The Collected Short Fiction, page 155
According to Erica, the pair usually woke around mid-afternoon and started drinking to kill the previous night’s hangover and played innumerable hands of twenty-one, each armed with a mason jar of pennies and nickels to cover their wagers. The drinking and gambling ritual wasn’t interrupted by our arrival. Erica sprawled on the couch and watched me sip tallboys and get snared into a marathon blackjack session. I took them for fourteen dollars in change. Willy scoffed when I attempted to decline the loot. She stuffed all those coins into a sock and made Erica put it in her purse. I didn’t argue. Much as it pained me to exploit a couple of pickled geezers, I needed the gas money.
For a while nobody said much, and I got the distinct impression Erica wasn’t exactly in their good graces, nor had lugging home a ne’er-do-well such as myself done much to improve the climate. It was so frigid in the trailer we could’ve used the services of one of those icebreaker ships. A golf tournament played on TV and the clock radio was tuned to college basketball, both of which the Coleridges had money riding on. Willy dealt the cards, occasionally pausing to lean toward the commentary, swear under her breath, and scratch totals into a ratty notebook. Rob kept the booze coming and responded to Erica’s queries about the recent blizzards and frozen water pipes with grunts and shrugs. He seldom lifted his bleary gaze from the table, studying the array of cards with tremendous intensity.
During a break in the action, while the couple exchanged monosyllabic insults over some point of contention, either regarding blackjack or the broadcasts, I wasn’t clear, Erica spirited me away to her old room. I gathered it sat untouched since she originally left for college. Kind of dusty and cobwebby and it smelled stale, although not bad after the cigarette smoke stench that permeated the rest of the trailer. Admittedly, I was curious to learn more about my woman of mystery.
The fossil record of a typical childhood: Lite Brite and Etch-a-Sketch and stars painted on the ceiling; stacks of Cosmopolitan and Seventeen and a poster of Mick Jagger as a sweet young thing. A trove of costume jewelry gleamed atop the vanity and at the foot of the single bed was a dog pillow, leash, and collar. The rabies vaccination tag on the collar said Achilles. She kept a picture of Achilles in a locket around her neck: a family scene in the woods—Erica ten or eleven, Rob and Willy in mackinaws and hip waders, and the dog at their feet. A brute with lots of teeth and a lolling tongue. Made me think of White Fang. No sign of brother Isaiah, oddly enough.
“Man, when did you move out?” I said, eyeing a parti-colored DNA model and slide rule gathering dust next to a stuffed panda that appeared to be a prize from some Alaska State Fair of yore. I edged away, paranoid she might try to make a move on me there in that musty tomb. The wheels were always turning in her brain, powering a carousel of agendas. Shagging me ten feet from the kitchen while her parents swilled liquor and squabbled over point spreads was just her kind of kink, but a bridge too far for my taste.
“After Achilles died. A long time ago.” That peculiar light inhabited her eyes again. She cocked her head in manner reminiscent of Willy’s habitual gesture, listening to her parents’ muffled argument, the faint exclamations of the announcers. “I went to college ahead of schedule. Full ride, so why not? Anything to get the hell away from here.”
“Yeah, you and your full ride. What was it for, anyway?” I’d asked before; this time she humored me.
“I wrote a paper. Some stuffed shirts liked it. Voilà.”
I hefted the DNA model. “Must’ve been a hell of a paper.”
“Yep. It detailed the effects of bong hits of Matanuska Thunderfuck on the female adolescent libido. Where are you going? Why are you trying to escape?”
She was smart, that I knew, despite the fact she preferred to show the world a bruiser and boozer persona. Smart isn’t even the right term—brilliant, genius, savant... Pick one of those and you’d be closer the mark. Erica had a photographic memory. List a sequence of phone numbers, book passages, whatever, she’d roll her eyes and recite them in a mechanical voice that sounded like the computerized time and temp recording. She could quote the entire dialogue of any film she’d ever seen, and did so on occasion when she was in the mood to drive me batshit. One of her favorite moods, in fact.
She had a will to self-destruction—that was the problem. If not destruction, definitely a kind of violent apathy. I was afraid to dig much deeper. Afraid and selfish. See, I liked how things were going between us for the most part. She didn’t care that I was broke and without prospects. A low-maintenance chick in regards to material objects. Stupid, callow me, I thought that was a bargain. I recognized the Devil and the deep blue sea, but not that I was caught between them or that the water was rising like in that old Johnny Cash song or my dream of canoeing the lake.
“Did you know we’re made of dead stars?” she said. “We’re always sloughing off detritus and rebuilding ourselves. Every ten years you’re basically a brand new person.”
I admitted to not knowing that factoid.
“Ah, so. Then you should also know I’ve done something to you. Not me, my electromagnetic field is kind of... Well it’s kind of fucked up, I guess you’d say. My best bet is, yours is fubar too. CTD... cosmically transmitted disease. Osmosis, sweetie. We destroy the ones we love.”
She caught me and stuck her tongue in my ear and had my belt mostly unlooped before I could react. Then she pushed me away, laughed, and said, “What, you think I’d fuck you in my old bedroom while my parents are sitting outside? Get real, dude.” She walked back into the kitchen, left me standing there with my pants down and a raging hard-on.
Willy sobered enough to sear the steaks on a griddle, and Rob found a mismatched set of glasses to fill with a nice Chablis they’d set aside for the occasion, and for a few minutes we sat around the rickety table in the 1960s kitchen and enjoyed a quiet dinner almost like a regular family. I got the feeling it was the first time in ages for any of us.
After the dishes were cleared, Rob turned his yellowed eyes on me and said, “So, kid. Any big plans?”
Erica clenched her knife and smiled at her dad. “Don’t do it.”
“She means it, Robert,” Willy said, lighting a cigarette. Her dreamy tone sharpened into something menacing.
“Ah, come on. He’s sniffing around my daughter like a hound dog. Be nice to know if his intentions are honorable.”
“Your daughter can take care of herself,” Willy said. “It’s the boy we should worry about.”
“What’s to worry about? Erica, you break the news to Fido here? Bet not, judging by the sappy expression he’s wearing.”
Willy said, “Robert, shut your mouth. Honey, put the knife down.”
Rob laughed a nasty drunken laugh, but he shut up and focused on his empty plate.
Erica set the knife aside. She stood and grabbed her coat. She said to me, “Let’s go.”
I didn’t argue. Two feet of fresh snow piled on the road, and beneath that, black ice. Seemed a safer prospect than remaining in the trailer for the imminent brouhaha.
White-knuckled the one-hundred-plus-mile drive home. Made it safe and sound, although, as Rob might’ve opined, that simply delayed the inevitable.
Spring came creeping on muddy little muskrat feet, and we spent a long afternoon chucking crap from the apartment into the bed of my truck for a garbage run. When Erica tossed a box of her old journals and the high-powered telescope onto the pile, my ears pricked up. She kept the telescope near the sliding door to the back deck and used it to watch the stars on clear nights. She frequently jotted notes into a logbook. I asked what the notes were for, and she ruffled my hair and told me to crack another beer like a good boy.
I couldn’t help but feel her mood to purge was bound to include me sooner or later. Among the outgoing was a photo album. Pictures of the family in various California settings, one of Rob dressed in a suit giving a lecture at a packed assembly hall with the NASA seal on the wall behind his podium. He was lean and sharp, mouth twisted in wrath, index finger stabbing toward the camera. Definitely not the wasted, basted guy I’d recently met. I hid it in a footlocker with my old collection of pulp and western paperbacks. In the back of my mind I was thinking she’d be grateful someday. Even farther back, nearer my animal part, lurked some nameless motivation, a longing, and fear.
Alaska is a damned big, empty place bordered by Nowhere. Between frigid temperatures and snowfalls ass-deep to a giraffe, it has the weapons to kill anything more complex than a rock. Civilization exists in tiny, disenfranchised pockets surrounded by a howling void. Basically, it’s the universe in microcosm.
There’s always been plenty of tinfoil hat theories and superstitious legends to go along with all that frozen tundra—lost radar sites fronting for secret nuclear launch silos aimed at Russia; FEMA concentration camps for the inevitable apocalypse; UFO observation bases; etc, etc.
One day I was reading an article in the paper about the HAARP Project and the author’s claim about how, instead of improving communication or navigation systems, the device was actually a bunker-busting ray being prepared for deployment against the various militia compounds scattered across the state. I laughed and pointed it out to Erica, hoping to josh her out of the funk she’d fallen into for the past several weeks.
Didn’t have the effect I’d hoped for—instead, she stared at the article, then at me with that laser-beam intensity she saved for her more sadistic moments. Her eyes were puffy. She’d abruptly stopped drinking and taking dope, which might’ve signaled a positive development under normal circumstances or with a normal person. Alas, this was altogether different with her; it heralded a deeper, more ominous stage of whatever she was going through. She said, “Well, of course that’s bullshit. It’s probably something worse. There’s always something worse.”
We didn’t talk for nearly a week. I worked days at a construction site, hauling sheetrock and digging trenches. I’d drag ass home to a TV dinner and a six-pack of suds while she hunched at the opposite end of the couch, still dressed in her PJs, glued to Nova. I didn’t have a clue what to say, so I slumped in my work clothes and drank silently while fear burrowed ever deeper and made its nest in my brain. When feverish sleep enfolded me, I dreamed of drowning and of fire.
Finally, it came to a head. Erica kicked me out of bed before dawn and herded me to the truck while the sky was still slashed with stars. She refused to answer questions except to say we were going on a picnic; told me to shut my trap and drive. I did, still half drunk, eyes swollen mostly shut. Occasionally I stole glances at her—she was bundled in a dark flannel coat and a knitted cap and she wore a pair of wraparound sunglasses, rendering her expression inscrutable.
Daylight burned away the shadows as we climbed onto the gravel access road that winds through Hatcher Pass. In the sourdough days there were hard rock mines and a series of tough and tumble camps. In my time the mines were long gone and the territory was deserted but for moose and fox and the ptarmigans that roosted in the crags and among the patches of tough alder and willow. Tourists from the Lower Forty-eight flocked to the hills in July to photograph the Dahl sheep that capered along the cliffs. Magnificent beasts, those sheep. As a kid, I saw one of the poor fuckers, a big old ram ambling in the sun, trip on a loose rock and plummet into a crevasse, and I wondered if any of the goddamned tourists had ever caught a pic of that side of Mother Nature. The Alaska they don’t show you on the travel brochures.
She made me park on the shoulder of the road. From there we scrambled down and walked across a field of tundra and moss and blueberry bushes that wouldn’t flower for a few weeks yet. The sun scorched us as it rolled over the peak, and a sharp breeze whistled through the looming icecaps and reminded me that the deathly hand of winter never truly departed the northlands; it only withdrew up its own sleeve, biding for the short span of summer to end.
I was getting nervous. This being Alaska (and me a paranoid, delusional fuck), murder/rape capital per capita of the US, and famous for people blowing a fuse and whacking whole towns, my animal self went on red alert, not so casually scrutinizing her every move, half expecting her to swing up the .38 auto I knew she stashed in her dresser and take a crack at me. Why would she do such a thing, you might wonder? Didn’t need to be a motive. Not in AK. Strange things were done in the Land of the Midnight Sun and only the Devil knew why.
Erica walked in front, a rucksack slung over her shoulder. Sack had a faded red hobo patch on the side. She’d packed chicken sandwiches and wine. The bottles clinked as she picked her way across an icy stream, hopping from rock to rock to keep her boots dry. She moved with the ungainly grace of a raven and when she glanced over her shoulder at me, her eyes were diamond cold as the eyes of the totem in front of Wasilla City Hall.
Atop a big flat rock that teetered near the precipice of a gulf into blue mist we made our stand and had the first bottle of eight-dollar wine, and after it was gone, or mostly, she scared me by suddenly cupping her hands to her mouth and shouting for Achilles over and over. “He’s out here, somewhere,” she said, taking my silence for inquiry. “Rob said a dog couldn’t make the trip, that the chemical composition of the doggie brain made it a no go. I figured he was lying. Rob would definitely lie. He hated Achilles.” She called for a long time.
For one brief, giddy, hysterical moment her hollering for the ghost dog was too goddamned much to endure and I thought of pushing her over the edge. Quick boot to the ass was all it would’ve taken. Doesn’t everybody have that thought, though? That morbid fantasy of how easy it’d be shiv a loved one in his or her sleep, to slip drain cleaner into his or her soup, to shove him or her off a ledge. Isn’t it related to that freaky impulse to hurl ourselves off ledges, to spin the wheel of our sports car into the path of a dump truck? To fall in love?
Eventually I asked her what we were doing there on the side of the mountain. She rested her hands on her knees and regarded me. Her face was flushed. She said, “I’m trying to remember where it is.”
“Where what is?”
“Our Plymouth Rock. Our Northwest Passage. My father’s New World. It’s right around here, somewhere. Too early to hit the next bottle?”
“Your folks wouldn’t say so.”
“Cut the comedy. You ain’t no Bill Hicks, boy.”
I took the final swallow of the wine as a tribute to the departed legend. “Baby, what the hell is going on?”
“I’m trying to explain. Ever notice I spell Kalifornia with a K?”
“Yeah, and you cross your sevens like the Europeans. Kinda fancy for a chick from the trailer park, but who am I to judge, huh?”
“Um, hm. You think it’s an affectation.”
“I don’t know what that word means.”
“Rob and Willy were big wheels in Kalifornia. The government took care of everything—that’s how important Mom and Pop were. Their brains were so powerful they could squash you with mind power. We were rich bitches back in Kal. Back in Kal I had a nanny, three tutors, a bodyguard/driver named Beasley, my own private rugby field. Back in Kal, Beasley drove me to an exclusive school in an armor-plated Cadillac. Back in Kal my pals were baby diplomats and shithead junior CEOs in training bras. The Secretary of State and a bunch of his cronies flocked to Rob’s barbecues. I spelled my own name with a K. Erika. Oh, what a scene it was, in Kal. Only problem was, we were all doomed. Voyager broadcasting its dinner bell wasn’t the brightest idea mankind ever had. First contact didn’t turn out so great. Turned out kind of like when driver ants march through the jungle munching every living thing that doesn’t get clear fast. We didn’t even get the fancy technological gifts or the fucking cookbook. Then again, what do you expect from a species that seeps down from cracks between the stars, huh?” As she spoke she loomed over me and a static charge built in the folds of my clothes and my hair stood on end.
I’d read a smidgeon of Nietzsche. I recognized an abyss when I saw one. Her eyes gave me vertigo, scared me in that instant a thousand times to the power of ten more than anything CAS or HPL ever said. I was an animal in the presence of a dark wonder, and all my masochistic resilience, my uncanny talent for taking a punch to the mouth, couldn’t help me now.
“No, baby, nothing can help you now,” she said. “Everything you believe is a lie. It’s bullshit down to the quark. Come on. Let’s keep walking.”
We kept walking, and walking. Picked our way downslope until we arrived in the shadow of an overhanging cliff. Here was a hollow much obliterated by high school graffiti and shards of busted beer bottles from many campfire parties. Farther back was an aperture and a set of rusted metal doors thrown wide to reveal a moldy tunnel into darkness. It put me in mind of a bomb shelter, although I wasn’t aware of any such structure in the region—the nearest bunkers were quietly crumbling a thousand miles south in the Aleutians.
“X marks the spot,” she said and gripped my wrist with bone crushing force. She gestured with her free hand, illustrating the scene: “Rob didn’t invent the technology. Smart, not that smart. Uncle Cahart made the breakthrough—not really my uncle, he was just around so much, too bad the coot didn’t make it through before... well, oh well. Nah, Rob is an opportunist, a two-legged coyote. He put apple and pi together and saw our way out of a super-bad situation.”
I didn’t understand and told her so. Erica shrugged and said she didn’t either except in the vaguest sense. Quantum physics wasn’t her area of expertise like Rob, or particle physics like Willy. Blow jobs and lit theory, yeah. She said, “Isaiah died two weeks before Uncle Cahart threw the switch on his supercollider Tesla coil space and time machine. Two damned weeks. Yeah. What say we lay our coats down and do it on glass? You game?” Her diamond eyes were glossy. Had she ever cried in front of me? Hell if I could remember.
