Читать книгу One Water - Rob McCue - Страница 8

INTERIOR ALASKA IN WINTER is a dark ocean, and we live miles beneath the surface. The cold resents our presence, our warmth an impediment to its equilibrium. It’s nothing personal, just a fact of our planet’s orientation to its host star: the axis around which the Earth rotates is tilted slightly relative to the orbit it traces around the sun, probably knocked out of whack by a meteor impact way back, before history. Due to this perfect imperfection the north is angled away from the warmth and light for months each year.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m thankful for these circumstances. If it were otherwise the hordes from the Lower 48 would’ve swarmed here long ago and obliterated this place with the same urban sprawl that’s chewed through the natural world to the south. The cold here in January freezes your flesh in seconds, and during the few summer weeks mosquitoes rise from the swamps by the trillions and our streets are littered with the sucked dry bodies of their victims. All in all, these inconveniences are boons.

Another good thing about winter is that it generates its own economy, sustaining us when we begin to second-guess our memories of summer. Mechanics, septic steamers, snowplow operators, tow truck drivers, furnace repairmen, woodcutters, drug dealers, cab drivers—we’re in it together up here, consuming food, booze, sex, money, diesel, sharing our mutual desperation until the sun returns.

I’ve driven a cab here in Fairbanks for twenty years. When the cold comes, people’s cars quit working. They lose their will to walk. They need to leave the house before they hurt someone, or get hurt. They call me.

My wife, Michele, is a high school teacher, English and yoga. We first met some twenty years ago on a ferry traveling down the Inside Passage. It was December, cold and wind wracked. I was with a buddy, but Michele was alone. We slept in sleeping bags under heat lamps on the solarium, the glassed-in rear deck of the boat. The walkways around the ship were coated in slick ice, and we bucked into a strong headwind. We found that if you released the handrail near the bow of the boat, the wind would sweep you over the icy walkways to the stern in just a few seconds. We found that a buzz heightened the sensation.

My buddy was a guitar-playing, bear-biologist woman-wooer. Michele turned him down. She thought he carried his instrument as though he were displaying his penis. I never made my move, but on the last day of the trip she came and kissed me. She was waitressing on the Kenai Peninsula, just north of Homer. I was in school in Fairbanks, preparing to flunk out of college for the fifth time. We swapped phone numbers.

In the springtime I went to visit her under the pretense of watching Mount Spurr erupt, visible from the trailer she was living in. But before I left Fairbanks, I got together with another woman. I’ve never stepped out on a partner; despite my many flaws I’ve managed to hold onto that. Michele and I couldn’t be together then, is what I mean—which was messed up too. She was lonely, and it probably would have done us both some good. She quit the restaurant and went to work for Fish and Game, counting salmon returns on an island in Prince William Sound. Eventually she came north and enrolled at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, but she never contacted me, and by the time we ran into each other again she was with another guy who she eventually married—and divorced.

We’d been leading separate adult lives until a few years ago—well, adult might be stretching it for me. She’d gotten her degree and a teaching certificate and a job at a local high school where she works to this day. Everywhere we go, people aged sixteen to thirty, smile and approach us and say, “Hello, Ms. Robinson.” Her former students. A lot of people recognize me too, the cab driver, but usually they’re not sure from where so they just stare a question at me to see if I respond. But regardless, there are a hundred thousand people in this town and six hundred thousand in this state, and we’re part of that, part of something. And our son, Cord, he’s almost three, he’s a part of it now too.

He’s upended my perspective on this world. He’s how I take measure of myself, who I was, where I’ve been, who I am now. He’s the reason for understanding the stories I’ve lived, the stories around me every day, so that from here on at least, I’m aware of trying to be the guy Michele saw something in a long time ago.

Driving a cab is essentially gambling, but it’s a good enough bet and doesn’t involve staring at a computer screen, working on a utility crew outside in the winter, or smelling like stale french fry grease. I don’t show up at a certain time and leave at a certain time and get paid for the time in between. Instead, when I show up I owe the owner of the company ninety bucks for the twelve-hour lease. When I’m done with the car, I’ll put around fifty bucks in the gas tank. I keep the balance, if any, and go home. Nobody much cares if I show up in the first place. Most of my fellow drivers would prefer I do something other than take food out of the mouths of their children.

There are usually enough drivers to keep the owner relatively rich and pay the dispatchers, insurers, managers, and mechanics. There are usually even enough to get the customers picked up in a somewhat timely manner. In fact, there are often more drivers than good fares on a given night, and we battle each other like dogs for the scraps that cover our expenses.

The company doesn’t really care how an individual driver makes his money. We get to do it how we want, as long as we pay the lease and don’t get caught by the police doing anything illegal. Some choose to make their living by providing transportation to the people who call the company for a ride. Some like to sit around the airport or cater to personal calls. Others might choose to sell drugs, arrange for prostitutes, or steal trips from other drivers.

However one decides to approach the job, it starts with the dispatcher, usually an underpaid over-caffeinated guy with enough attitude to take the shit from drivers, management, and customers and throw it right back. He spends his eight hours seated at a desk equipped with five phone lines, a two-way radio, a clipboard full of trip logs, and an upright steel board, sixteen inches tall and thirty inches wide.

The board displays a grid of three rows by seven columns. Each column represents a different zone in the city. Cabs in the top row are red and are available for a trip; cabs in the middle row are green and have customers; cabs in the bottom row are picking up. They don’t get a color. The drivers are represented by numbered magnetic buttons stuck to the board, each button corresponding to a particular cab.

You radio the dispatcher telling him where you’re going, or where you’re clear, or when you change zones, and he moves your button around the board as you try to pick up the most trips and win the big money. We’re little free-willed markers on the board game of Fairbanks.

It’s 4:30 when I show up. The sun’s been down more than an hour, early January, forty-five degrees below zero. The yard is layered in ice fog churned from the rumbling V-8 motors of the cabs waiting for night drivers. The warm water vapor from a car’s exhaust is cooled nearly three hundred degrees within ten seconds of leaving the tailpipe. The super cold air is too dense to absorb any of the vapor, so it turns into tiny hovering ice crystals. Add in the warm water discharged from the power plant; the emissions of all the woodstoves, furnaces, and boilers; and the exhalations of every living thing and our town is swaddled in a toxic gauze.

From negative forty on down, the taxis are left running to avoid the risk of freeze-up and lost revenue. Can’t see fifty feet.

I walk into the smoke-filmed walls of the dispatch office that smells of stale cigarettes, fresh cigarettes, coffee, old dog, and microwave. Smurf is dispatching, talking on the phone. All lines are lit up. There are thirty-eight buttons on the board.

“I can’t send ya a cab if you won’t give me the apartment number. So last chance, what’s the number? Ten or less, belookin’,” he slams down the phone, picks it right back up. “United! . . . Which door ya at? . . . What’s your name? . . . Okay, Randy, I’ll send one.” Slams down the phone, picks it back up, “United Cab! . . . Is who workin’? . . . No, he went home already, ya need a cab?” Slams down the phone, picks it back up. “United! . . . At the parking lot door? . . . Five minutes.” He slams down the phone, hits the foot pedal microphone key while writing in his personal hieroglyphics on the trip log. “United 17!” he says.

“United 17,” a surly nasal male voice croons back.

“Get Tanana Chiefs at the parking lot door!” Smurf replies, depressing and releasing the foot pedal in rhythm, moves 17's button.

“Check,” says United 17.

“Cab 72.”

“Cab 72,” answers a guarded female voice.

“Take it south, get the Rescue Mission for Duano.”

“Cab 72 check.”

“United 46 . . . United 46!”

“United 46.”

“You called me, 46!” yells Smurf.

“Oh, um, I’m green to um (squawk) . . . Fred Meyers.”

“Oh, um, geez, which one!”

“Oh, um, in the west.”

“Oh, um, golly, why don’t you get Tristan at the B door?” bellows Smurf. But there’s no answer. “United 46!”

“Um, United 46.”

“Listen to your radio and get Tristan at the B door when you clear.”

“Uh, United 46, check?”

“Now who’s next?”

A wall of static erupts from the radio as several drivers key their microphones at the same time. Smurf stretches back and sighs, lights a Marlboro.

I throw five dollars on the trip log in front of him. Part gratuity, part protection money.

He turns to me. He has a big drinker’s nose, a thinning mane of golden hair, and a wolfish Irish grin. I’ve watched him battle his personal demons for close to twenty years now. A trail of broken bottles, used hypodermics, meth memories stretching behind him, out of sight. Now, all that’s left are the medications, the battered liver, the clogged arteries. The doctors told him he can have a new liver if he stays clean for a year. I hope he makes it. The man’s got the love in his heart, and that’s all that matters to me.

“What d’you want?” he asks.

“I don’t know. I thought I’d try drivin’ a little taxi cab.”

“I don’t know. You think you can handle it?”

“I’m not sure. I heard it requires great mental agility.”

“Fuckin’ A right.”

“But they let you do it?”

“’Cause I’m fun to watch. What are you drivin’?”

“I’ll take twenty-nine.”

“Go get the Fred Meyer liquor for Regina.”

“Thanks.”

“You still here? . . . United Cab! . . . That was number twenty-eight? All right, right away.” Slams down the phone. “Cab 100 get Wedgewood M like your mama 28.” Slides one hundred’s button from the top row to the bottom row in the north column.

A voice with a Tajikistan accent says check.

“Okay, drivers, red cars only, one at a time please.” I close the door as another wave of static breaks from the radio.

I feel like a pinball that Smurf has shot into the night. Like some intricacies of spin, velocity, and position have cast me to the inevitable.

Town sneaks up on you in the ice fog. Stoplights and other cars appear out of nothing, and then they’re gone. Ghost lights. A hundred years ago the roads were just trails from the river, through the spruce, to the cabins of the pioneers and prostitutes. In 1938 residents approved a measure to pave the roads. It had been a hot-button issue for many years. Incoming pilots had been able to identify the dust cloud of Fairbanks from eighty miles away.

It takes five minutes to get to Fred Meyer. When I enter the parking lot, I catch a glimpse of an old Athabaskan man in a Carhartt suit with the hood up. He holds a sign with big military surplus mittens. The sign says, “homeles veitnam vet plese help.” No sooner than I see him he’s gone in the fog and steaming train of headlights.

At the liquor door Regina comes striding out pushing a loaded cart with three kids under ten behind her, respectful. I pop the trunk of the Ford Crown Victoria and help load her bags.

As we leave the lot she sees the man with the sign. “Jesus Christ, is that Uncle Melvin, kids? Could you stop for a second?”

“Sure.”

“Uncle, is that you? Jesus Christ, what you doin’? It’s too cold to be stannin’ around like that.”

A big beauty of a broken-tooth smile breaks across the old man’s weathered face like sunrise. He steps toward the cab and raises his hand.

“Uncle, get in the car with us, huh, we got moose stew at home. You can stay there.”

The old man seems hesitant.

“We got beer there too, c’mon and get in with us.” The smile gets bigger, and he climbs in. Cars behind us start to honk.

I take them to a house in the Hamilton Acres subdivision, a middle-class neighborhood north of the river. They give me $8 for a $6.20 meter. I thank the lady and help get the groceries to the door.

Back in the car I call on the radio, “United 29.”

After a pause the dispatcher comes back, “United 29.”

I say, “Red North, Glacier Street.”

“You’re six North.”

Yikes. This means I’ll get the sixth call out of this zone. I decide to move, gun the car sideways on the ice back up Farewell, catch the yellow light on the Steese Expressway, and make a left. I have the mike in my hand and call as I go through the intersection. The dispatcher calls back, and I tell him I’m red City as I cross the bridge over the Chena River.

“Get Smith Apartments, number nine.”

“Check.”

A young Athabaskan man is outside the drab building. This place has an unfavorable reputation, a home for low-income tenants and their no-income friends. When I get a call here, I go in with the doors locked, ready to check for money, which is kind of an awkward thing to do. But this guy’s holding some, and I unlock the doors.

He gets in, midthirties, weathered, smelling of vodka. The rigidity pickled out of his bones, a rumpled ten in his hands.

“Where to?”

“Twenty-First and Gillam, I guess.”

“Okay.”

“Time to quit drinkin’, I guess. Just gotta get someplace where I can rest.”

“All right.”

After a couple minutes he says, “You ever feel alone?”

“Yeah, sometimes.”

“What you do?”

“I try and remember it doesn’t last forever. Like the good times, I guess.”

“Yeah, I guess. . . . Hey I’ll pay you extra, can you turn this song up?” It’s the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

“Sure,” I say twisting the knob to the right until the bass is vibrating my solar plexus. “How’s that?”

“That’s good. Gotta like the Chili’s, huh?”

“Yeah.” I remember when the song came out. How cool it all was. Now hearing it on classic rock radio, I smile.

My passenger says, “Hey, can you just go around the block a little bit? I’ll pay you.”

“Sure.” We’re both singing when we go around the corner. “When I find my peace of mind . . .”

“Hey, it’s okay I have a shot?”

“If no cops see you, then I don’t care.”

“Okay, all right.” He pulls a half-full fifth of Rich and Rare from deep within his coat and takes a long pull. A few minutes later we’re back in the parking lot, $8.60 on the meter. He hands me $10 and tells me to keep it. “Wanted Dead or Alive” comes on the radio. “Oh, man, I love this song. I lost my uncle listenin’ to this song.”

“Sorry.”

“Can you hang out till this song’s over?”

But I’ve already called Smurf, and he’s sending me to the Twenty-Third Laundry, where I pick up a large African American woman with dozens of thin and perfectly twined braids falling to the middle of her back. There are four children under the age of ten skating around her like waterbugs on the ice. “Montrel, quit torturin’ your sister and get the rest of these kids in the car. And you better all have your seatbelts on by the time I get in there, or you will know my pain.” The kids become very serious and do as they are told. I get out and help her load mesh bags containing more than a hundred pounds of freshly laundered clothes. The warm clothes steam into the cold. I take them three blocks. The woman gives me $3 for the $2.20 meter, and I put the laundry by her door.

This brings me to $22, around 15 percent of my expenses, an hour into this. I call in and Smurf puts me one South. I tell myself to remain calm, go and park by the Dollar Store, try to flag. Listen to the radio. There are two City and three North. Ten minutes. Smurf sends a couple cars from the west into the University zone. He chews out a driver for stealing a trip that he had dispatched to a different driver. Says, “Listen to your radio, seventeen. If it happens again, you can gas it up and get it in here. You won’t get another trip outta me.” Fifteen minutes. Sometimes I feel like a shark, like if I quit moving for too long I’ll die. Eighteen minutes. Smurf sends a City car to the Westmark Hotel, sends me to 1227 Twenty-Third Avenue.

When I graduated from high school, my parents bought me a Ford Tempo, which I drove all over Kansas and then all over America, taking odd jobs to keep it gassed up. In order to get my diploma, I had to break into the school, steal the answer key for an economics project, copy it, and sneak back in to return it. From these two details of my formative years you can correctly conclude that I was a delinquent little upper-middle-class shit with a peripatetic itch, even though I was raised better than that.

My father was from Eureka, Kansas. He brought us back there from Kansas City when I was six because my grandfather was retiring from the helm of Eureka Federal Savings and Loan, which he built himself in the aftermath of the Great Depression. He and my grandmother still lived in the little pink house on Myrtle Street that my dad had grown up in. My grandpa held stockholder meetings with us during which he divvied out change that my two sisters and I subsequently spent on candy. He smoked unfiltered cigs through a black plastic cig holder, filling the little pink house with blue smoke. Grandma smoked too. I mean, why not. In the backyard were apple and cherry trees. She picked the fruit and made pies, which she served warm after endless portions of fried chicken, mashed potatoes, gravy, bread, and green beans.

We must have seemed fantastically rich to the many working poor families in town. Some people despised us for it; most didn’t care. But we were a little different and I was kind of oblivious to the hardships some of my friends endured. Sports, cars, girls, beer made that a little less obvious to my peers. We’d have parties way out on farm roads, at the low-water bridge, at the old quarter-mile drag race strip. We’d stand by a fire on the side of the road in the wind with the outlines of cows and silos close in the darkness.

In my early teens my folks sent me to a camp in Colorado for five weeks every summer. We climbed mountains, rafted rivers, hiked through forests and canyons. I loved to sleep outside and ponder the immensity of the Milky Way and my own insignificance as I drifted off. Back in camp, at dances, I was awkward and clumsy next to smooth city kids from Des Moines, Indianapolis, and New York, but alone under the stars I was free. I was nothing. The world could proceed.

Eureka was surrounded by hundreds of miles of dirt farm roads, and I’d spend hours driving them, listening to music, thinking. I loved the sensation of movement through space.

One night, a few years later, I was driving home to Kansas from Morristown, New Jersey, where I had a job at the Bell Labs loading dock. I was smoking a joint and thinking about the contrast between my life and the lives of just about everyone else I knew. I thought that this was largely due to the fact that I had the resources to live this vagabond lifestyle, that more people would choose to live similarly if the choice was available. I began to feel that it was important, somehow, that some people did live in this manner, that surrendering to the winds that blow us through our lives was as valuable a perspective on the human condition as any other.

Along the way I realized that I thought in the second person, that I used the pronoun you to talk to myself in my thoughts. You should do this. You shouldn’t have done that. I realized that this was causing me to think of myself as two entities. Sometimes it felt as if my personality were splitting to accommodate both perspectives. One that allowed me control of my life versus a more rigid ideology foisted on me by some mysterious other, a blunt instrument to hammer a niche in the malleable substance of the world. I chose to let go. I spent the rest of that long drive ridding myself of the habit of thinking in the you. I should try this; or I really fucked up there. I stopped arguing with myself. A few years later I woke up on a beach in Alaska.

The thing is, most of the riders in my cab come from places, from circumstances that I’ll never know about. I’ve spent a little time in remote Alaska villages, but I could never know what it’s like to be from one, where there are few jobs because there is little economic activity. Traditional work like hunting, fishing, berry picking, woodcutting, sure, but the price of a can of gas gets in the way of even these practices.

The influenza epidemic of the early twentieth century decimated the Alaska Native population and claimed wide swaths of traditional knowledge that had been passed on orally for thousands of years, a void that can’t be filled with well meaning, sometimes racist, attempts to change them into people more eager to compete in a capitalist economy.

In his book Yuuyaraq: The Way of the Human Being, Harold Napoleon argues that the trauma of losing up to 60 percent of the population in a generation left many of the survivors with acute post-traumatic stress syndrome. This condition has been passed on to subsequent generations, he explains, through the scourges of domestic violence, alcoholism, and drug abuse.

I can't help but wonder how much more of this generational trauma is woven into the fabric of our culture from all the wars of the last century, slavery, Jim Crow, poverty.

That's why if I’m behind the wheel, nobody in the car is in the second person. Anything they might be is more complicated than what’s merely apparent—larger than you and than me.

Clutching a bag of customized Magic Markers, an old Inupiaq woman with mussed bed hair is waiting in the parking lot. I don’t understand what she says through her blue lips, but it doesn’t matter. She’s one of our bingo babes, and they’ll be opening the halls any minute, so I know where we’re going. After I let her off at Downtown Bingo, Smurf sends me to 401 on Seventh Avenue, a retirement complex. Sara, an Athabaskan woman in her eighties, winces at the cold as she gets in.

“Youth Sport,” she says, agitated, not looking at me. She means Youth Sports Bingo, next to Downtown Bingo. It takes me thirty-eight seconds to get her there. She pays the $1.60 in quarters and a dime and gets out without looking back. Most bingo babes live within blocks of their favorite bingo enclave. They’re mostly elderly Alaska Natives. And while the thrill of winning the big money is the primary motivation for playing, the social scene is also important.

These elders come from villages strung along sixteen hundred miles of the Yukon River, up its tributaries, over the Brooks Range, and across the North Slope to the Arctic Ocean. People who survived the epidemics of influenza, typhus, and diphtheria that came with the first white men. People who remember hunting nomadically and whaling in skin boats. They’ve seen world wars, statehood, big oil, the division of their land, and the Internet. They’ve seen more change in their lifetimes than a hundred generations before them.

Now they’re in Fairbanks, the big village. They visit relatives, shop, see the doctor, go to funerals, take taxis, party. The bingo halls and the pan houses, where a form of rummy is played, are places to see people, visit, and hear stories from home as much as they’re places to gamble.

I call in and Smurf says, “You’re one City. I’m holdin’ one South, you want it?”

I say, “Check.”

“Get F.M.H. in the lobby for Richard.”

“Check.” I get on Airport and drive west and then south to the hospital.

“United 57.”

“United 57, how many times I gotta tell you we don’t serve Mexicans on this channel,” Smurf says.

“It’s a good thing I come from Texas then. Red South.”

“I thought Texas was in Mexico. Oh well, uh, can you fit five passengers in that thing?”

“Five Asians, maybe, no way five Americans.”

“All right then, get two packs of Newports and a three-pack of magnum-sized condoms, and take ’em to 1111 Nenana Street. He’ll pay you for ’em when you get there.”

“57 check.”

Richard doesn’t look well. He shuffles to the cab pulling an oxygen tank on wheels. He seems prematurely old. He’s tall, and you can tell that he had once been a strong man but now he is shriveled and bloodlessly pale, his hair and lips the color of dried bone.

He tells me he’s going to Yak Estates but wants to stop at a pharmacy on the way. I say no problem.

He’s out of breath after the walk to the car and doesn’t say anything for a couple minutes. Then, “Sorry, man. I move slow. I’m all fucked up.”

“That’s all right. You didn’t take too long.”

“No, but I will though, at the pharmacy. You’re probably gonna charge me for that, huh?”

“Yeah, sorry.”

“That’s all right. You’ve gotta make a living. How old are you?”

“Forty-six.”

He laughs fatalistically. “I’m only three years older than you. Found out a couple years ago I had hepatitis C. Now I’m dying. I got sclerosis of the liver and my knees are shot. I was hopin’ they could fix my knees so I could take one more walk before my liver gives out, but it doesn’t look good.”

“Damn, man. Sorry about that.”

“Yeah, they’re just figuring out this stuff can live outside the body for years. I could’ve snorted a line of coke with a contaminated twenty back in the day, and it could’ve hung out in my nostril until I got a cut in my nose and that was that.”

I swing into Fred Meyer west and up to the pharmacy door. He gets out and pulls his oxygen tank inside the mechanized whir of sliding glass and sits in an electric shopping cart and hums in to the din of the store. I turn the meter from mileage to time and let it tick, fifty cents a minute, thirty dollars an hour.

Cab 74 tells the dispatcher he’s getting no response at Alaska Motel, room fifteen. The dispatcher tells him to pick up the Ranch, room 208, for his dud. He tells cab 93 that he has a personal at the Golden North, room 107, for Stormin’ Norman.

“I ain’t pickin’ him up. He ain’t never got no money.”

“He says he’s got some now. Wants to pay you off.”

“Well, in that case I’ll check him out after I take Ruth home from work.”

“He’s ready to go, 93, go get him or he’ll call you back later.”

“Well, shoot, I guess I better go get him then.”

“Well, shoot, check. Waste a little more air time why don’t ya. Who’s next?” A car crash of static from the radio.

Ten minutes, the meter a bit over fifteen dollars. A guy on a mountain bike swoops out of the ice fog, hops onto the sidewalk, and coasts to a stop at the bike rack. His head, chest, and shoulders are covered with frost, and ice fog pours from his clothes and mouth. He has an empty backpack on over a down coat, snow pants, balaclava, mittens the size of beavers. There’s a plastic five-gallon water jug strapped on a reinforced rear rack. A freakish strobe flashes from the back of the seat, and he forgets to turn it off when he goes inside.

Twenty-one minutes, the meter almost to twenty bucks, I see Richard roll back into the entryway with a couple bags of groceries. I hop out and carry them to the car while he wheels his oxygen. We’re off. It takes him a few minutes to catch his breath.

“Man, it’s like I’m invisible to people. Like I’m a ghost. I have to bump into people with the cart before they acknowledge my existence. I just want to shout, ‘I’m still here,’ sometimes.”

I think about when I first saw him and felt a moment of dread knowing that he was my passenger. Like that made him real when I didn’t want him to be. Didn’t want this specter of death fucking with my perspective.

“Well, you seem real to me, man. A lot of people have it, right? I mean a friend of mine has it. He’s doin’ okay, gets tired easy. But you don’t hear much about it.”

“Yeah, more people have hep than AIDS in this country. They’re calling it the silent epidemic ’cause, you know, who gives a shit about a bunch of old junkies and hippies with blood poisoning? I guess it’s the price I gotta pay for all those years stayin’ up all night dancin’, drinkin’, whateverin’. Man I used to love to dance. Loved the ladies. And you know what? If I had it to do all over again, I wouldn’t change anything.

“There’re some new meds coming out too. I’ll just try and hang on till they get here.”

We get to his condo, and I carry in his groceries. I wish him good luck and shake his hand. He manages a weak smile and something sparks in his eye. For just a second I can see him dancin’ and makin’ moves on the ladies in some bar with a band, and I kinda believe him.

Smurf sends me to the Holiday House Apartments, and I pick up three young engineering students from India and take them to Safeway. They speak in Hindi. I listen to the cadence and bubbling tones, and they soothe me. I like hearing languages I can’t understand, all that yearning stripped of meaning and removed from me, an instrumental, a symphony.

They pay seven dollars and Smurf sends me to the Klondike, room 238. The Klondike is a bunch of Atco trailers laid out end to end. They were brought to Alaska in the seventies to house workers building the pipeline. Cheapest rooms in town.

I knock on 238 and a six-year-old Athabaskan boy answers. He looks at me with big dark eyes. I ask him if he needs a taxi and he shrugs and steps out, closes the door behind him. It doesn’t latch but hangs limp and gray in the frame. He follows me to the cab and gets in. “Where to?” I say.

He says, “Ninety-Nine Bentley Drive,” real fast, like he’d been rehearsing his big line for a school play. Well, Ninety-Nine Bentley Drive is a sketchy address, so I ask him if he’s got any money. He kind of shifts around like he’s trying to screw himself down into the seat. “My mom’s there. She’s got the money.”

“You promise?”

“Yeah, I promise, she’s there.” He wears a “Kiss Me I’m Irish” T-shirt beneath an unzipped red coat, no hat, no gloves.

“All right, man.” And I put it on Airport Way to Peger to the Johanssen Expressway to College Road to Island Homes. I slide around most of the turns because I like the way it feels.

It takes twelve minutes to get to Bentley Drive. We walk to the front door of the buried-in-snow ranch home. Reaching no higher than the knob, he knocks on the door. I barely hear it over the noise of the TV inside. Feeling the cold, I knock again, higher and louder. A big man, of mixed race, with a shaved head and a beer gut alive with distended blue tattoos swings open the door. He has little fidgety eyes, looks at me hard. “What you want?” The can of Natural Ice in his right hand is slightly crushed, like he squeezes the beer out.

“Uh, hi, yeah. I’m a cab driver. I just brought this guy over from the Klondike. He said his mom was here and was gonna pay for the cab.”

The guy looks down at the kid for the first time. Turns around and walks back in. “Desiree!” he shouts ahead of him. “Elliot’s here. Come pay the cab.”

I stand there as the warmth bleeds out the open door and the moisture supercools and hangs in the air. I smell the Hot Pockets in the oven, the kitty litter, smoked fish, dirty socks.

The woman appears in the entryway. “Jesus Christ, Norris, you born in a fuckin’ barn!” she shouts over her shoulder.

“Sorry, honey,” the voice yells back from the room with the TV. He has a downriver accent, chopped with German and Russian. The show sounds like Cops, one of those where police chase minorities through the ghetto.

“Well, come in and shut the door,” she says. “Hi.”

“Hi.” She’s a knockout. Early twenties, wearing a short white dress with pink and blue polka dots and a frilled hem that shows off her brown thighs. Past the thin waist where the fabric draws tight across her tummy, the subtle roll of her breasts, low neckline. When I get to her face she’s smiling coquettishly, her head tilted just to the right so that the long wave of black hair falls behind her shoulder.

“So . . . how much is the cab fare?” She raises her eyebrows playfully.

“Um, sixteen dollars’ll do it.”

She steps toward me and reaches between her breasts. She pulls out some bills and counts two fives and six ones, puts two more ones back between her breasts and comes to a stop a few inches away. She hands me the money. “Keep it,” she says and smiles again. “You want to come back and give us a ride later?”

“Sure. I’m number 29.”

“All right, number 29, I’ll call you.”

“Jesus Christ, Des, you gonna blow the guy or finish cookin’?” The voice from the TV room. “Me and Elliot’s hungry.”

Her eyes linger a moment before she turns back in the house.

I let myself out.

The older I get, the less stuff surprises me. One thing that does is how Cord has caused the love in my heart to grow beyond all proportion. Before Cord I hardly knew it was there. It scares me sometimes when I think about what would be left of me if this were removed, scares me to be so vested in a fragile boy in an uncertain world.

I had a tough time accepting the wisdom of my parents, but not their love. That was always pure and abundant. I was the oldest with two sisters two and four years behind. I tormented them mercilessly. I viewed them not so much as individuals but as a part of my existence, there to be manipulated. I hid their dolls. I threw balls at them when they weren’t looking. I probed weak spots like weight and popularity. Somehow we have a good relationship these days, though we’re strung out from Amsterdam to Alaska. Maybe all we needed was a little space and time.

My family ate dinner at a round barrel table in the kitchen; a small black and white TV was usually on. My mistake was thinking it provided a distraction, that I could continue to shovel my canned green beans into the hole in the barrel supporting the tabletop indefinitely. My mom had been noticing a smell of decay but waited to pounce until she caught me in the act. I was immediately grounded and sent to my room to await a spanking. But she couldn’t do it. We stood there, me with my pants around my ankles and her with the belt dangling limp from her hand for a long time. It was pretty traumatic for us both.

When I was fourteen my folks decided to remodel the house. I moved into the apartment above the garage. My youngest sister moved out of the room she shared with my middle sister into my old room. My sisters’ and parents’ bedrooms now opened onto a communal landing at the top of the main stairs. I had my first taste of autonomy. I covered the walls of my new digs with collages of my favorite sports stars and Sports Illustrated swimsuit models. Using rappelling skills I’d learned at summer camp, I was able to lower myself out of a window into the cover of night. At first I’d meet other friends, and we’d ride bikes around town and let the air out of the tires of our least favorite teachers’ cars. Stuff like that. Soon enough, though, we were riding in cars, drinking beer, chasing girls. It makes me worry about what’s to come. I feel like I was lucky to survive those years. Lucky I didn’t hurt anyone. I’m hoping Cord got healthy doses of Michele’s DNA regarding this behavior, but I don’t know. I can already see the mischievousness sparkling in his eyes.

After the remodel we ate in the new family room with the big TV on, though Mom would insist on a couple dinners a week where we just talked about Dad’s day at the savings and loan, our classes at school, Mom’s volunteer work at the local Red Cross.

But TV was terribly important. Next day the previous evening’s programming would constitute much schoolkid discussion, and too bad if you were the kid unlucky enough to have had to go to bed at ten. Michele and I were talking the other night about how, when there were only three or four channels, the whole country was essentially tuning in to the same message, the same projection of who we were as Americans: white heterosexuals with jobs and money. People who didn’t have drug habits or drink until they puked, or beat the shit out of each other because their fathers beat the shit out of them. What in the world would a young boy like Elliot have made of Happy Days?

I once saw my dad weep at the end of an episode of Little House on the Prairie. This was when we were still eating in the kitchen and watching the black-and-white. I think he was moved by the transience of their experience. How their sodroofed homestead simply turned back in to the land when they left. How this acted as a metaphor for our own existence, barely a ripple to mark our passage. He’s a sentimental man; I got it from him. But this wasn’t an easy characteristic in the savings and loan business in Eureka, Kansas, during the farm loan crisis. The nightly nightcaps multiplied as the years wore on and the farm foreclosures gave way to the S and L crisis. Cocktail hour stretched past bedtime and often occupied the whole day on the weekends.

The first time I got drunk was one summer when my folks were away at a savings and loan convention and my sisters were at camp. I was fifteen, staying with my grandparents, and security there was decidedly more lax than at home. I met up with my evil friend Hank, and we went to my house and did serious damage to my parents’ liquor cabinet. When my folks came home from Shangri La (seriously, that’s the name of the resort in Oklahoma where they’d been), I told them that I’d fallen while looking for food and wiped out five or six bottles of booze. Right. Wanting me to fess up, they probed me with open suspicion.

Not long after, Dad and I were in the kitchen. He was slicing salami, making us sandwiches, and I noticed that he was crying. His tears were splatting on the cutting board. I asked him what was the matter, and he told me that it was a sin to lie. I saw it differently. Lying seemed a part of the skillset of secret agents, undercover cops, and wise criminals. I wanted to be an actor at this point and lying seemed central to that mission. Plus, I was pretty sure that God was bullshit too, so the whole sin thing held little sway.

But honesty was important to my dad. He made sure I knew that. Now it’s important to me. I always sensed there was some truth beyond the holographic walls of our upper-middle-class projection, just as I knew there was sheetrock and studs and wires beneath the slick veneer of African animal wallpaper in my bedroom. I craved access to that truth. Still do. Though it exists everywhere, it can be hard to see. But the cab is a piece of that truth, driving one is like diving into a sea of humanity.

I can’t get through on the radio. Smurf’s in a rage because a cab ran the stoplight at Geist and Johanssen. “It’s busy as hell in here, Cab 16, and now I’ve got to tie up the phone lines takin’ complaints, and not for the first time either, about your crappy driving.” While he’s talking we can hear phones ringing off hooks. It’s his way of punishing everybody for the sins of one. Letting us hear all that unanswered business hanging up and trying another company. “So remember, you guys are driving billboards out there. Got my phone number written all over ’em. Surest way to shut these phones down I know of. Now, sixteen, you need to call Don before I give you another trip. Who was next?”

Sibilant static leaps from the radio and explodes in my inner ear. From it emerges a panicked beep. I clamp my hands over my ears and stifle a whimper. It’s Morse code. A few years back the Federal Communications Commission decided that in the interest of national security and personal freedom, all registered radio frequencies need to beep out their call letters and frequency at a tympanic tissue-piercing pitch every fifteen minutes. We’re all thankful.

Smurf says, “That’s too many of yuh, try again.” Just the crash of static. “Goddammit, that’s too much! One at a time! Ah, fuck it, I’m on the phone, and I don’t wanna hear anybody callin’ their number till I get back! Oops, forgot I’m not supposed to say fuck on the radio.”

Eventually I get through. Get sent to 15 Farewell. There’s an elderly lady in the entryway. She steps into the night and asks if this is for Opal. I tell her it is, and she asks if I could help with her things, pointing to a brown paper sack filled with hot food in aluminum foil. I put this in the backseat, and she gets in the front. “Where to?” I ask.

“I’m going to the Elks. Do you know where the Elks is?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You just go down this road. I guess it’s Farewell or something and go past the first few stoplights and then turn left and then right and go in that way.”

“Okay. How are you doin’ today?”

“Oh, all right I guess. I’m just going to meet my friend. We always get together on our birthday and have some drinks and talk about the good old days.”

“Well, happy birthday.”

“Thank you, young man. It is my birthday. I’m eighty-four.”

“Congratulations.”

“I don’t know that congratulations are in order, but if you help me get my stuff inside that’d be appreciated. Eighty-four’s a bitch, young man.”

“I’ll carry the stuff.”

“I came up here with my World War II hero in 1947. After the war he was having a hard time, and he asked me if I wouldn’t mind giving it a try up here. So that’s what we did. I met the lady I’m going to meet now not too long after we got here, and we found out we had the same birthday. We’ve been friends ever since.”

“Wow, you’ve seen some change, huh.”

“Oh, yes. This town’s about ten times bigger now than it was then. All that Bentley land, my husband used to look for moose there. Now, I won’t even go.”

“I liked it better when it was woods, myself,” I say, referring to the several square miles on the northeast end of town that in the span of the last decade has been leveled, buried in gravel, paved, and developed into Walmart, Home Depot, Sportsman’s Warehouse, Sports Authority, Barnes and Noble, a new Fred Meyer, Old Navy, Chili’s, Carl’s Jr., Boston’s, the Holiday Inn, the Hampton Inn, and a host of other chains.

“It’s like aliens came and dropped the Walmart from space. I’ll just stay with Safeway.”

“I go to the old Fred Meyer,” I say as we pull up to the Elks.

“All right, I like that one. How much do I owe?”

“Five’s fine.” She gives me six and gets out. I carry her bag in, let her hold my arm on the ice. Smurf puts me four North. I gun it past the Big International Bar, the oldest joint in town, dating to the forties. There was recently an effort to have the building removed to make room for a new bridge over the Chena River. The outcry was loud enough that the city decided to remove every building but the Big I and build the bridge around it—proving that you can rip down any historic Fairbanks building you want, as long as it’s not one that serves alcohol.

I cross the old Chena River bridge not far from where E. T. Barnette ran into shallow water in the steamship Lavelle Young in 1901. Barnette’s intention had been to establish a trading post near Eagle, where gold had already been found, but the deal he’d made with the boat owner stated his provisions would be unloaded when the boat could go no farther upriver. So, a long way from Eagle on a river that doesn’t go there, brush was cleared, supplies offloaded. The boat left. There was nothing else here.

Barnette established his trading post at the site his provisions were thrown off the ship. He sent word throughout the territory of large gold strikes in the region. It was a good thing that the Italian miner Felix Pedro actually did discover gold the following year; otherwise, the thousand or so folks who responded to Barnette’s promotions might have made good on their threats to string him up. But between Pedro’s hard work and Barnette’s bullshit, a town was born.

I call City and get a two position. I drive down Second Avenue and park in front of the Mecca Bar, the last bar on Two Street. In the seventies, when they were building the pipeline, there were close to thirty bars along these two blocks. Those were the days when you laid your gun on the bar to hold your money down while you did lines on the pinball machines in back, when a fight or a prostitute were equally available to everyone, when Vietnam vets were the ones trying to get away from it all.

There’s a wildness to this town that goes beyond the tens of thousands of square miles of wilderness that surrounds it. It’s a town of misfits. People who weren’t making it other places somehow find a home here. Nobody tells you how to build your house. Men are bushy and long haired. Women shoot moose and operate heavy equipment. People do what they want. But it goes beyond that. It’s like when a rock is formed there’s a unique magnetic signature derived from that stony matter’s orientation to the constantly shifting magnetic poles of the planet, but the signature on this town feels unfinished. So there’s this sense of newness, of our actions continuing to form the kind of place this will be.

I flag an Inupiaq man in his fifties out of the bar. He’s too drunk to remember which hotel he’s staying at. I ask to see his room key, and he digs it out. The key ring says Golden Nugget Hotel. We pass the sign for the Elbow Room bar jutting sideways from the abandoned concrete monolith that was once the Polaris Hotel. I remember nights in that bar crowded with Alaska Native people, a band with guitars and fiddles and drums, marijuana pipes passed between strangers disappearing into the night. It’s a meditation center now.

The man pays the three-dollar fare with a hundred, takes his change, and stumbles in.

I call red City and Smurf puts me one after sending another car to Big Daddy’s Barbecue. I count my money: ninety-six dollars, 8:05 p.m. So, after three-plus hours of work I only need to hustle up another fifty bucks before I make money. I’ve got the cab for another eight hours, if I can hang. Remain calm. Breathe in for four counts, hold it for four more, release it for four, hold this for four, and repeat the process.

I open my eyes when I hear a rapping on the window. There’s an older Athabaskan man smiling at me. He’s wearing a royal blue cap with a white bow in front. Dark eager eyes shimmer behind tinted glasses. He’s just a spruce needle taller than the cab. I smile and release the power locks. “Jeremiah!” I say as he ducks into the car. “How are you, my friend?”

“I’m good, good. Good to see you, my friend.”

“Good to see you too.” His lips are a shade gray from the cold. I am, as always, impressed by the size of his hands relative to the rest of him. Big meaty mitts always open and ready to begin some undiscovered chore his eyes are constantly seeking. “You have that baby, yet?”

“Yeah, man. But he’s not much of a baby anymore.”

“Same one I meet that time, huh, Michele?”

“That’s her.”

“Oh, that’s good. Good for you. You guys bring that baby up Venetie, huh? We go around that country. I got new boat this year.”

“Jeremiah, we’d be honored. That sounds great.”

“Hey, can you give us a ride? I got some lynx skins I want take to the buyer. You know where, huh?”

“Alaska Fur?”

“Yeah, that place. Can you take us?”

“Yeah, sure.”

He hops out of the cab and waves to a younger man standing by the door of the hotel with a large black trash bag. The man jogs over, and they both get in. We take Tenth to the expressway and head north to Farewell.

“How many lynx you got?”

“Only six right now. I only go out for couple weeks, though. I got sick really bad this winter. Had to go to Anchorage for operation. No good. No good.”

“Geez, that’s too bad. How’re you feeling now? You look great.”

“Oh, I feel good now. Ready to go back trapping. The price is good. He say maybe thousand dollar for six skins.”

“That is good.”

“He was really sick, though,” the man with the bag says.

“Oh, yeah?” I look at him.

“Yeah, he make us all nervous, didn’t you?” He slaps Jeremiah’s shoulder with his leather gloves.

“Oh, I guess. I make myself nervous. No good at all. But I’m better now.”

“How’re you, man?” I say to the friend.

“I’m good. I’ve been in town waiting for job out of Carpenters Union but nothing yet. Maybe I go back to the village soon if nothing come up. Try again later.”

“Not much happenin’ this winter, though, huh?”

“Economy’s no good I guess. I been okay, though.” He smiles.

We’re pulling into the driveway of a small house on a residential street. Nothing marks the house as a business other than a small, neon OPEN sign in the window of the garage door. Jeremiah and I agree to have coffee tomorrow. I wish them well.

A car clears North as I’m grabbing my mike. Smurf puts him six. I don’t bother calling until I’m in the city.

Smurf says, “Eagle 29 get the Comet Club for Leroy.”

I go in the squat block building on the airport access and shout, “CAB! UNITED TAXICAB!”

A row of regulars looks over their shoulders from the horseshoe bar and then turns back to their drinks and smokes. “That’d be me, partner,” a short, wiry guy in a cowboy hat and bolo tie says, his blond hair and beard half gray.

In the cab I say, “Where to, my friend?”

He says, “Man, why don’t you take me to the Mecca. See if I can’t find me an Indian gal to keep me warm tonight. What’d’ya think about that?”

“Sounds like a winner, man. You’ll never know if you don’t put your boat in the water.”

“Ain’t that the truth. Hey, where you takin’ me? The Mecca’s over that way. You got to go right here.”

“All right, but it’s over this way, too. Remember ’cause it’s a one-way street I have to go up to . . .”

“Hell no, man. I’ve been up in this town thirty years. I know how to get to the Mecca. Don’t go runnin’ me around, jackin’ up the meter.”

“I wasn’t runnin’ you around. I told you I have to go to Cushman before I can get there.”

“Bullshit, I know which way the Mecca is. Don’t be tryin’ to fuck with me, ’cause I know better.”

“You don’t know shit, and I don’t like people accusing me of cheating them.”

“You know, I think I’ll just get out here. I don’t need this crap.”

“Fuckin’ A right you will.” I said pulling the cab to the curb.

“How much I owe you?” he says pulling some bills from his chest pocket.

“Nothin’. I don’t want your money. If you leave any in here I’ll throw it out. Just get out.”

When he’s standing outside with the door open he says, “What’s your name, man. I call this company all the time.”

“Fuck you, man.” And I gun the car and the door shuts itself and the guy disappears in the ice fog. Remain calm, I keep saying, restarting my breathing. I call in a minute later and get sent to Chena Courts, another pipeline Atco ensemble. I say check, but there’s no one in number nine so I return to the car, fight through the radio, tell Smurf it’s a dud. He says, “You’re back one City.”

Then he asks if I want one on Post, and I say check and drive to the visitor’s center at the main gate of Fort Wainwright and park and go in to get a pass. This is a U.S. Army installation. The MP examines my paperwork and licenses behind bulletproof glass. Scrutinizes my face even though he’s issued me at least fifty passes since he’s been stationed here.

The base was established as a landing strip known as Ladd Field in the early forties. The nation was gearing up for war and the strategic location of Alaska was recognized by the U.S. military. One of the first uses of the base occurred after the German army invaded the Soviet Union in 1941. American flyers brought fighters and bombers from the Lower 48 to Ladd Field where their Russian counterparts took over and delivered them to the eastern front. The program was top secret. Unless you lived here.

I put the yellow pass on the dash and roll through the gate where the private security contractor examines my licenses and pass again. Then I call in on the radio and say, “Eagle Cab number 29, advise.”

And Smurf says, “29 take it to 3206 room 231 bravo for Menendez.”

And I say, “Check,” and drive to the barracks. It’s a sprawling three-story concrete cavity that houses close to a thousand soldiers. Most of them returned home from Iraq a couple months ago. Since then they’ve consumed enough alcohol to make up for the year they were gone.

The Stryker Brigade has only been here a few years. Before that the fort was a sleepy base where guys who liked the woods ended up. I remember the euphoria that swept the town those first couple years as a few hundred million dollars were spent building new housing and infrastructure. All the businesses in town were rocking and people couldn’t cut down trees fast enough to build more big stores.

Now, a couple deployments later, the economic lift the brigade gives is no longer a bonus but a necessary slice of the pie if the town is to sustain the enlarged commercial base. A bunch of local stores have closed. Crime is up. And there’s gonna be a spike in the number of single mothers in a few months.

The war economy. It’s changed the town.

But this is nothing new. The paranoid Cold War climate that followed World War II military spending here and at Eielson Air Force Base, southeast of town, quadrupled Fairbanks’s population in less than ten years. It’s continued to be one of the primary economic engines driving us ever since.

I roll in front of the barracks and three shadowy forms holding the collars of jackets over faces dart from the glass entry to the cab.

“Holy shit, man, it’s cold out there. You mind if I smoke?” the guy who grabbed the front says.

“Go for it. Where you headed?”

“How about San Diego?” the Hispanic guy in back says. The other two laugh.

“Sounds good to me, man. But I’m gonna need some money up front.”

“Yeah, no shit, huh. No seriously, dog, take us to Kodiak Jack’s.”

“All right, man.”

“So how long you been up here?” the Hispanic guy asks me.

“Twenty-five years, now.”

“No shit?” There are exclamations of amazement from around the car. “How can you stand it? What do you do here?”

“Well, I like the country, like the woods, you know. This is as good as it gets.”

“Shit, man, I like that country down in Texas. I can go outside and barbecue in it anytime I want. Plus there’s like a hundred times more women down there.”

“Yeah and there’s way more hot chicks, too,” the skinny, sharpfaced kid sitting behind me says. “Up here it’s all fat chicks. And the ones who aren’t fat are like the queens of the fuckin’ universe, you know. Even the fat ones act like porn stars. Hell, I wouldn’t even be lookin’ at ’em back in Chicago. Here you gotta fight through like ten guys just to talk to ’em. I hate this fuckin’ place.” Everyone nods in agreement.

“It is beautiful in the summertime, though. I’ve seen some truly beautiful shit here in the summertime,” the Hispanic guy says.

“Yeah, whenever it’s not all fuckin’ smoky from forest fires or raining, it’s fabulous,” the guy from Chicago says.

“Where you from?” I ask the guy in front.

“West Virginia.”

“You like it there?”

“Yeah, I’m from the western part, in the Smoky Mountains. It’s nice country, kinda like the mountains north of town. Not many jobs, though.”

“You got deer there, huh?”

“Yeah dude, tons. Whitetails. My family eats a lot of venison. Wild turkey too.”

“How’s that?”

“Like anything, it’s good if you do it right. If somebody knows what they’re doing.”

We’re pulling into the lumpy parking lot of the bar.

“I’d eat some whitetail tonight,” the Hispanic guy says.

“Fuck, I’ll eat any kinda tail I can get my hands on,” the Chicago guy says.

“Fifteen dollars,” I say. They give me seventeen and shout fuck when they open the doors and run to the building.

Part of the reason I chose this place as my home was because of the women I met. Many live here because of a desire to be close to the natural world. They chose this place because, here, nature is not the exclusive domain of men. Western civilization arrived scarcely a century ago. Its presence must often sublimate itself to the demands of survival in the subarctic.

When I was younger I was drawn to the wildness of the women I’d meet here. To women who could shoot and butcher a moose or row class-four whitewater and then spend the rest of the evening drinking whiskey and getting down to some rock band while wearing dirty Carhartts and Xtratufs. But as the years have gone by, this has evolved. I still appreciate the bawdier aspects of femininity, but I also appreciate the vast reservoir of love in a woman’s heart from which she can draw the patience necessary to compromise and co-evolve as circumstances require. And I need her toughness. Not tough like going out and getting in bar fights or anything. But tough in her ability to not just endure unpleasant circumstances but to work through them.

Maybe the kind of woman I’m drawn to is largely a reflection of myself, with the belief in herself to stand up to me when I’m wrong, or stand up for herself when she knows she’s more right. But I also like it when she puts on a short dress and looks sexy and reinvigorates us both. My wife grew up on a working cattle ranch. She herded cattle on horseback, mended fence, and cut firewood in the winter. Yet her smile and the way her motion comes from her hips continues to turn me on.

My friend Ruth, from Venetie, is in her seventies. She tans moose hides by hand. She helps fill the smokehouse and keeps a smudge fire going while chopping wood for the house, which always has kids running through it. She feeds them, gives them a place to sleep whether they’re descended from her or not. Maybe their parents are in Fairbanks for meetings or in jail or out hunting or drinking somewhere. Raised on the river between Arctic Village and Venetie, she knows that hunting and fishing and gathering—that living off the land—isn’t a lifestyle choice. It’s life.

The old ways are hard, but she seems happy breaking down the fibers in a moose hide using the same type of caribou legbone scraper her ancestors used a thousand years ago. She travels to other villages in the area, teaching tanning, skin-sewing, and the Gwich’in language. She worries about the future of her people and their gradual estrangement from the land but not for the illusion of the romance of the past. The occasional hunger and lack of access to medical care—not romantic.

When I see Ruth, working and smiling, I see transcendence. Not that it’s not painful for her to work a hide with those fingers that have already worked so many, but I see an acceptance that her actions are resonating, joining some greater narrative. And I see her making a choice to enjoy it.

Ruth and her husband, Garry, often call when they’re in town. Sometimes I pick them up in the cab, take them to bingo. Garry still likes to party a little, though. Ruth quit drinking years ago. She takes care of herself, and all those village kids, and in town she takes care of Garry too.

When we found out my wife was pregnant, there was never a question of going to the hospital. She wanted to be with the midwives at the natural birth center. Part of the reason was that she didn’t want Cord to be born in a sterile delivery room and then taken away from her. She didn’t want the drugs either. This might be her only birth, and she wanted to be conscious of this act that so many women throughout human history have experienced. She wanted this communion with womanness as a way of better understanding who she was, what this life is.

At first I didn’t really consider this much of a factor in our decision. I wanted Cord to be left with us, and I was inspired by the devotion of the midwives. These factors along with Michele’s desire were all I needed to support this choice. But as I watched her body swell, as I massaged her hips that felt like they were about to burst from the pressure, I came to want her to have this experience she sought.

But in the delivery room with the fecund smell of amniotic fluid like a pink mist that clogged pores and slicked hair, with the spray of blood soaking through one absorbent cloth after another, I had to wonder. It took a long time for full dilation, and Cord was in the chute for a while. Michele was screaming from the effort of trying to push him out and was exhausting herself. Dana, the midwife, said we’d give it another twenty minutes, but then we’d have to go to the emergency room. She sent her assistant to start the van, but to Michele she said, “You can have your baby!” And I was shouting out these countdowns between her pushing, and her focus was narrowed to this fine point like the rest of us weren’t even there.

Dana shone a large Maglite into Michele’s birth canal. She pushed away a lock of sweaty hair and motioned for me to look inside my wife. At the top of her vagina was the slime-streaked dome of my son’s head, punctuated with a few bolts of slicked dark hair. It was the first time I saw him. He slowly slid toward us over the course of the next hour. It was excruciating.

It was four in the morning. The thought that something could go wrong seeped into my consciousness for the first time since her water had broken that morning. For the first time, I realized that Michele was actually risking her life to bring this child into the world. For the first time, I understood what a badass my wife truly was.

Then Dana was reaching inside her and pulling Cord free. He was pissed, screaming nonstop. His soft skull was tube shaped after being in the birth canal for so long. He was hungry but unable to nurse because his little neck was jammed from being stuck. I was scared there was something wrong with him, but eventually we got him to have some milk Michele squeezed from her breasts by hand and I spoon-fed into his eager lips. We slept a little, smeared with blood, amniotic fluid, and breast milk. I didn’t feel much of anything. I mean, I guess I loved him then, but we were all too exhausted to think about that.

In the next few days his head assumed a normal shape. We saw a chiropractor who gently manipulated the tiny vertebrae so he could turn his head and nurse. I began to relax. Dana told us that it had been a difficult birth in her experience; though from her behavior in the delivery room, I would not have guessed. She’s been delivering babies in this town for thirty years, and she was nothing but calm and solid.

And it’s a wild world, full of passion and uncertainty. It’s just as well that his birth was an introduction to this. It’s just as well that it shocked us all into a posture of never having seen any of this before.

Michele was back at work in two months’ time.

I’m amazed by how much energy she devotes to her students. How much time she spends grading their papers. She needs them to take something from her that they can use. She’s driven by empathy and ferocity. It was her will that put the garden in this year, even though we were working long hours finishing the new house and repairing and cleaning the old one to ready it for the rental market. Even though she’s teaching summer school and raising Cord. She’s an inspiration to me, and I have to work to be the same to her.

On the radio Smurf is telling Cab 93 that he has a personal call, or PC, at the Bentley Mall.

“Well, I’m on another trip right now. Why don’t you send another cab and let her know I’m sorry.”

“She’s your personal, 93; she already knows you’re sorry. Next.”

I get through after a couple others and let him know I’m red City. He sends me to 653 Eighth Avenue. I double-park beside a row of buried-in-snow cars in front of a gray split-level across from the state office building. I honk the horn, hop out, knock on the door, get back in, hit the meter. The woman comes out four minutes later. She’s in her late twenties with thin brown hair and baby fat in her cheeks. She’s wearing gray sweats a shade lighter than her eyes. “Take me to the Golden Nugget, please.” She’s crying.

“Okay.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay, don’t worry about it.” I hand her a McDonald’s napkin my relief driver left in the door well.

“Thank you. I’m just, I was supposed to go out with my boyfriend tonight, but he turned off his phone, and he’s probably out having sex with another girl right now and . . .” She dabs at her eyes. “And I’m just gonna get a room for the night. Figure out what I’m gonna do.”

I pull up to the door. “You seem like a good person. It’ll be okay.”

“Thanks. What do I owe you?”

“Two bucks.”

“I’m sorry I can’t afford to give you a tip. I know it’s a short trip.”

“Don’t worry about it. Have a good night.”

“Yeah. Good night.”

“Cab 62 could you repeat that address for me again, please?” a whiny voice asks.

“Uh, I don’t know 62. What’d you write down?” Smurf replies.

“I didn’t write it down.”

“Yeah, well, maybe you should’ve, huh? Next.”

A mass of mutilated static detonates inside the car. I find a seam in the noise and get sent to the downtown parking garage. “And by the way 62, you’re going to 169 on Four, number three. Write that down! I don’t have time to be repeating myself every time I give you a trip.”

I pull into a parking space behind a red-and-gray bus in a slot on the Lacey Street side of the garage. There are people getting off the bus with duffel bags and backpacks. One of them walks to my cab. “Hey there, you here to pick up Stick?” the man drawls.

“Yep, I am. You need the trunk?”

“Nah, I can just throw it in back here. I’m goin’ out to the airport?”

“All right, no problem.” A terrible noise blurts from the radio followed by the shrieking beep. We slap our hands over our ears.

“Goddamn, what the hell was that?” Stick asks.

I explain to him about the FCC.

“That sounds like our government, all right. I’m a gold miner and you should see the hoops they make us jump through. You can’t even fire up a piece of equipment without gettin’ an environmental ‘impasse’ statement. I’m from Montana, and that’s completely shut down. I have to come up here to work.”

“Is that where you’re headin’ now?”

“Yeah, back to the family for a couple weeks and then back to the mine for a month.”

“That’s a hell of a commute.”

“Yeah. Well, at least I’m workin’. Price of gold stays where it is, this job’ll last awhile too. Got a family to support.”

I drop him at the departures door, and he tells me to keep the twenty, and Smurf tells me to pick up at Pike’s, a bar-restauranthotel on the way back to town.

I pull into the parking lot on the Chena River, just upriver from the confluence with the Tanana. An ice bridge leads from the lot across the river to the University West subdivision. Snow machine tracks arc off the ice road to head up and down the river and into the woods on either side. Like wormholes to the wilderness that rolls away in all directions from this pinprick island of the twenty-first century.

I pull up to the door and a guy in his late twenties walks from the log bar to the cab. He throws a duffel in the back, and the car sags to the side it lands on with a clanking of steel tools. He gets in the front. He’s wearing an Arctic Cat snow machine jacket. Pulls off a sweatshirt hood and runs his fingers through combed back brown hair, rubs the few days’ stubble on his chin. “Hey, take me home, Twenty-Seventh. I’ve been up north for six weeks.” Up north means Prudhoe Bay, the oil fields on the shore of the Arctic Ocean. He’s been at work.

“All right, welcome home,” I say.

“Thanks. Hey, uh, I don’t suppose you know where to get anything, do you?”

I look at him. See a beat guy after a long shift. “I don’t know. What’re you looking for?”

“Oh, something from South America, powder.”

I don’t really like the cocaine economy. There’s too much blood and too many feet on the product by the time it makes its way to Alaska. It feels dirty. But gasoline and alcohol are pretty dirty too. And this guy’ll probably find some whether I help him or not. And if they’d make it legal and tax it, this guy’s money could be helping people overcome addictions rather than funding drug cartels. And it’s his money. And I do know where to get some.

I say, “I know a guy who’s got fifties and hundreds. You’d have to give me the money then wait someplace. That’s all I know about.” The guy is opening his wallet, the crisp edges of new hundreds. “And the cab’ll be about fifty bucks in addition to this.”

“So about $270 altogether. That’d get me two and pay your fare.”

“Yeah, that’d do it.”

“You’re not gonna fuck me, are ya’ bro?”

“No. Trust me or don’t.” I look at him and smile and return my eyes to the road.

“Okay, here you go.” He hands me the money. I take it and put it in the inside pocket of my canvas coat.

“So where you wanna go?”

“Just take me home. What’ll you be like fifteen minutes?”

“Maybe twenty.”

“All right.” He tells me he’s got two weeks off. He’s going down to the Alaska Range to ride snow machines. He’s going to drink and chase women and sleep.

I let him out and take Cushman north, across Airport, over the bridge to the Miner’s Home Saloon, just down the road from the Big I. The door is at the northern end of a long low concrete building. Home to a pizza joint, a barber shop, a liquor store. The neon glows miasmic through the fog from wide, short windows on either side of the door. I can hear “Freebird” on the jukebox. The volume doubles as I go through the first door, into the entryway, and quadruples when I enter the bar.

The fog rolls in behind me and washes over the old plank floor. There’re two guys wearing Hell’s Angels jackets in back shooting pool. A thin couple in black jeans and canvas mukluks throws darts at the far wall. The horseshoe bar is half full of heavy, unshaven men and skinny women shouting over the music. I catch a shred concerning some sheet rock that had been hung poorly. “Had to twist in every screw by hand.” Hear a guy ask, “Why does a pussy have hair?” and then, “To hide the hook.” Insulted shrieks of laughter and the sound of a small fist hitting leather.

I head to the end of the bar where a short, muscular guy with long, curly black hair sits next to the free phone. He has prominent facial bones, like Native Americans of the northern plains, and the flesh hangs from them loosely beneath artificially tanned skin. It gives him a look of relaxed incredulity. He’s watching me with dark eyes and his high forehead is tilted back. I take the stool next to him and put my boots on the heated brass foot rail. “How’s business?”

“The colder, the better.” He smiles. He’s wearing a pound of gold. Raw gobs of nuggets with ivory beads and bear claws on gold chains around his neck and welded onto the rings on his thick, short fingers and all over the watch and band and hanging from his ears. He has two Corvettes and a half dozen snow machines. He sleeps with a different woman every night.

“I know the feeling.” Show him the two bills folded in my palm. “Can I get a couple reds off you?”

He takes a pack of Marlboros from the right breast pocket of his denim vest, which he wears unbuttoned over his bare bronze chest. He opens it and shakes out two folded pieces of glossy paper cut from a porno hot rod mag. I hand him the money with my right and take the pieces of paper with my left, place them in the inside pocket. He keeps Marlboro lights on the other side. In case somebody wants a half.

“You need anything?” the bartender asks from over my shoulder. I hand her my coffee cup and ask for a refill, which she gives me for free. I thank her and the guy and return to the cab.

The guy is waiting when I get back to his house. He hops in the cab, and I hand him the pieces of paper. “Wow, thanks man, that’s awesome. You, uh, you want any of this?”

I think about it but say no.

“All right, man. Have a good one.”

“You too.” He disappears in fog. I go back City. Smurf puts me three. I take out a sandwich and do the numbers. It’s ten thirty and I’ve got $175 booked. So I’m up $30 after five and a half hours.

My phone rings and I answer it. It’s Michele, home with Cord after the handoff at the school where she works. “Hey, hon, you got a minute?”

“Uhh, yeah, what’s up?”

“Oh, not much. I talked to Tim today and it sounds like the district isn’t going to approve our contract.”

Even though she’s been working without one for over six months. Before Michele and I got together, I didn’t understand what a politicized job teaching is. But every time the budget gets tight, people clamor for the blood of educators. It’s only gotten worse since the recession. Our legislature is packed with right-wingers who seem to think that teachers should work for food swaps and love of the job. Meanwhile, the ranks of the district administration swell with high-paying jobs in human resources and the curriculum department.

“Yeah, damn, that sucks. Maybe you guys should open up a hot dog stand or something.” I swerve around a section of broken exhaust pipe in the road.

“Yeah, thanks, I’ll bring that up. I mean it’s bad enough the legislature cut our funding again and we’re going to have to teach bigger classes next year. Then they say patronizing crap in the paper like it shouldn’t matter to really good teachers how many kids they have to teach.”

She currently has thirty students or more in each of her classes.

“Maybe Senator Kelly could come in and give you a hand with those freshmen in fifth hour.”

“Right. But get this: The kids, without any prompting from anybody, are organizing a protest in support of us. They’ve been making signs at home so they don’t get accused of using public resources. And they’re going to stand on Airport Way after school tomorrow.”

“Wow, that’s pretty awesome.”

“I know. Honestly, I got a little teary when I heard about it. But there was an article about it in the paper.”

“Uh-oh.”

“So, of course, I had to go online and read the comments.”

“Pretty ugly?”

“It’s hard to believe some of the people in this town. They’re calling the kids ‘brainwashed stooges.’ They’re accusing teachers of doing the brainwashing. Honestly, with class sizes as big as they are, I don’t know how anybody could find the time to do any brainwashing. It’s such bullshit.”

“Maybe we just have to become a community of dumb asses in order for people to appreciate the value of public education.”

“Yeah, but by then we might be too ignorant to know the difference.”

Smurf sends the first two City cabs to Youth Sports Bingo, and after a short pause sends me there too, tells me to pick up Mary.

I’m reaching for the mike, sandwich in the free hand, turning onto Noble, steering with my knees, and the phone tucked between head and neck when a black pickup careens out of the fog on a collision course with my door. I scream and drop the phone and the sandwich and punch the cab. The truck honks and swerves and misses me by a foot.

I grab the mike and check the trip, rescue the sandwich and the phone.

“Are you okay? What happened?” Michele asks.

“Oh, traffic. I should probably go. I’ll be home soon.”

“Okay, well, be safe, hon. We love you.”

As my heart rate returns to normal I think about being a part of a family, about the bachelorhood I left behind. Primarily, what I feel is an urgent need to not fuck this up. I mean it would’ve been one thing to be a bad dad when I was twenty. Honestly, I don’t see how it could’ve gone any other way. But if that happens at my age, I don’t know if I’ll be able to live with myself.

There are people waving in the street in front of the bingo hall. I recognize them. They’re the local bingo babes, and none of them are going farther than five dollars, but Mary goes to Sandvik Road, twelve dollars away. She’s the queen of the bingo babes. Plus she’s cool.

She’s between the two sets of doors, an eighty-year-old five-foot-tall Athabaskan woman with stylishly coifed silver hair. She walks to the cab making efficient use of a cane with a spiked fitting over the end for sticking in the ice. I get out and open the door for her.

“So how’d the bingo go?” I ask.

“Oh, I make enough for my cab ride that’s all. But I won twice this month, already. Maybe I’ll try again tomorrow. I just like to go and see people, really.”

“See anybody interesting?”

“Some people from Fort Yukon. That’s where I’m from. But I haven’t been there in twenty years. Everybody from Fort Yukon comes to bingo sooner or later, though. Really, though, I was from Chalkytsik.”

“On the Black River?”

“Yes, but we were nomadic too. We moved around all over that country.

“I remember when I was a girl. My mother marry her third husband, and he was not a good man. He try to abuse us, me and my sister, you know. He try to touch me and one time he raped my sister, and he held a knife up against her face and tell her that he cut her all up if she ever tell anybody.

“One time I was with him in camp, and he came and got into my bed. I jumped up real fast and said ‘Oh I have to go to the bathroom.’ And I got the gun and put it on him, and we sat like that all night.

“He tell me I don’t need the gun anymore, that I can put it away ’cause he’s better now. But I said, ‘No, I don’t believe you.’ And I tell him to get the dogs ready. We were traveling by dog sled then. I held that gun at him all the way back home.

“When we got there my grandmother ask me what was the matter. So I tell her and she told me, ‘You go to bed now ’cause you gonna wake up early.’ And she get me up real early the next day and tell me get dressed. And she put her hands on my shoulders and said ‘You remember those three long lakes you pass yesterday?’ I said, yeah.

“‘You going to go past those and go this way.’ She was doing with her arm like this ’cause she was speaking our native language, and we don’t have word for right. She said, ‘You’re going to follow that trail to Black River where your auntie stay.’ The whole time she talking to me I feel power coming into me from her hands. She was a shaman, you know. Then she tell me get going.

“I walked all day, but you know I don’t remember any of that walking. I only remember seeing my auntie and she ask me ‘How was your trip?’

“I say ‘I don’t know. I don’t remember any of it.’ We looked at my boots. I was wearing those canvas mukluks and they were completely dry and this was in April when everything was wet. My auntie say that my grandma had made me a wolf for that trip, and I believe her ’cause I walk all that way and I don’t remember any of it and my boots were dry when I got there.”

We were coasting into the handicapped space in front of the door to her building. “That’s a great story.”

“I been thinking I’d like to tell that one to somebody. That one and I got some others, too. Maybe somebody could write them down while I still remember. Is twelve dollars okay?”

“Yeah, that’s good, thanks.” And soon, Mary too is gone in the fog.

Author's note: Although many of the events recounted in this story occurred in 2012, many of them also occurred in the 21 years that preceded 2012.