Paperback(First Mariner Books Edition)
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780618446513 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins |
| Publication date: | 05/21/2004 |
| Edition description: | First Mariner Books Edition |
| Pages: | 180 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x (d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
Settled on the Cranberry Coast
This I know: our lives in these towns are slowly improving. When Rosie grew up in the old reservation houses, the roads were dirt and the crab factory still wheezed along, ugly and reeking, and in early summer the factory stayed open all night--it was the only work you could get--and the damp dirty smell of the crab cooking in its steel vats blew off the ocean, all the way to Aberdeen, even farther, for all I knew. I remember driving home from movies in high school, the windows open, the sweet pulp-mill smell of Aberdeen tinged with that distant damp cardboard of Tokeland's cooking crab.
some money, and almost at once Tokeland plumped with antique stores and curiosity shops, and the old clapboard hotel became a registered landmark and got a profile in Sunset. The Shoalwaters did all right, too--three years ago they sold their fishing rights to the Willapa and voted to put the money into the market, mostly into technology stocks. A lot of them have managed to live off the dividends, and now they buy fishing licenses like the rest of us. Their trawlers are easily the nicest around, you'll notice them moored under the bridge in Aberdeen, the big sleek powerful monsters with aluminum hulls, blue-striped, the new nets, new radar.
Rosie never married, and neither did I. We went to high school together, but we didn't travel in the same crowd. She was half Indian, and she tended to hang with the tough guys, pretty mild by today's standards, I guess--the kids who wore leather jackets, who smoked and overdid the hair gel. Rosie was beautiful, with thick brown shiny hair that reached the middle of her back, but I didn't have a chance at her. She was out of reach entirely, in another world. Her friends, if they drove anything at all, drove pickups instead of cars, and on Friday afternoons they'd motor out to the ocean, pitching and hurtling over the dunes and then speeding down the beach, big V-8s wide open. I envied them, in a way, but I didn't want to be them. Tokeland back then was not a good place to be from. It meant the clapboard shacks for the Indians, and outhouses, and pump wells instead of piped water, all of it on an open spit of land that caught the worst of the ocean winds. Winters, Rosie would say later, the wind would blow all day, all night, until it was part of your soul, an extra function of your body, like your heart, or your breath.
lived in the East for a few years with a woman I thought I would marry, but things, to make a long story short, didn't work out, and I came home. I took a job teaching high school history in Ocosta and kept at it for twenty-seven years, fishing during the summers and doing some casual carpentry, building rooms onto my house until my back yard was just about gone. Occasionally in the hardware store I'd see someone from Rosie's rough old crowd, most of them prosperous fishermen or at least on their way, the luckiest having inherited their fathers' boats, walking now with the casual swagger of money, wearing designer blue jeans and monogrammed dress shirts. Some of these guys made two hundred thousand dollars in a good year, I knew, and they always had the newest trucks, skinny wives with tousled hair and high heels. They'd recognize me from school, a lot of them, and I'd listen to them worry about their kids sleeping on the beach, the girlfriends and boyfriends, getting into this or that drug, trouble at school, and sometimes they'd ask me for advice. I'd try to tell them their kids would grow out of childhood, just as they themselves had, and privately I wondered why they couldn't see themselves in their children.
throwing out the battered posters, handing in my teachers' editions for the last time--I found I was restless. Fishing wasn't enough to hold my attention A year. My old women friends were either married or had gone to the dogs in various ways, and a lot had just moved somewhere else. I had some good friends at the high school but I didn't want to linger there, afraid someone might call me a sad old man. On a whim I advertised myself as a carpenter and plumber, but for months my only phone calls were from friends; they'd recognized my name on my sign, they said, and had called to see if it was really me. Oh, it's me, all right, I told them.
Then Rosie called. "I just bought a new house," she said, "and it's a big fucking wreck."
"Surprise," she said.
paper."
principal and the superintendent, and in the picture my stomach hung out a long, long way in its striped shirt, like a balloon edging through a doorway. I hadn't known I looked quite like that, and staring at the paper I'd felt as though I were seeing myself for the first time in years. "I'm on a diet now," I said. "All that cafeteria food."
Twin Harbors State Park sits right on the main roads in and out of the area, hundreds of campsites on both sides of the highway, one side forested and filled with mosquitoes, the other side scrubby and dry, with patches of sand where you pitch your tent in the Scotch broom and shore pine. The campsites sit right alongside one another, children run through the campground, the pit toilets smell. Years ago a friend of mine from college came out to visit me and insisted on camping there, and when I picked him up the next morning the place was littered with beer cans and broken glass, and in the campsite next to his was a sort of blackened skeleton that had been a little pine tree, the soil around it burnt brown. This is where Rosie worked.
least engaging places can grow on you. The high school, a one-story yellow brick budding set down in a dirt field, had no windows, supposedly to keep the kids from watching the traffic going by on the highway; the cinderblock hallways were dim and stony. It was an ugly place, institutional. The trees around the edges of the athletic fields had all died from a kind of beetle blight and stood there for years, brown and dry, waiting to fall on the soccer players. But I had my morning car and my thermos of coffee, and there was an easy sort of swinging progression through the years, from holiday to holiday, and the kids were often interested and articulate, and there were lots of good mornings when they were thinking and their hands were raised, or I'd have a sweet kid in a certain period who always understood my jokes, or pretended to. At one point a math teacher named Jack Patani, a little Italian guy, married one of his students, Isabel or Isadora, I could never remember. People were very understanding, for the most part. She was one of the sweet ones who adored him, and who, as he grew to know her, gave him good conversation and a nice young body, and it's hard to argue with that.
Rosie's house sat among rhododendrons right over a little bridge behind the post office, and her back yard ran along the edge of a cranberry bog. She was standing in the driveway, unloading lumber from her pickup. She'd cut her hair short, like a boys. She wore a white tank top, and her square face held deep wrinkles, like the soft folds in a bag. She stood straight and peered into my car. We shook hands.
strange we haven't run into each other."
crinkled at the corners. Her eyebrows were thick and black. "Got the water hooked up."
weightlifter's. A little rain had started, but she ignored it, put a hand over her eyes. Around the back of the house we could see the beginning of the hills, lit here and there with sun. The alders were in full leaf, and the cranberry bog was a deep russet now in the middle of summer. Down at the end of the road another little house sat, abandoned, its door gaping open as though to breathe, a tree growing through the windows. Somewhere we could hear a tractor. The ocean was a mile away across the highway, invisible, but I could smell it, the salty air.
of a plastic wading pool. She was wearing white underpants and no shirt, and her belly hung out like a trucker's. She had Rosie's thick grainy black hair, the same strange overmuscled arms.
in mine--wet and warm, like a little frog in my palm.
mildew. The light fixtures were gone, maybe stolen for scrap, and the cupboards were bashed in; the floor had rotten patches, and the ceiling was a wreck, sagging and stained. The tractor ran noisily along the fence, tending the bogs. "This is what a ranger gets?" I asked.
bedrooms. The nails pinged along the floor. "So," she said.
tucked it into her pants. I handed over her ranger's hat--it was stiff, as though it had been in the freezer. "The hat looks good," I said.
they rode off, Rosie glancing behind her as she backed down the driveway.
That afternoon I drove down to Raymond to have lunch with my sister Jodie. She's the principal of the elementary school, but when I found her she was in the teacher's lounge eating a banana and talking on the telephone. She is more or less plump, depending, and her blond hair is most often permed, though that depends on whim, I think: she has thin hair, which she's always hated, and for a while she wore hats everywhere. "Got some news," I said, whispering.
worksheets were stapled to the bulletin boards, and I could smell pee from the bathroom. I looked through the window in a classroom door and saw a teacher, a woman, very young, sitting on the carpeted floor, saying the days of the week. With each word she moved her hands: steepled her fingers together for Tuesday, settled her hands on her shoulders for Wednesday, folded them over her breasts for Thursday. The children's baby faces were set in earnest, their hands moving in grave imitation from shoulder to breast to cheek.
calves.
should have homework."
started I'd told her about Rosie.
"Whose name was Carolyn. Who I think ran off somewhere. I want to say she went to California. I think she worked as an apple picker for a while."
laid two fingers on her temple. "I've got too many people up here, they're all starting to look like one another."
for a minute, then Jodie said, "Does Rosie ever hear from her?"
"You don't have a problem with that?"
it with the grandmother."
about it."
From Rosie that night I learned this: that Carolyn had made it to California, barely, and that Rosie had tracked her down at a strawberry farm, where she was earning two dollars a flat with Hannah, two years old, slung on her back in a shirt. Rosie brought Hannah home for the summer, then for the winter as well, and Carolyn never came to claim her; she wrote twice from Mexico a year later, but on Hannah's fifth birthday her mother was present only in her two letters tacked to Rosie's fridge, in one smiling photograph of her with Hannah on her back, and in Hannah herself, who when asked about her mother remembered nothing, really, just the heat and shady hats, the ghosts of a few songs, and maybe the months of sunshine, and the easy dip and rise of Carolyn picking beans and fruit beneath her.
Since retiring I've put thousands of miles on my car, just driving. It's a way of feeling busy, I suppose. Down to Raymond, inland to Pe Ell and Menlo, down to Vader, sometimes all the way down to Naselle and Skamokawa on the river and the way things used to look around here, the frame houses hanging on the banks, the boathouses on stilts. I can catch Portland radio down there but on the way back up it fades quickly. It's a harmless way to live, more or less, and at least I'm out of the house. And I keep maps: some fairly good ones, with all the little horse trails and logging roads, and a satellite photo, too, which I have tacked to the wall over the bed. In it the sea is a strange dark gray, and the wash from the mouths of the various rivers turns out to be a lighter color, almost a tan, and the roads are laid down like hairs. Houses, too, you can see: the tiniest little white spots, but if you know the roads you can say what's what. The cranberry bogs are square red patches sewn into the flatlands near Tokeland, and Rosie's house is there, too, behind the new brick post office, which sits in the middle of its parking lot like a stone in a puddle. But the thing you notice is the bogs, which stretch for miles, tangled and dense, following the curve of the coastline. Finns, recognizing something familiar in the landscape, built them at the turn of the century, and they're still beautiful things, even from the air.
One afternoon when I was putting up gutters Rosie got out our yearbook and found me in it, combed and chubby. I climbed down from the ladder to look, though actually I'd got the thing out myself weeks ago. "God," she said. "Look at us." She touched the hornrims. "It's a miracle we didn't die laughing at each other."
you're wondering." A tractor was churning around the edges of the bog.
the glossy pages. "Your grandmother, Hannah, was not a very good girl."
important to be with my friends." She glanced at me, then at the tractor, which was coming toward us through the mud.
bathroom tiles we'd put in that day. "Not a close friend," I said.
seat and waved, then sat down and gunned the engine. Hannah cringed in Rosie's lap. "Christ," Rosie said.
gapped.
the gate back. "Thank you very much," said the driver, and halfway to the road he stopped the tractor, stood, dropped his baggy jeans, and peed in a long yellow arc, fifteen or twenty feet, into Rosie's driveway. Then he sat down again and drove off.
the driveway, where she kicked dust over the mark. "That's the sort of thing I did in school, honey," she called across the yard, and I thought she might have been talking to either of us.
Two weeks later we drove up to Grayland to watch the kite festival. The highway was lined with parked RVs, and a couple hundred people had gathered on the beach. Hannah gave a little gasp when she saw the kites, big fancy ones this year: tandem boxes, double-stringed stunt jobs, black and rippling, and a long rainbow tube, huge and dignified, hanging in the breeze like a blimp.
windshield. She's not used to having a man around, Rosie'd said; she doesn't know what you're going to do. I don't know what I'm going to do, I'd said.
her. "The kid knows her kites," I said, and she nodded seriously.
barbecuing hot dogs, wearing an apron. He had mustard in his mustache.
many."
working up at the park?"
Rosie, "but I think you've got a big dog following you around."
at her and barked, his boozy eyes red and haggard. "Woof," he said.
feeding her and everything."
a paper napkin; she took it boldly with both hands. I envied the easy way he talked to her, and her smiling for him.
been here before."
and bushy. "Nice kite," I said.
reel, which pulled up and away from me. I knelt down and put my arms around Hannah from behind. She was sweaty and smelled like sun and dirt and meat. The surf rolled over and over itself up the beach. We watched the tube hang majestically above us, spinning in place, like a dream animal. "Three thousand miles," she sang, "miles, miles, miles."
Over the next couple weeks the house got sturdier. I found some old oak boards in my shed and used them to patch the floor. I gutted the kitchen and put in a new fridge, new cupboards, a window over the sink. I was proud of my work--it was quick, cheap, and I didn't make any mistakes, no cuts too short, no crooked wallpaper. The new wall in the kitchen was solid, stronger than the original. Rosie and I worked into the night, the television on in the living room while we put up plasterboard. Sometimes, talking, we woke Hannah, who would come toddling out of Rosie's room and watch. In the television's late blue light her hair shone a sort of steely gray. She wandered over, peered into the joint compound bucket, watched me spread the stuff back and forth. I took a fingerful and laid it in her palm. "Don't eat that,"
Jodie came up one night during that last week with a bottle of wine and a twelve-pack of Henry's. We opened the gate to the cranberry bog and sat down on the grass. The cranberries were pale pink and small, hidden under the creeping leaves. "Here," Rosie said, dropping a handful in my glass. "A touch of elegance."
around like ball bearings.
school." Hannah said nothing, just crouched at the edge of the bog, collecting the brightest berries she could find.
from the ocean, squeezing through the pines and sliding past at eye level. Little tufts settled in the ditches, and scraps hung up in the trees like laundry.
becoming drunk and was making generous gestures. "No. Actually, no, I didn't. I didn't teach her. What am I saying? But I remember her. More or less."
opened another beer. "A very pretty girl."
time soon," Rosie said.
about the way she said our made us all look over at Hannah, who lay picking at the grass. I could imagine moving in with these two, sure, sleeping on the sofa at first--an urge to lend a hand, I suppose, to take on this little family--though they seemed whole there, at the edge of the bog, as if that our had sealed them off from us somehow. Rosie wore a strange expression, not of wonder, exactly, which you'll see on new mothers, but something closer to acceptance, and regret. I was drunk but not drunk enough to say what I wanted, that we don't live our lives so much as come to them, as different people and things collect mysteriously around us. I felt as though I were coming to Rosie and Hannah, easing my way toward them.
"She's not even something I think about anymore. She's gone, gone, gone. And now here's Eddie." She kissed me on the cheek. "Am I drunk?" she asked. Her eyes were bright.
about her," she said. "No point anymore." I sat, holding my beer. What was she imagining? Pheasants in the migrants' shacks, the mattresses that swelled with dew and rain between seasons? "No point," she said. Her lowered voice, the finality of it, and I imagined the orchards hanging full of fruit, a faceless Carolyn lost in the trees.
I spent the night on Rosie's sofa and woke up early, not sick exactly but with the feeling that a wind was blowing through my head, that I had created a few vacancies upstairs. I made coffee and sat on the front porch, facing the back of the post office. The flagpole was still empty; it was Saturday. The yard was littered with wood scraps. I sat there, retired teacher, gut on my lap, plaster dust all over my pants.
"Good morning," I said.
another spoonful, sat down next to me.
want to come along."
noticed the delicate point of her chin, like Rosie's chin.
out her seatbelt, but she grabbed the two ends and clicked them together. I could think of nothing to say. Her presence was palpable, her thick meaty smell. We were both a little tense. "We could get you an ice cream cone there," I said, and then remembered it was only eight in the morning. "Or maybe some pancakes."
glove compartment.
Patani said? He'd married Isabel, Isadora, to give himself a few more good times. Still happy together, those two, and he'd had several nice years, was looking at many more. I admitted to myself, then--I allowed myself to think, then, for the first time, about marrying Rosie. I still hardly knew her at all.
her seat, but she was asleep, her hands still clasped together.
unbuckled her seatbelt, and lifted her against my shoulder. I carried her inside, the lopsided sack of her against me. Around us stretched miles of lumber and pipes, and somewhere I heard a saw whining, but she didn't wake up; and as I walked through the aisles she spread her arms, her fat arms, to hold my neck, and I imagined that she remembered this strolling motion, and that more than any rocking could, or singing, it soothed her. I talked to the salesmen, and I handed over my wallet. Outside, it was raining, and I waited under a metal overhang. She slept as they loaded the radiators, clanking, into the trunk of my car, one after the other--they angled out awkwardly, and I had a flag tied on--and then I was alone with Hannah in the parking lot, waiting for the rain to stop, and I stood watching the rain come down over the river, over the ships and bridges, and over the highway home. I smoothed her hair with my hand, her head perfectly round against my shoulder, and I stood--I was on the verge of something, I could feel it--and I just waited there, listening to her easy, settled breathing.