FICTION

Jean Anderson

Snow hangs in the air like fog and it’s minus ten: February 2022, maybe the waning days of COVID-19 in Alaska—if a new variant doesn’t appear. Emma and Fletcher have had two shots of vaccine, and boosters, but fresh snow fell overnight atop four feet of it, and Emma’s longing for heat, for sun—summer—and maybe a visit to New Mexico where their daughter Meg and three youngadult grandkids kids live, and where a dear friend died in January last year.

Emma longs for a phone chat with Joanne, whose death sometimes feels like an abstraction then suddenly devastating. It’s silly, she knows it, but she’s all at once seeing the lovely old Greyhound station in downtown Albuquerque—built in the early 1930s, around the time Joanne was born—just when New Mexico became a trendy travel spot: a tall, pastel Art Deco building fallen on hard times. Homeless people drift along the sidewalk in front, past stucco walls broken and crumbling, everything barely maintained, its once probably stately landscaped and curved driveway now a rutted trail leading to a huge, pillared entrance.

Inside, a magnificent ceiling rises thirty feet above passengers-to-be, but it’s chipped and worn, like the varnished wooden benches lining the walls. Near the front door sits a tiny office where you buy tickets. Emma sees it all vividly. On that side are restrooms and candy machines—and maybe a tiny lunch counter? Emma’s not certain about this detail. What would lunches be, anyway? Dried-out sandwiches in crackling cellophane? Hardboiled eggs?

Emma and Fletch visited Meg’s family the year she’s recalling, 2017, for the graduations of two grandkids: a grandson from UNM and a granddaughter a week later from high school. Fletch vowed this would be his last flight; he didn’t enjoy traveling anymore—flights last an exhausting night plus most of another day. Heading south, they found a day flight with a layover in Phoenix, a city he hates—impossible to navigate and hell-hot. But he needed time to recover.

They’d booked a room at a Motel 6 they knew, close to the airport, in walking distance—but when they reached the place it felt like a waystation for the homeless, its TV set chained to the small desk in the room. They stayed anyway; it was dark, too late to hunt for another motel, and Fletcher was exhausted. He needed sleep to be fresh, rather than arrive dead tired to visit with Meg’s family. They’d rest up and fly to Albuquerque in the morning, then spend a few days in a motel they liked—it was too crowded and busy to stay with Meg and Rick and their grandkids, and Fletch liked having his own space. He’d fly home to Fairbanks after the first graduation: they’d told Meg they didn’t want to leave the house vacant; there’d been break-ins in their neighborhood. Which was true— but really, he just didn’t enjoy travel anymore.

Emma loves travel. It was a rare treat in her childhood to ride across town in a car, or take a bus into downtown Cleveland; her family didn’t own a car. She and Fletcher had married young, in their early twenties, during graduate school in Ohio for Fletch, where he held a scholarship. When the University of Alaska offered Fletch a job, teaching math, they’d leapt at the fantastic opportunity. They’d go for a year, a once-in-a-lifetime jaunt, real travel—“an adventure”—now stretching well beyond fifty years. The decision shaped their entire long marriage, and their lives.

Both their daughters were born in Fairbanks, though now Amy lives in Anchorage, and Meg, their traveler, in Albuquerque. When Emma travels again—if she travels— will it be alone? Yes. Probably yes, she decides, and never again from Albuquerque to Las Cruces by Greyhound. Though for years after the trip she’s recalling, Greyhound sent her enticing emails.

Meg’s work the week of the first graduation was impossibly busy—she had annual meetings, meaning long drives across New Mexico with colleagues. Rick and the grandkids were busy too. What would Emma do with four days alone? Joanne’s invitation was a godsend— come visit her and Dan in Las Cruces, where they’d retired. Emma could avoid renting a car—avoid the five-hour drive south on the insane, speed-crazed New Mexico freeway—she’d take Greyhound!

Meg and Emma dropped Fletch at the airport. Then, harried and tense, Meg drove Emma down the curved, weedy driveway at the Greyhound station and helped lift her heavy suitcase from the car—at Joanne’s suggestion, Emma carried copies of her new book of stories. Then Meg drove off in the dust, waving. They’d had an early meal at McDonald’s, it was late afternoon by now, and Emma entered the dark, high-ceilinged waiting room dragging her suitcase (one roller stuck). She felt stuffed with fries, burger, and a chocolate milkshake, flushed from the unfamiliar heat after Meg’s car’s air conditioning, and half blind with the loss of intense summery daylight to the waiting room’s oven-hot shadows—when she saw the woman.

She was small and perky, a gray-haired person sitting in the dusk of the room surrounded by lumpy bundles— pillows and quilts: you could tell even at a distance—and waving to Emma as if to an old friend. “Over here,” the woman called out in a high-pitched, girlish voice. “Come sit over here,” patting a spot on the bench next to her: “Keep me company!”

Emma couldn’t resist. The woman was her age, clean, middle-class and sane-looking—“old” maybe, but “youthful,” as Emma still saw herself—and smiling. She was bouncing up and down on the bench, waving an arm eagerly, gesturing to Emma to come and sit. Emma smiled back hopefully, then dragged the suitcase and sat. They exchanged pleasantries quickly: the woman—Maxine— was ticketed for Las Cruces too, like Emma, though she was actually going to Deming where she’d grown up, to stay with her brother. He’d meet her at ten when they arrived, just as Dan and Joanne would meet Emma. It was a regular monthly trip for Maxine, to visit her father—in his 90s—and she always carried her own bedding.

The bus was late: mechanical issues north of Albuquerque; they had to bring on another bus. Not a problem, the woman—Maxie, as she asked to be called—told Emma. Their driver was Bob: he was the best! He’d make up lost time and get them to Las Cruces by ten. Emma relaxed; no use phoning Joanne. She and Dan were never at home anyway and Maxie was good company.

When they boarded, forty minutes late, Maxie insisted that Emma climb on first and sit by the window—Maxie took her favorite seat, first on the aisle behind Bob. She cradled the big wad of bedding on her lap—as always, she said: to save time. Bob was plump, ordinary-looking, probably in his 60s, and clearly a pro at his job. He’d carefully stowed Emma’s huge suitcase in the belly of the bus. There were lots of other passengers on board, but they all sat in back.

Emma hadn’t taken a Greyhound since college days, when she and a girlfriend made rare trips to Columbus for frat parties at Ohio State. Emma was dating a boy from high school, a boy she intended to marry. She wore his high school class ring on her wedding-band finger, filled with paraffin to make it fit, as you did then—but she’d not yet met Fletch. All that seemed a lifetime ago—and maybe it was—but Greyhound buses hadn’t changed much over the decades.

Maxie said she’d worked in Washington, DC after finishing high school. The job was a small sinecure, thanks to her dad. She worked as a typist—for the FBI! It was fun. Exciting! And she often rode the elevator with J. Edgar Hoover! They laughed, bumping elbows and giggling— sharing an image of J. Edgar wearing stockings and high heels: Emma knew Maxie saw this too.

Maxie said J. Edgar seemed like a strange guy, even to an inexperienced teen-aged girl. But who’d suspect all the actual quirks of the FBI chief? Maxie loved the job, but she came home to New Mexico after two years to marry and divorce: “the whole nine yards,” she said cryptically.

Emma was carrying Mary McCarthy’s Memories of a Catholic Girlhood—she liked to read serious books when she traveled—and she now considered McCarthy’s life: her parents both dying of flu, days apart, in the 1918 pandemic. Her mother was 29, her father 39; they were happy, in love despite serious financial troubles. They left four young children: Mary was eldest, six—with three small brothers. A worldwide pandemic seemed unreal, though Emma had read—and loved—Katherine Anne Porter’s “Pale Horse, Pale Rider” too. But she knew better than to talk books with a stranger, even a friendly one like Maxie. The Company She Kept—Emma had just finished McCarthy’s story collection about female sexual freedom—might be way off base.

Maxie brought homemade café au lait (Emma loved it too) in a big thermos tucked into her wad of bedding, and she shared it with Emma. (A traveler like Meg, Emma kept a collapsible cup stashed in her purse, and she’d risk evening caffeine—the day had been so full and tiring.)

Maxie next offered some to a woman sitting across the aisle. This woman was tall and slim, lanky-looking, with blonde hair going white, but clearly lively—and their age too. She carried a sturdy paper cup in her bag and sipped from it like a Greyhound pro.

This second woman was called Trudy—her real name was Gertrude: her mother loved old, regal names, she said. They passed a field filled with sleek horses grazing in pastel evening light, and Trudy said she’d loved horses all her life—like Maxie, who nodded agreement. Trudy was proudly Hispanic (Maxie nodded again) with no Nordic heritage to speak of despite her name—but a fan of bratwurst!—and they all laughed. Trudy said her husband was Mexican; he lived in El Paso, she in Albuquerque with their daughter, though she visited El Paso often by Greyhound. Her husband was there only sometimes now: El Paso was too big. He preferred Mexico.

The three women sipped Maxie’s sweet brew— steady refills doled from her thermos—like giddy teenagers, laughing and sipping as gorgeous purple and pink bands of daylight dwindled.

“How do we know you haven’t spiked this stuff?” asked Trudy.

“You don’t!” answered Maxie, and they all laughed and sipped some more. It was good.

Both women were impressed by Alaska. Maxie hoped to visit someday, after she finished chemo: bi-weekly now, and why she remained in Albuquerque after retiring from years of office work at UNM. Maybe she’d really retire one day, who knows, in Deming!

It grew darker. They saw what looked like a woman—or a ghost—walking the highway alone, and Maxie told Emma about La Llorona, the ghost of a jilted woman who drowned her children in anguish. She haunts waterways, and maybe roads, forever looking for fresh children to steal. The tale brought silence. Emma couldn’t name the ghost she knew about: Chupacabra? Was that it? An awful hairy creature who sucked blood? What were the gruesome details? They both probably knew the silly internet legend anyway. Best to keep the thought to herself. And the next: amazing how Hispanics know—and embrace—dark undercurrents of life! A racist thought?

They were passing through desert now. Emma watched darkness gather above pale red land and tried to stay awake. Trudy joked about the plastic water bottles people carry everywhere: “Alcohol is expressly prohibited on all buses.” She quoted a sign in the waiting area. Had they seen it? Emma hadn’t. Not a drop, supposedly, is allowed, Trudy said. But how could anybody know what was in all those bottles everybody carried? Maybe they were all full of vodka.

“Well, of course they are!” said Maxie. “Like, how do you know this coffee isn’t spiked?”

“Is it?” Emma—always the naïf, her most embarrassing failing, and unfortunately lifelong—bit, blurting it despite Trudy’s earlier joke. As always, she’d been unable to seal her lips.

“Of course,” said Maxie. “Couldn’t you tell?”

“You girls,” sighed Trudy. “Enough.” They went silent again. The coffee—spiked or not—was gone, and they’d used up all their jokes. Then a uniformed Border Patrol agent climbed aboard. They’d stopped at a tiny town; Emma couldn’t see its name through the dark window. A few people exited as he climbed on. There’d been a bit of minor trouble, the agent said: “I’ve got to check things out.” He announced this to the trio quietly, after joking a bit with Bob. Emma worried about Maxie’s huge misshapen bedroll, but the agent passed it with no interest then left the bus, tipping his Border Patrol hat to Trudy as he descended the bus.

Emma mulled the notion of killing your children in sheer madness, then recalled McCarthy’s cruel treatment as an orphan—by her own family! Joanne and Dan had lost their son—their only child—in a terrible rollover accident in Alaska years ago on the Parks Highway. Ethan was in his mid-twenties. The car wasn’t found for three days, hidden in brush. The Parks is a small highway by national standards—or international ones—but it’s one of Alaska’s busiest roads, linking populations in the state’s two largest cities, Anchorage and Fairbanks. What Emma admired most about Joanne and Dan was how sane they remained, after. She doubts she could’ve done that. She’d probably be like La Llorona. But she couldn’t talk about any of this to Maxie or Trudy—too tragic and depressing. And they were traversing a similar highway themselves, of course, narrow and well-used, sparsely populated but speed-ridden—and now completely dark.

What is it about horrific human tragedy that puts the subject off-limits? Yet makes it so enticing. Drowsy Emma wondered that now—something else she couldn’t speak of. Maybe she’d become a writer because she could not easily speak? Joanne said people telephoned her after the accident, clearly not to offer comfort but to wallow in sensationalism. Ethan was with a young woman he’d just met, who was killed too. Joanne tried for years afterward to build a relationship with the woman’s small son, being raised by his grandmother. Though the boy, of course, wasn’t Ethan’s child. That hadn’t worked out: the grandmother resented Joanne. It was all very hard.

Emma found another tale: once, in a snowstorm, as she and Fletcher and the girls drove back from a trip to Anchorage during spring break, a small plane landed in front of their car on the Parks Highway—and the pilot turned out to be their next-door neighbor! She told it, and all three laughed. Not typical, she assured Maxie and Trudy—pure chance, and he was OK. But amazing!

Emma had begun to hope Dan and Joanne wouldn’t pick her up in their new Smart Car. But no—surely it would be too small for three people. She’d seen rare versions of the tiny car in Fairbanks, but hadn’t been inside one. Fletch had warned her—repeatedly—against riding in the tiny extremely dangerous thing, but what could she do? Joanne would be so proud, so eager to cart her around. Emma knew it: she’d certainly have to accept at least one ride.

Did Maxie have children? Emma wondered that now, but she hesitated to ask. It might be a painful subject. Instead, she told Maxie about the Russian Far East. She and Fletcher had visited Siberia once—Yakutsk, a bustling port city on the Lena River, a huge river, and the Sister City to Fairbanks. They’d gone with a group of Alaskans, arriving in late July—and Siberia was hot! Hot as the blistering summers in Cleveland when she was a child! Amazingly! Siberians were a lot like Americans—friendly, though not quite so spontaneous. But very innovative! Maybe they had to be creative, given their remoteness— and their repressive government? It was fascinating, Emma said. (And troubling—though she kept silent about that part too: how could former deadly enemies feel so at ease together, so comfortable, so alike and compatible as individual people?)

Maxie said heavy snowfalls in winter in D.C. were daunting—intimidating!—navigating big city traffic in wet snow. Emma said Maxie was brave, doing all that, and at such a young age! Then, critiquing herself as usual, she felt like a naïf again, spouting such stuff—even as she said it. Was it simply patronizing? Or just foolish? “Brave?” hooted Maxie. “You live in Alaska!”

Emma loved that compliment. Though she knew she was anything but brave—stubborn, yes, maybe. Possibly “smart,” whatever that meant. Headstrong. Dogged. Unwilling ever to give up.

Trudy was dozing despite the caffeine, but they’d compared ages. Emma, to her surprise, was oldest of the three—by three whole years! She told herself it wasn’t vain—not truly vain—to believe she appeared youngest. For instance, she wasn’t yet gray. All her adult life she’d looked kiddish—for decades she’d hated looking that way. Had it become an advantage? Trudy and Maxie seemed amazed. They’d both clearly thought she—76— was youngest.

Then a wondrous tale came to Emma in the dark: in a tiny museum on the UNM campus, during a long-ago visit with Meg’s family, she read a written description transcribed in English, telling of a young Navajo man’s walk west to the Pacific coast—and back, alone—in the 1600s. He’d seen the Big Water and many amazing fish— even carried bones of a few fish home! Emma loved every part of this wondrous tale, but she was too sleepy to find words to speak it aloud.

When the Greyhound arrived in Las Cruces, at their designated stop, it was a convenience store! Emma knew she’d be lost if she’d borrowed Meg’s car—or rented one to drive south in the dark on this speedway. Imagine finding Joanne and Dan’s house in the dark! Las Cruces was sprawling. Vast, beautiful lights spread in all directions in the darkness around and below them.

They were ten minutes late, just as Maxie said: Bob’s triumph! Maxie patted Emma’s knee and leapt from her seat with her bundle. She was the first person off and Emma never saw her again. She’d vanished like La Llorona, probably driving away with her brother. Trudy stayed on, waving a slim tan hand sleepily in the darkness while Emma climbed down the Greyhound steps.

Bob was removing her suitcase. And there were Dan and Joanne! With Dan’s used Volvo—old, brown, sandblasted by wind, sturdy as a tank: not the bright-yellow Smart Car. Which she and Joanne would cruise around in for hours the next day—so happily! The four days of the visit would be pure fun, despite a sandstorm. Joanne’s asthma flared, keeping them away from the monthly writers’ gathering. Pointless for Emma to have lugged all those heavy books.

Joanne needed a walker to get around, or a cane. But her mind was first-rate—excellent—her talk full of poetry, books, anecdotes from the early days of marriage—living in China Town in San Francisco, which she and Dan could afford and enjoyed. She walked without a cane in the house, but needed one—or the walker—outdoors. But she drove the Smart Car herself!

Emma hadn’t seen the house before: on a pleasant street, very Southwest, cactus in the yard, cozy and full of books—with two yappy dogs, though only the Chihuahua truly yapped. It felt like their former longtime Anchorage home—on Cope Street, a literary tidbit Joanne always loved. Emma thought she could learn to like Las Cruces. Hadn’t Lucia Berlin lived here? An all-time favorite writer. Or was that Albuquerque only, when Berlin lived in New Mexico?

How blessed I’ve been all my life! Emma thinks now. In February in Fairbanks. She sets aside the Greyhound trip and its images, capped by the fine visit, a trip back on Greyhound, and a second wonderful graduation! Their granddaughter’s huge class ended the outdoor ceremony—in gorgeous dusk—with a surprise balloon launch. Hundreds of inflated colored balloons, hidden under the graduates’ chairs, pulled out suddenly and released! None of which there’d been time to tell Joanne, who’d have loved it. Blessed in family and friends—and, of course, in travel!

Yet how could anybody measure the gift of life itself? The real gift. Enormous and puzzling. Endless layers, and most of the truth hidden. Enriched—though sometimes made more baffling and difficult—by relationships. Joanne’s constant chatter (like Emma’s own?) irritated Emma. How could Joanne be so sensitive, such a fine poet, yet when you were with her, at times seem so completely self-absorbed? So shallow? Then generous, patient, full of offhand wisdom. How many times had Emma sworn off Joanne, then gone back eagerly? How many decades were they friends? Forty years? Surely more. Sharing a passion for writing, for words—for family, travel, books, friendship—life itself—even chatter.

Joanne died not of COVID, but from a fall in the house in Las Cruces, causing bleeding on the brain. Her fine brain. At the best Southwest hospital specializing in such things, in El Paso, they’d tried surgery. It didn’t work. She fell in November during an awful surge in the pandemic in El Paso and died after Christmas—which she (like Emma) loved. Christmas. Secular Christmas. Though Joanne was Jewish—then Unitarian as an adult. So many ornaments on the tiny tree that Emma’s kept up in this horrible year— still up—are gifts from Joanne. Other things too, gifts of decades: bookends, potholders, teacups, even tropical dish towels! (“I got one for me and one for you!”) And books. Of course! So many small daily objects gifts from Joanne. Special things too: beautiful, unique—and silly trinkets— used often, placed throughout the house.

At least Joanne—a lifelong liberal—missed the terrible siege on the Capitol in Washington, D.C. last year, the insurrection. She died just a few days before it; Emma thinks that now. Maybe the worst political event in Emma’s adulthood, in an age of death and seemingly endless horrors.

Joanne was born in Boston, first of three children raised in a big house owned by her grandfather. He always found space for Holocaust refugees. Her father— depressed, unable to find work during the Great Depression—committed suicide when she was six. Her mother supported the family as a waitress. She wanted Joanne to become a nurse, and Joanne tried, earning a nursing degree.

But Joanne was always a writer: at seventeen she wrote a novel (her first and last)—which her mother (Joanne’s image in old photos) found and destroyed. Joanne wrote poems after that—small enough to hide. In her twenties, she fell in love with a young man—and married him. But he had undiagnosed brain cancer. A few months into their marriage, the cancer killed him.

Later, she met Dan: the most erudite man Emma knows—grounded in history, technology, science— despite only attending high school. Joanne went to college throughout her lifetime, in bits, during her long second marriage to Dan. (What Fletch and I both did, too! Emma thinks it suddenly—something else we shared! Of course! She’d forgotten.) Joanne slowly earned an MA, was

Poet Laureate of Alaska for two terms, taught university classes as an adjunct in Anchorage for years—also community classes in writing, always popular—which she offered for free!

In Anchorage, the roof of their home was crushed by a tree. It fell from the front yard and took months of repairs—just when Ethan had become a difficult teenager, no longer wanting to live at home. She and Dan couldn’t have children; they’d adopted Ethan in San Francisco and loved him dearly. A cute, red-haired toddler born on Emma’s birth date—oddly—many years before she and Joanne met. (Then maybe I was a gift to Joanne too, as she was to me?)

Joanne wrote some of her best poems in her eighties. She’d triumphed: remaining cheerful, positive, creative and happy—productive through a long lifetime. Happily married for decades to a fine man, winning many awards for her poems—editing poetry for a Las Cruces journal during the last summer of her life. What a gift to be her friend!

Yet so many subtexts. A horde of mostly unknown tales, shared only with a few friends. But maybe that’s always true? For everyone? Surface “reality” never the real story? Truth endlessly layered? Life a shell of random facts? Reality what you make it? So, is your supposed self in fact what life choses to make of you? An enduring fate? A human’s character is his/her abiding fate. That old quote—which Emma can never resist re-gendering— implies choice. We choose to be—whatever. Character is fate. An idea she’s cherished forever, but who said it? A Greek of course, but who? She can’t recall. Shameful not to recall. Ah, yes—Heraclitus. Though maybe Emma added “abiding”? According to the Internet. She can’t find it in books and has to google it now.

But—each of us cast into that odd, beautiful, tale-rich role called a life for only a brief timespan. Or granted the amazing thing—a life! And what ingrates we are! Emma thinks again of La Llorona. Choice or chance? There are still so many things she needs to talk about with Joanne. How blessed they were to be friends.

And how she’ll miss her—forever now.

Julian Appignani

When time just slips… Away

— Neil

Young, “Like a Hurricane”

You’re driving out of the mountains. There’s wind and there’s rain. The wind kicked up when you stepped out of the woods. You’d noticed the lack of light in the trees, a steady graying, but you hadn’t thought a storm was coming on. You’d had three days of perfect hiking. Dry heat, light breeze, sun—bright summer sun, in all the needles and leaves. So hot up the hills you’d stop to dip your face in the creeks. It cooled off in the evenings. At the lush, willow-rich campsites, strung about blue alpine lakes. When you came back to the trailhead all this had changed. A blanket of cloud lay over the land. A wind pushed from the far side of the fat mountain lake. By the time you unlocked the car the weather was there. The rain hailed slantwise, the wind pinned you down. You threw your pack in the back seat and ducked in under the roof. Rain hammered over your head. Wind tipped the car side to side. You’d made it out just in time.

You thank God the car starts. You breathe out. You turn on the lights, windshield wipers—even, after a second thought, the heat. You warm your hands up at the vents. Then you put the car in gear and start. Out past the lake, down out of the mountains. Leaving behind whitecaps, gale-force gusts, an angry gray sky. You wipe the rain from your face. The windshield wipers race, back and forth, silly, spastic. You can just see if you drive slowly. It’s like there’s never been so much rain. The wind on the lake is something else, something terrific; in five minutes it’s gone from a flat sheet to a sea of peaks. It’s good you got out when you did.

At the park entrance you duck into a gas station. You fill up the tank, get a cup of coffee and a snack. Something to keep you going. You’ve got a long drive ahead. But the hiking was good; was great; was just what you’d needed. You don’t know how the next few months will turn out but you like the start that you’ve made. You wave goodbye to the trails, the serried forests, the scree slopes, the great bears. You wave fondly goodbye.

You’re back on the interstate. The road is big and broad but meanders through that landscape like the thinnest piece of string. Big country, burly country. Fields of green, streams, meadows ringed around by mountains. The rain enfolds it all like a curtain hung from the heavens. You try a sip of coffee. Harsh but good, warming. You’re not sure where you’re going, but at least you’re on your way.

After a while you give the radio a try. One station tunes in, a blast of static. You ease off the volume and shut the radio back down. You smile, recalling how, in a flash of foresight for a trip without much, you’d thought to pack a grabbag of CDs. In a shoebox to your right sits a treasured, badly scratched, comprehensive record collection. Folk, classical, rock, funk. The CDs lie among snacks, maps, an assortment of paperback books. You rummage around there with your hand. Keeping an eye on the road. You’re going well under the speed limit, but between the wind and the rain it’s no joke. Visibility’s limited; the surface may be slippery. You keep an eye on.

After leafing through a few CDs you pause. A treasure, for sure. A record you haven’t listened to in years—ages. It’s heavy going, in places. But what of what you love most isn’t? You’re doing good, right now. And you know there’s a long way to go. This will, at least, make you awake.

You reach out slow-handed, one-hand it and—deftly, hardly taking your eye off the road—slide the cd in the tray and hit play. That same old sound, soul sound. Keyboard, guitar, harmonica. You take a draught of that coffee again. It tastes even hotter, even better. You ease your hands around the steering wheel, peer out the windshield. The landscape looms like a living thing, breathing, one motion, rolling green hills with gray, glinting dissections… And you think about how right it was to drive out here, even for just a few days, across such a vast distance, at such a preposterous cost, with all your lack of skills, and lack of knowledge, and lack of experience… And yet there you were, on the trail, in the mountains, through the forests, along the rivers, in the presence of grizzlies… Whatever comes next, you think, This was a good entrance.

You realize the highway is starting to climb. The trees grow smaller, are farther apart. The rain’s let up a bit, but the wind’s still wild. You think of driving a boat, and inadvertently accelerate… Meanwhile, you’re halfway through the cd. You haven’t listened to this record in forever, but you remember, remember just right, like knowing where your foot will go long before it falls, what piece comes next. Your favorite song on the album, if you had to name one. You tighten up. It shows in your face, your hands. You sense the tension in your chest. This vague apprehension…

You sit back in your seat. Shake it all out, shoulders, wrists, hips. You seal your hands to the wheel. You refit your butt to the shape of the seat. Pull once, twice on the seatbelt. You take a deep breath in, and breathe out.

And there it is…that perfect feeling, those falling five notes, all you’ll hear for the next ten minutes, or more, longer, forever. You gain the broad pass, gravid with rain. This enormous horizon. You drive on, into the wind. You’re being pulled slowly, steadily upward, away. The rain sprays sideways, the wind slams the tops of the trees. The sky shines like iron. The road winds in broad bends, winds and climbs. You’re going over it, the big pass. You’re going over it now.

If the aim of all playing is to make the instrument sing… No. It’s when the hawk cries; when the wolf howls; when the hands are raised and the cored-out body falls. The highway peels away. You check the speedometer and see you’re going ten over, your right foot like lead on the pedal. You ease off with an effort, squeezing. Your eyes are as tight as your hands are. There’s a light in them, at the sides. Bowls holding water, an old feeling brimming over.

Who knows what this is. You only see, against a tremendous gray sky, a hawk, diving; that unearthly cry; the earth’s surface, rushing upward, filling its eye. And in that moment you know that you’re driving with Death, what- ever this is, and you are certain, so sure in this knowledge, you take the next bend at high speed—and make it, not reckless—and the next, the sanest motorist in all that roadway, though you’re driving with Death, and it’s because, in that moment, you want to, will, live, at all cost; you are the hawk, diving; you are the earth, rushing up; the sky is your stage, your accompaniment, dum, dum dum, dum dum, dum dum, and there’s only this cry, the hawk’s cry, far as a star, loud as the world, tilting across it.

Tears stream down your cheeks. It occurs to you to get off the road, to pull to the side. Your mind seems to be blown open. But the hand on the wheel, the foot on the pedal… are still in control. Tail, talon, wing. You will not stop, will not relinquish this feeling. That maybe comes once in a lifetime, and is yet the most precious… You wipe your eye, careful, place your hand back on the wheel and

From the right side, through the rain, pours the form of the deer. It springs higher than the height of the car; it comes like a bullet; it floats, frozen, hangs in the air. Against the weld where land and sky join its coat glimmers, shimmers with rain. Its eye gleams, black, enormous, voided like oil, like shining from shook foil. Where you see mirrored your wonder, your fear.

It hadn’t been surprising that he fell. Decades of work in the mine had left him battered and brittle. He spends his time in a reclining chair now, with the TV always on, murmuring false vitality through the house. This lifestyle doesn’t help with his health either.

I set him up with coffee before I leave in the morning and serve him dinner on a TV tray when I get home. He is still capable enough to shuffle around though. This is evident in the objects surrounding his chair—outdated newspapers, pulp western novels, empty bowls and cups, half-eaten bags of junk food, a flyswatter, and a spaceheater. When I see his chair without him in it, I usually think of an object moved after snowfall. An absence revealed in the disparate space amidst a blanket of debris. I know I should clean more often, but I’m always exhausted when I get home.

When I was first hired, I’d expected to be working in the pit. I’d set up cameras that look beyond the rock face, ensure we were still following the vein, tell others where to drill and tamp explosives. Then, they’d muck it out. Productive work that results in valuable extraction.

Instead, I find myself moving listlessly through a forest that seems to endlessly duplicate itself. A long, flat drive down a gravel road. When the road ends, I walk further still—to the damp musk of disturbed soil in the spring thaw, and the herbal-sweet scent of fresh-cut conifers. There, I spend my days doing deadwork.

Deadwork consists of hopeful preparations: an access line is cut through the bush to a site where trees and topsoil are peeled off the bedrock, revealing a raw, telling wound. If this bare scar looks promising, you probe a little more, carving out trenches or pits, needling deeper and deeper, until eventually, if all goes well, you have considerable stopes or tunnels that finally expose something of value to extract. But that’s a big if.

Coming to live with dad again after school was the inevitable choice. There was work nearby to put my degree to use, and, more prudently, there was no one else willing to take care of this stubborn man. Upon my return, I was amazed to see just how diminished he had become after only a few years of seclusion.

It hadn’t been surprising that he fell, but it had been surprising how visceral his reaction had been to the mere mention of her. Hadn’t I prepared him better for this? These last few months might’ve been worthless after all. The risk is too high. We live alone—it’s a delicate environment. Although I’m trying to stay positive. He might come around still.

My mother disappeared when I was quite young. I haven’t spoken to her since she left. I wouldn’t even know how to get a hold of her. As far as I know, he hasn’t spoken to her either.

Her departure seemed to hit dad without warning.

‘It’s insane! Not a single word of explanation,’ he’d said as he paced the kitchen with what, I’d assumed, was an explanatory letter in his hand.

He wasn’t particularly capable of offering emotional support to a child, so I learned what I could by listening to him talk to himself. For a few months, he repeated synonyms for ‘deserted,’ as if anger should be enough to quell any grief. He’d mutter to the mirror while he shaved, or complain over the drone of the radio when we ran errands.

Whenever I found the courage to ask him directly what had happened, he’d kneel down, put both hands firmly on my shoulders and say something like, ‘left like an old pair of boots kiddo—that’s all there is to it. No point in dredging up the past now, okay? Got to get our chins up and keep moving forward.’ He’d look straight at me as he said it, but it felt like he was still talking to himself.

Eventually he got tired of having to repeat these platitudes. I arrived home from school one afternoon to find him rushing between his bedroom and the rusted 55-gallon burn-barrel he kept in the backyard. He was frantic, perhaps wishing he had finished before I’d gotten home. I kept my head down and pretended to start on homework at the kitchen table. While he was outside, I snuck a look out the back window and saw a plume of deep, black smoke. Dad tossed in a garbage bag and sprayed it down with lighter fluid. The noxious pyre hissed. When he turned toward the house, I bolted back to the table, pretending not to notice that something was going on as he walked down the hallway for another haul. When he was outside again, I snuck to his bedroom and saw shoes, books, and trinkets—a scattered mess. Mom’s things. The closet door was open, thinned of her clothes.

When I heard the backdoor open again, I ran and locked myself in the bathroom. I sat on the floor listening to dad’s frenetic movement through the house, a manic fervour to empty it of mom’s presence. I emerged when it finally sounded calm. He served me pasta and sauce for dinner and we didn’t talk about it. After this, he stopped talking to himself too.

Silence was key to moving forward. It became his way of life, and it went beyond just us: he cut out everyone else too. Driven perhaps by shame, regret, emasculation— who knows? It was never a topic that could be discussed. We have a large extended family spread between Sudbury and North Bay, though he never so much as calls. Our eremitic bungalow sits about an hour's drive north in a threadbare town. I offer them quiet, infrequent updates. This is about as connected as we get.

Since moving back, I’ve spent much of my time driving to various sites that have promising indicators: an iron-stained gossan jumping out of the green boreal with a telling change of colour, or a subtle spine of quartz breaking through the topsoil before diving back down. Once the underbrush is cleared, I conduct geophysical surveys, and then wait. Wait to see if more is possible. Wait for the go-ahead to expose the bare rock, carve into it, see if it reveals a larger discovery.

When dad was still talking to himself, he often repeated a rough theory for her departure: ‘She finally went off the deep end…completely lost it.’ It was an easy enough explanation for a child to internalize, and once dad’s silence solidified, I must have subconsciously decided this would have to do. I went through my adolescence simply believing she had ‘gone crazy.’ Far from tactful, but it did fit with the oddity that she’d left so much of her stuff behind, and that she hadn’t reached out, even to me, since she left.

Of course, this isn’t the kind of explanation that provides much lasting comfort, and driving to these remote locations out in the bush left me with a lot of time to think. I considered the enormity of what was still left unsaid. I wondered if those early, bitter ramblings were just dad’s insensitive way of avoiding a larger issue. Or— if she was truly unwell, why hadn’t anything been done to help? More and more in my idle moments, questions began to arise.

So: open dad up. Dig through the withdrawn, grumbling exterior bit by bit.

First, I forced him back into the world. Got him to come along on errands. Anything to get him out, move him beyond his cloistered life.

‘Come to Timmins with me, I’m going to get groceries,’ I’d said, trying to sound nonchalant, as if this were a normal request. When he muttered a complaint, I had to be more forceful. ‘You don’t have to get out of the truck, okay? Just sit and look around.’

Next, I started bringing up family memories whenever I could. Casually.

‘Didn’t Uncle Terry used to play for Owen Sound?’ I asked, when he had a hockey game on. Or, knowing he’d visited with mom before I was born, ‘you’ve been to Florida, haven’t you?’ when the Everglades appeared in a movie he was watching.

In the beginning, he simply ignored these inquiries. Stared straight ahead, stoic. Eventually he began allowing himself quick sideways glances my way. He’d grunt before returning his attention forward.

Finally, there were prickly acknowledgements.

‘Hey, didn’t we almost hit a moose there once?’ I asked when the news reported highway 144 was temporarily closed north of Cartier. He grumbled, and I continued, ‘When was that?

Were we on our way to Aunt Sheila’s for some reason?’

‘Uh-huh. Thanksgiving, I think.’

‘Right, right. I remember mom being terrified afterwards, and to calm her down you drove really slow the rest of the trip. Everyone shooting dirty looks and honking as they passed us.’

Dad swiped a dismissive hand through the air to end the conversation. But it was a good indicator—he had briefly permitted a discussion about that prior life.

Months of oblique exploration and then, after he’d finished with dinner last night, I came at him directly.

‘Dad, I want to ask you something.’

‘Hmm?’ He grunted, nodding his head toward me.

‘About mom.’

He stiffened, suddenly alert. The room seemed to momentarily hum with silence. He took a quick look at me and turned back to the TV.

‘Thomas, I really don’t—’ He paused and scratched at the fabric of the chair as if to calm himself. Then, in a measured tone, he continued, ‘I don’t think this is a good time for that.’

‘I just want to know more about what happened, or if you’ve talked to her since. If there’s a way I might reach out to her…’ my voice came out crackling and soft.

He kept his eyes at the TV, but I saw his eyelids twitch.

‘I’m not—’ he coughed and cleared his throat. ‘I’m not going to discuss this right now.’

‘Dad, we need to talk about it eventually. Did she say something in the letter she left?’

‘What letter? What are you talking about?’

‘The day she left, I remember you were holding a letter.’

He didn’t respond. Instead he fumbled for the remote and turned the volume up to a piercing roar.

‘…SERVICES HAS ANNOUNCED IT IS HOPING TO ATTRACT UPWARDS OF…’

‘Dad!’ I raised my voice.

‘…TO THE REGION WITHIN THE NEXT COUPLE YEARS…’

‘A little loud don’t you think?’

‘…A SIGNIFICANT INCREASE IN THIS SECTOR SAID….’

‘Dad!’

‘…WHO PROMISES IT WILL GO TOWARDS…’

‘Dad!’

‘Thomas please!’ he shouted, his voice momentarily filled with strength. ‘Let it be!’

He turned off the TV and cranked his reclining chair forward.

‘Dad, listen, I’m not trying to trap you or blame you, okay? I just want to talk about it.’

He wasn’t listening anymore.

‘No, no, no, no, no, no…’ he repeated as he stood up, where his legs abruptly crumpled beneath him. He fell forward, glancing off the coffee table before landing hard and awkward on the floor.

I rushed to him, tried to stop him from moving, afraid he might hurt himself more, but he ignored me and continued to flail and mutter franticly, weakly trying to prop himself up. So, I helped him to his feet, and tried to guide him back to his chair.

‘No, no! The bedroom, please, just my bedroom,’ he was looking past me, grabbing my wrist so tight I grimaced and let out an involuntary cry.

By the time we reached the hallway, he was already pushing me off, clutching his arm forward and angling away from me.

‘I’m fine, I’m fine. Let me go from here.’

‘Dad, I can help you to bed. Are you okay? Does anything feel sprained or broken?’ I reached for him again, but he swung his elbow back at me.

‘I said I’m fine!'

He continued on in short, frenzied steps until he reached his room and shut the door.

This morning, I could hear him wheezing and hacking. He’d call out for coffee as soon as he cleared enough phlegm from his throat to yell. Last night I’d waited for his quiet sobs to diffuse before I went to check on him, hoping that if I gave him the space to sit in that sorrow, he might come around. He didn’t. When I stood at his bedside, he looked up at me with tired, trembling eyes.

‘I can’t, Thomas, I just can’t.’

I saw him, desperate and frail, and it frightened me.

‘I know, I’m sorry.’

Still, I hoped he might feel differently today after that initial shock. While waiting for him to call for coffee, I considered cleaning the junk scattered around his chair, but I stopped myself. Driving into Timmins now, I’m glad I had. I didn’t ask him to join me on this grocery run, either. I’ll let him return to that isolated life— turn on the TV, the space-heater, and reach into the stale bag of chips. Fall back into untroubled silence.

The highway repeats itself through the forest. I slump in my seat and crack the window for cool air. The bush here is smothering. Incessantly flat and stretching on, dense and persistent.

There is, though, a deviation every now and then: a turnoff, where a gravel road cuts in and presses surely toward a decided spot. And there, the trees have been cleared and dozer scrapes mark exposed rock. There might be something to find.

All the materials removed during deadwork, those that conceal and wrap themselves around your desired ambition— the trees, the soil, the extraneous rock— are known collectively as overburden. You keep it nearby, in case you fail to find something productive.

Maybe sometime soon, dad will feel the need to talk to me about everything. Until then, remediate. Pretend like it didn’t happen. The disturbed overburden must be contoured back into repose.

Jesse Nee-Vogelman

Though my girlfriend knew about Uncle Earl for years, I met him first. He ran a distillery and wolf sanctuary out in Bonner, past the abandoned bitcoin mine. Electricity had been cheap, once, but nothing was cheap anymore, the gas station attendant told me, with all these out-of-staters moving in. I was alright, though. I had a Montana license and Montana plates. I showed him pictures on my phone of myself holding a fish.

I stopped at Uncle Earl’s on the way to a wedding. Coco Brusseau was getting married, and what’s more, she was finally clean. My girlfriend was the maid of honor, so she went out early to convince the bride not to call her exboyfriend. I did the drive with Marv, a seven-foot graffiti artist and former Mariners pitching prospect with a tattoo of a giant nail gun on his chest. He said it was better not to show up empty handed. He said we’d best stop at Uncle Earl’s.

We pulled off the highway and crossed a handmade bridge over a narrow creek. The forest enclosed us. I curved through the pine and past a slanted A-frame to the top of a hill. It was dusty and dry. The moment I killed the engine we sweat through our suits. We stepped from the truck and Marv dropped his pants and pissed into a pile of rusted scrap metal. He pointed at a chain link enclosure down the hill.

Wolves, he said.

A small hut stood behind us on the hill. A cardboard sign rested in the window. Uncle Earl’s it said. An open sign hung on the door. Marv shook off and knocked.

Yo, Uncle Earl, he said, and went inside.

I followed. The door opened to a small wood-paneled room. Dozens of rough knives hung by iron hooks from the ceiling. A man stood behind the bar. He was tall and lean, tattooed across the neck and arms by thick, blue veins. Scars covered his forearms. His fingers twitched in recognition as we opened the door.

Hey, Earl, said Marv. How about a taste?

Uncle Earl set two clear plastic shot glasses on the bar.

No tea for sale, he said. His voice was low, stoneground, like dirty water seeping through rocks. But you can try a bit of everything.

We stood at the bar as Earl poured the shots and told us the history of liquor. He told us about charred oak and the Whiskey Rebellion. He told us about barley versus corn versus cereal mash and how when you drink Scotch, all you’re getting is whatever’s filtered down over centuries of sheep farming through the bogs into the peat.

All that smoke is nothing but sheep shit, he said.

He pushed the shot glasses toward us.

But this, he said, is the smoothest 120 proof this side of the divide.

We took the shots. The whiskey was clean and it was strong. I looked at Marv, who gripped the bar and doubled over at his enormous waist.

Wooooo, he said.

Uncle Earl poured himself a shot.

That’s a flask whiskey, he said. You get out into these hills, 80 proof is barely strong enough to get your buzz on. But eight ounces of this will get the job done.

He took our glasses and drew several bottles out from back of the bar. He poured us his Settler’s Tea, made with black tea, mint and rose hips. He poured us his gin, but not your grandma’s gin, he told us, that English crap, an entire country of inbred hicks, who made the worst food on earth, so why would we trust them with liquor, but a real gin, a tasting gin, made with juniper, sure, but also cinnamon, cassia, Java pepper, grains of paradise, and licorice root. He poured us vodka, which disgusted him to make, but your generation, he said, pointing at me and Marv, fucking loves vodka, and then he poured us the Huckleberry vodka, because it’s Montana and everything’s gotta be fucking huckleberry, and the Italian lemon vodka, which was delicious.

By then the drinks were working. We were laughing and joking and sweating and talking about things that weren’t alcohol like we were old friends. Then Marv wiped his forehead and asked about the wolves.

Uncle Earl poured.

Down to one, he said. Daisy. Sweet girl. Sick, he said, and drank. Old, like me.

He pointed behind the bar, where there hung a picture of a younger Earl surrounded by a pack of snow white wolves. He looked somehow even more wild, even more thin. A patchy beard covered his cheeks, his bright eyes withdrawn into his skull.

Used to have thirteen pure plus ten hybrids, he said. And a wolverine too. One day, swear to god, she was just left in a basket at my door, like baby Moses. That was a hell of a morning.

He cleared our glasses and replaced the bottles behind the bar.

But I’m sixty-five, now, he said. Wolves live fifteen, sixteen years. Can’t be running wolves when I’m eighty. He gestured around us at the small tasting room. This used to be the gift shop, he said. Closed to the public, now. Wasn’t helping anyone anymore. Wolves are political, these days. You want them alive or you want them dead. No on cares about the facts either way.

That’s sad, I said, hoping to show who’s side I was on, but Uncle Earl shook his head.

No, he said. That’s just how it is. No way to make everyone happy. Out here, you tell someone what to do, and it’s going to cause trouble, one way or the other.

Then he placed his hands on the counter and leaned across the bar.

I’ll tell you one thing, though, he said. Those goddam wolves saved my life. He pointed at the marks on his arms. I knew if I was gonna take care of these things, I had to take care of myself. Shit, I even got the flu vaccine this year. I told my doctor I don’t want that government bullshit in my body. He said, shit, Earl, sixty years you don’t care what you put in your body. Why start now?

We all laughed and I paid for a couple bottles. When Uncle Earl heard they were for a wedding, he tied a limp ribbon around each one and poured us another shot in celebration. We collected the bottles and thanked Earl and just as we were about to leave, I got it together to ask him about all the hanging knives.

Oh, that, he said. Got a forge out back. Fire it up every year at first snow.

Fuck me, said Marv. You’re a smithy too?

Uncle Earl shrugged.

Winter’s long, he said. What else am I going to do? Work?

By the time we left, we were tired and drunk. Marv folded himself into my truck, tucking his knees up against his chest. We still had a few hours to go, so about halfway, I pulled over and we napped on the shoulder, leaving the truck running. When I woke up, Marv was out cold. I drove for a while and tried the radio, but the music made me feel lonely, so I shut it off and listened to Marv snore. The noise comforted me. If I needed him, well, there he was. A little while later, I turned onto a dirt road off the highway and then a dirt road off that until we came to a driveway that ended in a Lincoln log cabin the size of an airport hangar. A multi-peaked gazebo draped itself across the lawn, its many legs crawling like like octopus tentacles into the earth.

Jesus, said Marv, coming to as we parked the truck. My girlfriend appeared in the driveway. She had a drink in her hand and she was happy to see me. Her cheeks were flushed and she was covered in sweat from dancing. Though it had been just a few days, I felt suddenly that I was a man coming home from war to find his wife had thrown him a surprise party. Who are all these people, I wanted to ask. All these people when what I want is you.

Guests milled around the gazebo as my girlfriend showed me the property. Coco’s parents were in construction and had built the cabin themselves. An enormous earthmover idled behind the house. Her parents had leveled a hill for the ceremony, my girlfriend explained. I was confused.

Wasn’t Coco, like, a meth head? I said.

My girlfriend crossed her arms.

You don’t have to be poor to be fucked up, she said.

I got myself a drink and filed slowly into the audience. The ceremony was short. The bride’s grandfather officiated in a ministerial neck tie of black satin ribbon. He spoke into a microphone clipped to his lapel, which he periodically caressed with his hands. Behind the crowd, a man in cargo shorts piloted a drone camera from a digital tablet. Halfway through the ceremony, the speaker died and the grandfather’s voice disappeared, his prayer from Ecclesiastes consumed by the drone’s buzz. Before kissing, the couple braided a knot from three ropes attached to a wooden cross. Everyone cheered.

At the reception, I drank and introduced myself to my girlfriend’s old friends. At dinner, I sat near Coco’s grandfather, who had raced pigeons as a young man. There was a vodka cocktail named for the bride and a whiskey cocktail named for the groom. There were flies and salt rifles to kill the flies. For dinner, everyone chose steak.

The entire wedding I talked about Uncle Earl. I told the grandpa about the whiskey and the wolves and the forge. I told the groom’s mother about wolverine baby Moses. The more I drank, the more enthusiastic I became. A knife-forging whiskey distiller and wolf savior? I said. You couldn’t make this stuff up. What a place this was, I said, where you could just stumble into an Uncle Earl.

During dinner, my girlfriend listened and drank. She was unusually silent, but weddings were, I thought, one of those things that made some people loud and some people quiet. Then, over dessert, she gave her speech. Almost immediately she began to cry. She talked about how much life had changed for them. How they had been girls together, and it seemed, for a time, that maybe that would be all for them. That they wouldn’t make it out, that they would be stuck in that time and that town forever, but now look at them. At her wedding. And she said how everything they had ever dreamed of had actually come true, love, of course, but also living, being alive, and that was itself a miracle, which they were there to celebrate as much as anything else.

We all raised our glasses.

Then it was time for dancing. Across the gazebo, a band swung onto the stage. They played wedding classics: Whitney and Michael and Queen. Only instead of jumping and shouting, the couples linked hands and whirled in country swing. All around us, men spun their women, stepped and kicked and dipped. I shuffled limply with my girlfriend on the edge of the crowd. Marv took an elderly aunt by the hand and twisted her onto the floor. He was enormous and handsome and polite, a boy built for aunts. An older man in a cowboy hat tapped my shoulder and asked if he could borrow the young lady.

Sure, I said, in surrender.

I watched the man twirl my girlfriend, her cheeks pink and her eyes bright with laughter. I’d bought a bolo tie, but it didn’t matter. Nothing could replace a childhood learning the moves.

So I lurked at the bar. I told the bartenders about Uncle Earl and his whiskey. They too were from elsewhere and together we marveled at the impossibility of this strange, wonderful place. Then my girlfriend appeared behind us. She ordered a drink and I could tell from her face that something was wrong.

Hey, I yelled, chasing after her. What is it? Did that fucking cowboy—

You don’t get to just tell people about him, she said, spinning around.

What are you talking about? I said.

Uncle Earl, she said. He’s not yours.

What do you mean?

You’re here telling every single person you see about him, and what is he to you?

I stopped and looked at her.

You haven’t even met him, I said.

But I knew about him, she said. He was a special thing, and you come in here and talk about him like he’s yours. Nothing means anything to you. Nothing is secret. You see something special and you want the whole world to know you saw it. To know that you’re having some real authentic experience. You guys are all the same. You show up and say it’s so beautiful, so strange, so fucking rejuvenating. The mountains, the people, fucking wow. But the truth is you don’t belong to any of it, and whenever you want to leave, you get to do that. And all those people you you’re talking about, they don’t get that. They’re just here. So no, you don’t just get to show up and have Uncle Earl, she said. He isn’t yours.

I didn’t have much to say to that. It was like my mind was a white wall on which nothing could be written, so that I’d get halfway through a thought only to realize the beginning had disappeared. When I finally came to, my girlfriend had gone. I finished my drink and found Marv sitting at the back of the gazebo. His enormous body spilled over the chair as he stared out into the dance floor. Without looking, he patted the seat beside him. Marv was so in love with Coco he could hardly speak. I followed his gaze out onto the dance floor, where she spun with her husband, her white train painted black with the carefree steps of dancers. For a moment, at least, she was more than beautiful—she was happy, a state even more difficult and rare.

So I asked him about his bullshit, things that had nothing to do with all those reasons we were there, joy and love and living. We talked about wild fires. We talked about baseball. We talked about how rich we would be in just a few years with just a few more good breaks.

I’ve got new hustle, Marv told me, pointing at his shirt. Vintage wear.

Oh yeah? I said.

Flip it from thrift stores, he said. Even the frontier isn’t immune to style.

How do you know what’s good? I asked.

Check the sleeve, he said. Double stitching means double dollars.

He pulled a flask from his suit jacket, barleycorn tweed, exactly the wrong material for summer, so large he must have tailored it himself.

Uncle Earl, he said, passing me the flask.

I took a pull. We looked out toward the crowd, where my girlfriend was dancing with Coco Brusseau, their cheeks pressed together, girls again, and every man watching and in love.

The whiskey went down, but Uncle Earl was wrong. Even this would could not get the job done.

Then a new song started and everyone screamed and rushed to the dance floor.

Fuck, said Marv, taking a sip. Let’s get the fuck up.

I stood as the dancers formed a line, stepping left and right in unison. Marv ran forward and grabbed a woman, who laughed as he pulled her onto the floor. I finished the flask and joined, but it was really no fun. Within moments, it was clear that everyone knew the steps but me.

Mary Fogarty George

(and Part One translation into Yugcetun (Yup'ik)

by Julia Jimmie)

After you latched the cabin door and placed the grass-woven knapsack over your shoulders, it sealed to your skin like a melting garment and created a seamlessness between you and your body. Attachment, you thought, where duality obscures and you become one.

You wanted to have a homebirth, but when you told your husband, he reacted quietly. And you couldn’t stand that. You wanted an answer in the form of words, but he was unable to formulate them, so you left and took a long walk. You hiked along the tundra lakes because you needed to get away, not only from him, but from the village. You needed time alone, to get ready for the final stages of your pregnancy. You wanted to feel a spiritual connection with the land. You were changing and needed freedom outside in the fresh air before the birth. You went for a walk in marsh country without telling him. It was early summer on the Bering Sea and the mushy ground sucked at you like quicksand. Your boots filled up with moss and water. Your feet were cold because your socks were wet enough to wring out. The geese flew and cackled while you walked.

You decided to shed your clothing and dip your toes into the lake. Plants scratched at your feet and ankles. You were shy about your nakedness because the sun hadn’t touched your body all winter. The wide-open space was fresh. It smelled like Labrador tea. It teased your nostrils. It smelled as old as the earth itself. You looked up to the sight of lake after lake, thinking there must be a million of them.

You dipped your body into the cold water. The mosses rose, and bubbles surfaced from the sandy bottom. Alongside, the loons swam, sitting on top of the water. Then they plunged down and swam under the water. You guessed where they would surface, but always miscalculated, and you played a game with them. They were unaware of your participation in their wild dance. As they ducked for food, and fluctuated up and down, their feathers sparkled as the water glistened off their oily backs. Seeing you, they flew off, not far, to another lake, to be alone. Not with you. The dance ended and you sat there, with child in your belly, in the middle of the lake.

The loon called eerily. You listened carefully and you heard one calling and her lover answer. They called back and forth to each other. It made you think about love.

You walked so far that you found yourself at the old village of Calitmute, way across the lakes, where tundra hummocks of grasses and tunnels abounded. The old sod houses were overgrown and robbed by red fox families. The mice tunnels ran like highways. Little mice families lived there now, nibbling and foraging for food. Their caches were empty, after just awakening from their winter hibernation. That one mouse, he had a large family. His wife had so many children. He was a good mouse provider, diligently digging out tunnels and carving out houses to assure all his children had space with rooms of their own.

When you walked, the little godwits tried to lure you away, “Follow me, follow me over here.” They kept you from finding their nests. Hungry, you looked harder and when you found them you greedily cracked three eggs and drank them; they were so small in your hands.

Your long hair was wet. Wringing it dry, you sat on your clothing while the breeze dried your skin. You imagined the old village. Kayat were stored along the tundra streams. White fish swam and released their eggs, and women cut, hung, and smoked them in their smoke houses. The men were together in their men’s house making community baths for themselves while the women washed themselves in their children's urine. You were wondering about their lives and their sicknesses.

One time, you told an old woman, I wish I could have lived like that, and that woman giggled and shook her head, “No good-no good.”

And that’s exactly what she said when you tried to explain to her about your decision to have a homebirth. “No. No good.” She didn’t give any lengthy explanations. She didn’t describe the losses and deaths of babies in the womb of the many others before you, or of a father holding his new-born child and watching it die in his arms; eyes closing, lips opening, the little body turning purple and its limbs limp.

While you napped in the sun, you dreamt of wolves. They gathered around you in the cold snow, their paws making prints like tangling webs. You fell in the snow on your back; and black hair everywhere covered your face, long enough to reach your hands. Your hair was waving and covered you into a cloud of darkness. As you disappeared into the cloud, the wolves couldn’t see you, but the cloud couldn’t disguise your smell. They hovered around you. It confused them and they sniffed into the air. One howled loud enough to awaken you.

You couldn’t forget the dream. It haunted you throughout the afternoon. You noticed that the marsh marigolds were ready to pick. The geese flew over-head and a couple of ducks swam together looking for a place to mate. A south breeze blew while you looked around at the blue sky. When you bent over, you could feel the baby jabbing at your pelvis. You pushed the little foot back to make room for yourself. You began to sing the Tulukaraq (Raven) song.

He flies above the world and looks down, spreading his wings over all he sees.

He caws and glides and slides aroundTulukaraq. The Raven-maker, oh, Raven-maker; he’s made you; he’s made me.

After you picked enough marigolds to fill your knapsack, you turned back, but you had hiked so far, and there were so many lakes, you became tired. You lay down to rest and dreamed again. You dreamed you were falling through the sky. The weightlessness confused you and your body detached itself and you kept falling, spiraling downward like a magical bird until you almost hit the ground, but the earth opened up and you passed through mouse houses, and mastodon fossils, and salmon-berry patches until you were swooped up by Raven with his huge dark wings. You slept in his feathers. He didn’t return you to the tundra. Instead he flew up to river country where the willows and cottonwoods grew taller and stronger than reed grasses used for basket-weaving. You could smell wood smoke from the smoke houses.

When you awoke you were worried that your husband wouldn’t find you. You called out his name two then three times. You were crying. Your tears became stream-like, gurgling around you. You were wet. Water engulfed you and you struggled to keep afloat, treading water with your tremendous legs. You gasped for air, and a King salmon pulled you to him. You became a fish.

You swam up the river together. Deeper and deeper, through colder and darker water, you swam against the currents for miles until Raven swooped down and with a deep dive spun up with you on his back. While riding him you fell asleep. When you awoke, you were cramping. Abject, you called out to Raven to release you. “I’m pregnant, Raven. This is not suitable.”

The pangs in your abdomen fluctuated like the waves under a little boat at sea. In a modulated movement, the baby stretched out and kicked, pounding inside of you.

Raven let you rest. You pillowed your hair around you, drying off the water droplets from your skin. Softly, you patted your breasts; the rings around your nipples were growing larger and darker. Liquid oozed out of each nipple. You touched your opening checking for the goo, but it was dry. Relieved with swelling, you sank to sleep. You dreamed of your husband. He was reaching for you and paddling his qayaq up the Mukqluktuli slough during salmon-berry season, but his reed baskets were empty. Wearing his seal-gut rain jacket, he was handsomely tall and strong. His brown fingers were tying and untying sinew. Western sandpipers began their migration, flying in circular patterns above the berries. A snowy owl landed near him. He spoke softly with anguish, “Where’s my wife?” The owl’s claws stretched open. Grabbing a mouse, they flew off, ignoring him.

He scanned the horizon for black and green, the colors of your hair and jacket. But he could not see you. Then he faded from your vision.

When you woke up, you gathered your knapsack, arranged your hair, pulled up your boots, untangled your dress, and held your stomach. The tightness alarmed you.

Before arriving at the cabin you stopped a few times to rest. The baby inside of you began to talk to you. He was big and round and sliding into your groin, punching at your opening. He felt heavy and you lifted him with both hands but he sunk back down and stayed there.

When you opened the latched door to your cabin, Kali was hammering nails into the paneling of new walls.

“Ugh, I feel like I’m about to pop.”

“I’d better call the clinic,” he said.

“No, I’ll be O.K.”

Kali placed his hands on your belly and massaged your skin. Sweaty and with a moan, you reacted to his massage. You moved in and out of consciousness and the contractions heightened and tightened. Your water broke.

You thought about your girlfriend’s birthing experience. She pushed so hard the blood vessels around her eyes broke and she looked like she had two black eyes. You thought that baby beat up my friend when he was ready to be born

You remember your mother saying, not all babies are meant to be born.

Your delirium lasted all night. You struggled in and out of consciousness. Your husband watched over you and soaked your face with warm water. Then he picked up his drum. He tapped slowly with his thumb and babyfinger. It was an old song he remembered his grandfather sang.

This poor one here Aa-rraa-raa- a- nga- li- yaa

One who keeps me warm Ii-rrii-rrii-nga-li-yaa

She lies here ill Yaa-a-nga-raa-aa-aa

He closed his eyes as his mind raced backwards and he saw a light and followed it down through the ice. He paddled from ice flow to ice flow. He saw the baby seals on an ice flow, and they resembled ghosts.

He opened his eyes and kept beating the drum and lured the child. He looked out the window at the river and saw a skiff with a family riding by, and then another.

You moaned. He checked your opening and massaged your stomach and vagina with Crisco grease.

Two days passed this way. He lay on the floor next to you. When you made your final push, he cupped his arms to catch the baby. The little pinkish-purple baby came into his hands. He cut the cord and bathed him from the kettlewarmed water. He laid the baby on your engorged breast.

“A’gaa,” you cried out, “A’gaa. It hurts.” His suckling was so weak that your breasts were sore from trying to help him suckle. You touched his face with your fingers. Checked his fingers and toes many times. His body was so little. Black hair, like yours, covered his head. His eyes opened and he looked at you. You stared into him. He closed his eyes. In your arms he stopped breathing. His body went limp. You held him closer to your bosom, until your husband pried him away from you.

You buried him on the tundra in a white box your husband built. He painted it and you placed his infant gowns and a small blue rosary inside. Then you tucked your and his father’s pictures inside a sealskin beaded pouch and hid it near his fingers. Reverend Jimmy Dock came to bless you. Your husband shared a meal of dry fish and seal soup with him, while you rested.

When you wept, you crawled inside of a dark tunnel. You held yourself for many days, willing the tunnel to house you. The darkness felt comforting.

When your husband saw you on the bed, you were covered in blankets. They disguised your features. Your black eyes darkened and then they reddened as though they were withdrawn into their sockets. He knew he had to break you free. He built a fire and made tea. He sat crossed legged on the floor where feathers were strewn, and he picked one up and swept and tidied the room. He boiled plants in a pot of water. They simmered and smelled like the tundra. He poured a cup for you, but you didn’t drink it. He tried to brush your hair, but you jerked away.

“How long does it take, Min? How long are you willing to live like this?”

He told you a story about Yuuyaraq or Living Well. There was a lady with a husband. She loved him very much, but one day he went hunting and never returned. Her heart was broken, and she felt like a discarded tea kettle. Every day she expected him to return. She watched her door, cleaned her house, cooked his meals. But she always ate alone. Even though she had begun to neglect herself, she always thought about him. She burned ayuq to add aroma to the air in her house, and she waited for him. One day he knocked on the door, but he couldn’t go in although she wanted him to come home. She was holding his spirit back. Finally, she let him go and he never returned.

He told you, “Min, you have to let our baby go. You can’t hold on to him. He belongs somewhere else.”

He picked up his mask and drum and began to play a song that eased you into a new world. He wore his Raven mask with a King Salmon on the side and as he did, he changed shapes and his drumming beat out the spirits that inhabited your eyes. He played until he grew tired. Laying down next to you he held you; and his arms melted into your bosom and attached themselves.

You hoped he would not leave you now, or ever.