I wasn’t sure what I was seeing. A small crowd formed around what I first thought was a young child, someone about my age, but it was a fish, the largest fish I’d ever seen, almost as long as I was tall and shining silver-blue. I watched one man kneel as if to touch it, to speak to it. His hand rose and fell, just once and then more: a steady motion as if he might be hammering a nail, but he was clubbing its skull with a length of pipe. Four, five, six, seven times. His arm rose and fell. And when he did stop, after the eighth or ninth blow, he paused and knelt even deeper and clasped at its mouth with his other hand. It seemed that after killing it—after making very sure it was dead—he would now lean deeper, put his lips to its mouth, breathe deep, and try to bring it back.
He forced it open and looked inside its throat, searching for something down in there, his forearm disappearing down into its guts. I glanced up at my mother to verify that she was still with me. She was watching too, but with that same look of judgment she sometimes cast in my direction if they sent me home early for fighting, as if she put this in the same category as my black eyes and bruises and notes about detentions.
I followed her sight line. She was not looking at the fish, but at another man, standing a little further away and holding his hand. Twenty years have made the sight beautiful—the long spiral of green hose and the rainbow of diesel covering the dock as it mixed with thinning blood. They were washing it away, but it seemed to be coming up from between the boards. That was not the case, of course. The blood came from him, the man my mother was watching. It ran down his arm, his leg, and pooled around his black rubber boots. He gripped one hand with the other to make a double fist. That’s where the wound resided, somewhere in there, but his face didn’t register any pain. He seemed more curious than anything, expectant, as if he might be wondering what the other man might find down there in the throat of the fish as he crouched in close.
Two men in white jogged down the steep plank to the dock and I saw their ambulance behind us strobing red. The two men split, one to the injured man, one to the man kneeling, and they spoke as if they might be commenting on the weather. The kneeling man produced a knife. He ran it down the length of the fish and then dug in both hands. After a moment he held something up—a ring or a jewel—and then he handed it to the paramedic who cradled it in both palms. I had the sense that this ceremony had been conducted before, many times, although of course I knew that was ridiculous even then. The crowd had grown larger. I heard someone say, “That must have hurt.”
“Hey,” my mother said. “Let’s not talk about this with your father, okay? There’s no reason for him to know we were here.”
I think I might have said okay, or maybe I just kept looking. They were taking the injured man back to the ambulance and the rest of them stood on the dock. I think they were waiting for something else to happen. A few minutes passed without incident, and eventually the crowd began to disperse, although a few people remained. They seemed disappointed that it had all ended so soon. Then my mother did a very strange thing. She took me by the wrist and walked down the plank, down to the dock, and moved up to the men, and her attitude—carefree, almost girlish—was as surprising as what we’d just seen. “Did somebody do something stupid?” she asked.
She seemed to know them, or at least one of them, the man closest to us, the one who had hammered the fish and cut it open. His wide face was red and pockmarked and his long hair whipped around in the wind. “Hello, Marlene,” he said, but he didn’t seem happy to see her. He glanced at me and then away, out at the bay. All the boats turned in the same direction with the tide, clinging to their moorings, and out past the jetty and the white triangles of a few sailboats. I looked down at my feet and noticed the blood was almost gone already. They were letting the water run it away.
“My kid is sick,” she said, “but I couldn’t stay away. Glad I didn’t either. I would have missed all the drama.”
“Just an accident,” he told her. “Like you said, somebody did something stupid. I suppose you wouldn’t feel any pity for someone like that, would you? A stupid person, I mean.”
“I didn’t say that,” she said, and now she was the one who looked annoyed. Her hair whipped around her head too. She reached up and tried to tug it out of her eyes, but the effort was useless. “Harold,” she said, “this is the man I told you about. Bobby. He’s a friend of mine. Say hello to him but don’t shake his hand. You’re sick, after all, and he’s filthy.”
“Right,” I said, but I couldn’t remember her telling me about anybody. All she wanted to do was leave the house and watch the ocean, get the hell outside and breathe some real air.
“Nice to meet you,” he said. “Marlene told me about your exploits. You going to be a boxer when you grow up?”
I made a sound of dismissal, false humility, and watched the water for traces of the blood. But it was like nothing had happened. Even the hose had been curled up again. “That’s nothing to be proud of, you know,” my mother said. She had been holding my shoulder, using that grip to guide me as she walked, and squeezed—squeezed so hard it hurt at the place where her thumbnail pressed against my collarbone—and said, “The child is the father of the man. Have you heard that expression before? Every decision you make is an important one.”
“I’d agree with that, Harold,” the man said, and he laughed, and she laughed too, and for a moment I thought they might touch.
“See, Marlene?” he said. “You can’t help but have a good time with me.”
But all it did was make me think of my father, who was at work about an hour away in Kingston, New Hampshire. I felt sorry that he’d missed everything and sorry that he had to get up early before I was even awake. I would find traces of him, bread crumbs on the table, his dirty coffee cup in the sink, a Popular Mechanics left open by his chair.
They had taken the fish away when I wasn’t looking. I felt like I had been tricked, distracted from the important thing by all of this back-and-forth between my mother and this man, the thoughts of my father rising before the streetlights were off. I heard my mother say, “Oh, don’t flatter yourself,” but she was still laughing. “Do you think this is going to change things? We’re still the same people. It’s not like you’re some kind of hero now.”
They grew quiet then and I figured this was it, my mother had said everything she had planned to say. Possibly we’d stop for food on the way home, cheeseburgers that we’d eat in the parking lot, and she’d remind me not to mention anything to my father. She’d ask how I was feeling and I’d tell her good and that would be that. There had been other men. I had seen them too, had them slap my shoulder and smile at me, speak my name and make a joke.
The man must have noticed that I was looking at the boats because he said, “Fantastic, huh? It quiets the mind, looking out at all that. Of course, all of those out there piss me off a bit. Seems like mockery.” He indicated some of the biggest sailboats anchored further out in a shoal where the water grew greener and calm. One of the boats had a double hull and it reminded me of pictures I’d seen of manta rays, alien and beautiful. I couldn’t picture myself ever stepping foot on a boat like that and that made me a little angry too—and angry too that the man had snuck that feeling into my heart against my will. “Lawyers and doctors down there,” he said. He pointed at the very biggest boat. “That guy is a real piece of work.”
“Hey,” my mother said. “Quiet mind, remember?”
“Sure,” he said, and put his hands on his hips. He was lean and he reminded me of a gunfighter standing that way, a gunfighter watching the distance for enemies. I decided that I was his enemy and he didn’t even know it. I was standing right next to him and all he could do was watch way out there at the prettiest spot in the bay and get mad. This was in Newburyport, Massachusetts just before all the boats became like those boats out at the shoal and people like Bobby had to move on to Gloucester and Ipswich. At the time he seemed so confident that he was going to win and it wasn’t that hard to be tricked by his confidence, the way he looked out at the water or smashed the head of a fish. I guess that’s one thing my mother liked about him. I could tell because I liked it too.
On the way home, my mother shouted into the backseat above the music, “Hey, how are you feeling?”
“Pretty good,” I said.
“Well, don’t tell your father about this trip today, okay? It’s important for people to have little secrets, and he wouldn’t like that I kept you home. You’ve missed so much school already, you know?”
“Sure,” I said.
“Good,” she said. “Now would you like a snack?”
A few days later, after my latest fight, my mother picked me up at school. She didn’t seem angry though—she was grinning—and she reached over the seat to open the door for me. She didn’t ask me what had happened. Instead, she pulled away from curb and said, “You know that man who had his finger bitten off by the bluefish? They surgically reattached it. Can you believe that?”
“Finger?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said. “The one in the fish.”
She seemed to be tickled by the whole thing. More than that. The news had made her giddy. “It’s incredible,” she said. “I saw it today. He could even move it.” She raised her arm and wiggled her index finger in a small dance. “That’s the time we live in. Your kidney fails on you and they just slap in a new one. You lose a finger and they pack it in ice and reattach it and it’s like you never lost it in the first place. Boom. All fixed.”
“That is amazing,” I said, although it felt strange not to know what was really going on.
“And then,” she said with a wave of her hand. “They ate the fish.” She paused for a moment as if considering the next piece of news. “I ate it,” she added, “and it was delicious.”
“It didn’t taste funny?” I asked.
She glanced at me and I felt even more like an idiot. “Why would it taste funny?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know,” I said.
The next time I saw the strobing lights they flashed across our house, across my face as I stood in the living room window, and I’d think of my mother’s words and tell myself everything would be fine.
I don’t remember much about my father: the sound of him taking his shoes off in the bedroom, the way they would clatter on the floor and wake me up; his face illuminated by the television as he clicked channels; and the size of him filling our small kitchen. He was tall and heavyset, ponderous, a victim of a heart attack at the age of thirty-three. The second one killed him at thirty-eight, when I was ten. It was like a door had been kicked open. My mother and I left a few weeks later for the Southwest.
“This is a new start for you and me both,” my mother said. “Try not to break anybody’s nose at the new school, okay?”
Except that I only stayed in the new school in Santa Fe for two weeks before we moved out of our small adobe house in town to a circle of trailers on a stretch of land in the hills. Fires burned at night and the people there sat in circles and discussed politics. Warheads aimed right at us, right at our children, they said, and everybody would nod. This was the open secret of the world: that we could all die at any moment. My father had proved that.
They seemed to be planning something, something important, but what it was could never be directly stated. We often ate together outside, gathered around two doors set end to end on sawhorses. Good food, especially when it was summer, although as we moved into October and November the portions grew smaller. By December my mother saved things for us in our trailer, cans of soup, the heel of the bread. She said, “It shouldn’t taste so good, but it does, doesn’t it? I think it’s because it’s just you and me.”
I wondered what my father would have thought about a place like that, but he was already growing dim to me, a thing that moved around the edges of my mind but no longer seemed to occupy it. In the mornings I woke before my mother and expected to hear his car in the driveway as he headed out. Then I’d reorient myself and the length of the trailer would come into focus, the plastic curtain hiding the toilet, the hot plate and the burned-black toaster oven.
My mother would be homeschooling me from now on because she didn’t want teachers filling my head with nonsense. That, she said, had been the problem on the East Coast, that and a couple of poor choices she would take responsibility for now that she was past them. “There are all kinds of violence,” she said. “I’m reading books about it. Sex can be an act of violence. Fast food is a form of violence. And education can be violent. So I don’t blame you and you shouldn’t blame you.”
Some of the books were stacked outside along a little wall we had made of stones in a half-circle at the front of the trailer. Stickers along the spines bore the name of the West Newbury, Massachusetts Public Library. The inside covers were inscribed with the names of people who had used them before and the dates they had checked them out. That was the thing that had impressed me most: that these things had come through the hands of others and found their way to us.
In that place there were other children about my age, most with long hair, so long that at first, I couldn’t tell if they were girls or boys as they stood in the bright sun. Sometimes we played with metal cars in the dirt, but mostly we walked the perimeter of the camp along the old barbed wire made for cattle and tried to find things: arrowheads, old pieces of pottery. People had lived here hundreds of years before, one of the kids said, and left behind some ghosts. Good ghosts, my mother told me later. The kind you can learn from if you listen carefully. She tied her hair in two thick braids on either side of her head. Her skin darkened. She wore dresses made of yellows and browns, loose fitting in the heat, and her arms grew ropey with muscle. My skin turned red along my arms and the back of my neck. I’d peel it off in small patches and sometimes taste it. I felt like a snake, hard and still in the heat. “Your father’s bad influence,” she said. His complexion, his eyes, his laziness. “But biology isn’t destiny,” she said, and she laughed like it was a joke I couldn’t understand, might never understand.
“Let’s pretend we’re monsters,” I’d say to the other kids.
But they’d have none of it. They knew it meant rolling around in the dirt with me, headlocks, a twist of the ear and a pull of the hair. They were all thin as sticks and I had my father’s bulk. “Cowards,” I’d say, because that was a word I had heard my mother use. I’d try to laugh like my mother too but it was difficult to capture it exactly. Her laugh was animal-like and deep, a smoker’s laugh, the bark of a dog.
Sometimes my mother would wake me and say, “Hey, why don’t you go look at the stars for a while, okay? They’re beautiful tonight.” Which meant I needed to pull on my jeans and vacate the trailer for a while. There was always someone else with her when she did that, and I knew I shouldn’t ask if they wanted to come with me. I’d head out and the stars would be beautiful and when I saw them I wouldn’t mind being out there at all.
The man who came to our trailer most often reminded me of the children: blonde hair and small wrists and an untested confidence. He was the one who spoke most around the fire but something about his voice lulled me into calm, even when he was speaking about war. I imagined myself as the survivor scrambling through the rubble, finding treasures in the cracks. Sometimes my mother was with me, but sometimes I wandered alone. “Five megatons,” he’d say. “That makes Nagasaki look like a firecracker.” His car sat on blocks on one end of the property so sometimes he borrowed my mother’s to head into town for supplies and he’d come back with a secret thing for me: Twinkies or fruit pies, sometimes a long stick of beef jerky I’d eat while wandering the fence. As the weather grew colder he talked more and more about the missiles and one night he grew so angry that he stood up and began shouting, waving his hand. It seemed kind of funny, as if he were trying to conjure something out of the fire, but everybody else sat there gazing up at him. My mother turned her head sideways away from him and out toward the flat land where the sun squatted red against the horizon.
“We keep going around and around,” she finally said. “Around and around and around. Like a fly stuck behind a windowpane.”
She made a light buzzing sound and I smiled in the dusk.
“This is important,” the man said, but his confidence had already abandoned him. I could hear a crack in his voice. He looked out at the horizon too and maybe he saw our future there in the red ball disintegrating at its edges. Maybe he meant everything he said.
“Men try anything to get laid,” my mother said, “but this has been a new one. It really blindsided me.” She looked at a couple of the other women around the fire and then she laughed her barking laugh. “You don’t know what working class is,” she added, as if this might be the worst insult she could imagine.
“What’s that?” he asked.
She sat back on the stump with her arms folded and said, “I’ve got the only functioning car in the commune. One of the key things about being working class is the work part, don’t you think? Winter is coming and we haven’t even started the building you were talking about.”
Another woman said, “So true. You guys are too busy planning a revolution to dig a decent well.”
“Let’s start the revolution at home,” my mother said. “Let’s start by having some of the guys do the dishes tonight.”
Their eyes met across the fire and they smiled at each other—these two women, my mother and a stranger with pigtails just like hers.
“We’re learning as we go,” the man said.
My mother was still looking at the other woman. They seemed to communicate to each other in a way I couldn’t understand and they seemed to be enjoying it. I was enjoying it too, but for different reasons. I wanted to be away from that place and I thought there might be just enough force in this argument to send us spinning back to our neat adobe house in town.
“My husband, he was working class,” my mother said. “That was a real man.” She had a smirk on her face, as if she were mocking her own words as she said them, but as she spoke her voice grew louder. “He worked his ass off. All he did was work. He wouldn’t fit in here very well.”
She had started a debate. The man sat down.
When she spoke again she sounded more forlorn than angry. “Some of you had other lives, but not like me. You never lost someone like that. Divorce isn’t the same thing.” She paused and let that settle in. She smiled and said, “Fishing is one of the most dangerous jobs in this country, you know, and it’s most dangerous on the East Coast. You wouldn’t think that, but it’s true. He loved it though. It was a choice he made every day. It put him at peace.”
She seemed to be describing the man on the dock and not my father. I could imagine his hand rising and falling in that hammer motion. I remembered the ambulance and the blood and for some reason I said, “Tell them about the fish, Mom.”
She turned her head to me as if surprised by my voice. But then she nodded and said, “This is a good one. He lost his finger once. And then it came back to him.”
She held up her hand and wiggled her finger again, just as she had done in the car a year before, although I guessed that she didn’t remember doing it then. In the moment it must have seemed an original and funny thing to do, to hold up her own finger as an example right then and let everybody imagine it being severed. She said, “He caught a bluefish and it took off his finger just below the second joint. Not his fault. You have to club a fish like that, really beat its brains in, and the guy who was supposed to do that didn’t hit it hard enough.” She looked at the man who had been speaking before and for the first time I realized he was maybe a good decade younger than my mother, maybe in his midtwenties. His face was sunburned, his eyes marked by crow’s feet, and he seemed older most of the time. “They had to gut the fish and get this. He reached in himself and took out his own finger. Would you be able to do that?”
I decided I would have the courage, I’d kill it and open it and remove that small piece of me without thinking twice. For a second, I saw myself as the center of her story and it made me listen harder to find out what might become of me.
“They packed it in ice,” she said. “And rushed him to the hospital and stitched it on.” She wiggled her finger again. “Almost as good as new, although he didn’t have much feeling in it anymore. After that he called it The Deserter.” She laughed and the woman across from her smiled. I laughed a little too. I knew we were done with the trailers and the desert, the red sunsets and talk about death by fire.
Later that night she woke me up and said, “Sorry about earlier. Sometimes I go off on a tear, you know? They just get me going. But this is a good place. You like it here, right?”
“Sure,” I said. “It’s okay.”
“Good,” she said. “Do you want to look at the stars?”
“Okay,” I said. I threw my legs out of the bunk and found my jeans in a small bundle on the floor, belt still attached. I pulled them up my legs and began putting myself together. There was the woman from the fire standing just behind my mother, except this time my mother put her hand on the back of my neck, very gently, and stepped outside with me. The woman followed and the three of us walked a bit away from the trailer, looking up at the dome of the sky. “The Deserter,” I said, and laughed again, but my mother didn’t respond.
After a while she said, “I’m still very young, you know. I met your father when I was nineteen. I’ve never told you that before. I know nineteen probably seems old to you now, but trust me, it’s incredibly young. Too young to have to make certain kinds of decisions, you know? But I had to make them and I made them fast.”
I considered the moment that always separated the insults from the first punch. I never grabbed or wrestled like the other kids. I made the decision fast, and the other person was always surprised by the sudden burst of pain. Did they think we’d just stand there arguing, strutting around? No, go for the face with everything you’ve got. Someone had told me that once, but I’m not sure who, definitely not my father. Maybe I had heard it from the TV. Regardless, I thought I understood what my mother meant by having to make a quick decision and I said, “Sure.”
She rubbed the back of my neck and said, “You’re a good kid. You’ve already led a full life and you’re ten years old. You know more than all the men here put together, don’t you?”
“I don’t know about that,” I said.
“Well, I do,” she said.
The next day I felt stronger and out at the barbed wire I knocked one of the other kids down hard to the ground, stood above him and watched him to see how he would react. His hair fell across his eyes but I could see that he was afraid of me and that seemed like a good thing. I kicked him, small kicks that sent him scuttling backward in the white dirt, and then he scrambled to his feet and ran. “Coward,” I hollered after him. “Liar.”
My mother said, “New Mexico was a mistake. I admit that. But in another way, it wasn’t a mistake, because it brought us here. It made me realize I needed a more radical approach to my life.” She paused. “To our life. Together.”
“Right,” I said.
“That which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. Which is not true, just tell that to the person who’s had a debilitating stroke, right? But it’s as good an illusion as any. Remember in California when the transmission exploded? That’s what I was telling myself then when we were standing on the side of the road with our thumbs out. It sounded really good then.”
We lived on the west side of Anchorage in a nest of apartments that used to be off-base army housing. Icicles hung from the roof, some of them as long as me, and at night we’d walk outside and check for the northern lights. We hadn’t seen them yet, just the smallest flicker of blue that might have been nothing at all.
“Light pollution,” my mother said. “There’s nothing we can do about it. Too many people. Even here.” Then we’d head back inside.
My bedroom wall was spotted with fist-sized holes. Each one had been covered up with spackle that didn’t match the paint. I decided that something bad had happened here but I couldn’t imagine what. One or two I could see but a dozen seemed like something else entirely, something beyond me. My mother spread books on the kitchen table and sometimes lifted her head up to share a quote with me. “Listen to this,” she’d say. “‘Labor is the father of material wealth and the earth is its mother.’ That’s pretty clever, don’t you think?”
“Sure,” I’d say, and her head would go back down as if into deep water.
She wore flannel shirts now, heavy boots with double knotted laces, and tied her hair back in a single braid. Her eyes had sunken into her skull and she liked to mumble to herself, to the writers she was reading. The table became a complicated puzzle of dishes and books and scraps of paper bearing small notes. When I stepped outside I could walk out to the main road where the traffic was heavy, then look up and see the mountains all around. Sometimes she went with me and we walked through the slush on the side of the road on the way to the grocery store. Everything was breaking up, melting and coming loose, and the cars were all covered in dirt. Ours had made it this far but had died and we were waiting to raise some money to fix it.
“If you’re going to get stranded somewhere,” she said, “it’s best to make it a beautiful place, right?”
We’d walk back from the grocery holding shopping bags. Sometimes the cars would honk at us from behind and my mother would hold up her middle finger without turning.
“Just give me a little time,” she said.
She didn’t talk about school and neither did I but we’d go to the library and she’d stack more books up in her arms, in my arms too.
But I also remember books about vampires and werewolves. She’d read parts of them to me aloud and then tell me to continue while she spread out the other books and took notes. Numbers and measurements and the names of plants. “You’re growing strong and smart,” she said to me. “It’s better not to be too dependent on others. What’s happening in your book now?”
“He’s arrived at the castle,” I said. “I think he’s going to go inside. And then he’ll probably get killed.”
“I don’t know about that,” she said. “He’s the one telling the story. But keep at it.”
My mother no longer talked about the missiles but that strange sense of imminent danger had stayed with me, with us. I even felt it in the quiet of the library, so silent you could hear the turning of our pages, the water from the fountain when someone bent and drank.
We slept in the same bed and late at night she’d sometimes push my shoulder, a nudge, and I’d wake up and she’d whisper to me, like there was someone else around, a parent in the other room maybe, still awake and listening for us. “Years from now you’re going to write a book about me. I swear it. That’s how I see you. You’re a deep thinker and you’re going to write a book.”
“And it’s going to be about you,” I said.
“Yes,” she said, “I think so. And this place, I think. We’re going to go to those mountains, you know. The best is yet to come, as they say.”
“Biology isn’t destiny,” I said.
“What?”
“Never mind,” I said.
And then she’d talk about what she was going to do for work. She wanted to become a nurse. If you were a nurse you were always needed somewhere. She’d take classes soon and there was plenty of work around. “What I’d really like to be is a doctor,” she said, “but that ship has sailed.” She’d tell me that eventually we’d buy some land and if I wanted to pee I’d just walk in the woods and go against a tree.
Doing something like that somehow seemed like the height of indulgence to me and I liked to hear her talk about it.
Then as the weather warmed up I began sleeping alone some nights. She said she would still be in the building, not far away, and if there was a problem she would know about it.
“I don’t believe in love,” she said one night. “Not in the way most people think of it anyway. But I believe that two people can line up in the right way for a while.”
“Can I meet him?” I asked.
“That’s probably not a good idea,” she said.
I remember the night she nudged me awake, roughly, speaking my name, shaking me. “Hey, Harold,” she said. “Tell me. What does it feel like to be a man?” I felt her moving in the dark, her leg shaking. “Because I’d really like to know.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“Tell me,” she said. “Give me all the secrets.”
That same hoarse laugh. I thought of telling her about the holes in the wall, how I sometimes could imagine myself doing something like that, but then I decided that’s not what she was looking for so I didn’t say anything. “Tell me,” she said again in a raspy whisper. “How does it feel to be a prick?” She took a deep breath and turned on her side away from me. “Sorry. You wouldn’t know, would you? That’s why I like you. You’re not one of them yet.”
She kicked her legs out over the edge of the bed. I could hear her shallow breathing and I stayed awake for a long time listening. I could tell she was still awake. I said, “You’re a very good mother. Sometimes you just get angry.”
“You too,” she said. “Sometimes you just get angry too, don’t you?”
“No,” I said, because at that moment I felt as distant as the scenery around us. My own body was just another thing apart from me and I wanted to keep it that way.
I met him the next day. He appeared at our door, his face in the gap allowed by the chain lock, and then my mother said, “Let him in. Let him in. Let’s have breakfast. I’ll make sausage.”
He sat at the table turning his coffee cup around as if he was trying to wind it, forward and then back, forward and back. He looked like a lot of the men I saw around there, unshaven, heavy, slow to smile. I sat on our couch and turned on the radio and listened to a song playing out from the Lower 48. My mother called out from the stove, “Tell him it’s true. He doesn’t believe me. You should believe me, Toby. I have a reliable witness.”
“What?” I asked.
“He doesn’t believe what happened to your father. Remember that? Isn’t it all true?” I turned from the TV and saw her hold up two sausage links. She opened her mouth in a circle, fish-like, and made a feint at them, as if to swallow, as she watched the man. “Just like that,” she said, and she laughed. “What can you do with a man who doesn’t believe in things?” she asked. “Everything I tell him he looks at me like we’re playing poker.”
“It’s all true,” I said. “Everything.”
In the early evening the moose would come down the hill, usually one large one trailing a couple of calves, their heads lowered in a way that seemed almost shy. I’d watch them from the porch and as long as I didn’t move they’d come closer and closer. It was something I was good at and sometimes it seemed that they’d come so close I could touch them. Then something would happen—the smallest of noises—and they’d lift their heads and recede back into the trees. It was early June and everything in Fairbanks was turning green again.
Often my mother sat inside reading her books. She had transitioned to how-to manuals, things about building your own house, vegetarian cookbooks, home remedies with small drawings of leaves and herbs. We were living with her girlfriend Bianca and my mother was talking about building another room onto the back of the place. Sometimes the three of us slept in the same big bed, me on the far-right edge, my arm dangling to the cold floor. Although often Bianca patted my back and said, “Okay, now. Go on and get,” and I’d head off to the couch in the cabin’s only other room.
We brushed our teeth outside and spat the toothpaste onto the ground. I remember that for some reason and also the smell of the wet lowlands, decaying leaves and fallen branches and sometimes the smell of a rotting animal coming in from a long way off. It was not a bad smell, it was just nature, and late at night we’d sit outside and Bianca would tell us stories about working the pipeline. It was tough, she said, but the money was fantastic and as long as you didn’t weaken—as long as you didn’t spend the money on drugs and booze—then you could make a good life for yourself. Which is what she had done. Now she worked sporadically as a river guide.
She reminded me a little of my father because she was slow speaking, slow moving. She wore a black hoodie most of the time, even when the weather grew hotter, and smoked cigarettes, dropping the butts into a Coke bottle she kept on the porch. “Never do this,” she’d say, as she finished one off, and then she’d tell a story about someone falling out of her boat or a guy busting himself up because he did something foolhardy while working on the line. She’d tell us about the parties afterward, men running through money on cocaine, snorting it right off the table at a local diner between mouthfuls of pancakes. All of it seemed to have happened a long time ago but it was just a couple of years.
I was twelve, almost thirteen, and my mother told me, “This is it. Wasn’t it worth it?” She cut her hair short and took to wearing a knit cap. In the morning she’d be the first one up and I’d hear her outside splitting logs. By the time I was out of bed she was already inside, smelling of birch, slivers of wood on her T-shirt, putting dishes down on the table. We ate dried salmon and eggs for breakfast, the same thing for lunch on weekends.
I was going to school again and although I was failing a lot of the work, I had made a few friends. We’d roam around the halls, skipping classes, and it felt like innocent fun, like we were just exploring. I would spit in the drinking fountain, kick open a door and head outside. “We should be careful,” one of them said, and not long after I rifled through a closet of art supplies they began to avoid me. I’d see them up ahead and they’d act like they couldn’t hear me calling out to them.
“Nice shirt,” I said to one of them when I finally caught him alone in the hall. “Nice new pants.”
“I got to go to the office,” he said.
“I’ll walk with you,” I said, but I trailed just behind him, sometimes kicking the back of his foot. “I’ve been missing you,” I said.
“Cut it out,” he said, and stopped and stared me down.
I went right inside and knocked him into the lockers just to hear them clatter. When I came away again he was hurting, holding his face, and I felt sorry, not for him really, but for myself and mostly for my mother, because I thought I knew what would happen next. This was a long time ago and a teacher could grab a kid by the back of the neck and shake him. That’s what happened to me. The burly shop teacher gripped me hard and I almost came off my feet.
“Wait,” I said, as if I had something to say in my defense, and he loosened his grip.
“Don’t spoil this for me, Harold,” my mother screamed at me in the car on the way home.
“I’m not going to spoil anything,” I said.
“You spoiled his smile,” she said. “You knocked out two teeth. That’s money I don’t have right there. Is that all you know how to do? I swear sometimes. Maybe you are a man. Maybe I should start treating you like one.”
“I don’t know what that means,” I said.
She stopped because there were moose ahead, just before the turn to the dirt road that led to our place, to Bianca’s place. I liked to believe that I could tell the difference between two moose and these seemed familiar, a family that lived close by, maybe. She twisted her fists on the wheel while we waited. By then we were used to them and they could just be an inconvenience. Their slowness now made me think of the elderly and they seemed fragile out there, especially the three smaller ones.
“Fuck,” my mother said. “I was just starting work this week. You’re going to have to stay home by yourself. Can you do that?”
I didn’t say anything. The last calf moved down into a rut and then off into the woods and my mother picked up speed onto the dirt road, past a long row of mailboxes. All the streets were named by miners. Grubstake. Hardrock. Each name a kind of boast. I looked out the passenger window away from her at the white trees flickering past. “You know what?” I said. “There’s reasons for what I do. Good reasons.”
“Oh yeah?” she said. “That’s just great. There are reasons for what I do too. You can’t stand that I’m happy with Bianca. And don’t look at me like you don’t know what I’m talking about. I know more about what’s going on in your head than you do.”
“You drive too fast,” I said. “Someday you’re going to get us killed.”
“Shut up,” she said. “Just shut up. We’re five minutes from home. Can you keep your mouth shut that long?”
I made a sound of agreement, guttural, somewhere from my insides.
“I said shut up,” she said. “No more about her.”
A few days later Bianca returned from Homer smelling of salt water and my mother smiled for the first time that week. We cooked up caribou from the freezer and Bianca stood apart from us smoking while my mother worked the grill. “What’s news this week?” Bianca asked.
“Nothing much,” my mother said. “Pretty boring. The cycle of life continues.”
“Well,” Bianca said. “A Cessna crashed into the Beluga Lake while I was there. I mean, I wasn’t there. I didn’t see it. But I heard about it, and I met the guy who was flying the plane. He just walked away from it.”
“Swam away from it,” my mother said.
“Yeah, swam,” Bianca said, and she smiled.
“Did he do something stupid? All your stories have someone doing something stupid. But you’re never the stupid one.”
Bianca shrugged and looked out at the line of forest.
“Everybody but you,” my mother said.
“Is the food ready?” I asked.
“We need you around here more,” my mother said. “I have a son, in case you didn’t notice.”
Bianca shrugged but she rubbed out her cigarette and moved closer. “Don’t touch me,” my mother said. “I’m not in the mood.”
“Okay, okay,” Bianca said, and she held up her hands in surrender. I remembered my father making a similar gesture but I couldn’t place it in a moment. I could recall my mother telling him to stop but not the exact words. And then it was gone, wiped away by my mother’s voice.
“I’ve had adventures too,” she said. “I’m as strong as you.”
My mother held up her hand as if to show off a ring, but there was no ring there. “Yeah, I know, I know,” Bianca said. “The fingers.”
“Right,” my mother said. She seemed on the verge of screaming again, just like in the car, but her voice stayed low. “Alaska isn’t the only dangerous place in the world. You don’t have a monopoly on that.”
“C’mon,” Bianca said. “Why are you being this way?”
My mother wasn’t even listening. “There’s no bluefish here. We had to gut it down the length of its body and pull it out. I said before that there was no pain but it was very painful. It hurt like hell. And there were people there who thought it was funny, I could tell, even though I was missing a finger. They weren’t smiling but I could tell, they wanted to laugh at the dumb girl who got her hand too close.”
“So we’re picking up where we left off?” Bianca asked. “Is that what we’re doing? Why are you in such a bad mood, for God’s sake? I thought me being away would help.” She looked at my mother and something hard came into her face, a look I couldn’t read. “This is for shit,” she said, and she went into the house. I could hear her marching into the back room.
My mother turned to me and said, “What? Haven’t you seen a lover’s quarrel before?”
“There’s no scar, Mom,” I said.
“Yeah, well,” she said. “If you look close enough.”
“Mom,” I said.
“Look,” she demanded, and she put her hand to my face.
I’ve learned that things seldom end in one moment. We stayed there for a couple of more months but one day in early November Bianca met me at the school bus, her hands shoved into the pockets of her hoodie. “Hello, kiddo,” she said. “Just thought I’d have a walk with you.”
“Sure,” I said. “Nice to see you,” because she had been in Sitka for two weeks.
“Great,” she said and we began our walk home.
“Your mother will say some bad shit about me,” she said, “and some of it’s going to be true. I just wanted you to know that I’m not usually the one who breaks it off. I’m the one who sticks around. Really. And I like you a lot, kiddo. You know that, right?”
“I do,” I said, because that’s what I was supposed to say. I knew that even then.
“Good,” she said. “I’m not going to give you piles of advice, but I will tell you one thing.” And then she stopped because she saw my mother up ahead, standing in the snow. She was wearing Bianca’s heavy parka and she looked small and strange and for a second, I thought she might turn and run. I suppose she looked frightened, that’s what I’m trying to say, but I don’t know why I would think that. She was too far away to see her face. “Man,” Bianca said, when she saw her coat. “For a second I thought that was me.” I tried to laugh a little but I realized that I had thought the same thing, and not as a joke. For a moment I had thought Bianca was out there and also standing next to me. We stood and waited for my mother to do something, to come closer or go away. Finally, Bianca said, “Just take care of yourself, okay?” And she reached out and her hand touched the back of my neck and I was the one who wanted to run.
I reached up and slapped her hand hard, hard enough that she made a noise and pulled it back, the way you do when you touch something burning. It was that fast. I watched her hold her hand close to her chest and then I moved in, striking at her body until something hit me back, so strong that my feet came loose beneath me and I hit the ground. I heard my mother yelling, “Leave him alone. Leave him alone.” And then I rose to my feet. “I’m fine,” I said. “It’s nothing.”
“It’s all coming back to me,” my mother said. “Look at this. This is where I would hide.” And she slid open a small door, bent down, and looked inside at the square hole. There were blankets in there, a small box that I thought might be a mousetrap. “I used to get a pillow and a flashlight and read books. I wonder if there are any books still in there. What do you think?”
My grandmother sat downstairs in the living room, a shawl across her lap, watching the TV. I had never met her before. I hadn’t even known where she lived: only an hour from our old house on the coast, in Haverhill, Massachusetts, a place we used to drive past on the highway.
“I wish I had a flashlight,” my mother said. “You probably have better eyes than me. Come down here and look.” She knelt and pushed herself half into the space. I leaned down above her but I couldn’t see anything. “Hey, hey,” she said. “A discovery.” She pulled some dust-covered books out and something else, a pair of black leather gloves. “For some reason I used to like to read with those on,” she said. “I don’t know why. It felt nice, I guess.”
At dinner my mother raised her voice loud to speak to my grandmother. “I’ll do the dishes,” she said. “You just show me where to put things. We don’t want to be an inconvenience.”
My grandmother said, “We used to call your mother Mouse because she was always underfoot.”
“Mom,” she said. “Please.”
“I’m sorry about your father. I didn’t know.”
“We’ve been over that, Mom,” she said. “That’s ancient history. This food is pretty good, by the way. You still know how to burn a meatloaf.”
My grandmother looked at me across the lazy Susan. I could tell there was more that she wanted to tell me. “Pass the catsup,” my mother said, and I gave it a spin.
At school that week the kids asked me where I was from and I told them Alaska. They stood around me in a half-circle, sizing me up, and the more they looked the more I looked back. I could feel my hands ball up in my coat pockets. “Nobody’s from Alaska,” one of the kids said. “It’s just glaciers and polar bears. What were you doing there? Living in an igloo?”
“You don’t know anything,” I said.
That afternoon my mother picked me up in my grandmother’s Chevy Impala. Her hair was styled, pasted down across her forehead, and for the first time I saw the connection between them, something I couldn’t identify, but hoped ran through me too. She opened the door for me, slammed it hard. It seemed a perfect car to escape in, much better than the other one we had owned. That one made rattling sounds when you brought it out on the highway. This one smelled like butterscotch. “I can’t believe this,” she said. “What are you trying to do to me?”
I sat watching the front of the school. It was early afternoon and the rest of the kids were still in there at their desks. “They didn’t believe me,” I said.
“Believe you about what?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
She pulled away from the curb and I imagined that we were going someplace else other than home. “You’ve got to listen to me,” she said. “I know things have been rough, but they’re going to get better. A lot better. Don’t become a stone on me. Look at me when I’m talking to you.” But I was staring at the houses gliding by, the fences and porches and squares of lawn. She was going fast and it was starting to stream together. I put my hand to my face and closed my eyes and I could feel the vibration of the car engine in my body, the car moving beneath me. She said, “Tell me what they said. You want me to understand, don’t you?”
“I guess,” I said, and I felt like I might be flying. Or pushing through the water. The tires sounded like water passing under us and then when I opened my eyes I realized that it was water and it had started raining. Had I fallen asleep? Everything had become different. The car up ahead glowed in our high beams. My mother was still driving fast, even faster, through a place I didn’t recognize.
It’s easy to just fall asleep again and then wake up somewhere else.
This is how we moved through the world back then, and even now, when people ask me about my mother I don’t know where to begin and where to end. Newburyport, or Alaska, or northern Montana or the others. I have not talked to her in a long time and I imagine her in each of these places and then I am there too. What would I tell her if I had a voice? That they didn’t believe the story of the fish that took my finger.
But that’s not what made me throw the first punch, the second punch, and the next and the next. They didn’t believe the next part, because I told them my mother didn’t miss a beat. I told them how she pulled out the knife and slit it open and found the stolen thing there, and now look, here it is, returned to me, my hand made whole. Watch it move. Watch it open and close. The same as it was before. See it open up in a wave. See it close into a fist. Isn’t it amazing? Isn’t it so strange?