Читать книгу Point of Direction - Rachel Weaver - Страница 9

2.

WHEN WE met just over a year ago, I was hitchhiking on the ALCAN, the two lane road that points toward Alaska through Canada. Kyle pulled up beside me on the road in a beat up blue truck that had seen better days. He lowered the glass of the window with one hand while he worked the knob with the other. I watched the strength in each finger. I hadn’t seen a car or truck in three days. My feet were sore in my boots and the silence of the tundra had become loud.

“You’re all alone?” he asked.

My left hand moved toward the bear spray in the outside pocket of my backpack.

“You’re heading north?” I asked. Obviously he was, there were only two directions available, and he was driving north.

“What are you doing out here all alone?” He asked with what struck me as true concern. “Get in the truck, some crazy person could pick you up. You have a name?”

“Anna.”

“Kyle. Nice to meet you.”

I stood in the road and watched him for a few minutes longer before I tossed my pack into the open bed of the truck, stepped on the back tire and climbed in. His door opened, footsteps, and then he was standing next to the bed. Nothing extra about him, then or now, only muscle and bone under a wool shirt and workpants. “You can ride up front.”

“No, thanks.” I pulled my hood up, settled deeper into the space between my pack and a stack of tires. Winter wasn’t completely over. Three hours later, we stopped for dinner. After the waitress took our order, I huddled in the bathroom, fingers under the hot water to warm them enough to hold my hamburger.

“How far are you going?” I asked when I returned to the table.

“All the way to Neely. You?”

“Neely.”

“You’ll like it. Seems like you’re the kind of person that would.”

“Is that where you live?”

“I fished out of there last year. Fished out of Juneau before that, another couple years out of Sitka. I like Neely the best.”

I stared at his olive skin, suntanned somewhere warm over the winter. I watched his hands again and the set of his shoulders. Gripping the table, I pushed back against what was pulling me toward him.

“You going to stay in the back for the rest of the eight hundred miles?”

I shrugged. “For now.”

We drove north, cradled between ocean and mountains. As Canada melted into Alaska, the previous two years chipped away from me in small irregular pieces until I was back to that morning on the ice peering into the depths of the crevasse, willing myself over the edge. After years of avoiding it, I was now heading straight toward it. I had written the ten digit phone number on a small square of paper, slid it into the inside pocket in the top of my backpack and started moving north.

As Kyle drove us closer and closer to where it had happened, the guilt started out on its well worn path, clawing its way through me. I closed my eyes as it spread through my body and began to hum. I shifted my weight against my backpack. It didn’t help. I took a deep breath and concentrated on the trees whipping past, reminding myself that this is what I need to do, that this is my last choice. That didn’t help either. It was worse than usual.

I started to feel like I should get out of the truck. I started to feel like I should turn around, start walking south. I studied the back of Kyle’s neck through the window as we sped northward. The smooth arc of skin and muscle, a solidity I had sought on rock walls, a solidity I could not find in myself. I wanted to be in the cab, I wanted to have someone at my side. I knocked on the small window between us. He pulled over and I climbed into the front seat, settling my gaze on the double yellow line stretching into the distance.

A couple hours later, steering wheel loose in one hand, body relaxed against the bench seat, Kyle looked over and asked, “What do you do?”

“I move.”

He cut his eyes across the cab, grinning at me again. “That’s what you do?”

I nodded. “Utah, Colorado, Yosemite, Arizona, New Mexico.”

“Why?”

I shrugged. “Something new each time.” I kept my eyes forward, felt his on me.

“Alaska’s not like any of those places.”

“Exactly,” I said and then after some time, “What’d you do before you fished?”

“I tried to go to college, but all I ever wanted to do was come up here. I hated Chicago. I got lucky and found a job on a good boat my first summer and I’ve been fishing ever since.”

“What’s that like?”

“Its good. Especially when the weather gets really bad, rain and huge waves—that’s really living, you know what I mean? Are you going up to fish? You need to be careful about who you sign on with, I mean I’m sure you could handle it, it’s just that some of those guys don’t act the way they do in town once you leave the harbor.”

“I’m not going up to fish.”

Kyle stared at me for a few seconds, looked like he was going to ask more questions, but then didn’t.

We camped that night on the side of the road in the sparse trees of the tundra. Not a single car passed. I spread my sleeping bag out and got in. Kyle spread his out ten feet away. A little close, considering all the space around us.

“Why do you move so much?” he asked once he had settled in his bag.

“How many places have you lived in the past three years?”

“Well. . . Juneau, Sitka, Neely and Mexico.”

“See?” I asked from deep in my bag.

He rustled in his bag until he was up on one elbow. “But that was so I could fish on different boats.”

“Right. Something new each time.”

“Why don’t you just answer the question?”

“I did. There was nothing keeping me in any of those places. I rock climb. I climbed everything there was to climb and moved on.” And there was always something pulling me back here, I thought, but did not say.

“There’s no climbing in southeast Alaska, unless you head up on the glaciers. Gonna try your hand at ice climbing next?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Why do you ask so many questions?”

“If you’d quit being so mysterious, I wouldn’t have to.”

“Go to sleep,” I said.

“It’s not even dark.”

“I thought you’d spent lots of summers in Alaska, you should be used to it.”

“It’s always strange at first.”

He left me alone after that and eventually, fell asleep. I watched the sky, and listened to him breathe for a while before I climbed out of my bag and picked my way through the tundra, wondering how far away was far enough. In a relatively flat spot, I spread out my bag and climbed back in.

I started with as many verbs as I could remember in Spanish and then moved on to kitchen utensils. Tenedor, cuchara, cuchillo. Every night I worked to hold off sleep, that slippery place from which I woke fighting, most nights. A roommate came home once with Spanish tapes. What I thought would be something to fill in rainy days that couldn’t be spent climbing, turned into an obsession, a tool to use to pick away at the night.

I glanced across the distance between Kyle and me, trying to decide if I should move further away. I’d never woken up screaming, but didn’t trust that I wouldn’t. There was enough space between us that he wouldn’t notice the kicking to get free, unless he was up first. Plato, taza, sustantivo. The night darkened around me, my eyes ached from holding them open.

The nightmare had grown. Every night for the past two years, more details added, some subtracted, only to return weeks later. It was always cold and dark and tight. There was always the falling, the blood. Some nights the ice moved while I was in it, pressed against my skin so cold it burned. Other nights, I heard my voice, thin and full of fear, yelling her name over and over, the ice throwing it back at me, unanswered. Other nights, I was no longer sure which way was up or down. Whichever way I chose to move, it was darker than where I had been. Most nights, I heard the helicopter beating against air above the ice while I was in it, heard it leave as I froze, alone, one layer at a time.

The Spanish vocabulary words didn’t work that night on the tundra. Just as they didn’t work every night. I feel asleep despite the fight not to.

I woke to the soft light of an early dawn. My arms and legs were tucked snuggly in my bag, a thin layer of frost covered everything. I sat up and could see that Kyle was still sleeping. I sat there stunned. For the first time since that morning on the ice when I lowered myself into the belly of the glacier, I had not fallen in my dream, I had not been pinned into submission, I had not lost.

Kyle rolled over. “Morning,” he called over, and stretched. I stared at him until he smiled. I did not feel exhausted as I did every morning, I did not feel as though I’d been through a war.

“Did you sleepwalk?” he went on, “because if you did, it’s too bad you didn’t end up closer instead of farther away.”

I tried to make sense of it. I had never found anything that would give me a break from the nightmares. Kyle must’ve noticed the look on my face. A look of concern crossed his. “I’m just kidding. Probably shouldn’t say stuff like that when it’s just you and me in the middle of nowhere. Sorry. What do you have to eat? I’ve got plenty of oatmeal. You drink coffee?”

I nodded, still confused. He slid out of his bag, stepped into his boots and began rummaging around in the truck.

* * * *

Later that day, when the road wound down the backside of the mountains, then ended abruptly at the edge of the ocean in downtown Neely, I got out of the truck. “Thanks for the ride.”

“See you around,” he said. “Soon, I hope.”

I looked directly at him for the first time that day. I wanted to tell him I had not spent the night in terror, I wanted to ask him how that could be possible, I wanted to ask him if he had something to do with it. Instead, I turned away and he drove off down the street. I glanced up at the glaciers hanging between the peaks high overhead. Who was I to drag someone else down with me?

* * * *

Neely sat at the thumb of a long arm extended from Juneau in a narrow waterway carved by glaciers. A deep ripping that left sheer walls interrupted only by a few valleys. Snow covered mountains towered over town and on either side of the water. Steep streets ended at the sea’s edge and cross streets were packed tightly with a few restaurants, a coffee shop, a grocery store, and a hardware store. An old wooden dock reached out into the vast stone colored ocean. Fishing boats of all sizes were tied up; some shiny aluminum, others heavy steel, several wood, thick with paint.

From the road, I watched men in rubber raingear move up and down the dock, indistinguishable except for what they carried—tools, buckets, a sandwich for lunch.

That night, I walked to the edge of town to a state park and camped between hemlocks, each too thick to get my arms around. I grew up without the protection of trees. I studied the way branches wove together on this shoreline, felt I had finally found a place to rest. In the late evening light, I stretched out flat on my back and stared until I could see the exact overlap of needle, branch and sky.

The rain started later, sometime toward morning. A slow drizzle, a thick blanket against the walls of the tent. I nestled deep into my sleeping bag, feeling comfortably held under the branches and rain, thinking this is right, this is what I should be doing, this is close enough.

I actually welcomed sleep that night, gave in quickly to the rhythmic sound of the rain against the tent. The dream started with the helicopter, me buried in ice. I heard it leaving and then the roar of silence, the sound of blood rushing deep in my ears. I needed to yell, but couldn’t. I needed her to hear me, but couldn’t make my voice work. I struggled to free myself, but only slipped down farther into the narrowing throat of the glacier. My hands tore, my fingernails filled with ice as I tried to claw my way out.

I kicked and struggled and thrashed until I pulled the wet tent free of the stakes, until it covered my face and wrapped tight around my body. I woke up panicked, fighting the tent and the sleeping bag, unable to figure out where I was.

In those first few days, I kept my eyes on the ocean. It seemed to breathe. Two long breaths in and two slow breaths out each day; always pushing or pulling at the shore. The wind blew every afternoon and most mornings across glaciers before funneling into the fjord, bringing with it familiar smells and a new horrifying specificity to my dreams.

A week later, Kyle found me washing beer mugs behind the bar. I’d offered to close the bar every night I’d worked, anything to put off climbing into my sleeping bag. My mind was thick with the fog of very little sleep.

“Jack and Coke, please.” He had on a heavy wool jacket under orange rubber raingear. I watched his hand, thick with work, wrap around the glass I set in front of him. I decided then that thirty was a few years ahead of him, as it was for me.

“You sticking around?” He peeled off one of his two jackets.

“’Til I run into somebody driving south.” Maybe tomorrow, I thought. Coming back had been a bad idea.

He smiled, eyes light. “I’ll be driving south in six months.”

I methodically moved the glass in my hand to the drying rack, grabbed another two and dropped them into the suds. “You working on one of the boats?”

He nodded. “Heading out tomorrow.” He waited until I looked up again. “I’ll see you when I get back.”

“I don’t know.” I set two mugs in the drying rack, wiped my hands and moved down the bar, away from him.

Six days later he was back. I poured him a Jack and Coke. The night before I had listened to my own screaming, the sound absorbed, lost in the dark ice, I had watched each finger of my right hand turn black from frostbite and then break off. I had kicked and flailed myself awake somewhere around 3am and had walked the rainy streets of Neely until the rest of town woke up.

“Can I buy you a beer?” he asked.

“No.”

“How about dinner?”

“I already ate.”

He raised his eyebrows, laid a hand heavily on the bar. “You’re going to make me work harder at this than I already am?”

My eyes burned with lack of sleep. I thought about that night on the tundra, wondered again if that one night of actual sleep had something to do with him.

“C’mon,” he said, “I know there’s a lot of us to choose from up here, but I’ve got all my teeth and a job.”

I laughed.

“And I’m really glad you got in my truck, even if you did ride in the back the whole first day.”

I studied his face and that same feeling I’d woken with that morning on the tundra flooded me, pushing out the exhaustion. I decided it was him. “Probably not too much harm in you buying me a beer.” I pulled one from the cooler.

“Not when you’re at work. Sometime when we can hang out.”

I watched him stand, noticed again the way his body had been shaped by work, the length of his forearms outlined in muscle from pulling nets.

“When do you get off tonight?” he asked.

“Ten.”

“I’ll come back.”

I watched the door close behind him, cracked open the beer and thought of all the reasons I should not meet him at ten, and then did anyway.

* * * *

Kyle fished all summer, four and six day trips, with a couple days in town in between. I found a small apartment with slanted walls in the attic of an old cannery, and moved in for the season. Kyle stayed with me on his days off and left me his truck to use when he was out fishing.

I’d kept to myself over the past two years. If I went to bed with a man, I made sure I left before I fell asleep. I steered clear of anything resembling a relationship, not willing to attach myself to anything at all.

Kyle somehow absorbed the dream from me or perhaps he was like a thick blanket that it couldn’t get through. Every night that he wrapped his body to mine, I slept uninterrupted. I began to think of him as some sort of miracle, a sign that I was where I should be, that I might possibly be forgiven.

It was like adding flour to cake batter, my life into his. A certain dissolving, thickening, inseparability. I would hear him, after so many days away, climbing the stairs to the attic. A certain step, a certain weight that made me stop what I was doing. My body pulling toward his, surprising me with the specificity of need. Always, two knocks and then he was pulling me toward him, that look that was for me alone. He smelled of time spent outside, the salt of the waves carried by the wind, buried in his neck. My hands would begin to move independent of my mind. Words were in the way. I was unable to make measured decisions, only blind leaps.

“Most people don’t like to picnic in the rain,” he said one afternoon at the height of summer, his hand moving slowly across my back as I made sandwiches in the misty rain at the hip of a slow moving river. We’d been together for a couple months at that point.

“Have you seen these trees?”

He shook his head, moving closer. “I love that nothing about you is normal.”

I smiled into his shoulder as he moved close. “I just like trees better than walls.”

“I can’t believe I found you on the side of the road. What woman hitchhikes to Alaska alone?”

“Here’s your sandwich.”

He took a bite of turkey and cheese. “You never have explained why an avid climber would come to southeast Alaska where all the rock is covered in moss. Why do you make me ask for any and all information about you? Being mysterious is sexy, but it might get old sooner or later.”

I kissed his neck and ran my hands up under his shirt. He set his sandwich down on the rocks. “It’s raining,” I said. “Your bread’s going to get soggy.”

“I don’t care,” he said and reached for me.

When September came to a close and the sideways rain began to pound the shoreline, Kyle said, “Come to Mexico with me this winter.” We were in town at the diner. Pancakes, eggs, toast, bacon and coffee spread between us. I had been in Neely five months. I had picked up the pay phone on Main Street once, dialed the phone number, and hung up before the first ring finished. If I kept my head down, never looked up, I didn’t have to notice the ice above me.

“Okay.”

He tilted his head back and laughed, reached for my hand. “It’s that easy?”

“Apparently.”

We left Neely on the last day of September, as the wind blew the rain hard against the side of the truck. I settled in next to him on the bench seat as we started up and over the mountains. I liked the way the small cab perfectly contained us from the rain that beat against the trees and the road.

“Tell me more about the town,” I said. Despite my Spanish skills, I had never been anywhere I could use them.

“It’s right on the beach. We’ll drink cheap beer and surf every day.”

“Sounds glorious.”

“Every fall I think about checking out somewhere else, but when fishing’s done and it’s time to drive south, that’s always where I want to go.”

“I can’t wait to put my raingear in a box.”

“It’ll be sunny and warm all winter. We’ll pick up odd jobs—a friend of mine owns a restaurant and another guy I know runs a construction crew, but mostly we can just chill out.”

I put my hand over his where it rested against my thigh. The idea of spending every day with him for months on end sounded better than anything else I could think of.

The hours of driving stretched into days. The truck had only a tape deck so we took turns buying tapes at gas stations. I stuck to old country legends and he went for eighties’ classic rock.

At night we slept in the back of the truck in state parks, in rest stops, or campgrounds. I made us coffee in the mornings in a plastic French press while he stirred oatmeal over the camp stove.

As we passed through the southwest, Kyle asked if we should stop somewhere to climb. “This is where it all happens, right? I saw a sign for Joshua Tree. You could teach me.”

“I don’t climb anymore. I quit.”

“You quit because you moved to Neely where there is no climbing. C’mon, I want to learn, I want to see you in your element.”

“I said I quit. I gave away all my equipment.”

“Why?”

I took a deep breath, watched the lines of the road. “It was a diversion. It wasn’t leading me anywhere.”

“Oh. And working in a bar in Alaska is leading you somewhere?”

I looked across the cab at him. He would never understand. I’d given up everything else in the hopes that it would help. I’d run out of ideas. Climbing was the last thing to go.

“What?” He said. “It just doesn’t make sense. All you do is climb, work a little, live out of your van, whatever it takes to spend as much time as possible on the rock and then you quit for no good reason? Don’t you miss it?”

I flexed my hand the way I used to before I reached up for the first hold, but that had lead me to ice, to nightmares, to being on the move.

“No.”

He shook his head, smiled. “You’re like a one page story. More details would make for a better read.”

I was driving when we crossed the border into Mexico, after six days on the road.

“ID please,” the man in uniform said. He lowered his head to see into the cab better. “And your husband’s.”

I smiled at him, liking the way it rolled off his tongue, one word connecting me to Kyle indefinitely.

“We’re not married.” Kyle leaned across me to catch his eye, severing that connection quickly before it was fully formed in anyone’s mind.

After the border, hours of silence settled between us. I watched the dusty landscape through the window and tried to figure out why he had answered that question so definitively and why I cared so much. A shiver ran through me at the idea of him walking away one day. I glanced over at Kyle. Somehow he had stepped in between the nightmares and me without even knowing it. If he walked away, I would be left with them.

After a full day of confusing side roads, Kyle announced, “Here we are.” I climbed down from the truck into the small downtown. The heat rushed at me, a big cushion making everything comfortable. The sea spread out just beyond the buildings, a friendlier version of itself. He reached for my hand.

We rented a one room hut on the beach for twenty-five dollars a week. It had a bed, a hot plate, a table, one bare light bulb and a thatched roof. The bathroom was a separate building down the beach, shared with several other huts. I cleaned rooms at one of the nearby hotels and Kyle worked construction, but never full time. We didn’t make friends, although we could have. The rest of the world began to happen farther and farther away as our world narrowed to each other.

We browned in the sun, the edges between us blurring. It had been a solid month in which I’d thought only of the future and not once of the past, but it was still there, looming. It seemed heading north had only sent me farther south.

We sat on the beach in front of our hut every night after dinner and watched the polite water barely disturb the smooth sand of the shore. The warm air rested against my skin like a favorite sweatshirt. On a night a few months after we’d arrived, I dug my feet into the sand looking for the cool layers underneath while Kyle sat next to me.

“Why doesn’t everyone live like this?” he asked.

“Because they like money in their bank accounts.”

“I’m serious.”

“So am I.”

“Why do some people work their ass off just to pay off some lame house?” he asked.

“Some people like to invest in their future.”

“Why is everyone so convinced they have a future? Why not enjoy everything now?”

I looked over at him in the bright moonlight. “Some people like to build on what they have, create something—you know, a life.”

“Oh come on. That’s all an illusion. You build a life, then one day it gets pulled out from underneath you. Why bother building it in the first place?” He rolled on top of me, pressing my body into the soft sand. With his mouth inches from mine, he assumed the voice of an interrogator. “Have you ever bought a couch or had curtains that matched one?”

“No.”

“Have you ever said no to some crazy plan?”

“Not in awhile.”

He rolled off me onto his back in the sand, spread his arms wide and closed his eyes. “I have found the perfect woman.”

I laid my head on his stomach and stared at the sky. I thought of everything he did not know and swore I’d never tell him. Another night on the beach, I asked about his parents. “You never talk about them.” I studied his face. I knew he was an only child, that he had grown up with his mother, but no other details.

“There’s nothing to say.” He looked away, something closing between us.

“Do you ever talk to either of them on the phone?” I persisted.

“My dad took off, I don’t know where he is.” Kyle glanced in my direction. “Same old story. Half the population has a dead beat dad. My mom hates Alaska, she doesn’t understand why I want to be there. Every time I talk to her she guilt trips me about coming home, so I don’t call. Why are you asking me this? It’s not like you go on and on about your family. Or anything else.”

I thought about what I might say, remembering the sound of my mother’s heels in the entryway of our house. Always a fast, definitive clip. The way she whipped her long coat onto the hanger in the closet when she got home from work. Every day she headed straight for the dish rack and the wine glass that never made it to the cabinet. She filled it full, always pouring a few swallows worth into a juice glass for me. She didn’t like to drink alone. This was always Our Time. The rest of the time was Her Time. She clinked her glass to mine. I swallowed dutifully, wincing as always, as she refilled both our glasses.

My older sister always made sure she was in her room when Mom got home. She employed the same tactic Mom used with us at all times except during Our Time. That sliver between the first glass and the second when she was happy, before Dad got home and the bickering started, before the bottle was empty and she was loose with too much wine.

I tried to be gone, I tried to avoid it, but the sound of her heels, the way she stirred the still air of the house, slow and comfortably at first, pulled me toward her. I endured the information handed over in Our Time in exchange for the way she looked me in the eye, for that half smile directed at me alone. It was during Our Time that I learned that my father preferred oral sex to the real thing, that my mother had wanted to be a dancer, had auditioned and been accepted, had kept her pregnancy, me, a secret until she no longer could.

I looked over at Kyle in the hazy evening light. “All I learned from my parents is that it’s easier to be alone.”

“And that’s why you move.”

I shrugged, remembering the scratch of crampons on ice, the slide of the heel and the eventual grip of the toe.

“Maybe both our parents had it all wrong,” I said. “Maybe there’s another way.”

As the days in Mexico began to get longer and hotter, we set out north again to make it back for the start of the next fishing season. The cab of the truck pressed in, felt smaller than when we had driven down.

“Do you think we’re close?” I asked somewhere in British Columbia.

“No,” Kyle said, eyes on the road. “We’re still three days from Neely.”

“I mean you and I—do you think we really know each other?” I tried to imagine the words, how I would start to tell him.

He kept his eyes on the road. “We just spent six months living in a little hut. Of course we know each other. Or at least we do until you move.”

I studied the side of his face. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“How am I supposed to trust that?”

“Because I said I’m not going anywhere.”

“Hmmm,” he said, still looking straight ahead. “But that’s what you do.”

“That’s what I did.”

Later that day, we stopped for gas and I snuck around the side of the building to the pay phone. The piece of paper was rumpled from so much time in my pocket, but the numbers were still clear. I dropped in a handful of change, held my breath and dialed.

Maybe now was when I’d be able to do it. I waited for the click that meant the call had gone through, waited for the first ring, tried to imagine the bright kitchen into which it was ringing.

The fear that shot through my body was sharp and hot. By the end of the first ring, the fear had dropped into my stomach, so that I had to bend forward to accommodate it. I slid down the side of the phone booth so that I was sitting on my heels, one arm across my stomach. The phone rang a second time. Before it finished, I hung up, ran from the phone booth as if there had been bees, kept running to the side of the building where I stopped to catch my breath before I walked back to the truck.

We arrived back in Neely six weeks ago in early May on a day when the clouds hung three hundred feet above the water, swallowing all the mountains. I could not see the glaciers hanging overhead, but I could feel their presence.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” Kyle squinted into the rain, everything around us some shade of gray or black. It was beautiful in a way that demanded something. A landscape that has the power to ask anyone, at any time, to measure all the hidden parts of themselves.