Dasvidaniya
Anchorage
Mama is crying into the dryer again. If there weren’t always a load of towels or underwear to soak up the tears she leaves in that General Electric, it would’ve rusted out by now. Her readiest advice on any bad, dumb day is, “Just go on, honey, and have yourself a good cry”—confusing to me, since she comes from people who might’ve cried a river, but hardly ever let a tear go. Whatever is in a good cry that can’t be had in a bad one must be found in abundance in the dryer Daddy and Uncle Mick bought last summer at a swap meet in Fairbanks.
She would prefer to hang our clothes on a line: her bras pinned discreetly between our t-shirts, blouses and skirts and pantyhose swaying bashfully on a line of their own, Daddy’s work shirts shrugging with the weight of pocket flaps and name patches, and nearest the poles, Levi’s and coveralls, pockets pulled out, looking formidable and beggarly at the same time. But clotheslines aren’t an option here in Alaska, not in winter anyway, or the rivets would freeze right off our pants.
“Mama, you alright?”
She doesn’t hear me because, despite her pregnant belly, she has managed to get a good part of herself into a load of laundry. Today it’s bed sheets. They used to be her favorite thing to hang on a good strong line, like she was hoisting sails in fair weather.
I tug on her sleeve. She jerks, hits her head against the inside of the dryer drum. She pulls herself out of there, her long dark hair straying from her ponytail. She sits back on her bare heels and rests her hands on her belly.
“I’m fine, Maggie. Doing laundry.”
Her mascara hasn’t kept its promise. Her green eyes are bloodshot, and the lipstick she is never without is smeared a little. There’s probably a smudge of Maybelline left on the repeating patterns of clouds and cacti on my little brother’s cowboy sheets. Even the phony-looking desert scenes in flannel must be a comfort to Mama.
“Your daddy is coming home tonight. I guess Uncle Mick is driving him down from Fairbanks. He’s coming home early again, but this time it won’t be a surprise,” she says.
She is talking about the night, a few months ago, when Daddy came home from his job on the Slope a week early. He woke us up early the next morning and said, “Let’s take a drive.” He invited Sergei, our next-door neighbor, to ride along with us, and as usual, Sergei brought his camera. We drove one of those lonesome Alaskan highways Uncle Mick is always talking about.
About ten yards from the road’s edge, at a park on the coast up north, Uncle Mick swam out to a little ice floe. He did it for the best of all reasons, he said—to prove to Daddy it could be done. Uncle Mick swore the swim wasn’t inspired by his flask of vodka, but it kept him warm. Then he took another naked dive, this time into the back seat of his idling Saab sedan, one hand on his balls and the other tipping back the flask glinting in the fickle winter sun.
“You’re gonna kill your damn self,” Daddy said.
“Not today, brother. Not today.”
Sergei snapped photos of Uncle Mick screaming and thrashing through the water.
“For proof,” he said, “of the longest thirty seconds in the life of your uncle.”
“Let’s go, Patrick,” Uncle Mick yelled. “Guy in Anchorage wants to deal today.” Uncle Mick was laughing, shaking so hard he could hardly get the flask to his blue lips. A happy, naked, blue man. “Come on, Pat,” he said. “He’s hot to sell.”
It could’ve been boxes of combs from Korea, or Finnish pickled herring, or Tennessee whiskey that the guy in Anchorage was hot to sell, so we didn’t pay any mind when Uncle Mick barked with the irresistible urgency he assigns to every transaction, to every sweet deal.
“Sergei, you wanna ride back with Yvonne and the kids, and I’ll drive Mick to the Lodge?” Daddy asked.
Our family day was over then, Christmas or not, because the Moosehead Lodge was where Uncle Mick made deals to buy and sell everything from cigarettes to radios, used carburetors to surplus parkas. Sergei couldn’t go to the Lodge, because if there were trouble—the kind that used to happen between airmen and protesters, or the kind that could happen between real Alaskans and short-timers, or the kind that always happens between hunters and fishermen who tell big, fat, drunken stories about their kills and catches, according to Uncle Mick—then things could go bad for Sergei. He has no family here, no one besides us, and he can’t get a real job because he doesn’t have the right kind of papers.
While Uncle Mick struggled into his clothes in the backseat of his car, Daddy shot a query Mama’s way without ever saying a word to her. She only adjusted her sunglasses, and shrugged.
Now, at the end of this long day, Mama’s agreeable shoulders are leaned into the dryer. Remembering Uncle Mick’s icy morning swim makes me want to crawl inside the dryer too.
“Whatcha need, baby?” Mama asks.
“Can we turn on the record player?”
“Y’all can listen to your record, Maggie, but don’t turn it too loud.”
The record player is another plus from Daddy’s new job. He brought it home last summer, and I hadn’t seen Mama that happy in months—not since she called her sisters long-distance last summer and laughed for over an hour, like the world was one funny thing after another and she had never heard of a phone bill. Next morning, she didn’t even hesitate when Shannon and I asked for chocolate cigarettes and candy lipstick at the grocery store. Then Mama drove to downtown Anchorage where she bought an Ella Fitzgerald record while we waited in the truck, eating our smokes and painting our lips a nice grape. Then we went to the public library, where she borrowed Hank Williams and Ray Charles records, and the story read-alongs that have become a habit.
I push a couple of chairs from the kitchen to the record player. Shannon sits, and makes room for Sean on her chair. She slips the The Castaways record from its sleeve that makes our place smell like the library—cellophane, and old ink and paper, and a little dust. She sets the record on the turntable and lowers the needle.
Music and books, books and music. This is what gets us through winter in our small duplex apartment. The math of our home is laid out this way: one Daddy who’s hardly ever here, one Mama who’s sometimes not here even though she never leaves, three of us kids—four, if you count the baby who will be born in a couple of months, right around St. Patrick’s Day. And our own numbers are important when it’s time to argue about bedtime: I’m eleven, Shannon is ten, and Sean will soon be eight years old. There are two bedrooms—or three, counting the trundle bed in the living room, an eat-in kitchen with a window on the alley, and one bathroom where we’re supposed to gather whenever an Alaskan tremor shakes the house.
In the brochures Mama picked up at the library back in Albuquerque, Alaska is all about space. Wide-open territories owned by no one but fiercely beautiful animals who’ve never had to lay one wild eye on a human being. Roads that stretch for hundreds of miles and end up nowhere. Apparently, people drive those highways that are all business and no business at the same time, see what there is to see, and then turn around and drive back the way they came, only to see it all again. And Alaska is all the big, wide-open we’d been told about, sure, but in the winter, inside our apartment, Alaska is the smallest place in the world, even with a good dryer and a brand-new record player.
When I return to the kitchen, I find Mama at the window, her considerable belly-full-of-baby pressed against the sink. The blank postcard stuck to the window has slipped a little, and Mama presses it to the glass. She runs her fingers across the big blue and gold letters: “Land of Enchantment!” She peers into the darkness of the alley where we park our truck that Uncle Mick took in trade for his fishing boat because he said we needed some decent wheels.
“Daddy back yet?” I ask.
“No, sugar. I imagine he’ll only be another hour or so.”
It’s good when Mama can imagine. Sometimes she can’t. When the unexpected overtakes us, good luck or bad, she says, “I can’t imagine, I can’t imagine. I mean…I just…can’t…imagine.” And the hours following this deficit of vision are always difficult—filled with guilt or worry, or shades of both. So, if Mama is able to imagine Daddy pulling into the alley soon and in good weather, we’re bound to have a boring, average, wonderful evening.
We came up here for Daddy’s work on the Alaskan pipeline. It’ll carry oil from Prudhoe Bay, at the North Slope, to southern Alaska where the oil gets shipped out. Daddy says his job is to make sure the pipeline doesn’t leak or give way. The crews work round-the-clock shifts, like relay teams, laying pipe across eight hundred miles of Alaska, one weld at a time.
Daddy is more carpenter than welder, but we left New Mexico because he ran out of work. So, he was forced to light his torch in the Alaskan wilderness where, he says, the pipeline is an invasive species.
We eat fried egg sandwiches slowly, making them last through the story. But Sean falls asleep before the end, and Mama lifts him from the floor.
Mama says Alaska has ruined bedtime. It’s even worse in the summer when, even with the clock reporting 10:45 p.m., we know it’s daylight beyond the tinfoil on our windows, a circumstance made especially vexing when Daddy has promised a fishing trip on the river that also doesn’t like to sleep in the summer. Our favorite Alaskan word: Yukon.
We’ve been here long enough to get used to the feel of Alaska on our tongues, in the place names so consonant-heavy they come out of your mouth in stops and starts, or so filled with a-e-i-o-u-and-sometimes-y, they sound like a song: Naknek, Chugach, Aniakchak, Kodiak, Yakutat.
Sergei says these words derive from the languages of the First People. He is fond of words that feel like marbles in your mouth. Sergei is a linguist, and he came from Russia on a fishing boat. But his real love is photography, he says. He snaps pictures of things we’d never notice unless his lens took us there: my unlaced ice skate, a stack of library books left on the porch when Mama let us sit outside and read all night on the Fourth of July, a single feather resting on a little mound of snow atop a fence post out in the yard, Mama kneeling in a field of wildflowers outside Kenai last summer, dazzling yellows and purples framing her unsuspecting face. Sergei showed all these photos to Mama and me one night, an essay he calls “Uitayok,” another of his favorite words.
Mama appears in our doorway and flips on the hall light behind her, making a silhouette of her big belly and crazy ponytail. “I’ll let you stay up until Daddy and Uncle Mick get back.”
But if we can last until Uncle Mick is here, it won’t matter, because everyone forgets what they’re supposed to be doing—or what they’re supposed to be making us do—when he is around. Uncle Mick is a hunter, salesman, sailor, mechanic, and barber. He has a job in the barbershop at nearby Elmendorf Air Force Base where he does a mean business. He says military haircuts are fast and easy money, and the clippers don’t care whether it’s a general or an airman in the chair. Uncle Mick is a whiz with numbers, and he can add dollars in his head faster than I can call out the price of a six-pack and a bag of sunflower seeds at the Quik Stop. The sum of Uncle Mick himself is impatient, plus gruff, divided by a real talent for almost everything, minus any understanding of kids, which equals pretty confusing to us.
“But you have to get ready for bed,” Mama says.
Then we hear it. The low grumbling of an engine that sounds so big, it must’ve eaten three trucks for breakfast. The bathroom window rattles in its casing. Then the engine quits, and we hear Sergei moving around on his side of the wall. A chair scrapes across his kitchen floor.
Uncle Mick’s growling laughter takes over the alley and steals through the double-panes. Shannon and I push past Mama through the back door. Shannon’s mouth is open, but no words are coming out. There is no way to prepare Mama for what’s out there. And then I hear my own voice speaking her words: “I can’t imagine. I just can’t imagine.”
Skinny City
Patrick lifted his welding hood and let his eyes adjust to the moonlight of midday on the North Slope. The rigs and cranes and camp shacks in the distance seemed cast in blue, and the pipeline snaking over the next rise and into the tree line shone silver against the snow. But he knew it would all be a gray slash through the wilderness when daylight returned in spring.
Working alone this far up the line, off-radio and without a helper, was a violation of union rules, and the patch embroidered on Patrick’s parka was a constant reminder: “For the safety and dignity of the worker.” But there had been no headlights, no traffic on the gravel roads alongside the pipeline. A hundred feet wide and eight hundred miles long, Skinny City, as the crews called the pipeline, ran through the heart of Alaska, from Prudhoe Bay to Valdez. This section of Skinny City, a couple miles south of the workers’ camp, had been quiet all afternoon. Or all night. He had begun losing track.
Even with the overtime and extra shifts, saving money was slow. He bit the fingertips of his thick welding gloves to pull them from his hands, and thought of Shannon’s toothache, one of her new permanent molars; Patrick was ashamed that none of the kids had yet sat in a dentist’s chair. Three more months of regular shifts, plus as many doubles as he could get, and he might have enough money for the dentist; but Mick had to stop bringing candy and Cokes to the kids, uncle or not. Also on the list, new tires for the truck. And, of course, airfare for Yvonne to take the kids to her parents’ place in Arizona, where Patrick would join them before the baby came. He did not want Yvonne to deliver up here with no family around her.
And the baby—oh, he could not wait to meet the baby. But how many hours, how many paychecks, minus expenses and taxes, to pay the obstetrician? Almost as intolerable as indebtedness was the inevitable chiding from the doctor: “You kids know what causes this, right?” Or the receptionist’s insincere questions: “You’re twenty-seven, right, Yvonne? And your husband is the same age? Twenty-seven, and you have four kids? My goodness, you have your hands full!” No, Patrick would pay cash up front this time. And maybe their family had hit its size, but that was up to Yvonne, not the doctor who could not even correctly pronounce her name.
Patrick unzipped the cheap parka he had taken in trade from Frankie, who needed Patrick’s own heavier parka for a weekend trip to Fairbanks. Patrick unsnapped his heavy coveralls. The cold that had bitten through him all day and threatened his steady hand on every weld had finally subsided. The almost violent shivering ended—an hour ago? Two? He felt better. Warm. Calm.
He tried again to add, multiply, and subtract the figures of his life. A headache took hold, as mean as it was sudden. He loosened the headband and removed the hood. His fingers found the impression the band had left across his forehead, and then he ran a hand through his hair that was longer than he had ever worn it. “It’s not hippie-length, not yet,” Yvonne had told him the last time he was home. “But definitely groovy.”
Such a strange pleasure, removing his hood and balaclava after a long shift. “Groovy,” Patrick said. It was like kicking off his socks under the sheets at home when he was finally warm enough. Later, he or Yvonne would find stray socks—never pairs, it seemed—every time they changed the bed sheets. How he missed their warm bed. And Yvonne. The comfort of her body. She still reached for him, and they still laughed or sang or cried after. And he could tell her anything, though he told her little, needing to protect her. Still, they fit each other, they were one.
Usually, he denied himself these memories, out here in these never-time hours when the moon rose at noon and he shook with cold no matter how many layers he wore: the crazy-simple joys of sleeping with Yvonne. How the smells of the day clung to her, even after a bath—paint and ink, crackers and laundry soap and newsprint and that strawberry shampoo she uses on her long black hair, and always a burny little hint of her cold cream at night. Over all of that, the fragrance of her lilac body lotion. And by morning, many mornings, tucked between and around them were the kids, softly snoring and eyelids twitching with dreams, undisturbed by the cramped space of the double bed.
He leaned against the ladder. The headache was intensifying, and no wonder—Patrick could hardly hear himself think above the rumble of the generator. What would it hurt to shut it off, only long enough to gather his thoughts and summon the energy to climb back on the ladder and light his torch? And he needed a break from the blinding lights that hung on poles around the perimeter of the windbreak. A short rest. He would be fresh again in a few minutes, and maybe his helper could step in. But there’d been no helper all night. Or all day. And no Frankie. Where was Frankie?
Patrick turned off the generator. The work lamps slowly dimmed, and the world went quiet. He stepped around the windbreak. In the nearby clearing, a half-mile swath the company had burned and bladed through the tundra and scrub last summer, a rabbit darted across the new snow, kicking up powder in its wake. A fox loped after, undeterred by the rabbit’s zigging and zagging, and finally broke into a purposeful run, closing the distance between itself and its prey. The animals’ winter coats became almost indiscernible from the bright, bluish snow. After all these round-the-clock shifts of staring into the blue arc and star-bright sparks from his welding torch, Patrick’s vision was strained—but not flashing, not like when, as an apprentice welder, he had worked without goggles and burned his eyes. Still, he lost sight of the rabbit and the fox, and an unease settled over him: they must have entered the woods where things would go well for only one of them. They must have been exhausted, running for their lives in the arctic air. They must have been near to giving out.
All the creatures who stepped into the clearing were hesitant, a little confused—fat snow hares and tough little foxes like the ones Patrick had seen racing across the clearing tonight, or was that yesterday? And moose cows and their yearlings stepping cautiously and regally through the snow on their long, stilty legs, or herds of caribou as connected and choreographed as any flock of birds in their passage over the meadow. Even the occasional lone, lumbering grizzly or brown bear would pause, it seemed, waiting for instinct to catch up with this reconfiguration of the world. And then they either pressed on through Skinny City or retreated again into the shrub or the thick and endless groves of spruce.
But sometimes, at the end of a shift, the pipeline work crews would pull out rifles or pistols from their gear, and shoot at passing animals, aiming to kill, to take a trophy, or attempting to scatter a herd of caribou from each other, or a bear from her cubs born too early, probably, and disoriented by the noise and artificial light of Skinny City. The animals called to each other, bugling or roaring or bawling, and were answered by men’s laughter and still more gunfire. Firearms were not permitted in Skinny City, and neither was alcohol, so the first time Patrick had witnessed “target practice,” as the crews called it, he had sought the job steward—only to find the man shouldering a rifle himself and reloading from the back of his company truck. Patrick later learned there were plenty of guns, ammunition, and liquor, stashed on wall-to-wall shelves in two converted camp rooms called “the Jungle.” The combination of bullets and whiskey was deadly for the animals whose migration paths were bisected or disrupted by the pipeline.
Patrick climbed into the pipe and drew his knees to his chest. It was a snug fit, but his six-foot, slight frame could tuck in there—the four-foot-diameter pipe would accommodate a welder, his helper, and their gear. He would sit there for only a short while, he promised himself, and then he would slide out a new man. He had work to do.
He peered through the open end of the pipe and scanned the meadow. It was quiet now. Not a creature in sight, not here, not tonight. He thought of the first time he had been alone in the wilderness. The Slope was not all that different from the high desert where Patrick had spent summer herding cattle on his Uncle Abe’s small ranch. Patrick’s mother had sent him there to sort himself out after Yvonne had broken up with him that time in tenth grade. “A kid needs a father, I guess,” his mother had said, “and we’re short on those around here. So, you’re going to Abe’s.”
At first, Patrick had hated the solitude of ranch work, gathering and feeding, sunup to sundown. But the truth was, there was no such thing as “alone” above Escalante. It was the birds that had first captured his attention. There were all kinds—not only the hawks and vultures that people were used to seeing in magazines and Westerns. Seemed like he couldn’t take a step without scattering a nervous covey of quail or raising a flurry of mourning doves. Elk and mule deer and coyotes and mountain lions roamed there too, and sometimes Patrick would spot bighorn sheep. In the unspoiled basins and ranges, those animals had seemed as oddly unconscious of Patrick as they were of each other. The work had been difficult and lonely, but he had proved to himself, Uncle Abe said, that he could do anything. “And work you love is the solution for just about anything that ails you.”
Patrick took his welding chalk and flashlight from his coveralls pocket. Listing his remaining tasks felt important. “Cap weld,” he wrote on the interior of the pipe. And then, a bit of verse from a book he had found in the mess hall: “…strange things done in midnight sun.” Below that, “Fitters Local 798.” He drew a clock face but could not remember which hand reported the hour and which the minute, so he sketched a single lightning bolt at twelve o’clock. “Lightning strikes midnight,” he said. “Or high noon.” Finally, he wrote “I (heart-symbol) Yvonne” with as much a flourish as he could manage, though his hands were not cooperating.
He set down the flashlight. He would count to one hundred, and then he would get back up on the ladder, light his torch, and finish the last pass. But then he reconsidered. Instead, he would count backward. Starting at twenty-seven. Because why not? The stars blinked their agreement.
Patrick was uncertain how long he had slept. He woke to a commotion and saw three foxes, or was it more, enter the clearing. He blinked hard, and now there was a pack of foxes. They turned to grin at him, in that fox way, the way of an animal who knows something you don’t.
The small fox nearest the edge of the clearing yelled at him. “Patrick, what the fox you doin’, man? You need a nap? It’s foxin’ freezin’ out here!” Then all the other foxes laughed. Apparently, even foxes could be assholes sometimes.
But he wasn’t cold anymore—couldn’t they see that? He was overheated, in fact, and so he had removed his gloves and coveralls and hood, and unbuckled his boots. He would ignore the foxes. Again his eyes closed.
A firm grip on his shoulder, a gentle shake, like the kids gave him when they thought he wasn’t listening. He fell over and hit his head on the interior of the pipe.
“Hey, you hear me, Patrick? What the fuck you doin’? It’s fuckin’ freezing out here.”
“Why’d you cut off the generator? Where’s your goddamn helper? Where’s Frankie?”
“Hey, Patrick. Look at me. How long you been out here?”
All the answers were in Patrick’s head but wouldn’t tumble from his mouth. He closed his eyes again.
“Oh my god. Call the camp doc. This guy is an icicle.”
Then the growling of engines, and Patrick’s eyelids held open by rough fingers that smelled of motor oil, and painfully bright lights trained directly into his eyes.
“Jesus, man. Say something.”
“I’m here,” Patrick said.
Then he was carried away. There were more voices, shouting and arguing. Finally, a pile of heavy, heated blankets was laid over him.
“Go to sleep, McCarty. No more doubles. And no more working solo, or we fly your dumb ass outta here, you hear me? Back to tropical Fairbanks.”
The foxes laughed again, only now they were men in parkas. Goddamn sneaky foxes.
“McCarty, you are one crazy son of a bitch, you know that?”
“Leave him alone.” It was Frankie.
“Frankie,” Patrick said. “I didn’t finish.”
“It’s okay,” Frankie said. And then he bent low, leaned into Patrick’s view. A hoarse whisper carried on whiskey breath. “Come on, man, don’t do that, Patrick. Don’t cry.”
A small man in the doorway said, “Frankie, a word. Now. Out here, Fran-cois.”
Another voice, “Local’s gonna have a shit fit when they hear about this.”
“Shit fit,” Patrick said. And he succumbed to a deep, warm darkness.
Patrick woke up. He lay still until the room was familiar. Snatches of memory came to him. Taking Frankie’s shift at the farthest section up the line, and swapping parkas with him. And then the cold that penetrated his gear, pierced his bones, and shook him hard. Until it let go. After that, only a warm relief that had carried him to sleep.
He had nearly died. How had he let that happen to himself? He cried. Only tears at first, but then he had to pull the blankets over his head to stifle the sobbing he could not control. He had to stop thinking about Yvonne and the kids, how he’d nearly left them.
Creedence Clearwater Revival blared over the camp loudspeakers now. He would listen closely to every note, every lyric, to gain control again. He would think about the trouble the music was probably causing, how Reuben, the communications technician, had likely locked himself in the radio room and commandeered the PA system again. This record, Reuben’s favorite, would be on repeat until the job steward found an extra key to the radio room, and that would take a while. There was time. Patrick breathed deep, exhaled slowly, the way Uncle Abe had taught him to do after he had been thrown by a green-broke colt and broken his arm.
Patrick inhaled again, took the breath deep into his lungs, and held it there. Reuben’s music was preferable to other noise hazards in Skinny City: the incessant arguing between the geophysicist and geologist who often left their radio mics open, or the high-pitched whistling of wind over heavy equipment and shacks and through long sections of pipe, or the other sounds, humans at their idle and selfish worst, that Patrick loathed and feared. Another series of deep inhalations. He stopped crying.
The windowless room was lit by the reading lamp beside Frankie’s empty cot. Patrick heaved the mountain of wool and flannel off himself, and saw that he was wearing someone else’s thermals and socks. He was lightheaded, but he stood and slowly padded his way to the bathroom. Steadying himself against the sink, he inspected his hands and feet, and then his face, for signs of frostbite. He had been lucky.
He washed his face, brushed his teeth, and felt nauseous. The pain in his stomach was hunger, a realization that filled him with shame. He returned to his cot and lay down again.
The door rattled in its frame, and Patrick heard Frankie’s keys clanging against the lock. Frankie stumbled into the room, looking rougher than usual after his weekend furlough.
“What happened to you?” Patrick asked.
“Nothing for you to worry about,” Frankie said. “How you doing?” He turned his head. His face was bruised all over, and his right eye was swollen shut.
“Frankie, tell me.” Patrick stood, and the lightheadedness returned. He sat down again.
“You better take it easy, brother,” Frankie said, and he slowly lay down on his own cot.
Then Patrick saw that underneath Frankie’s unzipped parka, his left arm was bandaged and splinted, slung against his body.
“What happened? Why’d they pound on the smallest guy in camp? No offense, Frankie.”
“You just answered your own question.”
Patrick knew the crews were all tough on Frankie. For his long and winding stories about New Orleans, for whipping them all at chess and pushup contests, for his tears on movie night. And for being small and skilled and game enough to do the toughest welds in the most dangerous configurations.
“But did you do like I showed you? Did you fight back?” Patrick stood and took the stance he had shown Frankie—planted his left foot forward, dipped his left shoulder, tucked his chin. “Protect and jab with the left, punch with the right. Don’t swing till you have to.” Patrick was too weak himself to throw an air punch, but he tried.
“I know, I know. They made up their mind to whip my Cajun ass, and that’s what they did. Your lessons couldn’t save me, no way no how. No offense to you.”
“I’m so sorry,” Patrick said. “You saw Doc, looks like.”
“Yeah. They cracked my ribs, busted up my handsome face. And I got a broken wing here.” Frankie winced as he raised the elbow of his injured arm. “But these will help.” He took a small bottle of pills from his coat pocket and shook it. “And I won’t be working for a while.”
“Hey, I’ll give you the pay on those extra shifts, Frankie.”
Frankie laughed. “Don’t you know? You went a little loco over the weekend, my man. You’re not likely to get paid for that—except the company don’t want the union to know what happened. Who knows. Maybe they’ll pay you triple, them crazy bastards. Hey, some real pretty artwork inside the pipe, though, I hear.”
Patrick stared down at his feet. At somebody’s socks on his feet. He had a faint memory of chalking measurements inside the last pipe or signing off on his welds.
“You shoulda told me you were already down on sleep. You’re in some deep shit with the job steward too. My advice? Get the hell outta here, Patrick.”
“Lemme get showered, and I’ll go get you some breakfast, Frankie.”
“It’s supper time, Johnny-come-lately. And you’re the one needs food. Just bring me something to drink.” Frankie closed his eye.
Patrick walked to the mess hall to wait in line for the phone, hoping he wouldn’t be summoned before he had the chance to call Mick. The line was always longest on weeknights when workers were checking in with their families, doing sixth-grade math over the phone, making plans with their girlfriends for the weekend, or quietly crying to their wives about the endless night of winter. The darkness could get to a guy quicker than the cold.
The aromas from the kitchens were enough now to drive him to his knees, but the smell of freshly baked bread was the most painful. Almost anything imaginable was available here, and the company flew in chefs and cooks from all over the country to keep the crews well fed.
Finally, it was his turn at a phone. He dialed the number and reversed the charges. He hoped Mick would be at the barbershop. No sense worrying Yvonne.
“What’s going on, little brother?” Mick said. “Make this quick, man. These calls cost big bucks.”
“I need you to pick me up in Fairbanks on Friday.”
Mick was quiet for a few seconds. “I thought you were going to do three weeks before going home this time. I mean, that was your plan, right?”
“I can’t. I’ll explain later. Can you pick me up?”
“Sure. You okay?”
“Yeah, I’m alright. Fairbanks, Friday night. Same flight as usual.”
“Right on,” Mick said. “I’ll pick you up. Drive you to Anchorage.”
“Thank you, Mick. I mean it.”
“Don’t get weird, man. It’s okay. See you Friday.”
Patrick stepped away from the phone, faint with gratitude and hunger. He took his place in the second most important line in camp and piled his tray with food from the roasters, steamers, and iced buffet—fried chicken and okra, mashed potatoes and gravy, fresh corn, a mound of vinegared tomatoes and cucumbers. And those hot rolls.
He sat down and stared at his food, and wondered what his kids were eating at home and whether Yvonne had been able to get to the grocery store this week. And oh hell, now he was trying not to cry into his potatoes.
A man on the other side of the hall, one of the electricians from Oklahoma, stood up from his meal and walked over to the radio room. He pounded on the door. “Hey, Reuben, turn that shit off! Enough already, goddamnit!”
Outside, there was an eruption of shouting and whooping, and the ignition of truck and snow machine engines. Then laughter, and whistling, and a long steady blast from a truck horn.
The electrician continued pounding on the radio room door, but Reuben only turned up the volume. Patrick pushed aside his dinner tray and lay his head down on the table. Even over the yelling electrician, and Reuben’s loud music, and the ruckus of camp outside, there was clarity and comfort in this singular thought: Home.
The Trade
Mama zips us into our down coats that cost Uncle Mick only a few bottles of Stoli. We stand in the doorway, the cold air biting our faces and exhaust fumes making us lightheaded. Uncle Mick sits behind the steering wheel of the coughing school bus.
Daddy carries Shannon and me to the idling bus. Mama follows, wrapped in her own parka, and Uncle Mick pulls the door open for us.
“Ladies,” Uncle Mick says, through his teeth clamped on a fat cigar.
“Daddy, is this ours?” Shannon asks.
“It sure is, baby.”
Mama steps aboard, pauses behind us on the top step. Shannon and I run down the aisle, counting the high-backed, green vinyl seats. I try the handle on the emergency door. It’s jammed shut.
“I can fix that,” Daddy says. “Heater works real good. Feel it, hon?” Daddy asks Mama. If by “works real good” Daddy means all the racket the heater makes, then I guess he is right. The heat leaves the vents only in timid whispers.
I sit behind Uncle Mick. On a bus, even cold has a smell, and it’s here for sure, along with vinyl, rubber, grit, banana, wet leaves and, I tell myself, the faintest hints of pencil lead, pee, and vomit.
“Where’s the truck?” Mama asks. She sits in one of the front seats across the aisle from me and looks up at Daddy, who turns to Uncle Mick.
“Tell her,” Uncle Mick says. “Yvonne, he’s afraid you’ll be mad.”
Daddy stares at his boots. He takes hold of the rail above the top step. “Honey, I know how much you want to go home. So, we’re gonna fix up this bus, Mick and I, make it ready to travel real soon.”
Daddy smiles at Uncle Mick who nods his approval of Daddy’s little speech. Daddy is as tall and lean as Uncle Mick is short and solid. As brothers go, they couldn’t be more opposite. Their smarts and blue eyes and sandy hair aren’t enough to match them up in a crowd, but they share a few facial expressions, and they’re sharing one now: the mouth twisted, eyes narrowed like there’s too much bright light in here, even though the only light is from the stubborn Alaskan moon and the little yellow bulb above the back porch.
“Where’s the truck? Patrick?” Mama asks.
“Well, I traded it to a guy.”
“Traded it? What do you mean, traded it? That truck is how we get around—the store and school and the post office.” And how could Mama forget the library? “You traded the truck for this…this?” Mama can’t say the word bus for some reason, and I’m glad she can’t. Hearing her say it would make us all embarrassed right now.
“Yes, dear, he traded the truck for this bus,” Uncle Mick says, taking the cigar out of his mouth and holding it between two fingers while he stands to explain things to Mama. “And when we get this bus into cruising shape, you’ll be glad. Beds, a little kitchen, lots of privacy. A custom motor home is what we’re talking about here, Yvonne.”
“I don’t want a—what’d you call it—a motor home?” Mama says. “I want my truck back. Whatever you did, you can just undo it. And what would you know about caring for a family, Mick?”
Uncle Mick can swim frigid waters, fish for three days and never sleep a wink, and drink a fifth and still whip your ass at chess. But he can’t take Mama on. He fades in her heat. “Nice,” he says, a strange word to hear someone growl.
Mama stands and folds her hands across her belly.
“See, Yvonne, we thought going home would make you happy,” Uncle Mick says. “And this bus will take you there. It’s a good idea he’s dreamed up.” He claps Daddy on the back. He always says Daddy is the Dreamer, and Uncle Mick himself is the Executor.
“Have you two lost your minds?” Mama says. “What—airplanes don’t fly up here anymore? I’ll go back home the same way I came,” Mama says.
“Now who’s forgetting? You got fare to take all them kids home? You wanna have baby number, what is it now—four?—up here? Where you got no family?” Uncle Mick cracks his knuckles.
That’s it. A mention of her own kin, and Mama loses her will to argue: score one for Uncle Mick. Mama sits back down in her seat and cradles her belly in her clasped hands. She is quiet. But I can still feel the fight going on.
I wonder if our unknown little brother or sister can hear all this shouting, if it’s making them sick. If these people don’t stop arguing, I might barf.
Mama struggles out of her seat again, and takes slow steps toward Daddy who’s still leaning against the pole nearest the steps. She says softly, “I don’t see how re-building this thing makes any sense.”
“’Cause we can do it for next to nothing, honey, and next to nothing is what we got right now,” Daddy says. His smile dissolves. The Dreamer’s graveyard-shift-eyes are dumb-staring at his boots, and the Executor is slumped in the driver’s seat now, playing with a flapping piece of torn vinyl. The joy of this idea has flown right out the broken bus windows.
“I can’t do it, honey,” Daddy whispers. “I can’t do this work anymore. You should see what’s happening out there. We have to leave. And we got to do it now.” He finally raises his head, meets Mama’s gaze.
She takes a step back, locks eyes with him. “Girls, come on. Storm’s moving in,” she says. “And it’s bedtime.”
But I’m more awake than I’ve been all day.
Pondcakes with Sergei
Sunday mornings, I wake to the sound of Sergei’s music, and today is no exception. I put my hand on the cold wall between Sergei’s place and ours, and feel the vibrations of his scratchy recordings of compositions by the Mighty Handful. This music is what Sergei calls “untainted,” good for working on his essays and photos, he says, so when we hear the Handful, we don’t bother him. But as soon as we hear the stuff he calls “Romani”—my favorite Sergei music because it starts off in slow and mournful strumming and then accelerates into dead-on sprint-picking that makes you want to dance and shout—we know his work is done and we can go next door. He’ll let us braid his beard and look through his lenses, and he’ll say, “You, darlinks, are the mighty handful.”
We slip past our parents’ open bedroom door. Daddy’s feet are sticking out of the covers and Mama is sleeping on her side, as she usually does when she is this far along.
We steal to the kitchen and open the back door. I want to make sure we didn’t dream it all last night. And there it is, a big yellow bus, hogging the alley. On the side of the bus, a single lazy layer of blackish spray paint emphasizes the same words it was meant to conceal: “Chuptalaki District, Bus No. 9.” Dangling from the driver’s side is the little stop sign, robbed of its authority and bent in a gesture that opposes the sign’s intended purpose. It seems to say, Come on by now, go on past. The mud flaps are torn and the windows are broken or half-open. Layers of black exhaust are crusted on the lower half of the bus.
We shut the door against the cold, and return to the warmth of our quilts and comforters. But then the pipes in the wall behind me begin singing with water for Sergei’s shower, and it won’t be long before he is ready to answer his door.
I jump down from the bunk, and pull on my jeans and the Tulek Elementary sweatshirt I won in the sixth grade spelling bee last term. “Who’s coming with me?”
Sergei opens his door before we can knock. “Gooood mornink.” His long hair is wet, and his beard is still dripping. “How are you today?”
“Fine, thank you,” Shannon says, “and how are you?”
He hangs our coats on a rack by the door. “Well, not so good. I need someone to eat breakfast with me.”
“We can,” Sean says.
“Pancakes and chocolate milk?” Sergei asks. But it comes out pond-cakes and choke-a-lot myelk. It’s these little things that delight us about him—his knowing what we like and then hearing him say it.
Sergei’s apartment has even less furniture than ours. But the small crates, brick shelves, and wall hooks all hold photographs and charcoal drawings. Ocean scenes, birds, people. Shots of folks caught in the middle of their work—pitching fish off a boat’s deck, shoveling ice, directing traffic, writing on a chalkboard. None of these people are his wife or children.
The first time he invited us into his place last year, we asked him if he was married or if he had kids back home in Russia, because Daddy told us never say Soviet Union to Sergei.
“Aren’t you lonely without a family?” I asked while we played chess.
“I have family, in Russia, but no children of my own.”
“But don’t you miss your mother and daddy?” Shannon asked. “Guard your queen.”
“Every day I miss them,” he said. “But they understand.”
Mama’s parents say that about their kin in Oklahoma. The ones who couldn’t leave or didn’t want to go have to be understanding of the ones who left. And Daddy says the same to Mama about the people she left behind in New Mexico: “They understand, honey. We got to go, and they understand.”
“But aren’t you lonely, Sergei? I mean, without some kids? And a wife?” I pressed.
“How I can be lonely?” Sergei asked. “I have you.” He looked up from the game. “And why must I have wife to be happy?”
We had no answer.
“Darlinks, today is for chess. And you,” he said, tapping my forehead, “better to use imagining to write poem. Or love story.”
Since then, we’ve learned what to ask Sergei. And what to leave to imagination.
We’re setting Sergei’s table with the dishes Mama found for him at Sears, when there’s a knock at his door. Shannon and I exchange a glance that might as easily be shared by Daddy and Uncle Mick.
“Your mama knows you are coming here?”
“Well, we didn’t want to wake her up,” I say.
Sergei brings his face so close to mine, I see orange flecks in his black-brown eyes, and the fleshy lips and white teeth his dark mustache and beard usually conceal. “This is a bad one, darlinks, to leave when Mama sleeps.” His dark eyes are stern beneath his heavy eyelashes. Then he stands up straight, tousles the hair on all our heads, and says, “Forgiven. Eat your pancakes.” As he moves to his front door, he straightens his turtleneck sweater, smooths his beard, and asks, “So your papa is sleeping too?”
“Yeah—” I start to explain, but Sergei is already opening the door. Mama stands in the doorway, wearing a face I can’t read.
“Come in, please, Yvonne,” he says.
“Sergei, I’m so sorry. The kids shouldn’t be bothering you so early. I didn’t hear them leave—”
“It’s nothing,” Sergei says. “Please, you will join us?” Sergei guides Mama to the table like she is made of glass. And then it hits me what’s so different about her—she has left the house without a single pass of Maybelline across her lips or over her eyelashes. And her long black hair is messy and caught up in a clip at the back of her neck. Even so, she is so beautiful right now, I’m embarrassed and I don’t know why.
“Oh, no, I couldn’t,” Mama says. “Let me get the kids out of your way.”
“But we are sitting now. Come on, children, eat, eat.”
Sergei takes Mama’s coat and pulls out a chair for her. He takes her by the shoulders and carefully seats her. He steps away with Mama’s coat, and her expression withers my courage.
But Shannon knows no such fear. “Mama, we made sure Sergei was awake. And we didn’t want to bother you. After your late night and all,” she says.
Shannon means the crying and arguing that kept us awake. Money this, truck that. New Mexico then, Alaska now. Money this, bills that. Your brother, that bus, our baby. Home here, home there, everywhere and nowhere. I don’t know if Shannon intended it, but hinting at last night’s raised voices distracts Mama from scolding us for sneaking out of the house.
Sergei returns to the table, slides pancakes on our plates, and dishes up fresh fruit—precious hard to come by, but Sergei has met Uncle Mick’s friend at the grocery store. Sergei serves Mama a cup of his chocolate milk, and she takes it in her hands and holds it to her lips. She blows on her steaming drink, looking at Sergei and then at us over the brim of her cup. She sips and sips. When she takes the cup away from her face, she is left with a foamy mustache.
“So, Sergei, the kids told you about the bus, then?” Mama asks.
“We hadn’t got that far yet,” I say.
“Well, how I could not notice?” Sergei says, and jerks his head in the direction of his back door that, like ours, opens on the alley. “I was awaked when they returned, Yvonne.”
“What dang bus?” Sean asks. He leaves the table and runs to open Sergei’s back door. “It’s ours?”
“Sean, shut the door,” Mama says. “You’re letting the cold into Sergei’s house.”
Sean shuts the door and runs to the kitchen sink where he steps onto a crate Sergei keeps there for him. “You can see it from your window, Sergei,” Sean says.
Sergei looks at Mama. I’m angry at her for coming over here because Sergei isn’t happy like he was when he opened his door for us. She is ruining everything. I decide against telling her about her chocolate mustache.
Apparently, Sergei’s not telling her either. He stands and joins Sean at the window. He lifts Sean a little higher for a better view.
“You can see now, cowboy? Better, no?”
“Lookit, Sergei. A bus!” Sean says.
Sergei sets Sean back down on the floor and fills the sink with hot water, steaming the kitchen window. He squirts a little detergent into the water, and returns to the table.
“Yeah, Sergei, whattaya think? I mean, we could drive back down there, is what Uncle Mick says, you know, to New Mexico,” Shannon says.
Sergei tugs on his beard, like he does when he considers a chess move or listens to me talk about what my social studies teacher said. Then he runs his fingers through the long curly hair Uncle Mick is always offering to cut for him.
After a few more sips of his chocolate milk, Sergei says, “What I think is it’s a lovely adventure, driving back to, where–the New Mexico?–in a big bus. But better to wait until summer. And better to wait until your mama’s baby is coming.”
“Oh, Patrick isn’t serious, Serge,” Mama says. “We won’t really do it. You know him. It’s only an idea.”
“Well, that idea is parking in the alley. And I think Patrick is serious.”
Mama and Sergei lock eyes across the table. And it’s another wordless conversation between grownups.
Sean says, “Can Daddy take us for a ride?”
“But did you eat enough, cowboy?” Sergei asks. He pushes a dish of cooked apples and berries toward Sean. “There is more than enough here,” Sergei says, like it’s a shameful thing to confess. “And if you do not eat it, I will have to throw in garbage and bring bears. I would never eat all this myself. More than enough.”
“More than enough” must be a sin and a blessing at the same time to Sergei. Okies and Russians are alike, I guess, because that’s how Mama and her kin view a table too. Or a refrigerator, or a bank account.
Sean scrambles through the bundle of coats at Sergei’s front door. He finds his own, slips it on, and steps inside his boots. “Mama, I’m wakin’ up Daddy, okay? Sergei, you wanna go for a ride?”
“Maybe later, Sean, thank you. I have working today.”
“We’ll get out of your way, then,” Mama says, and she eases herself away from the table. “Thank you, Serge, for feeding the kids.”
“I don’t feed them, we eat together. Thank you all for the company,” Sergei says.
Mama clears the table, stacking plates and cups together. She takes the dishes to the sink.
Sergei steps beside Mama and puts his hands in the dishwater too. “No,” he says. “I mean, thank you. You can walking the kids home.” Sergei starts scrubbing the plates.
“Okay then, Serge,” Mama says, and she dries her hands on the little cactus-patterned dish towel she bought for him at the grocery store.
“Girls,” Mama says.
“One moment,” Sergei says. He takes Mama’s hand, offers her a napkin from the table. He leaves suds in his own mustache when he taps his lips with fingers pink from the hot, soapy water. “You are needing a shave, Yvonne,” he says. But he doesn’t let go of her hand, even when she rests it on her belly. They have locked us out of another wordless conversation.
Mama breaks the silence, seems shocked and a little offended, but maybe she is pretending. Then she pulls the napkin from Sergei’s fingers and wipes the chocolate milk from her lip. His hands drop to his sides.
“Thank you, Sergei,” she says.
Mama lowers her head and steps around the table. She walks through Sergei’s front doorway and disappears down his steps. “Come on, kids.”
Shannon follows Mama out, and shuts the door behind them.
I should leave now, but I can’t make myself. “Sergei, you want some help with the dishes?”
“No, darlink. Thank you,” Sergei says. He doesn’t turn around.
“I’ll go on home, then. Thanks again.”
“Okay, yes. Have nice day.”
I walk to the sink and drop a fistful of sticky forks into the water. I lean in and try to get a good look at Sergei’s face, but his head is down and his long curls are in the way.
“Better to hurry, sweetheart,” he says. “Your mama will missing you.”
Dasvidaniya
We’ve missed two days of school while Daddy and Uncle Mick got the bus ready. All our stuff is packed in duffel bags and Chiquita banana boxes stacked in the kitchen. Shannon and I run in and out of the apartment, filling the bus with our household.
Daddy and Uncle Mick struggle with the trundle bed, shoving it through the emergency exit door at the back of the bus. Next, they heave the dryer in, and stack the bigger boxes around it. Uncle Mick has put a little table in there for us, and even hung a curtain on one side of the bus, in case we need half our privacy.
The apartment is empty now. But it isn’t much different from before we packed up.
Sergei is in the alley, the shutter on his camera flying open and shut like there won’t be any more photos left to take in the world after today. He shoots us as we’re playing in the yard, kicking snow at each other, or running in and out of the back door with boxes and bags. Then his lens finds Mama, leaning on the bus, her hands on her big belly, her parka hood lowered behind her head. She stares out at the Alaskan coast, the bluffs where our neighborhood dead-ends. She is unaware of Sergei or his lens or us or any other thing except the ocean. And his camera snaps and snaps and snaps.
Daddy steps aboard the bus, and starts the engine, and all the adults who were smiling and laughing and joyful only moments ago are instantly unrecognizable to me. And seeing Uncle Mick cry is as unsettling as noticing Daddy is clear-eyed. Uncle Mick hugs us all, kisses Mama on the head, and gives Daddy the longest hug I have ever seen them share.
Sergei helps us all aboard the bus, smiling and pretending to take tickets from us. When it is my turn to board, he presses a new notebook and a pen into my hands. “For your stories,” he says. When Mama steps up to board the bus, Sergei tries to hug her, but her belly and his camera make it almost impossible. So, he kisses the top of her head, then her gloved hand. “Goodbye, Yvonne,” he says. “Dasvidaniya.”
Mama touches his cheek, says, “Come and see us, okay?” She takes the New Mexico postcard from her pocket, and he takes it from her without even looking at it. “Thank you, Sergei,” she says. “For everything.” And Mama steps aboard.
We make our way to the back of the bus, to the section Uncle Mick calls the “not-quite-finished motor home.” Daddy closes the bus door, and looks up at us in the rearview mirror.
“Okay, take a seat,” he says. “Here we go.”
Daddy taps the horn repeatedly as he turns the bus onto the street. Sergei and Uncle Mick run after us, from the alley to the front yard. Sergei collapses against Uncle Mick for a moment, and now that’s twice in one day I’ve seen Uncle Mick hug somebody. Then Sergei stands tall, his features stitched together and the breeze catching his parka hood. He blows us kisses from his mittened hands. Sean can’t wave back hard enough.
As we leave the neighborhood, Sean frees a kitchen chair from a pile of our stuff at the back, and pushes it up the aisle. He sets the chair beside Daddy, then stands on it. “You can do it,” he says. “Steady, Daddy, steady as she goes.”
In minutes, the neighborhood is behind us, and we are on the highway. The windshield wipers are beating a fast tempo, like Mrs. Carter’s metronome at school.
“You all right, Mama?” I ask.
“Oh, I’m okay. Isn’t this exciting?”
She pulls Shannon and me onto her seat.
“How far is it, Mama?” Shannon says.
“Three thousand miles, honey.”
“Is that far?”
“It feels far,” I say.
Mama pulls us to her, hard, and she holds us there like she might lose us if she lets go. She smiles into the sun stealing through the clouds.
“Oh, it is very, very far,” she says. “But we’ll get there, darlins. I imagine we’ll get there.”
Migration Patterns of the Ruby-Throated Hummingbird
They had crossed into Canada, from foggy twilight into the deep winter darkness of the Yukon Forest, three hours behind schedule. Yvonne wondered if Patrick had calculated for slow travel in the old bus. They’d be lucky to make it to Whitehorse in the wee hours of tomorrow.
The solitude of the highway was at once a comfort and its opposite. Since the Alcan Border, Yvonne had seen only two other vehicles, semi-trailers headed to Alaska, and she hoped this meant the roads through the Yukon territory were passable.
The ride was not as bumpy as Yvonne had feared. Their household, the pieces of their material lives that had not been given away or left with Mick to sell, were sad-looking ballast. She took an inventory of the load that stabilized their rattling road-schooner: a washing machine and dryer, which she had insisted on bringing; Patrick’s welding and fishing gear, and strapped atop that with duct tape, the record player and speakers that somehow seemed now both cheap and lavish; the kids’ bunk beds, pine frames broken down and tied together with rope, and the mattresses leaned against the walls of the bus for insulation; the double fold-out bed that, she guessed, replaced four or five rows of seats; a few fruit boxes full of clothing; and most of the kitchen, except for the small table she had left with Sergei. “Ah, a desk,” he had said. “It will be my desk where your letters I am writing.”
She had not permitted herself to think of Sergei since Anchorage, or on the journey across Alaska in the daylight. But as the bus rumbled along in near darkness, the girls asleep beside her and Sean curled up in a seat at the front, she allowed her mind to worry and wonder.
It seemed an unfairness, whenever she packed up and cleaned and loaded out their most recent former home. And what did that word mean, anyway? And hadn’t her people been chased out of every place they’d attempted to take root? And couldn’t their flight always be traced to someone’s greed or negligence? Choking dust, dead, tired soil, a river turned out of its own bed where it had run for hundreds of years without requiring so much as a never mind from human beings? Or water completely rerouted from people who’d relied on it for generations, so someone could farm thousands of acres cheaper and faster?
So, how could she judge Patrick for leaving the pipeline—the best job he had ever had? How could she blame him for refusing to participate in the destruction of the wilderness? He was convinced, as she once had been, that their roaming was a “moral imperative”—when they left the power plant in Arizona where the non-union labor had taken over, or the dam project in New Mexico that stole water outright from small farms and villages, or even when they left behind family who weren’t in any way safe company for children.
But she didn’t feel noble or righteous, jouncing along a dark highway in a bus that creaked with age and disrepair. And maybe she was not condemned to wander, as it seemed so many generations of her family had been. Maybe she and Patrick were like the hummingbirds she’d watched in her granddaddy’s yard in California; building a nest almost anywhere—on a low-hanging branch, inside a dry gutter pipe, or in an abandoned mailbox, and remaining only long enough to nurture a few fledglings before embarking on a journey of thousands and thousands of miles. Granddaddy had told her by the time one of those little red-and-green beauties was hovering at his flowers, they’d probably seen all of Mexico and half of Canada. “And their tiny wings took them all that way, honey. Just how they’re made, I reckon,” said the man who had fled Oklahoma when the bank finally took from him whatever the wind hadn’t already blown off the map.
The girls groaned in their sleep and repositioned against the cold, drawing closer to each other. Yvonne drew the quilt tighter about them, and draped her coat over them too.
She took a deep breath, and slowly exhaled, counting the seconds until the pain subsided. The cramps that had started in the morning were increasingly intense and persistent—about every six hours, she guessed. But these weren’t contractions, and she was glad she knew the difference. The decision not to tell Patrick about the cramping had seemed, yesterday, a kindness. But now, as the bus lumbered ever deeper into the Yukon territory, she knew what Sergei would call her choice: reckless.
She caught Patrick’s smile in the big rearview above him. He would always do his best by her and the children—she could read that in his face whenever she felt uncertain or unsteady.
And how could she complain, anyway, about their migratory life when Sergei had survived so much—and most of it he had never told her about? He would likely never see his home again, and to return would cost him his very life.
She would wait to read the letter Sergei had tucked into her coat pocket, and she hoped he had found the recipes she’d copied for him on index cards and bundled with string. The label on the stack of cards she had tucked into one of her cast-iron skillets he had admired was only, “Your Favorites.” And the records. She had left him a Billie Holiday and a Hank Williams.
Sergei had been inexplicably moved one night while they listened to music and played Scrabble. His dark eyes flooded even as a smile overtook his face.
“You know, if it rains while the sun shines, that means the devil’s beating his wife,” she told him.
“I think he beats her, no matter the weather, darling. I am sorry, Yvonne,” he said. “These blues, like Russian lamentations—if you’re paying the attention.”
Sergei had taught her to pay attention to so many things.
Maggie mumbled in her sleep again.
“You okay, sweetie?” Yvonne asked.
Maggie slumped against Shannon who lay across the quilt on Yvonne’s lap. Yvonne gently lifted the girls’ shoulders and scooted them closer to each other—the bus wall was cold to the touch and the windows had iced over.
As if he had heard her thoughts, Patrick called, “Lemme see if I can get some more heat going back there.”
He pulled a knob on the dashboard. Yvonne waited a few minutes, and then waved her hand over the floor vent beneath her seat. The heat lasted only a few seconds against her fingertips. She pulled on her gloves.
They were already losing the battle with the cold, she thought. The thing she feared most was on board with them now, stealthy as a bad memory. Cold always found its way in. It seeped into the heart of a house, whispering through a crack in the foundation, or a nearly imperceptible gap between a windowpane and slightly-bowed frame, or a torn zipper on a second-hand parka over layer upon too-thin-layer of cotton shirts and sweaters. Or, the way it was told in Sergei’s favorite verses that seemed more puzzle than poetry to her, in the lines he translated but could not quite explain, cold drove itself straight into your bones, into the spongy marrow where things lovely and terrible were memorized. After two years in Alaska, Yvonne had come to believe deep cold could not be cured by a hopeful fire, or a willing furnace, or a mountain of quilts. Even in the brief, bright season that called itself summer, when daylight outlasted the energy of all creatures great and small, cold waited at the edges of the seen world. And there was no warning when winter came calling either; fall was sudden and fleeting, not a negotiation with the next season but an announcement of its arrival. Or a scolding, as Sergei liked to say, for their summertime complacency.
Alaska had reduced Yvonne to a sum of her parts: a hard, mother brain, and a body that longed for comfort but sought efficiency, always efficiency. And in the dark winter days, she thought, she was really no more complicated than the short lines of sentimental Yukon rhymes Patrick recited to the kids at night: I haven’t been warm, you know / since we left old New Mexico.
Yvonne could make out the silhouette of Sean’s snow boots in the light from the bus dashboard. He had fallen asleep in the seat just behind Patrick, and his legs were hanging in the aisle.
The kids would sleep better, stay warmer, in the bed, she thought, though the frame could not be completely unfolded. She stood slowly, and gently rested Shannon’s head on the quilt. The baby stretched in Yvonne’s belly, and she had to steady herself on the seat in front of her; she had sat for too long. She moved to the bed, conveying herself down the aisle on the backs of the remaining seats.
The quilts and comforters spread across the mattress were all the bedding they owned, apart from some baby blankets and extra linens tucked inside the dryer, and the sleeping bags Mick had given them—“…top-rated, too, high quality, and only cost me a case of Budweiser and a ’68 Ford ignition switch.” A straight rollback of the covers would signal an all-business, lights-out, go-to-sleep-now, tucking-in. But Yvonne turned back the layers of blankets the way the kids liked, their covers smoothed and opened just so, an invitation to bedtime stories, even though her gesture couldn’t be seen in the dark and the kids were not likely to wake.
She made her way to Sean. She would place him in the bed between the girls, and they could keep his smaller body warm. She pulled Sean across the vinyl seat. Patrick looked up from the road, into the rearview fixed above him. His tired face was lit by the instruments and gauges before him, a free-floating visage in the mirror. Their eyes met, and Yvonne could feel his exhaustion in her own bones. But, as always, his smile overcame her.
“How ya doin’, hon?” Patrick asked. “How’s your passenger?”
“We’re okay.” Yvonne patted her belly. She bent, lifted Sean’s limp body to her, scooping his legs to the side of her belly and draping his arms around her neck. He did not stir.
“I’m putting the kids to bed.”
“I can pull over and help,” Patrick said. His eyes went again to the road ahead.
“No, no. Let’s keep moving. I’ll come back up here after they’re settled.”
Patrick nodded. “Listen, past Quill Creek, it’s dirt road for a long way. Gonna get rough. Try and make yourself comfortable.”
Yvonne turned slowly and, as she carried Sean down the aisle, she could feel that Patrick had decelerated to accommodate her halting steps.
Sean rolled from Yvonne’s body and curled into the mattress. “Sack of potatoes,” he whispered.
“Yep, that’s what you are. My little sack of potatoes.”
Yvonne woke the girls and, one by one, guided them to the bed. She took up the canvas bag from beneath the bed. Her fingers found the cold metal of the heavy flashlight in the bottom of the bag.
“Maggie, climb over Sean, and go to the other side. That’s it. Shannon, you here, hon. Leave Sean in the middle,” she said.
She trained the beam of the flashlight on the bed. The children were still again, their faces already owned by sleep. Yvonne sat across the aisle from the children’s makeshift bed. She reached into her coat pocket and found the envelope. She carefully opened it, and held the flashlight over the pages covered with Sergei’s loopy handwriting.
“Everything alright back there?” Patrick called.
“Oh, yes, yes. Just getting settled.”
The Six Daughters
Darling Yvonne,
I find myself in a pickle, as your children like to say, wishing you happiness and at the same time worrying for your safety. I worry for your lives on this journey. I fear it is too soon—winter has not finished with us yet.
But you are still here, for now, and I can hear the excitement on the other side of my kitchen wall. The children whooping and hollering (more words you have added to my American-English vocabulary). And Patrick and Mick marching through the house. I will go over soon and help them load up the heavy things. First, a few words I hope you will carry with you.
I was thinking today about your trip across the continent in that old bus. No doubt Mick got it for a sweet bargain, surely. But is this vessel truly road-worthy? Will it make the trip? Has Patrick had time to properly assess the engine, the transmission? Will you all stay warm on the road? How will you care for the children and for each other along the way, across such a barren stretch, if something should happen?
You are thinking as you read: too much worrying, and too many questions, Sergei, always with the questions. It is my nature, I have told you this, to be curious. And it is my nature to worry about people I love.
But I promise only one more question. Did I ever tell you about my crossing? The whole truth and nothing but the truth, as Patrick says? Well, a promise broken—that was two questions. You know that I crossed the Bering Sea from Chukotka on the Russian side—you know I will never call it “USSR”—to Hooper Bay on the Alaskan coast. And you know I was an undocumented passenger on a fishing trawler.
What you don’t know about my journey is a lot. I was in prison for two years in Chukotka—that the prisons are all closed now, it is a lie. I was arrested for photographing the sky—the clouds above Red Square, like a silly tourist. They took my camera, a group of young soldiers, and put me on a bus. Then a train. Then another bus. All I will tell you about my arrest and the long journey that followed is that by the time I arrived in Chukotka, I was not able to hold a pen as I am doing now.
But what comes to me as I hear you all next door, loading boxes and slamming drawers and playing your records, is not that awful prison, or my release which was almost worse. No, what I am thinking of now is my journey across the sea. From one fishing boat to another. Then to Alaska. To you.
Did I tell you the name of the boat? The Six Daughters–I hear you laughing now. The Six Daughters–like you and your sisters back in New Mexico. Perhaps the captain or owner had a large family, many daughters, or perhaps this name is tribute to American folktale. I don’t know. Or maybe whoever named the boat intended to reference the Pleiades, but didn’t know there were seven of those sisters. No matter. When you told me about your family, six daughters, this seemed to me a good sign. Lucky ducky, as Sean says.
I earned my passage by paying someone’s uncle in US dollars—no more than might buy a good pair of work boots in Anchorage, and I cannot tell you how I came by that cash. Someday, perhaps. And I cleaned fish and tossed them into the hold, into big piles of ice not even Mick could describe. And I was keeping house (this is right, yes, “keeping house”?). Scrubbing pots and washing dishes. And a little cooking.
I wonder if that’s what you are doing as you read this—keeping house aboard your big bus. Your school bus bound for everywhere but school. And I see you wrapping the children in your quilts I love so much—stitched by the women in your family.
Someday, maybe, I will meet your family. I would like that. And someday, maybe I will tell you about mine. But not now. Not in this letter. I know I promised. And you stopped asking. Because you are kind. Someday, Yvonne, I will tell you.
Some advice, if you don’t mind. Because time is short and I know Patrick could using my help right now. But he worries me. He doesn’t look well. Not enough sleep. Too many hard thoughts. Please tell him to rest—he should not drive bus when he is too tired.
Have you any fears about the baby—we can only celebrate another life, yes? But this will be hard on you, this trip, and on the baby. What can I tell you? I have no say, as you told me, and yet it seems I am the only one who is afraid for you all, including the baby.
Please forgive haste of this letter. My written English is only slight improvement on my spoken English, but I know you will understand.
I wish you happiness, darling Yvonne. I will think of you, some weeks from now, smiling in the sun beneath a bright New Mexico sky. Fair weather for the rest of your days, this is what I want for you. Thank you for everything you gave me, and for everything you allowed me to share with you. Meeting you was worth all the miles and miles and misery of my journey to you.
It feels wrong letting you all go, but none of this is in my hands. This is in Patrick’s hands. And yours. Take care of each other. And give the children the little gifts I hid for them. You will know where to look.
Always,
Your Sergei
Into the Night
The children, limbs heavy in almost-sleep, did not resist when Yvonne tugged off their boots and peeled their damp socks from their feet. She had forbidden them to kick off their boots in the bus, worried there could be stray shards of metal or glass missed by Mick’s broom or Sergei’s mop. She reached into her bag and found the heavy wool socks. “Here,” she said, rolling socks onto the feet of each child. “These will keep you warm.”
There was a chorus of mumbled “thank-you”s and “g’night Mama”s and then they settled into the mattress and each other, their heads inclined together at the slightly elevated end of the fold-up bed. Yvonne turned the quilts and blankets over them. Her belly and the pain in her lower back would not permit her to bend and kiss the children, so she patted their blanketed forms. “G’night, darlins,” she said.
Yvonne took up the quilt from her own seat and, steadying herself on the backs of the seats, walked to the front of the bus. She stood beside Patrick and placed a hand on his shoulder. His serious gaze was fixed on the road ahead, his hands gripping the steering wheel before him that might as well have been the helm of a ship.
“Hey, baby,” Patrick whispered. But he did not look up. “It’ll be slow going for a while. Road’s a washboard.”
And he was right. The bus shook and rattled over waves of deep ruts and loose gravel. Yvonne draped her quilt over Patrick’s shoulders and rested her hand on his back. There was little heat whispering from the vents at his feet. The windshield wipers slapped away the hard-slanting snow in a steady and surprisingly comforting rhythm.
Even through his parka, Yvonne could feel the tension in Patrick’s back when he leaned forward in his seat, as if he saw something beyond the curtain of snow and darkness before them. And she felt in her joints and belly the vibrations of the bus as she steadied herself on Patrick’s shoulders. She tried to align her view with his. She wished hard to share his vision, to have a glimpse of the future that, for him, was always filled with intoxicating possibility. But over Patrick’s shoulder and beyond the beam of the headlights was the blackest night Yvonne had ever known, and the great and lonely wilderness.
