Correcting the Landscape (16 page)

I was a little concerned about the way our date was beginning, but if this is what she needed, I was all for it. “From what I've seen, Gayle, it must be.”

She gave me a sidelong glance and a smile. Happy. Something she needed to clear up.

We parked at the Well Street baths and hurried across the frigid parking lot. It was only about ten below, but it always feels colder this side of the year, going into winter; the same temperature next March and people would be out in nylon shells, bareheaded, barehanded.

I sat in the men's steam room, in the hot, damp fog, wrapped in a towel, and thought about Gayle next door. After a minute or
SO
I was ready to quit, but she had made me promise to give it ten minutes. So I did. Finally there was nothing to do but calm down. My pores opened up and my thoughts sank down into what was troubling me and then way down through my recent decisions and finally I wasn't thinking at all anymore. No more quick and restless monkey mind, you could say. One overweight naked soon-to-be ex-publisher started to feel better.

I'd lose a lot, but I'd still be here.

The understanding came to me, and for a minute I was holding very still and almost at peace. But I stared too hard at that idea and like a reflection in water, it vanished. I lost it. It wouldn't stick.

She told me to take my time so I did; but I still finished ten minutes before she walked out of the women's locker room, damp hair curling around her face, looking a little breathless. I thought, wow.

“I'm a terrible show-off,” she announced.

“Oh, I wish you would be,” I said, and put her hand through my arm as we left the building, warm now despite the cold air. She put her hood up loosely over her damp head. “But what makes you say that?”

“Doing Tai Chi that time in the coffeehouse. Carrying on about writing fiction.”

I tightened my arm against my side, holding her hand against me. “I like it,” I said. We walked toward the Peking Pagoda, downriver a few blocks. “You have good ideas about writing, about fiction. And telling the truth.”

“Tad Suliman's a friend of yours,” she said.

“Yes.”

“I want to say something about that. I thought that your friendship kind of influenced the way we handled the story about the trees at Dr. Leasure's house, that time.”

“I thought so, too,” I said. She dropped her hood back. “Truth is,” I went on, “I didn't quite know what to do. But now, looking back—that's one story where maybe I did make the right decision, for me, for the paper. It's true that Tad's made a lot of money doing things I wouldn't. But he didn't cut those trees without the full complicity of the way things get done in this town. It was outside the regulations but not illegal by a long shot. I agree, it was a kind of theft, like you said. Whose town is this, whose river?”

“I said that?”

“Yeah. And if he hadn't been a friend I might have raised those issues. Like you started to. I didn't. But maybe I made the best decision I could at the time, which was to look at the broader issue. We didn't stop with that episode; we went on, we widened it. If someone else had called it different, well, that would have worked out, too. It's funny, I see that now. You know it's a good thing people don't rely completely on newspapers for history, say; I can't think of a more inaccurate source, right this minute. So much depends on a few decisions.”

“There were complications in it for you. I didn't have anything to lose. Maybe in your case I'd have done the same thing.”

“Take this park we're standing in,” I said. The Unknown First Family loomed to our right, floodlit. “This is part of the same problem. Does anybody really like this place? What happened to the idea of a greenbelt?”

She was silent. Finally she said, “I don't like this place at all.”

“You don't?”

“You know how they pour concrete over nuclear waste?”

“Yeah.”

“The poison's still there, off you go to make more. They poured concrete over this place where people from out of town
used to gather for free, watch the water, and yeah drink. But nothing has changed. People are still drinking themselves to death all around us. Who cares as long as the public doesn't see them. Nice little favor the Native people are doing for us, drinking themselves to death.”

She made an effort to remove her hand from my arm, but I tightened it against me, looked down at her.

“Cathy,” she said. “This park makes me think of Cathy. I hate thinking about that.” She looked at me. Couldn't see her too well, in the darkness, except for the brightness of her eyes. “After Cathy stopped living with us…she still came by, from time to time. A couple of times the month before she died. Whenever her boyfriend hit her. But because of the drugs, and because of him—that man—and because I had Jack, I…”

“Yeah?”

“The last time she came by I wouldn't let her in. I gave her money for a taxi and said go to the women's shelter. I am so scared of people who buy and sell drugs.”

Her eyes had filled with tears.

“She was on drugs when she drowned?”

“She was using. And I know her boyfriend, he was a dealer from time to time and he had connections. He was a bad person. I…I hate to remember that. Go away, I said to her, don't you come back here, I don't want anything to do with you! Stone cold sober and I said that to my own cousin.” Her eyes were wide and wet as though she could hardly believe it, this story she carried around that condemned her.

We stood together. I touched her hair; the outer strands were turning crisp. “You need to put your hood up,” I said softly, and I raised it around her. “There. I don't want you to get a cold.” I touched her cheek. I was so glad she could let it go. I wanted to
say, like some kind of priest, “What else? Anything else?” I wanted to say, “You are a star performer. And human, too.”

“A river's a nice thing, though,” she said after a minute. “They can't take that away. A river, at least, is bigger than the things that happen next to it. Do you think?”

“That's a great idea,” I said. “Yes, it is.”

We walked on, toward the restaurant, where we were met with warm air and rich smells, a tiny woman in silk, and circular red booths. We sat next to a pool filled with resin mountains like a Chinese painting in relief. There were little paths and tiny bridges and a hut made of Popsicle sticks.

She ordered sweet and sour pork; suddenly I wanted the same thing.

“Would you like some beer or wine?” I said.

She looked puzzled.

“No, no. Tea.”

“Me, too. Pot of hot tea,” I told the waitress. “You know how to use these?” I asked Gayle, breaking open my chopsticks. She smiled, watching my hands.

“No. Show me.”

“Oh, no. Can't help you.” Suddenly, with the pool and its miniature landscape next to us, the chopsticks that we couldn't handle, it was as though we were both much younger, completely without care, and all the footpaths around us open, uncluttered, easy. Except for one small thing, one problem like a kettle boiling away in a neglected kitchen.

“Excuse me just a sec, Gayle,” I said. I went out to the entrance where a telephone hung on the red brocade wall and called Polly Swisher's office. Her machine answered.

“This is Gus Traynor,” I said. “I'm ready. Please make an appointment for us to get started as soon as possible. I can't hold it
together anymore.” I took a breath. “There is no reason to wait. If you can give me a hand with this, I'll do it. Please let me know where we go from here.”

A small adjustment to the evening. I didn't tell Gayle, it wasn't like that. She knew she was looking across the tablecloth at a nearly penniless guy, she already knew that, and she didn't mind. Now I could admit it to myself, too. Now we were looking at each other.

Later we stood in her arctic entryway, in the darkness, and the lights were on inside the house. But it was dark in there. I pulled her against me and we stood there so close to the edge, my mouth in her hair, gathered together.

“Can I call you again?”

“Yes.”

“I will.”

“Well I guess folks are still up inside, so I'll say good night.”

“Shall I poke my head in?”

“Lucerne's going to want all the data right away. She'll be like a satellite dish. Zap us.
What's the scoop
?”

“What is the scoop?”

“Private.”

“Yeah. It is. Between us.”

“Gus, I have to warn you, I've always kind of done whatever I wanted to. Some people don't think too highly of my track record.”

“I think you're the greatest.”

“I kind of run away from things.”

I drew back and looked at her.

“It's true,” she said, “I stayed away, I didn't go out with you before because I have all these bad habits, I don't take things seriously enough, as serious as other people do, it's because I'm scared. That's all. I'm scared it won't be returned. So I act like people are toys.”

“Shameful,” I said.

She giggled. I leaned into her hair, whispered into her ear. “It's returned,” I said. “It is returned.”

“Oh, God,” she said. She put her arms around my waist and I kissed her. One kiss. Just for a minute. There was thumping inside the house. Tomorrow was a school day. I needed that excuse, to step back in amazement, whisper good night, go back to my truck. I had been such a long time alone.

I
DROVE HOME SO SUFFUSED WITH THE CHANGE
in my life—I mean Gayle's friendship, not the bankruptcy—that my foot kept drifting off the accelerator; I found myself going about twenty-five miles per hour on the highway, and peering through the windshield for the northern lights even though snow was falling all around me. As if their presence, like celebratory bunting in the sky, would confirm the transformation in my life. That thing Judy Finch talked about:
the universe will provide
, as though the universe responds to our small personal needs. But why the hell not? The thought of the
Mercury's
fate made me feel sick, but Gayle was more than a thought: she was presence in my cells. A change from the inside out.

I had admired a lot of women in the past ten, fifteen years, but I'd been busy. And they seemed to like me but to lose interest, fast; a spark was missing—but not with Gayle.

A big, slow rig appeared in front of me, blocking my view of the dreamy, snowy ribbon of highway. A flatbed loaded with the dark shape of some heavy equipment. I was in no hurry. I fell
back. In a minute the rig fell back. I noticed the driver's speed was not steady. A heavy load, this hill, what do you expect. Good thing they move these loads at night.

Why was he turning onto Bad Molly?

With some curiosity I followed the rig up the road toward my own home, braked in the road, and watched from a safe distance as with dreadful slowness and care the driver brought that thing to a stop in my own driveway. A bulky man in coveralls came around the cab and inspected his parking job. Tad Suliman. Well. I hung back there in the road as he helped himself into my front door.

It appeared to be an off night for both of us, then.

I found enough room at the tail of his rig to get most of my own truck off the road and walked around his machine. It made my yard look unusually Alaskan. I went inside and found him supine on the couch, his pac boots and massive coveralls on the floor.

“What the Sam Hill,” I said, giving him a nudge.

“You Gus?” He stretched and groaned. “Lemme sleep. Got to cross town when it's dark. Lemme know if I'm in your way. Thanks buddy.” He smelled of the Last Gravel Bar, the cold and dirty streets of Fairbanks. He rolled over on my couch like he owned the place.

I stared down at him for a minute and then I thought, what difference does it make? All will be made clear. I unzipped a sleeping bag and put it over him.

 

POLLY SWISHER WOKE US BOTH UP, RETURNING MY CALL AT
eight
A.M.
, leaving a message on my machine. I ran out to the living room to grab the phone when I realized what was happening but she had hung up. I replayed her message. How about noon,
she said. So it was going to happen. I forgot about Gayle and just felt sick. Tad, who had pushed himself up on the sofa, stared at me and fell back down.

“I know that voice,” he said.

“Yeah.”

He pulled the sleeping bag over his head and didn't stir, while I put on the coffee and hiked out to the newspaper box, past my new pet in the yard, a frosted D7 Caterpillar tractor sitting on a flatbed trailer. I ought to take my Christmas card photo today, if I did things like that. Season's Greetings, you-all in the temperate zone.

I read the paper, drank coffee, and swung at a few somnolent but noisy flies with a rolled-up magazine until Tad threw the sleeping bag off and rose to his feet.

“Sorry about this,” he said after a number of groans, holding his head.

“Smart of you not to drive any farther last night.”

“Take a shower?”

“Go on.”

While he was running the water I called Polly back and confirmed our appointment. It made my stomach feel like I was in an elevator that was dropping fast, or a cable car or some other unnatural device hurtling me toward unknown territory. Unknown. How will people take it. That part I don't know either.

Get everything ready. I go to meet my fate. I could hear Felix singing one of his patriotic pub songs:
Rody McCorley goes to die on the bridge of Toome today
.

Tad walked into the room damp and steaming, red-faced, looking imprisoned inside a too-small white T-shirt. At something over six feet he carried his fat better than me, but there it was. He poured himself a cup of coffee and sank down at my table.

“I was at it way too long yesterday,” he said. “Can't take it anymore. It's been a while.”

“What's the story?”

“Oh, I thought I'd clear some land out by a cabin I have, then I got everything ready and was driving across town and seemed like I couldn't quite find the road, and I thought, damn, I might be drunk, better go home and sleep it off, and then no, Gus's place is closer, maybe a safer bet.”

“I mean, why the drinking?”

“Hell, Gus, there's no reason.” He pushed the coffee aside. “This isn't going down too well. You have any beer?” Without waiting for my answer he studied the inside of my refrigerator and found a few bottles of Alaskan Amber.

“This here is your new beginning?” I said. “You gonna be all right with those or we need to swing down to Gold Hill Liquor for another box?”

He shrugged and drank. “I'll let you know.” He leaned forward and rubbed his fingers through his wet hair. Black mixed with gray, thinning out. I could see his scalp; we were getting up there, both of us. Topics lay on the table between us—financial collapse, love, drinking, old misery and new beginnings, a Cat in my driveway—but we avoided them.

“How was that poetry reading? How's our friend Felix?”

“I hope he gets a check out of this…uh, settlement,” I said. “I mean, he could use it. Yeah, he did a good job.”

“I don't read a lot of poetry, but I liked his. You don't meet a lot of poets. Least I don't.”

“Felix says that being a poet is hard, like being a salmon swimming upstream. But in America, it's also lonely because, how did he put it, you look around and you're the only salmon in the stream. He's got a colorful way of talking.”

“I can see that. That statue poem. Got me thinking about the
one downtown, the Unknown First Family. I have a little personal gripe with that one.”

“Funny you mention that. So did Gayle. She said, maybe we ought to do an alteration on it.”

He chuckled. It was a nice sound, to hear the misery lift. “She did? Were you here when they unveiled that thing?”

“I think I was in Juneau with the Department of Labor that year.”

“Well, I tell you Gus, what a love-in the respectable people had for themselves that day. It was downright embarrassing. A regular love-in. Aren't we the greatest people in the world for living here and having families. Shelley was big on it, you know. Right up Shelley's street, that sort of thing, getting rid of the First Avenue bars and paving the riverbank, and putting every fucking donor's name in bronze for all time. Every time you go down there now you have to walk around the base of that statue and those ten-thousand-dollar plaques with the contributors' names—ha, I even found some bronze typos in the thing. Ten thousand dollars and they misspelled some words!” He drank his beer. “What did Felix say, involuntary subscription? That's what got to me. Because it was practically that. Shelley wanted me to pony up. And all this time there are real artists around here, who could do something pretty great with ten thousand dollars.”

I thought, staring at him,
you gave that much to me
.

“So what's Gayle's objection to the First Family? Isn't the goddamn obvious thing, there's no way those Nordic giants are Athabascans?”

“Well…”

“Or the stupid way they are standing out there in the wind? Imagine trying to pass that thing off as representing anyone. I'd be pissed, if I was her.”

“More that the riverbank was a gathering place,” I said. “Which of course it still is, but now it's swathed in concrete. Like Red Square.”

“That was the whole point. Get rid of people who loafed in the grass and hid weird stuff in the bushes.”

“And she said rumor has it there's a body inside the statue.”

“No. Can't be. Although, you know, it was in storage here in town for several weeks as I recall. If you had to dispose of a body and you could figure out how to slip into wherever it was stored…Man that thing is pretty solidly in place now. Shelley tried to get me to help with the base of it, they were hauling granite off of Pedro Dome to pave the base. I'd say that thing is in there good. You know this was your last beer. That okay?”

“I don't care.”

“It occurs to me,” he said, “that Gayle is speaking, you might say, metaphorically.”

“Metaphorically, Tad?”

“The body inside the statue could be the body of her people, so to speak.”

“Gayle is half Swedish.”

“Don't be difficult, when I'm being profound.” He looked past me, frowning. “Not a physical body but a spiritual, um, essence.” The post-Judy Tad struggled with the vagueness of this vocabulary. “A healthy body contains a healthy spirit. Or does it? I forget.”

I suddenly began to understand. “There's two different uses of the word
body
,” I said. “There's your own body, which can go long periods of time without a spiritual life, right?”

“No question.”

“Then there's the body of a people, of a community. Like the body politic and whatever. Two different meanings, and the second meaning, the body of a community—that's a spiritual thing.”

“Where are we going with this?”

“I'm getting it now, Tad. I see clearly. Take the body of Christ. That's the church, right?”

“As I recall, dimly.”

I hurried on, briefly grateful for our shared frame of references. “Using the word
body
to describe a community is the use that you mean. Maybe one human being can live through times when his spirit is dormant or crushed. Who hasn't lived through that? But the body of a people, of a group—when that spiritual light goes out, the community ceases to exist. No more, ah, cohesiveness.”

“Could be.”

“Your own corpus, whatever, your flesh-and-blood reality”—I waved my hand at his—“can carry on for some time without a spiritual life. We all know that. But a community? I don't want to say it dies, but what does happen to a community when its connection is drained away? Or goes missing, or dries up, or whatever happens to it?”

“What does happen to it?”

“I don't know.”

I sat back in my chair exhausted by following my own logic. I couldn't answer Tad's question. He sipped his beer slowly, waking up. “Well it sounds good to me,” he said at last. “What holds people together is the question. I'm not sure how we got on this, though. What was our starting point? Because that would make a difference. Did we begin this conversation on solid ground?”

“Sure we did. Granite from Pedro Dome.”

“And the body of Christ, didn't you say?”

“That, too.”

“Well, then. Maybe the spirit of a broken people is trapped inside that monstrosity and we ought to set it free.”

“Maybe that's the meaning of Felix's poem.”

“So maybe we ought to move that thing.” He laughed. “That's
an action I would consider. But not until I get a damn sight drunker.”

“I'd have to be drunk myself to go further with this and I don't drink.”

“That's true. Why don't you?”

“Tad, why the hell do you drink so much?”

“It seems to help.”

“Doesn't look that way to me.”

“Yeah, I see how you might say that. I won't argue with you.”

I know I come out ahead not drinking, given my propensity to go for broke, to lose it all, to hang on too long. Eighteen years in Alaska and here I am picking at the lining of my wallet. Maybe Tad was gifted with extra resources. I mean the stuff he was made of, the physical part; he seemed able to do a little better personally with the reality of each day. Tad was a craftsman; you didn't often see his hands lying unemployed on the table. Maybe not an artist, exactly, but let's say, a materials expert. Not content to live in his head.

“Want to go eat?” he said.

“There's cereal here, and eggs. I have an appointment. I have to go down to the
Mercury
this afternoon.”

“Let's grab a bite first. I need to get out. And I can't take a casual trip in that rig outside.”

“Where would your Sorry Self wish to breakfast?”

“Gus, you want to be polite to a guy who's descended from sultans. How about the Klondike? Steak and eggs might put me back together.”

“I'll have to leave you somewhere. I have this date at noon.”

“No problem.”

In the truck I asked him, “How is it that a guy with your ancestry is Catholic?”

“Turks invaded Europe, didn't they? Or maybe the Crusaders
converted them. How would I know. Family lore, none of it amounts to much, people believe what they want to believe. Which is not a small thing, the wanting to believe. Judy…Judy would come out with her mystical new age ideas about the universe and wait for my acknowledgment, know what I mean? And I could tell, it was ninety-five percent a simple decision: did I want to believe her? If so, do it. Simple as that. The imagination or whatever it is, would do the rest, pick up the pieces and knit the whole thing together.”

“You have a point there.”

I drove in silence. It had snowed all night, over last night's tire tracks. I followed faint indentations through the fresh, smooth covering on the road.

Then I attempted the beginning of a confession. My words as faint as the tracks in front of me. I said, “I really wanted to believe in the
Mercury
.”

The snow around us, concealing every hard landing, made the moment seem right. My words were weak, but I wanted to say something. Tad looked at me but didn't respond right away.