Correcting the Landscape (13 page)

“I only wanted to let you know. I might not be around quite as much this semester, on account of the class. But I will be here.”

I scratched the back of my neck. Bereft. What to offer.

“There's this story about Cathy's boyfriend,” she said.

“Yeah?”

“The police in Whitehorse one winter night, they picked him up and drove him ten miles out of town. Do this sometimes to drunk Native guys. And they dropped him off, forty below zero, sneakers and a crummy jacket. He made it back to town just fine. He left Whitehorse because he was singled out like that, for mistreatment. That's a guy who can hurt you.”

“I see that.”

“But the thing is….”

“What?”

“Another girlfriend of his, eight years ago, so I'm told, went missing. People tell stories. I don't know what to believe. Because they don't solve a lot of these cases. There are lots of them, and they don't get solved.”

 

HOMICIDE A POSSIBILITY IN DROWNING DEATH, RAN OUR HEADLINE
after Noreen's story. In the absence of much new information, Noreen's effort to keep the story alive still impressed me.
Two weeks after she started at the station, Noreen made a deposit in the
Mercury
's account. Her first paycheck. She sent me the deposit slip and a note. She still felt guilty about letting the foreclosure list slip from our grasp.

“You shouldn't have done that,” I told her. “Don't do it again; this money is going to come back to you.” I hoped she would ignore me. I hoped she'd make a habit of surprise donations.

Stone cold sober, although so grim and surly I doubted he could last, Tad had agreed to make another investment in the
Mercury
. I put his contribution together with my bank loan and started meeting with the publisher of the
Highway Sentinel
. We agreed to experiment with a joint venture, to give it three months—our news and features wrapped in their ads. It's a small trend in the country, we assured each other—opinion pieces, advice columns, movie reviews, wrapped up in the ads that pay for the whole thing; down the road, we might not even need subscriptions. For the time being we would maintain separate offices and mastheads.

Tad Suliman was heroically avoiding booze and working his tail off, but he also started dropping in to the office from time to time.

“Kinda thin,” he said, picking up our latest issue, which would become the filling in a
Mercury-Sentinel
sandwich. He turned pages of back-to-school announcements and reviews, looked over an article from a freelancer about growing your own organic food in Alaska and an exchange of opinions about Ross Perot.

“Newswise a thin soup,” he repeated.

“The
New Republic
is thinner, too, in August,” I said. “Dog days. Everyone's on vacation.”

S
UMMER IN ALASKA IS FAST AND CHAOTIC
, from first to last. You step outside in the morning and the stage crew has tweaked the set during the night. Weeds, trees, shrubs, wildflowers, turn green, blossom, and put out their seedy litter so fast you can almost see it happening day by day. In late May a scum of birch pollen rides the rain barrel and stains the sidewalks, but by the middle of July damned if you don't start to notice the end approaching. Petals drop off the wild roses and the fireweed's in bloom. Fireweed is a clock ticking away the last of the summer. Makes your confidence tremble to see that brilliant color, beautiful as it is, filling up the roadside ditches. Just as soon as it's fully bloomed, as soon as hundreds of fat spears of fuchsia fill the clearings, the plants start to smoke away and go to seed from the bottom up, one rung at a time, and when the color's gone, that's autumn. Cold nights and dying leaves, rain, the return of the stars at night.

August: the beginning of winter.

A trial merger with the
Sentinel
didn't exactly hit the ground
running. Among the details which took me by surprise was delivery of the damned thing. I agreed to supply vendors along ninety miles of highway, from Nenana, fifty miles southwest of Fairbanks, to the Coffee Dome Quickstop, thirty miles to the north. My route included the city of Fairbanks. Wrapped up in a shopper, the paper now weighed three times as much. Saturday was delivery day, and in order to finish by ten
P.M.
, I started at four
A.M.
instead of noon, and that first weekend I was so astonished and exhausted by this unexpected labor that I couldn't sleep, though my eyes burned with fatigue. I remembered something then that an editor at my first job used to say: lowliness is all.

Ray Harwood at the
Toledo Blade
, the one other paper for which I've worked. Ray used to come down on me to simplify my language and he'd quote Saint Augustine, of all people. Why is the Bible the world's all-time best seller, Gus? he'd ask. Because it's simple. It draws multitudes into its bosom because of its holy lowliness. Don't forget that, whenever you aspire to write unforgettable prose: holy lowliness. We used to mock him: holy friggin lowliness, someone would mutter when things weren't going right. Well, I felt so damned low and beaten flat that Sunday morning after the first delivery marathon that I wondered if holiness could be that far away. Holiness might be next.

And the next Sunday, too. The physical part didn't get easier.

Of course that wasn't what Ray was talking about, this kind of grunt lowliness. He was talking about prose. I didn't have time for prose anymore. I was negotiating our future like an addict every week, weighing the unpaid bills against each other, dreading the day that the press room foreman would crook his finger at me again. And say, Gus, you havin' a little trouble with twenty pages. We think you'll do better with sixteen. And by then, with all these ads and fluffy features, we'll have merged so far into the
Sentinel
we'll be indistinguishable from our own wrapper.

Hold on, just hold on, I told myself.

Because of Noreen's presence on TV I watched the news more these days and I happened to catch the presidential candidate, Bill Clinton, wooing the gay voters. “I have a vision for America's future,” he told a noisy crowd. “And my vision includes you.” The cheer that went up was unbelievable. Their first-ever cheer for a mainstream candidate. It must have been a good feeling. “My vision includes you.” A safe remark for sure, but he didn't have to spell it out; their desire to be at the table did the rest. It was reciprocal.

Why, it even made me happy, to witness an expansive, openhanded gesture like that. He wasn't saying,
We mustn't move too fast, there is much reason to be cautious
, he was just flinging his arms wide, a carnival barker for the American way.

This conversation has to be reciprocal, too. If readers in the interior need us, we'll fly. I rocked back and forth in my office chair and told myself that, over and over.

How about a TV ad? Something funny, even. Someone opening his paper, reading it over coffee, then recycling it? A joint ad, maybe with a local coffee roaster, another cooperative venture?

“You working on something, Gus?”

Felix looked around my door. Heard me talking to myself again. I came forward in my chair, picked up a pencil, crossed something out.

“I'm just trying to work out an editorial.”

“I always say poems out loud as well. You hear it when they go thunk.”
T'unk is
what he actually said. I couldn't help smiling.

“There you are,” I said. “If it doesn't sound right aloud it ain't written well. Keep your prose whole and lowly. And I guess your poetry as well.”

How did this kid manage to turn out so honest, so forthcoming, so comfortable with the truth, when he spends so much time
in self-imposed concealment? He's an illegal alien and a queer but he seems so at home with the reality he's landed in.

“Do anything for you?” he said.

I pretended that my detachment was creative intensity. “I'm kinda caught up in this train of thought.”

“Right so. I know how that goes. I'll be off then.”

I listened to him gather his things. His
t'ings
. He poked his head back in to say good-bye, this time wearing the white foam bike helmet he found at a garbage dumpster. It was like a battered float you might see hauled up on a dock somewhere. A lucky find, Felix had announced. Lucky. Imagine. In Felix's world, a beat-up helmet picked up for free amounted to
good luck
.

I ignored so many bills, business and personal, that I came home one night to find the lights and telephone at my house on Bad Molly cut off. I walked around my few rooms not knowing what to do. Finally made two peanut butter sandwiches, stirred some freeze-dried coffee into a cup of tepid water and got into bed, excommunicated. If you want to be part of the family of man you better pay your utility bill. The next day I removed some cash from the
Mercury
's account and reestablished my connection with humanity. I'd done the reverse so often, it didn't feel like stealing. We were becoming seriously intertwined, the paper and I.

 

THEY DIDN'T CLOSE CATHY CAREW'S FILE BUT THEY HAD A PLACE
for it, just the same—out of the public eye. Limbo. She wasn't the only Native person to drown in the Chena while probably under the influence of drugs or alcohol that summer. Addicted, refusing all constraints on her own behavior; who could argue that Cathy wasn't a very sick young woman, that the family would be better off at this point if the case were closed and they could accept the
truth? This lifestyle leads to terrible trouble and pain. Break out of it, to save yourself. Or not—

Or not.

Whatever you choose to do, the public will still turn away. What you see tarnishes you.

Gus Traynor is no detective. Should I pester Gayle to tell the police everything she knows about some mean bastard from Whitehorse, or wait until she decides one way or another, herself? If you want to be with someone, someday, do you pester them to do what you think is the right thing, offer ethical advice, bring up the really painful subjects? Or do you leave them alone for fuck's sake. How am I to know?

If we can't look at a book, how can we face the death of a young woman?

That's what I asked myself at Liam Sheedy's barbecue. The Sheedys, and others—or am I imagining this?—have figured out an answer. Not one they express outright.

Their answer is to turn away. What you look at tarnishes you or threatens you: so turn away. The answer to the question is, do neither.

A kid at the university turned in a couple of guest pieces in the Hunter S. Thompson style of wild personal journalism about the local elections coming up. They were good, and because of their energy they were exciting as well as funny, and I published them. A miscalculation on my part; these two pieces made the paper look like it was heading in a certain direction. Downhill, some said. I should have realized that we didn't have the depth of resources to take that kind of risk. No safety net, no guaranteed readership. Christ's sake, Gus, bite the bullet, stay low, pick your fights with more care. I forgot Ray Harwood's advice. Gus, Ray Harwood would say, don't look up at the sky, keep on looking down at the lowly ground. Don't be getting in your own way.

I don't drink much but this whirling talk in my head about finances and editorial direction, and all possible connections between the two, kept me in a constant hangover state. I'd drop off exhausted then wake up at three, drowning in the subjunctive: what if we could, here's what I would have, in that case I should, I should not have, if only I would have.

I opened my envelope from the Permanent Fund and looked at a dividend check for $915. My entitlement as citizen of this oil-rich half-cocked state, reward for just living here, and it was nowhere near enough. I had convinced myself it was going to be more. Thousands. Save my ass. Might as well go buy a New York steak for dinner as hope to pay any bills and I think I will, too. Could be that the cheap carbohydrates I'd been consuming of late were driving me toward negative thinking. A steak with some black pepper and blue cheese, and a frying pan on the back of the stove reducing a couple of sliced onions to a sweet heap of melting caramel. What did Tad say, I can't live on tofu even if it kills me?

The check was spoken for of course, long since, but I took three twenties to the supermarket just the same. Trouble with shopping is seeing everybody. “How's it going over there, Gus?” “Never better!” I considered keeping my head down and steering that cart at top speed through the aisles, but that's unfriendly. People would stare, wonder, and gossip. Like Felix said, you can't be an introvert in Ireland, it's considered rude, and you can't switch horses in Fairbanks—if you're a glad-handing publisher one week, you better be that same person the next week. Don't change. People will wonder what's wrong.

Two whole frozen chickens at fifty-nine cents a pound, pink crystals of frozen blood in the corners of the plastic wrap. Make some good soup with forty cloves of garlic, served over a heap of angel hair spaghetti. I couldn't wait to suck down those noodles and lumps of chicken thigh, like Charlie Chaplin in
The Gold
Rush
. But I also grabbed a tray of steaks, two sweet onions, a wedge of blue. It was already getting cold and dark outside again. You don't want to lose weight in this weather. Keep some extras between myself and the environment. Fat. That's the trouble with this forest around here, there's no fat in it. A couple of big modern log slasher-fellers working their way up the river, inside a couple of days they could ruin the landscape for the next century. People don't see that.

They look at this forest, and they see a different one, they see fat Michigan pine or Douglas firs from Washington State that are forty feet across. Just don't see what is in front of our eyes. Impossible. The catch-22 of being a human: can't see a thing as it is.

I noticed Willie Nelson on the cover of
People
. He's an individual I happen to resemble, minus the braids and musical genius. Couple of grinning codgers, Willie and me, though he owes Uncle Sam millions of dollars in back taxes and I owe a much smaller sum to an assortment of friends and neighbors. People I knew appeared at the end of the aisle, looked my way. I picked up the
People
and sank my face into it. Something to hide, Gus? You bet.

To lose your grubstake, let's call it, is the kiss of death in Alaska. The do-it-yourself imperative of this community elevates that one thing above all others, competence. You don't even have to be that good at anything. Merely competent. But I'm kind of afraid, these days, that old Gus Traynor is not quite the sailor he thought he was.

“Grin and bear it, Gus.”

I knew Gayle's voice right away. She was browsing nearby, and looked at me over the head of her own magazine,
Mirabella
. Blue jeans, a flowered cotton parka, a wide smile. Different turf than the newsroom: outside of the
Mercury
offices, Gayle was more confident, more talkative. It was confusing to me, but in a pleasant way.

“Gayle. How's that writing class?”

“Kind of fun. Not sure about the teacher.” She smiled and looked down, then took a step closer. Decided to talk. “I'm working on character description right now. Take for instance, that thing you said once.
I won't be kept inside any building I don't want to be in
.”

“Did Noreen tell you that? Shame on her.”

“It's a description of someone, don't you see? It really works. You could say, he's the kind of man who once said—”

“Okay, okay, enough of that. What are you working on that you need descriptions?”

“Fiction. You can tell the truth in a way, with fiction.”

“Is that right.”

She smiled, a lovely, coy, woman's smile, that smile when they have secrets, or want you to think they do.

“Yup,” she said.

“Mom, can I get this?” Jack appeared at her elbow with a copy of
Off-Road
.

“Yes,” she said promptly, and “No,” when he also brought forth a can of Planter's Cheese Balls. “Absolutely not this time. Say hello to Mr. Traynor.”

“Hello, Jack. Do you think we're going to have a new president?”

“I don't know. Some people do. Mom wants a new president.”

“Me too,” I said. He ducked his head, looked agonizedly at his mother, and sidled away.

“I gotta go,” she said.

“Gayle.”

“Yeah.”

“Good luck with that story you're writing. I want to read it.”

This time her smile was surprised, touched, flattered.