in trouble. This was a dangerous place to be for somebody like me who had come here for the express purpose of messing myself up.

Before the ferry left Ketchikan I tried to call Mac again, from a pay phone on the street. I dialed the number of a bar where we used to go, and asked for him. I heard laughter and the music of ice cubes before the bartender came back to say he wasn't there.

The ferry was blue and white and clean-looking, big as an office building. People drove cars right into its belly. People had kayaks, bicycles, dogs. Once again I felt underequipped. Cabins were expensive, so I slept on the floor of the lounge. The solarium and the observation deck were full of campers, kids who pitched tents and played guitars and smoked dope all night long. I could have joined them, but I was too busy being alone and tragic.

The only person I would have talked to was the Solitary Traveler. That's what I called him. He looked even more alone than me. He was an old hippie with gray hair down to his collar, a green army surplus parka, and lumpy boots. Little bits of fringe and leather sprouted from his clothes. He sat by himself on a deck chair, smoking a long curved pipe. He sat and smoked and watched the sun go down behind the blue-black hills, and he didn't need one thing from anyone. I wanted to talk to him, though I knew I wouldn't. Where was he from, and where was he going, I'd ask him.

No place in particular, he'd say. No place in particular, coming and going. How about yourself? A woman like you shouldn't be knocking around these parts alone.

I can handle it, I'd say. I can handle most things.

Tough, eh? Come to Nome with me, where men wear guns on their hips, like the old West, and the sidewalks are built of boards, and everyone's running from something. Come to Kotzebue or Disaster Creek. Ever drive the Alcan when the gravel runs out? Ever camp on pack ice at minus thirty? You can be just as tough as you want to be.

Excuse me, I'd say. I have to make a phone call.

I got off the ferry in Petersburg the next morning. Petersburg was this fishing town founded by Norwegians. I heard some tourists complaining that it was not as Norwegian and picturesque as they had been led to believe, and you couldn't buy anything Norwegian. There was a blond here and there, and a few of the downtown buildings were painted with hearts and birds and flowers. That was all. There were a lot of big fish factories and canneries in Petersburg and now, in the summer, crews of kids worked there, living in campsites outside of town. On their day off they all hiked into the Laundromat to wash the fish guts out of their clothes. The tourists contemplated them glumly, their cameras sagging around their necks.

I got sick in Petersburg, a fever and a cough. For three days I stayed in a hotel room drinking a bottle of cheap brandy and trying to call Mac. No one bothered me. It was the weekend so I called him at home, but his wife always answered. Once when I called I was an old woman who had reached a wrong number. Once, and this was the best or worst one, I said I was the hometown paper, and did she want to subscribe. I thought she'd say no, because I always did when I got calls like that, but when she said yes, I had to go ahead and pretend to sign her up.

Mac's wife was a tiny girl with long limp hair falling into her eyes. The one time I met her, at a party, she made absolutely no impression on me. That was before Mac and I began anything, so I didn't have to feel melodramatic about her. At the party Mac's wife drank diet soda and got into a lengthy conversation with the host about the merits of electric bug zappers. Of course I wondered what Mac saw in her. For a long time I wondered what hidden charms or powers she possessed, but I finally figured it out. She was his advertisement to other women: I am available for screwing around.

I thought I could handle it. I thought I was tough and reckless and wild, a real old sourdough. I had handled it pretty well while it was going on, but not now, when it was over, coughing up snot and brandy into a dead phone. I was losing track of who I was pretending to be. I packed up my bag and tottered down to the ferry terminal to wait for the next boat.

I'd missed the scheduled ferry while I was sick and no one knew when one would come through again. Things were like that in Alaska, hit or miss, as if they were too far away from the rest of the country to be bothered by the usual urgencies. I sat in the weeds outside the terminal, waiting. The fever made the sun blare down too hard and everything tilt in odd directions. I talked to a man waiting for a ride back into town. I was talking to him because he was short, though I didn't tell him that. I figured short men were safer, if you had to talk to someone.

I traded him the telephone credit card number for some dope, and we sat in the weeds, smoking companionably. He had a cheery, handsome face, and he wore a plaid shirt and khakis. He looked out of place, like a fraternity rush chairman gone wrong. He'd been bear watching at the town dump, him and a friend, and they'd spotted two. I asked him what the bears looked like.

“Disgusting. Like anything looks when it's going through garbage.”

His name was Willy and he was from Connecticut. He was going to Denali, Mount McKinley, hitching the Alcan. He wanted to see Eskimos and glaciers and whales. He wanted to see everything. When he'd used up half his money, he'd turn back. He thought. “Sometimes I'm afraid if I go too far I'll just keep going. End up in Japan or somewhere, you know?”

Willy had been camping out with the fish factory workers, but that was getting old. Those jokers thought it was great to cook fish over a campfire and eat it with their bare hands. As bad as the goddamn bears. If I ever came to Connecticut, I should look him up. If he was there, that is. He knew some pretty nice restaurants. We'd have ourselves a real dinner.

I said I'd do that. It seemed like a good-enough plan to me. When his ride came he hiked off with a jaunty wave. I was trying to get used to people coming and going, popping up and disappearing so fast.

The ferry came at dusk. I stood on the deck and looked around me. It was like no place I'd ever seen. The sky was a bowl of stars held in by the black shapes of the mountains, and the harbor was a pool of the last sunset, and the lights of the little town glittered. I was thinking it didn't have to be so bad, being here. That was a new thought for me. I went down to the ship's purser and bought a bed for the night.

What you could buy cheaply was called dorm space, one bunk in a four-bunk cabin. There were only three of us, me, Vivian, and Rose. Vivian was getting off at Haines Junction and driving a pickup truck to Valdez to meet her husband, who worked on the pipeline. Vivian said it
VAL-dez
, which I guess is how it's supposed to be pronounced. She said she hadn't seen her husband in eight months. I said she must be pretty excited about seeing him.

Vivian shook her head. “Eight months. What kind of marriage is that? I don't know anymore. You ever been to Valdez? They had them this big earthquake. Everything got smashed and they built it up again all trailers. I'm going to drive seven hundred miles to live in a trailer with what's-his-name. I just don't know.”