The Collected Short Fiction, page 152
Eastern settlers had carved a hamlet from wilderness during the 1920s, plunked it down in a forgotten vale populated by eagles, bears, drunk teamsters, and drunker fishermen. Mountains and dense forest on three sides formed a deep-water harbor. The channel curved around the flank of Eagle Mountain and eventually let into Prince William Sound. Roads were gravel or dirt. We had the cruise ships and barges. We also had the railroad. You couldn’t make a move without stepping in seagull shit. Most of us townies lived in a fourteen-story apartment complex called the Frazier Estate. We kids shortened it to Fate. Terra incognita began where the sodium lamplight grew fuzzy. At night, wolves howled in the nearby hills. Definitely not the dream hometown of a sixteen-year-old girl. As a grown woman, I recall it with a bittersweet fondness.
Upon commencing the hunt for Orlando, whom my little brother, Doug, had stupidly set free from the leash only to watch in mortification as the dog trotted into the sunset, tail furled with rebellious intent, Dad faced a choice—head west along the road, or troll the beach where the family pet sometimes mined for rotten salmon carcasses. We picked the road because it wound into the woods and our shepherd-husky mix hankered after the red squirrels that swarmed during the fall. Dad didn’t want to walk if he could avoid it. “Marched goddamned plenty in the Crotch,” he said. It had required a major effort for him to descend to the parking garage and get the wagon started and pointed in the general direction of our search route. Two bad knees, pain pills for said knees, and a half-rack-a-day habit had all but done him in.
Too bad for Uncle Ned and me, Midnight Road petered out in the foothills. Moose trails went every which way from the little clearing where we’d parked next to an abandoned Winnebago with a raggedy tarp covering the front end and black garbage bags over the windows. Hoboes and druggies occasionally used the Winnebago as a fort until Sheriff Lockhart came along to roust them. “Goddamned railroad,” Dad would say, despite the fact that if not for the railroad (for which he performed part-time labor to supplement his military checks) and the cruise ships and barges, there wouldn’t be any call for Eagle Talon whatsoever.
Uncle Ned lifted himself from the backseat and accompanied me as I shined the flashlight and hollered for Orlando. Dad remained in the station wagon with the engine running and the lights on. He honked the horn.
“He’s gonna keep doing that, huh?” Uncle Ned wasn’t exactly addressing me, more like an actor musing to himself on the stage. “Just gonna keep leanin’ on that horn every ten seconds—”
The horn blared again. Farther off and dim—we’d come a ways already. Birch and alder were broken by stands of furry black spruce that muffled sounds from the outside world. The black, green, and gray webbing is basically the Spanish moss of the Arctic. Uncle Ned chuckled and shook his head. Two years Dad’s junior and a major-league stoner, he’d managed to keep it together when it counted. He taught me how to tie a knot and paddle a canoe, and gave me a lifetime supply of dirty jokes. He’d also explained that contrary to Dad’s Cro-Magnon take on teenage dating, boys were okay to fool around with so long as I ducked the bad ones and avoided getting knocked up. Which ones were bad? I wondered. Most of them, according to the Book of Ned, but keep it to fooling around and all would be well. He also clued me in to the fact that Dad’s vow to blast any would-be suitor’s pecker off with his twelve-gauge was an idle threat. My old man couldn’t shoot worth spit even when sober.
The trail forked. One path climbed into the hills where the undergrowth thinned. The other path curved deeper into the creepy spruce where somebody had strung blue reflective tape among the branches—a haphazard mess like the time Dad got lit up and tried to decorate the Christmas tree.
“Let’s not go in there,” Uncle Ned said. Ominous, although not entirely unusual, as he often said that kind of thing with a similar laconic dryness. That bar looks rough, let’s try the next one over. That woman looks like my ex-wife, I’m not gonna dance with her, uh-uh. That box has got to be heavy. Let’s get a beer and think on it.
“Maybe he’s at the beach rolling in crap,” I said. Orlando loved bear turds and rotten salmon guts with a true passion. There’d be plenty of both near the big water, and as I squinted into the forbidding shadows, I increasingly wished we’d driven there instead.
Uncle Ned pulled his coat tighter and lit a cigarette. The air had dampened. I yelled, “Orlando!” a few more times. Then we stood there for a while in the silence. It was like listening through the lid of a coffin. Dad had stopped leaning on the horn. The woodland critters weren’t making their usual fuss. Clouds drifted in and the darkness was so complete it wrapped us in a cocoon. “Think Orlando’s at the beach?” I said.
“Well, I dunno. He ain’t here.”
“Orlando, you stupid jerk!” I shouted to the night in general.
“Let’s boogie,” Uncle Ned said. The cherry of his cigarette floated in midair and gave his narrowed eyes a feral glint. Like Dad, he was middling tall and rangy. Sharp-featured and often wry. He turned and moved the way we’d come, head lowered, trailing a streamer of Pall Mall smoke. Typical of my uncle. Once he made a decision, he acted.
“Damn it, Orlando.” I gave up and followed, sick to my gut with worry. Fool dog would be the death of me, or so I suspected. He’d tangled with a porcupine the summer before and I’d spent hours picking quills from his swollen snout because Dad refused to take him in to see Doc Green. There were worse things than porcupines in these woods—black bears, angry moose, wolves—and I feared my precious idiot would run into one of them.
Halfway back to the car, I glimpsed a patch of white to my left amid the heavy brush. I took it for a birch stump with holes rotted into the heartwood. No, it was a man lying on his side, matted black hair framing his pale face. By pale, I mean bone-white and bloodless. The face you see on the corpse of an outlaw in those old-timey Wild West photographs.
“Help me,” he whispered.
I trained my light on the injured man; he had to be hurt because of the limp, contorted angle of his body, his shocking paleness. He seemed familiar. The lamp beam broke around his body like a stream splits around a large stone. The shadows turned slowly, fracturing and changing him. He might’ve been weirdo Floyd, who swept the Caribou after last call, or that degenerate trapper, Bob something, who lived in a shack in the hills with a bunch of stuffed moose heads and mangy beaver hides. Or it might’ve been as I first thought—a tree stump lent a man’s shape by my lying eyes. The more I stared, the less certain I became that it was a person at all.
Except I’d heard him speak, voice raspy and high-pitched from pain, almost a falsetto.
Twenty-five feet, give or take, between me and the stranger. I didn’t see his arm move. Move it did, however. The shadows shifted again and his hand grasped futilely, thin and gnarled as a tree branch. His misery radiated into me, caused my eyes to well with tears of empathy. I felt terrible, just terrible, I wanted to mother him, and took a step toward him.
“Hortense. Come here.” Uncle Ned said my name the way Dad described talking to his wounded buddies in ’Nam. The ones who’d gotten hit by a grenade or a stray bullet. Quiet, calm, and reassuring was the ticket—and I bet his tone would’ve worked its magic if my insides had happened to be splashed on the ground and the angels were singing me home. In this case, Uncle Ned’s unnatural calmness scared me, woke me from a dream where I heroically tended to a hapless stranger, got a parade and a key to the village, and my father’s grudging approval.
“Hortense, please.”
“There’s a guy in the bushes,” I said. “I think he’s hurt.”
Uncle Ned grabbed my hand like he used to when I was a little girl and towed me along at a brisk pace. “Naw, kid. That’s a tree stump. I saw it when we went past earlier. Keep movin’.”
I didn’t ask why we were in such a hurry. It worried me how easy it seemed for him and Dad to slip into warrior mode at the drop of a hat. He muttered something about branches snapping and that black bears roamed the area as they fattened up for winter and he regretted leaving his guns at his house. House is sort of a grand term; Uncle Ned lived in a mobile home on the edge of the village. The Estate didn’t appeal to his loner sensibilities.
We got to walking so fast along that narrow trail that I twisted my ankle on a root and nearly went for a header. Uncle Ned didn’t miss a beat. He took most of my weight upon his shoulder. Pretty much dragged me back to the Fleetwood. The engine ran and the driver-side door was ajar. I assumed Dad had gone behind a tree to take a leak. As the minutes passed and we called for him, I began to understand that he’d left. Those were the days when men abandoned their families by saying they needed to grab a pack of cigarettes and beating it for the high timber. He’d threatened to do it during his frequent arguments with Mom. She’d beaten him to the punch and jumped ship with a traveling salesman, leaving us to fend for ourselves. Maybe, just maybe, it was Dad’s turn to bail on us kids.
Meanwhile, Orlando had jumped in through the open door and curled into a ball in the passenger seat. Leaves, twigs, and dirt plastered him. A pig digging for China wouldn’t have been any filthier. Damned old dog pretended to sleep. His thumping tail gave away the show, though.
Uncle Ned rousted him and tried to put him on Dad’s trail. Nothing doing. Orlando whined and hung his head. He refused to budge despite Uncle Ned’s exhortations. Finally, the dog yelped and scrambled back into the car, trailing a stream of piss. That was our cue to depart.
Uncle Ned drove back to the Frazier Estate. He called Deputy Clausen (everybody called him Claws) and explained the situation. Claws agreed to gather a few men and do a walk-through of the area. He theorized that Dad had gotten drunk and wandered into the hills and collapsed somewhere. Such events weren’t rare.
Meanwhile, I checked in on Grandma, who’d occupied the master bedroom since she’d suffered the aneurysm. Next, I herded Orlando into the bathroom and soaked him in the tub. I was really hurting by then.
When I thanked Uncle Ned, he nodded curtly and avoided meeting my eye. “Lock the door,” he said.
“Why? The JWs aren’t allowed out of the compound after dark.” Whenever I got scared, I cracked wise.
“Don’t be a smart-ass. Lock the fuckin’ door.”
“Something fishy in Denmark,” I said to Orlando, who leaned against my leg as I threw the dead bolt. Mrs. Wells had assigned Hamlet, Julius Caesar, and Titus Andronicus for summer reading. “And it’s the Ides of August, too.”
My brothers and sister were sprawled in the living room in front of the TV, watching a vampire flick. Christopher Lee wordlessly seduced a buxom chick who was practically falling out of her peasant blouse. Lee angled for a bite. Then he saw, nestled in the woman’s cleavage, the teeny elegant crucifix her archaeologist boyfriend had given her for luck. Lee’s eyes went buggy with rage and fear. The vampire equivalent to blue balls, I guess. I took over Dad’s La-Z-Boy and kicked back with a bottle of Coke (the last one, as noted by the venomous glares of my siblings) and a bag of ice on my puffy ankle.
The movie ended and I clapped my hands and sent the kids packing. At three bedrooms, our apartment qualified as an imperial suite. Poor Dad sacked out on the couch. Doug and Artemis shared the smallest, crappiest room. I bunked with Shauna, the princess of jibber-jabber. She loved and feared me, and that made tight quarters a bit easier, because she knew I’d sock her in the arm if she sassed me too much or pestered me with one too many goober questions. Often, she’d natter on while I piped Fleetwood Mac and Led Zeppelin through a set of gigantic yellow earphones. That self-isolation spared us a few violent and teary scenes, I’m sure.
Amid the grumbles and the rush for the toilet, I almost confessed the weird events of the evening to Doug. My kid brother had an open mind when it came to the unknown. He wouldn’t necessarily laugh me out of the room without giving the matter some real thought. Instead, I smacked the back of his head and told him not to be such a dumb ass with Orlando. Nobody remarked on Dad’s absence. I’m sure they figured he’d pitched camp at the Caribou like he did so many nights. Later, I lay awake and listened to my siblings snore. Orlando whined as he dreamed of the chase, or of being chased.
From the bedroom, Gram said in a fragile, singsong tone, “In a cavern, in a canyon, excavatin’ for a mine, dwelt a miner forty-niner and his daughter Clementine. In a cavern, in a canyon. In a cavern, in a canyon. In a cavern, in a canyon. Clementine, Clementine. Clementine? Clementine?”
Of the four Shaw siblings I’m the eldest, tallest, and surliest.
According to Mom, Dad had desperately wanted a boy for his firstborn. He descended from a lineage that adhered to a pseudo-medieval mind-set. The noble chauvinist, the virtuous warrior, the honorable fighter of rearguard actions. Quaint when viewed through a historical lens; a real pain in the ass in the modern world.
I was a disappointment. As a daughter, what else could I be? He got used to it. The Shaws have a long, long history of losing. We own that shit. Go down fighting would’ve been our family motto, with a snake biting the heel that crushed its skull as our crest. As some consolation, I was always a tomboy and tougher than either of my brothers—a heap tougher than most of the boys in our hick town, and tougher than at least a few of the grown men. Toughness isn’t always measured by how hard you punch. Sometimes, most of the time, it’s simply the set of a girl’s jaw. I shot my mouth off with the best of them. If nothing else, I dutifully struck at the heels of my oppressors. Know where I got this grit? Sure as hell not from Dad. Oh, yeah, he threw a nasty left hook, and he’d scragged a few guys in ’Nam. But until Mom had flown the coop she ruled our roost with an iron fist that would’ve made Khrushchev think twice before crossing her. Yep, the meanness in my soul is pure-D Mom.
Dad had all the homespun apothegms.
He often said, Never try to beat a man at what he does. What Dad did best was drink. He treated it as a competitive event. In addition to chugging Molson Export, Wild Turkey, and Stoli, Dad also smoked the hell out of cannabis whenever he could get his hands on some. He preferred the heavy-hitting bud from Mexico courtesy of Uncle Ned. I got my hands on a bag those old boys stashed in a rolled-up sock in a number-ten coffee can. That stuff sent you, all right. Although, judging by the wildness of Dad’s eyes, the way they started and stared at the corners of the room after he’d had a few hits, his destination was way different from mine.
Even so, the Acapulco Gold gave me a peek through the keyhole into Dad’s soul in a way booze couldn’t. Some blood memory got activated. It might’ve been our sole point of commonality. He would’ve beaten me to a pulp if he’d known. For my own good, natch.
Main thing I took from growing up the daughter of an alcoholic? Lots of notions compete for the top spot—the easiest way to get vomit and blood out of fabric, the best apologies, the precise amount of heed to pay a drunken diatribe, when to duck flung bottles, how to balance a checkbook and cook a family meal between homework, dog-walking, and giving sponge baths to Gram. But above all, my essential takeaway was that I’d never go down the rabbit hole to an eternal happy hour. I indulged in a beer here and there, toked some Mary Jane to reward myself for serving as Mom, Dad, chief cook and bottle washer pro-tem. Nothing heavy, though. I resolved to leave the heavy lifting to Dad, Uncle Ned, and their buddies at the Caribou Tavern.
Randal Shaw retired from the USMC in 1974 after twenty years of active service. Retirement didn’t agree with him. To wit: the beer, bourbon, and weed, and the sullen hurling of empties. It didn’t agree with Mom either, obviously. My grandmother, Harriet Shaw, suffered a brain aneurysm that very autumn. Granddad had passed away the previous winter and Gram moved into our apartment. By day, she slumped in a special medical recliner we bought from the Eagle Talon Emergency Trauma Center. Vivian from upstairs sat with her while I was at school. Gram’s awareness came and went like a bad radio signal. Sometimes she’d make a feeble attempt to play cards with Vivian. Occasionally, she asked about my grades and what cute boys I’d met, or she’d watch TV and chuckle at the soaps in that rueful way she laughed at so many ridiculous things. The clarity became rare. Usually she stared out the window at the harbor or at the framed Georgia O’Keeffe–knockoff print of a sunflower above the dresser. Hours passed and we’d shoo away the mosquitoes while she tunelessly hummed “In a cavern, in a canyon, excavatin’ for a mine” on a loop. There may as well have been a VACANCY sign blinking above her head.
After school, and twice daily on weekends, Doug helped bundle Gram into the crappy fold-up chair and I pushed her around the village, took her down to the wharf to watch the seagulls, or parked her in front of the general store while I bought Dad a pack of smokes (and another for myself). By night, Dad or I pushed the button and lowered the bed and she lay with her eyes fixed on the dented ceiling of the bedroom. She’d sigh heavily and say, “Nighty-night, nighty-night,” like a parrot. It shames me to remember her that way. But then, most of my childhood is a black hole.
The search party found neither hide nor hair of Dad. Deputy Clausen liked Uncle Ned well enough and agreed to do a bigger sweep in the afternoon. The deputy wasn’t enthused. Old Harmon Snodgrass, a trapper from Kobuk, isolated footprints in the soft dirt along the edge of the road. The tracks matched Dad’s boots and were headed toward town. Snodgrass lost them after a couple hundred yards.
In Deputy Clausen’s professional opinion, Randal Shaw had doubled back and flown the coop to parts unknown, as a certain kind of man is wont to do when the going gets tough. Uncle Ned socked him (the Shaw answer to critics) and Claws would’ve had his ass in a cell for a good long time, except Stu Herring, the mayor of our tiny burg, and Kyle Lomax were on hand to break up the festivities and soothe bruised egos. Herring sent Uncle Ned home with a go and sin no more scowl.
“How’s Mom?” Uncle Ned stared at Gram staring at a spot on the wall. He sipped the vilest black coffee on the face of the earth. My specialty. I’d almost tripped over him in the hallway on my way to take Orlando for his morning stroll. He’d spent the latter portion of the night curled near our door, a combat knife in his fist. Normally, one might consider that loony behavior. You had to know Uncle Ned.
Upon commencing the hunt for Orlando, whom my little brother, Doug, had stupidly set free from the leash only to watch in mortification as the dog trotted into the sunset, tail furled with rebellious intent, Dad faced a choice—head west along the road, or troll the beach where the family pet sometimes mined for rotten salmon carcasses. We picked the road because it wound into the woods and our shepherd-husky mix hankered after the red squirrels that swarmed during the fall. Dad didn’t want to walk if he could avoid it. “Marched goddamned plenty in the Crotch,” he said. It had required a major effort for him to descend to the parking garage and get the wagon started and pointed in the general direction of our search route. Two bad knees, pain pills for said knees, and a half-rack-a-day habit had all but done him in.
Too bad for Uncle Ned and me, Midnight Road petered out in the foothills. Moose trails went every which way from the little clearing where we’d parked next to an abandoned Winnebago with a raggedy tarp covering the front end and black garbage bags over the windows. Hoboes and druggies occasionally used the Winnebago as a fort until Sheriff Lockhart came along to roust them. “Goddamned railroad,” Dad would say, despite the fact that if not for the railroad (for which he performed part-time labor to supplement his military checks) and the cruise ships and barges, there wouldn’t be any call for Eagle Talon whatsoever.
Uncle Ned lifted himself from the backseat and accompanied me as I shined the flashlight and hollered for Orlando. Dad remained in the station wagon with the engine running and the lights on. He honked the horn.
“He’s gonna keep doing that, huh?” Uncle Ned wasn’t exactly addressing me, more like an actor musing to himself on the stage. “Just gonna keep leanin’ on that horn every ten seconds—”
The horn blared again. Farther off and dim—we’d come a ways already. Birch and alder were broken by stands of furry black spruce that muffled sounds from the outside world. The black, green, and gray webbing is basically the Spanish moss of the Arctic. Uncle Ned chuckled and shook his head. Two years Dad’s junior and a major-league stoner, he’d managed to keep it together when it counted. He taught me how to tie a knot and paddle a canoe, and gave me a lifetime supply of dirty jokes. He’d also explained that contrary to Dad’s Cro-Magnon take on teenage dating, boys were okay to fool around with so long as I ducked the bad ones and avoided getting knocked up. Which ones were bad? I wondered. Most of them, according to the Book of Ned, but keep it to fooling around and all would be well. He also clued me in to the fact that Dad’s vow to blast any would-be suitor’s pecker off with his twelve-gauge was an idle threat. My old man couldn’t shoot worth spit even when sober.
The trail forked. One path climbed into the hills where the undergrowth thinned. The other path curved deeper into the creepy spruce where somebody had strung blue reflective tape among the branches—a haphazard mess like the time Dad got lit up and tried to decorate the Christmas tree.
“Let’s not go in there,” Uncle Ned said. Ominous, although not entirely unusual, as he often said that kind of thing with a similar laconic dryness. That bar looks rough, let’s try the next one over. That woman looks like my ex-wife, I’m not gonna dance with her, uh-uh. That box has got to be heavy. Let’s get a beer and think on it.
“Maybe he’s at the beach rolling in crap,” I said. Orlando loved bear turds and rotten salmon guts with a true passion. There’d be plenty of both near the big water, and as I squinted into the forbidding shadows, I increasingly wished we’d driven there instead.
Uncle Ned pulled his coat tighter and lit a cigarette. The air had dampened. I yelled, “Orlando!” a few more times. Then we stood there for a while in the silence. It was like listening through the lid of a coffin. Dad had stopped leaning on the horn. The woodland critters weren’t making their usual fuss. Clouds drifted in and the darkness was so complete it wrapped us in a cocoon. “Think Orlando’s at the beach?” I said.
“Well, I dunno. He ain’t here.”
“Orlando, you stupid jerk!” I shouted to the night in general.
“Let’s boogie,” Uncle Ned said. The cherry of his cigarette floated in midair and gave his narrowed eyes a feral glint. Like Dad, he was middling tall and rangy. Sharp-featured and often wry. He turned and moved the way we’d come, head lowered, trailing a streamer of Pall Mall smoke. Typical of my uncle. Once he made a decision, he acted.
“Damn it, Orlando.” I gave up and followed, sick to my gut with worry. Fool dog would be the death of me, or so I suspected. He’d tangled with a porcupine the summer before and I’d spent hours picking quills from his swollen snout because Dad refused to take him in to see Doc Green. There were worse things than porcupines in these woods—black bears, angry moose, wolves—and I feared my precious idiot would run into one of them.
Halfway back to the car, I glimpsed a patch of white to my left amid the heavy brush. I took it for a birch stump with holes rotted into the heartwood. No, it was a man lying on his side, matted black hair framing his pale face. By pale, I mean bone-white and bloodless. The face you see on the corpse of an outlaw in those old-timey Wild West photographs.
“Help me,” he whispered.
I trained my light on the injured man; he had to be hurt because of the limp, contorted angle of his body, his shocking paleness. He seemed familiar. The lamp beam broke around his body like a stream splits around a large stone. The shadows turned slowly, fracturing and changing him. He might’ve been weirdo Floyd, who swept the Caribou after last call, or that degenerate trapper, Bob something, who lived in a shack in the hills with a bunch of stuffed moose heads and mangy beaver hides. Or it might’ve been as I first thought—a tree stump lent a man’s shape by my lying eyes. The more I stared, the less certain I became that it was a person at all.
Except I’d heard him speak, voice raspy and high-pitched from pain, almost a falsetto.
Twenty-five feet, give or take, between me and the stranger. I didn’t see his arm move. Move it did, however. The shadows shifted again and his hand grasped futilely, thin and gnarled as a tree branch. His misery radiated into me, caused my eyes to well with tears of empathy. I felt terrible, just terrible, I wanted to mother him, and took a step toward him.
“Hortense. Come here.” Uncle Ned said my name the way Dad described talking to his wounded buddies in ’Nam. The ones who’d gotten hit by a grenade or a stray bullet. Quiet, calm, and reassuring was the ticket—and I bet his tone would’ve worked its magic if my insides had happened to be splashed on the ground and the angels were singing me home. In this case, Uncle Ned’s unnatural calmness scared me, woke me from a dream where I heroically tended to a hapless stranger, got a parade and a key to the village, and my father’s grudging approval.
“Hortense, please.”
“There’s a guy in the bushes,” I said. “I think he’s hurt.”
Uncle Ned grabbed my hand like he used to when I was a little girl and towed me along at a brisk pace. “Naw, kid. That’s a tree stump. I saw it when we went past earlier. Keep movin’.”
I didn’t ask why we were in such a hurry. It worried me how easy it seemed for him and Dad to slip into warrior mode at the drop of a hat. He muttered something about branches snapping and that black bears roamed the area as they fattened up for winter and he regretted leaving his guns at his house. House is sort of a grand term; Uncle Ned lived in a mobile home on the edge of the village. The Estate didn’t appeal to his loner sensibilities.
We got to walking so fast along that narrow trail that I twisted my ankle on a root and nearly went for a header. Uncle Ned didn’t miss a beat. He took most of my weight upon his shoulder. Pretty much dragged me back to the Fleetwood. The engine ran and the driver-side door was ajar. I assumed Dad had gone behind a tree to take a leak. As the minutes passed and we called for him, I began to understand that he’d left. Those were the days when men abandoned their families by saying they needed to grab a pack of cigarettes and beating it for the high timber. He’d threatened to do it during his frequent arguments with Mom. She’d beaten him to the punch and jumped ship with a traveling salesman, leaving us to fend for ourselves. Maybe, just maybe, it was Dad’s turn to bail on us kids.
Meanwhile, Orlando had jumped in through the open door and curled into a ball in the passenger seat. Leaves, twigs, and dirt plastered him. A pig digging for China wouldn’t have been any filthier. Damned old dog pretended to sleep. His thumping tail gave away the show, though.
Uncle Ned rousted him and tried to put him on Dad’s trail. Nothing doing. Orlando whined and hung his head. He refused to budge despite Uncle Ned’s exhortations. Finally, the dog yelped and scrambled back into the car, trailing a stream of piss. That was our cue to depart.
Uncle Ned drove back to the Frazier Estate. He called Deputy Clausen (everybody called him Claws) and explained the situation. Claws agreed to gather a few men and do a walk-through of the area. He theorized that Dad had gotten drunk and wandered into the hills and collapsed somewhere. Such events weren’t rare.
Meanwhile, I checked in on Grandma, who’d occupied the master bedroom since she’d suffered the aneurysm. Next, I herded Orlando into the bathroom and soaked him in the tub. I was really hurting by then.
When I thanked Uncle Ned, he nodded curtly and avoided meeting my eye. “Lock the door,” he said.
“Why? The JWs aren’t allowed out of the compound after dark.” Whenever I got scared, I cracked wise.
“Don’t be a smart-ass. Lock the fuckin’ door.”
“Something fishy in Denmark,” I said to Orlando, who leaned against my leg as I threw the dead bolt. Mrs. Wells had assigned Hamlet, Julius Caesar, and Titus Andronicus for summer reading. “And it’s the Ides of August, too.”
My brothers and sister were sprawled in the living room in front of the TV, watching a vampire flick. Christopher Lee wordlessly seduced a buxom chick who was practically falling out of her peasant blouse. Lee angled for a bite. Then he saw, nestled in the woman’s cleavage, the teeny elegant crucifix her archaeologist boyfriend had given her for luck. Lee’s eyes went buggy with rage and fear. The vampire equivalent to blue balls, I guess. I took over Dad’s La-Z-Boy and kicked back with a bottle of Coke (the last one, as noted by the venomous glares of my siblings) and a bag of ice on my puffy ankle.
The movie ended and I clapped my hands and sent the kids packing. At three bedrooms, our apartment qualified as an imperial suite. Poor Dad sacked out on the couch. Doug and Artemis shared the smallest, crappiest room. I bunked with Shauna, the princess of jibber-jabber. She loved and feared me, and that made tight quarters a bit easier, because she knew I’d sock her in the arm if she sassed me too much or pestered me with one too many goober questions. Often, she’d natter on while I piped Fleetwood Mac and Led Zeppelin through a set of gigantic yellow earphones. That self-isolation spared us a few violent and teary scenes, I’m sure.
Amid the grumbles and the rush for the toilet, I almost confessed the weird events of the evening to Doug. My kid brother had an open mind when it came to the unknown. He wouldn’t necessarily laugh me out of the room without giving the matter some real thought. Instead, I smacked the back of his head and told him not to be such a dumb ass with Orlando. Nobody remarked on Dad’s absence. I’m sure they figured he’d pitched camp at the Caribou like he did so many nights. Later, I lay awake and listened to my siblings snore. Orlando whined as he dreamed of the chase, or of being chased.
From the bedroom, Gram said in a fragile, singsong tone, “In a cavern, in a canyon, excavatin’ for a mine, dwelt a miner forty-niner and his daughter Clementine. In a cavern, in a canyon. In a cavern, in a canyon. In a cavern, in a canyon. Clementine, Clementine. Clementine? Clementine?”
Of the four Shaw siblings I’m the eldest, tallest, and surliest.
According to Mom, Dad had desperately wanted a boy for his firstborn. He descended from a lineage that adhered to a pseudo-medieval mind-set. The noble chauvinist, the virtuous warrior, the honorable fighter of rearguard actions. Quaint when viewed through a historical lens; a real pain in the ass in the modern world.
I was a disappointment. As a daughter, what else could I be? He got used to it. The Shaws have a long, long history of losing. We own that shit. Go down fighting would’ve been our family motto, with a snake biting the heel that crushed its skull as our crest. As some consolation, I was always a tomboy and tougher than either of my brothers—a heap tougher than most of the boys in our hick town, and tougher than at least a few of the grown men. Toughness isn’t always measured by how hard you punch. Sometimes, most of the time, it’s simply the set of a girl’s jaw. I shot my mouth off with the best of them. If nothing else, I dutifully struck at the heels of my oppressors. Know where I got this grit? Sure as hell not from Dad. Oh, yeah, he threw a nasty left hook, and he’d scragged a few guys in ’Nam. But until Mom had flown the coop she ruled our roost with an iron fist that would’ve made Khrushchev think twice before crossing her. Yep, the meanness in my soul is pure-D Mom.
Dad had all the homespun apothegms.
He often said, Never try to beat a man at what he does. What Dad did best was drink. He treated it as a competitive event. In addition to chugging Molson Export, Wild Turkey, and Stoli, Dad also smoked the hell out of cannabis whenever he could get his hands on some. He preferred the heavy-hitting bud from Mexico courtesy of Uncle Ned. I got my hands on a bag those old boys stashed in a rolled-up sock in a number-ten coffee can. That stuff sent you, all right. Although, judging by the wildness of Dad’s eyes, the way they started and stared at the corners of the room after he’d had a few hits, his destination was way different from mine.
Even so, the Acapulco Gold gave me a peek through the keyhole into Dad’s soul in a way booze couldn’t. Some blood memory got activated. It might’ve been our sole point of commonality. He would’ve beaten me to a pulp if he’d known. For my own good, natch.
Main thing I took from growing up the daughter of an alcoholic? Lots of notions compete for the top spot—the easiest way to get vomit and blood out of fabric, the best apologies, the precise amount of heed to pay a drunken diatribe, when to duck flung bottles, how to balance a checkbook and cook a family meal between homework, dog-walking, and giving sponge baths to Gram. But above all, my essential takeaway was that I’d never go down the rabbit hole to an eternal happy hour. I indulged in a beer here and there, toked some Mary Jane to reward myself for serving as Mom, Dad, chief cook and bottle washer pro-tem. Nothing heavy, though. I resolved to leave the heavy lifting to Dad, Uncle Ned, and their buddies at the Caribou Tavern.
Randal Shaw retired from the USMC in 1974 after twenty years of active service. Retirement didn’t agree with him. To wit: the beer, bourbon, and weed, and the sullen hurling of empties. It didn’t agree with Mom either, obviously. My grandmother, Harriet Shaw, suffered a brain aneurysm that very autumn. Granddad had passed away the previous winter and Gram moved into our apartment. By day, she slumped in a special medical recliner we bought from the Eagle Talon Emergency Trauma Center. Vivian from upstairs sat with her while I was at school. Gram’s awareness came and went like a bad radio signal. Sometimes she’d make a feeble attempt to play cards with Vivian. Occasionally, she asked about my grades and what cute boys I’d met, or she’d watch TV and chuckle at the soaps in that rueful way she laughed at so many ridiculous things. The clarity became rare. Usually she stared out the window at the harbor or at the framed Georgia O’Keeffe–knockoff print of a sunflower above the dresser. Hours passed and we’d shoo away the mosquitoes while she tunelessly hummed “In a cavern, in a canyon, excavatin’ for a mine” on a loop. There may as well have been a VACANCY sign blinking above her head.
After school, and twice daily on weekends, Doug helped bundle Gram into the crappy fold-up chair and I pushed her around the village, took her down to the wharf to watch the seagulls, or parked her in front of the general store while I bought Dad a pack of smokes (and another for myself). By night, Dad or I pushed the button and lowered the bed and she lay with her eyes fixed on the dented ceiling of the bedroom. She’d sigh heavily and say, “Nighty-night, nighty-night,” like a parrot. It shames me to remember her that way. But then, most of my childhood is a black hole.
The search party found neither hide nor hair of Dad. Deputy Clausen liked Uncle Ned well enough and agreed to do a bigger sweep in the afternoon. The deputy wasn’t enthused. Old Harmon Snodgrass, a trapper from Kobuk, isolated footprints in the soft dirt along the edge of the road. The tracks matched Dad’s boots and were headed toward town. Snodgrass lost them after a couple hundred yards.
In Deputy Clausen’s professional opinion, Randal Shaw had doubled back and flown the coop to parts unknown, as a certain kind of man is wont to do when the going gets tough. Uncle Ned socked him (the Shaw answer to critics) and Claws would’ve had his ass in a cell for a good long time, except Stu Herring, the mayor of our tiny burg, and Kyle Lomax were on hand to break up the festivities and soothe bruised egos. Herring sent Uncle Ned home with a go and sin no more scowl.
“How’s Mom?” Uncle Ned stared at Gram staring at a spot on the wall. He sipped the vilest black coffee on the face of the earth. My specialty. I’d almost tripped over him in the hallway on my way to take Orlando for his morning stroll. He’d spent the latter portion of the night curled near our door, a combat knife in his fist. Normally, one might consider that loony behavior. You had to know Uncle Ned.
