And She Was (14 page)

They didn’t speak. They felt nothing but were acutely aware of the void. Like the nothingness itself swelled with profound emotion. These killers would come to know this feeling well, until other emotions became foreboding intruders.

When they had completed the ritual and the dead-man’s fat was only a sticky residue in their throats, the women moved together toward the village. Toward Usilax.

Usilax did not live alone. His daughter and her husband slept in the same
ulax
. The children, Usilax’s nephew and niece, had died several weeks before. The women had not spoken about how they would han
dle the others, who were sure to wake up when the disturbance began. They did not want to speak of it.

The women undressed, leaving their clothing outside the
ulax
. Agripina descended the ladder, naked and quiet as a spirit. The awareness came to her as her foot touched the dirt floor. She heard Usilax’s breath and felt his body lying in a dugout to the right. Sounds of lovemaking came from the larger dugout on the left. She stepped aside to allow Teresa and Kristinia to descend. A man’s soft grunting and the shuffling of bare skin against hides gave rhythm to their work.

Kristinia pulled the ulu from a strap around her waist. She tipped her shoulders to slide past Agripina without stepping on the collection of lamps and bowls in the center of the house. Agripina followed, ducking to avoid the hanging idol she could not see but felt in the darkness. Kristinia pushed aside the grass mat that separated Usilax’s sleeping quarters and crawled inside. Agripina and Teresa followed, creeping on all fours. Only one other person could fit inside, but the women pulled themselves close, holding the flap to the side and crouching at the entrance.

Kristinia bit the ulu between her teeth so she could use both hands to feel the wall and floor as she slid alongside Usilax’s sleeping form. When she had reached his head, she balanced on the balls of her feet, knees bent, torso hanging over the rise and fall of his sleeping skins.

Agripina watched the opposite dugout, listening to the man’s heavy breathing and now a woman’s softer ones. They were close to finishing. She felt the man’s tension coming like arrows and the woman’s rising up from the ground. She turned back to Kristinia and Usilax when the connection of blade touching skin whispered to her.

Kristinia sliced deep as if into the tough hide of a sea lion. She knew this motion well. Aya’s ulu separated most of Usilax’s head, leaving only his spinal column untouched. Usilax never made a sound. He died in a dream he had every night. He is paddling, leading them all to an invisible island, untouched grasses swaying against soft swelling ocean, eagle chicks chirping above. Behind his people’s smiling faces fog swirls in, covering their tracks.

Agripina felt the mist of the dream fading from the
ulax
as Kristinia dropped the ulu and stepped over the body. Teresa and Agripina rose
from their crouches and moved to the ladder, climbing to the lovers’ final moans.

When dawn came and Agripina heard her mother and uncles rising, she stretched and pulled aside her sleeping skins. She had not slept that night but had lain awake, listening with the new ears given her. She heard the slight change in the sound of waves that marked the changing tide, and listened to the breathing of the village, the sleep words spoken in another
ulax
.

The family was still eating their breakfast of dried fish and berries when the news reached them. Usilax’s son-in-law pulled open their door. “Usilax has been killed in his sleep,” he said. “A meeting is called on the beach.”

He left to alert others before anyone could respond.

Agripina’s uncles scraped up the last of their breakfast. They were out the door before Agripina and her mother had collected the scraps and thrown the bones outside.

No one spoke as they assembled on the beach, strafed with offshore wind. Agripina heard scattered thoughts as if they were spoken. Some were afraid, others curious. But the thoughts she heard most clearly came from the ones in which hope was growing. Usilax would not be mourned by these. She listened carefully. One man began packing his kayak for the long journey to Dutch Harbor. She listened to him plan how to ask the priest for the inoculations.

Usilax’s son-in-law stepped forward. “It will not be difficult to discover the monster who has done this terrible thing.” He held up the ulu. “This was beside Usilax. His blood still clings to its blade.” He moved around the circle, holding the ulu for each person to inspect.

Teresa and Kristinia came first in the circle. Both women studied the ulu without speaking until he moved to the next person. When the knife passed before Agripina’s mother, she gasped and turned her head.

“This ulu is known to you?” Usilax’s son-in-law asked.

Agripina’s mother kept silent, her head bowed.

“If you know, speak.”

Agripina’s mother didn’t look up as she spoke. “It is Aya’s.”

A search was begun for Aya. But through days of effort, she could not be found. At last the villagers gave up. Aya was likely dead by now, her strength lasting just long enough for this one act of revenge. Already the ancient cave burial customs were fading from the people’s memories. So much had changed too fast, and so many had died too young. Only the three women found her body, sitting in the warm, dry air of a cave opening at the sea cliffs, its power dwelling in the dark with others, waiting.

Years later, when Agripina had entered into the stream of motherhood with four children of her own, including a girl just becoming a woman, Agripina went to her great-grandmother to ask the question that had gnawed at her since the day she had killed. Aya had hunted, killed a beast to bring her village back to life. Agripina had murdered, killed a man to stop more death.

“Great-grandmother?” Agripina crouched by Aya’s blackened body and touched her shriveled fingers. “Was it wrong?”

Agripina heard nothing but wind skidding through the cave’s mouth and felt nothing but the insistent shadow she had come to know so well. It was the shadow of Aya’s sacrifice, elongating now as it moved toward the next generation.

JULY 30, 1986

I
found her slumped in the far stall at closing time. A puddle of urine seeped from her pink pantsuit. Her chin crusted with vomit, which had flowed, unwiped, until it trickled through the papery petals of her corsage.

“Liz?” I stood a safe distance from her and nudged her with my boot toe. “Liz, wake up.”

She grunted, and her head rolled forward.

“Marge! Liz’s passed out.”

“Get her out. I’ll call a cab.”

I looked down at the pink form, an unfamiliar sense of compassion buzzing like a pesky horsefly. Shit, I was going to have to touch her. Somebody loved Liz. Didn’t they? Somebody cared. Even Dad had Yolanda. Yolanda wouldn’t leave my father lying in the bathroom of some bar. If Yolanda could do it, so could I. I studied the angle of Liz, how her legs were splayed, the distance to the stall door, trying to figure out how to drag her out without touching either the wet suit bottoms or the crusted top. If I squatted by her shoulder, I could hook my arm around from behind, gripping under her pit.

I knelt beside her and slid my arm along her back. I turned my head from the smell on her lapels, which were now right under my nose. I got her halfway up and had to adjust my feet to finish the lift.

Unfortunately, I stepped right in the largest accumulation of urine and slipped. Liz slid back down the wall with a damp plop, coming to rest in exactly the same position she had occupied. I, however, came down hard, my head hitting the protruding metal of the toilet paper holder right on the edge. My legs skidded out the stall door. The holder snapped. Blood gushed from just above my temple.

I slumped to the floor beside Liz, scooting my rear across the urinepuddled floor until my back rested against the wall too. When I touched my head, my fingers came away stamped with blood. I glanced at Liz to make sure I hadn’t crippled her.

Her eyes were wide open and staring right at mine.

She grinned, her gums wet and naked. Her hand reached for my hair, a light touch, then came down to clench my knee, and she began to laugh. Her breath came at me in waves of booze and vomit. Maybe I should have been indignant, but I was sitting next to a pink-polyestered drunk in a pool of pee beside a well-used toilet in a tiny bathroom in a remote fishing town on the Bering Sea. I laughed too. I laughed while blood trickled off my eyelashes. I laughed while Marge’s head appeared in the stall doorway.

“What the fuck?” she said. “Get up. Shit.”

But I couldn’t stop laughing. I laughed until Liz threw up again. It didn’t stop her, however. I grabbed onto the broken paper holder and hauled myself up. That’s when I saw the second message.

Another.

Written in blue marker, the word stood alone, no trace of that first odd message,
Killing hands,
underneath. I must have stared at it too long because Marge growled at me, “Gimme some fuckin’ help.”

Marge was trying to get her shoulder under Liz’s arm. I grabbed hold of her other arm. We had to turn ourselves sideways to squeeze out of the stall. I moved carefully, partly because I felt a bit woozy and partly because I didn’t want to slip again. As we pulled Liz through the door, I turned back, taking a last look at the carnage. I saw the imprint of Liz’s polyester butt on the floor as a sort-of dry spot. I saw where her urine and my blood had mixed and formed an orangish pool. And I saw the blue marker, lying at the rim of the floor behind where Liz had passed out. Marge had Little Liz in a good grip. I risked letting go to lean down and grab the marker. I slipped it into my jeans pocket.

“Hey, what’re you doin’?”

“Nothing.”

I couldn’t sleep for a long time that night. I lay under my white down comforter and listened to the wind harass a loose plank on the roof. I’d washed the bloody patch of hair at my kitchen sink, but the gouge still felt moist, not so much bleeding as leaking. I forced myself to quit touching it. Instead my fingers toyed with the bead, which I’d hung on a thin chain around my neck. Just because there’d been a blue marker under Little Liz’s butt and a new blue message on the toilet paper holder didn’t mean Liz had written the message. She could just as likely have plopped her pink behind on a marker someone else had dropped. The marker didn’t even necessarily have to be the same one that had written the message. But the coincidences gathered in my mind, and I decided to believe Liz was my mysterious toilet-paper-holder graffitist.

I woke up early, made coffee, and sat on the edge of my deck. I hadn’t been laid for going on three weeks and was feeling edgy. And all this time alone. It was taking a toll. Every day I had hours to get through, hours with no one watching, no one nudging with smiles and innuendoes and possibilities. That’s why I’d become so interested in the bathroom scrawls. I was bored. I’d been here for almost a month. I’d saved two thousand dollars already, carefully counted, rolled, and stuffed into a Crown Royal bag I had stashed behind a row of books. While groceries and fuel were expensive, there wasn’t much else to spend money on. Thad wouldn’t be in for a few days, and then he’d leave again. You take out shopping, sex, and all of your obvious amusements like movies, road trips, club hopping, and you’re left with a pile of time and a brain desperate for stimulation.

At half past nine I headed down the path to my bike. It took the requisite five minutes of yelling and stomping, but I got the damn thing going and made it to the Elbow Room before it opened at ten.

Carl was leaning against the building, waiting for Marge to open up. He was wearing that same grungy bandito poncho. He grunted in my direction when I pulled the bike alongside the porch step. The motor
died the second I took my hand off the gas. I pushed the kickstand into the sandy ground and hopped off. I was still pulling the underwear out of my ass when the bike began slowly tilting toward the left as the kickstand sank under its weight. I made no attempt to grab for it. The bike eked its way to a forty-five-degree angle, then gave way to gravity and fell with a thud. Taking a wide stance, I grabbed hold of the upper handlebar and pulled with my arms, back, and legs. I managed to get it up about six inches.

Carl pushed himself off the wall and stood next to me. We stared at the bike. It didn’t move. Carl reached over, yanked the bike up, grunted again, and shoved it against the wall.

“Might be better off with something smaller,” he said. We heard Marge unlocking the door from inside, and Carl turned with another grunt and pulled the Elbow Room door open.

I followed.

“Marge,” Carl said as he pulled out a stool, “see if Norm still has that one-fifty Yamaha. Brandy needs it.”

By the time I’d finished my first Bloody Mary, Marge had found me a new bike and sold my old one.

“Norm’ll come down sometime today with the bike,” she said, hanging up the phone. “You can take a look.”

“Thanks,” I said, snubbing out a cigarette. “How’s your basket class coming?”

She lit a cigarette and leaned her elbows on the bar. “Working on the lid now. That top knot is tricky. But it’s really the key to the whole basket. Now, I can’t say my grasses are as good as they should be. Anna keeps telling me I’m too lazy, not looking hard enough for the delicate strands she wants. But shit, look at my fingers.” She held out her right index finger and thumb. I could see healing, vertical gashes on each. “Anna says I’m supposed to split on top of my thumbnail. But I can’t get the hang of that. Let me tell you—”

The phone rang before she finished talking.

“Elbow. How many? Who? Yeah. Shit. I knew something like this was coming.”

Marge set the phone down and sloshed a stream of tequila into a glass. She stared out the Blue Room window, then turned to Carl and
me. “The
Northwind
went down,” she said. “They rescued one. Five others dead. Alex Ocheredin dead. So’s Ian.”

I’d met both men briefly in the bar. They were brothers, born and raised in Dutch. The night before they’d left for fishing, they’d been in with their skipper, a guy from Seattle, drinking seven-and-sevens. The skipper had been so drunk, Ian and Alex had had to prop him up to get him out of the bar.

“I warned those boys,” Marge said, lighting a cigarette. “That boat nearly sunk twice before. And that skipper. He had ’em load a case of hard stuff plus all the beer.”

“Haven’t had one this bad for four, five years,” Carl said, pushing his glass toward Marge. I noticed a series of scars across the knuckles of his right hand.

“Last one we lost was Hal Noise. ’Member that, Carl?”

“Two years ago this winter.”

“Who was Hal?” I asked.

Marge leaned against the back bar and crossed one leg in front of the other. “It was just plain weird the way he went.” She blew out a jet of smoke that nearly made it across the bar before spreading into a cloud. “He was this big Swede, came out here from the Lower Forty-eight. Married a local girl, Alice. He got himself elected to the council, got in tight with some of the businessmen peckerheads at the Ounalashka Corp. Pretty soon he’s leasing out O.C. land to canneries and boat businesses, the bigwigs in town. Some of the old folks didn’t like a white guy handling so much of the Aleut land deals. Then he up and dies.”

Carl nodded, twisting his beer glass.

“Right in the middle of a council meeting,” Marge said, lighting another cigarette. “He’s clutching his stomach, falls outta his chair, and hits the floor, dead. They sent someone out from Kodiak to investigate. But then the body turns up missing. Nobody ever did know what happened. Didn’t stop the rumors from flying.”

“He was up to something,” Carl said.

“That’s what I always thought,” Marge said. “Nothing ever got proved though.”

Carl mumbled something that turned into a grunt.

Marge poured herself another shot. “Shit. I can’t believe Alex and Ian are gone. Wish it had been that prick Nick instead. Did you see what he did to Mary?” Marge didn’t wait for an answer. “Shit. Worse for her is not having them kids. She don’t even get to see them hardly. Shit, you’d think they could find a foster home closer than Kodiak.” Marge shoved a rag along the bar. “Martha says she’s gonna die without them kids. I believe it. She’s no good at picking men, but she sure was good with them kids. Member that time the little one broke his arm over at the day camp?”

Carl mumbled something I didn’t hear because the door banged open and several guys came in.

“Marge, turn on the marine radio,” one of them shouted. “Coast Guard’s talking about the
Northwind
.”

A steady stream of people came into the Elbow Room that afternoon. They listened to the radio, shared what they knew. Talked about Ian and Alex. As the place filled up with locals, mostly Aleuts, I felt the shift. I’d become the minority. I felt too big and bright. An interloper. As a member of the conquering tribe, you’re supposed to feel confident and powerful among the natives. But when the numbers work against you, all that disappears, and you become aware of the color difference, aware of the shameful past. I would have left, but I wanted that new bike.

People told stories about the two men, crammed bills into a collection jar for the families—an impromptu wake. Part of me wished I’d known these men, could consort with the sorrow in the room, and part of me was glad that I didn’t and didn’t have to try.

I sat and drank, feeling like a trespasser, and waited for my bike to show up. I was starting to wonder if it ever would, when the door opened again and I saw the ancient woman from Mary’s sister’s place come in. She scanned the crowd, then made her way to the bathroom. I’d never seen her in the Elbow Room. The bathroom door closed behind her. Less than a minute later, it opened and she emerged. She scanned the bar again and saw me staring at her. She held my gaze; I felt as if I were being pulled under all that loose skin and into those eyes. Then she turned to the door and was gone.

Something in the way she looked at me made me feel like I’d been
measured and weighed. I slurped up the last inch of my watery Bloody Mary and slid off the stool. I hesitated. What did I expect? I had no idea, but that battered bathroom door drew me.

The room was still fairly clean this early in the day. I opened the far stall door and slid the toilet paper roll off. Liz’s, or whoever’s, message was gone. The metal had been scrubbed clean. I touched the bar—still damp.

I had only started to wonder why the old woman had cleaned up Liz’s scrawls when my new bike arrived. Norm, a slim, middle-aged man, had a 150 Yamaha Enduro in Day-Glo green he was willing to sell. Knowing nothing about motorcycles, I proceeded to the only test that mattered. I walked around the bike, noted that the plastic front fender was only slightly askew, that it had a gas gauge. Then I lifted my right foot and gave it a hefty kick. It fell over onto the sand parking lot. I reached for the handlebar, pulled hard, and righted it.

“I’ll take it.”

I traded the 500 plus two hundred dollars and didn’t care if I’d made a good deal.

Les pulled up in his Subaru Brat as I threw my leg over to straddle my new bike. He ran his hand along the seat. “Nothing like something big between your legs, uh?”

I rolled my eyes at him.

“Heard from Thad lately?”

“I’m not talking to you about Thad.”

“No need to worry,” he said, his lips mimicking a pout. “Actually, I got a new honey.”

I raised my eyebrows.

“New guy. Doesn’t know any better.” He laughed and patted my ass. “’Course, I’m keeping my options open, so don’t go getting careless with our boy.”

As usual I didn’t know what to say to Les. I slammed my weight on the starter and eased the gas. The bike started the first time. I waved over my shoulder and took off down the beach road.

I swung right, drawn to the old woman’s house. The yellow-checked curtains were closed. I turned toward the road that ran east and north along the beach and out of town. I popped the bike into
second then third. The difference was astounding. I hit potholes and bounced out the other side. I gunned the gas over gravel patches. I even practiced a couple of sliding-turn stops. I kept going until the road turned into a two-track trail. I stopped at a five-foot berm piled at the end of the road to block traffic. From here a four-wheeler or a bike could make it fine. I thought about going on but decided not to press my luck.