PETER COASTED DOWNHILL. The “Welcome to the Makah Nation” sign receded to a speck in his rearview. He stepped on the gas, ready to get this over with. And just like that, a cop swung into position behind him. Neah Bay PD.
Dread coiled in his gut. His eyes flitted to the speedometer. 35 in a 25. The officer spoke into his radio and settled back in his seat. Peter slowed and waited for the flashing lights. None came.
He peered out the passenger window. The wrinkled gray water of Neah Bay rippled north from the Coast Guard dock and around Waadah Island, unfurling toward a container ship suspended in a line of fog that pierced the strait. Damp driftwood beaches divided the bay from town. The reservation’s main drag was lined by low buildings and trailers, some proud and tidy, others boarded up, defiant. There were still no stoplights. Dogs made dirt nests wherever they saw fit to bed down.
He was almost home.
Peter pulled over by a semicircle of young men on Front Beach, heads bent toward a common purpose. He lit a cigarette and watched the cop pass him to cut left into a big parking lot. The cruiser spun a circle to face Front Street.
Dozens of bald eagles spotted the mudflats, dipping their heads and slumping their shoulders, spreading water on their wings and shaking themselves clean, fluffing their leg plumage to step from one pool to another. Peter thought of his father, who in a rare fit of whimsy once said eagles pulled up their petticoats to bathe.
That he tried not to think of his dad, but did, proved his constant lack of self-control, an admission that he was less than a man. The only good hours were those he lost underwater, mind on the glare, sucking stale air and pissing his suit. Welding made sense. He could measure a day’s progress without searching his soul. Nothing but light and metal. That’s what he saw when he sat poolside with other trainees doing flutter kicks with fins on, abs burning—a tiny bright arc turning into piers and harbors, a long line of pilings carrying everything above.
He checked the cop, casual as he could. Still there. Sweat beaded the lines of his forehead.
If he spun around and stepped on it, he could probably stay ahead long enough to make it back off the rez, where a tribal cop was unlikely to bother. They could always call in the feds, or Clallam County. A state trooper, even. He doubted they cared about long-dead Indians.
Eagles shrieked from the highest branches of a cedar towering above the beach. Their whistling unsettled him. Two girls with green braids walked by, heads bowed over phones.
Raucous laughter drew his head to the right. Between the men’s shifting, shuffling legs, Peter saw a crow hopping with a can in its clutches, thrusting its beak inside and tumbling before going aloft with a quick flap of wings.
Low hills slid toward the strait. Skinny trees grew in silent crowds over the clearcuts of his youth. The town clustered on the flatland along the water. Recognition clutched at him. This is your place. He batted it away. I don’t belong here.
Peter listened to the sway and clank of the marina—that was new—and tried not to look for their old troller. It was easy enough. The fleet had tripled in size. Who made good? Probably the same names that dominated back in the day.
For as long as there was memory, Neah Bay had been a collection of families soaked in drama and the preservation of status, each head of family claiming chiefs for ancestors—never mind the slave blood that coursed in the night—mapping triumphs in public, charting in private the fall of a cousin, a sister. It was only a question of when tragedy would hit, he thought. Not how. There are only so many ways to wreck a life.
Maybe he underestimated his own. The big boats at berth told him that, and so did the new gym’s digital sign. The Red Devils had a tourney coming up. He hadn’t played basketball since high school. Had his mom kept his jersey?
One of the women who tried to claim him, Tammy—even her name was suburban, and that’s where her folks lived, on the outskirts of Bellevue, though she tried to hide it—was always going on about racist mascots. He hated when she got involved with shit like that; it let him know he was part of her street cred with the guilty liberals she called compatriots. She had a master’s degree and waited tables, for Christ’s sake. Being on the ass end of capitalism didn’t make her revolutionary, even if she liked to paint.
He tossed the filter and pulled onto Front Street. The cop eased out behind him, stayed close as they passed a VFW trailer. Didn’t flip his lights until they approached a big building with long ramps.
Here we go. Peter was furious he’d stashed his gun in the toolbox. This place never forgets. The officer strode up with a notebook, fingering his holster, speculative. Peter tried the breathing exercises he found online to fight anxiety. He hid his unease as best he could. No one likes a nervous man.
“Peter.”
He kept his silence with both hands on the wheel, so there could be no excuses later.
“I seen you comin’ down the hill. You back?”
“Depends. Maybe.”
“You been gone a long time.”
“Am I getting a ticket?”
“Don’t recognize me?” The cop pulled off his aviators. His face was wide, like someone had stepped on it, pushing his cheeks into jowls that bulged. Still, there was something in his eyes, a brightness that moved beneath, bringing intimations of boyhood.
Peter squinted. “Randall.”
Randall’s hand crowded Peter’s face. They shook, compressing each other’s fingers until Randall grinned and called it off. “Three kids, a wife. You?”
“Flying solo. On my way to see my mother.”
“About time. You should come over, meet the kids.”
“Who’s the lucky lady?”
“You and Maggie don’t talk, eh?”
Peter was no longer panicked, but he was getting irritated. Why exactly had he been pulled over?
Randall smiled, sure of himself. “Roberta.”
Roberta read Peter’s lifeline when they were kids. “You’re gonna die before you get old.” She traced his palm with a chipped red nail. She smiled, hair spilling silken on the inside of his wrist, showing her dimples. “You’re gonna have lots of lovers, though. Lucky guy.”
“Lucky? To die young?”
“Yeah.” She pressed his hand between hers. “You know, go out when you’re still good looking, the ladies chasing you right into the grave.”
“You think I’m good looking?” He flipped his hand around to take her by the wrists, fingers meeting and overlapping, body screaming to bring her close. He never forgot what she said, or what they did. It never felt inevitable to love someone again.
The ache echoed through his chest. Roberta was the one who tracked him down with the diagnosis—dementia—his mother squirreled away with so many other secrets. Roberta hadn’t said anything about being married. To be fair, he didn’t ask, hustling off the phone to nurse the old hurt alone. She must not have told Randall about the call. That was encouraging.
Her husband was a big cock in a small town, but he had his gun at the ready. It was good to keep that in mind.
“Congratulations.”
“You can go along. I just wanted to say hi.”
“Put on a little show, you mean.”
A handful of elders gathered on the building’s ramps.
“I seen you coming down the hill.”
“Yep, that’s what you said.”
A man in a Seahawks baseball cap, eagle feather dangling from its crown, shuffled down the ramp. Peter steered his truck past him, stomach curdling with spent fear. An old woman covered with blankets sat in a folding chair across the street. Slow as a heron stalking the shallows, she turned to watch the action.
“I’m not ready for this.” His dashboard rattled in response, like always.
Speeding past dead ends choked with blackberries and trucks on blocks, Peter wove around basketball hoops and sedans with flat tires. But Diaht Hill had come up in the world. Every third or fourth house had a new SUV pulled up front. There were neat woodpiles and clipped lawns. He slowed by the old carvings, here a thunderbird with mother of pearl eyes, there a mossy headed whale.
His family’s patch of land was a postcard of a place he’d never been, at first. Just a tired doublewide. But soon he saw himself flying on a bike with the training wheels snapped off, heard big boots scraping the pavement behind him, his front wheel wobbling and tipping him into the gutter, bloody but toughing it out as his dad scooped him up and carried him to the couch.
He bade his memories be quiet as he stepped onto the street. And then his mother was standing there, smaller, distilled.
Peter took her birdlike shoulders into his arms, guarding his smile. Cataracts ghosted the blacks of her eyes. He touched the gray cloud of her head and hugged her. Knowledge of his own mortality emanated from the bones shifting, frail as popsicle sticks, beneath the loose skin of her back.
Through the tickle of her hair, the trailer’s tufted brown carpet came into focus. He braced himself, blinking against the vision that came to him unbidden. Blood and oil spreading on plaid linoleum, pooling around his dad, spread eagle and unmoving.
“Thick as a tree.” His mother patted his chest. “I made coffee.”
She pulled him in, shooing a herd of cats from the porch and shutting the door against the smiles and stares of neighbors.
It was dark inside and smelled of wood smoke, coffee, cat piss and a dank funk he could not place. He fought the urge to breathe through his shirt.
“Jesus, Mom.”
She edged past yellowed stacks of the Peninsula Daily News and milk crates filled with old phonebooks. A narrow path snaked toward the bedrooms through mounds of debris tall enough to block the windows. His disquiet deepened.
He followed her, lifting his arms, trying not to touch anything. The piles brushed against his calves, his knees, his thighs, his hips.
She pushed open the door to his childhood bedroom. His jersey hung on the wall. The floor was clear but for cobwebs waving in the corners and balls of dust that spun in the wake of their arrival. Had she known he would come? Or just held out all these years?
His daybed squealed in complaint when he sat on its swayed back; he remembered his teenaged vigilance, oiling the bedsprings through a narrow red straw to mask dull nights of jacking off.
“How about that coffee?”
Peter stepped sideways through aisles wide enough for a woman. A wood stove warmed the room; this place was a firetrap. He gathered strips of cedar bark and bear grass from the coffee table, making his way down to a layer of graph paper covered with basketry patterns. Her notebook lay open to a series of dots forming the long curve of a whale and the arc of its tail. Behind, six figures leaned forward in a long canoe. All paddled but the man in front, harpoon at the ready.
Moving so slow it hurt to watch, she slid the tray onto the table and sank into the chair that was his dad’s favorite, despite its pattern of covered wagons. Cups and spoons clattered, coffee staining the creased packets of powdered creamer. Peter did not react, not wanting to embarrass her. He flicked a pack until one end was fat and tore it open, drowning the lumps, patch by patch.
“It’s good you’re here.”
He tossed the spoon on the tray. A cold film covered his palms. He rubbed them dry on his knees, overwhelmed by the desire to wash his hands. Two tabbies appeared, meowing and rubbing his shins. He stamped his feet.
They sat, sipping. The rain was tender at first, then violent. The trailer shook with its force.
His mother held her mug like an offering. Her swollen wrists distended sideways; the acute angle of attachment and disproportionate size of her joints made her hands seem welded onto the wrong body.
He jiggled his leg. “What’s with the stuff?”
“I’ve been saving it.”
“What for?”
“There are things you will need to know.”
Peter studied the path along the floor, trying not to take the measure of his absence by the height of the piles. He went away inside himself to fill his face with forced cheer. “Let’s go through it. While I’m here.”
“How long will that be?”
“I don’t know.”
She pressed on the cap of an orange vial. Her whole body shook. Failing twice, she extracted a round pill with a jagged nail.
“What’s that?”
“Methadone.”
“Wow.”
“My rheumatoid arthritis.”
“You could make good money with those on the street.” His joke came out like an invitation.
“The clinic counts our pills.”
Peter flinched, looking around for something to say.
“You make me wish I still smoked, son. And you’re late.”
What did she mean by “late”? She always claimed to know things. A lot of Indians claimed to expect shit that happened. “I saw a crow flying backwards, and then they called to tell me my cousin died, but I already knew.” If she knew so much, why hadn’t she done something?
She was it, the only one who knew what they’d done after he came upon her in the kitchen, her face purpled, forehead smeared with blood and oil, his dad’s head in her hands, broken.
He’d never told anyone about that night, which lived in him nonetheless as waking dreams. He would break his promise to guard their silence. He needed to talk to his mother before dementia took the memories he most wanted from her, the only things he needed from her, because he sure as fuck would not load this crap into his truck when he left. And he would leave. She would not snare him with need. He was older now.
“Peter.” She repeated his name.
He jerked as though he’d been kicked. It wasn’t usually this bad. Being here was making him worse.
“Sorry. You were saying?”
“I was asking if you’re with someone.”
“I’m not here to make brown babies, Mom.”
“Geez, you’re touchy, eh?” She pushed her mug from the edge of the table. “Why don’t you unpack? I’ll make lunch.”
“What are we having?”
“Canned smoked salmon and French fries—your favorite.” She touched his knee. “Help this old woman up?”
Putting his boots toe to toe with her slippers, he slid his hands along her forearms until his thumbs came to rest at the crooks of her elbows and rocked back, waiting for her thigh muscles to catch as she straightened, her smile showing a strong line of teeth grown crooked.
The top of her head reached his clavicle. “Put the cups in the sink.”
They zigzagged to the kitchen. “Mom, you can barely get around in here.”
“I manage.”
“The cats pissed on your newspapers.”
“Finally put to good use.”
He snorted. “We’ll get rid of some stuff, okay?”
The scanner squawked and burbled, gushing forth a domestic disturbance at 200 Line. Peter lowered the volume, fighting the old feel of a fist on his face. She heated oil in a cast iron pan. Stooping to pull a bag from the bottom drawer of the fridge, she untied the handles—potato peelings—and considered the garbage can in the corner. He did everything but whistle and stick his hands in his pockets. Blushing, she plunged a hand into the garbage and retrieved a saggy plastic bag, giving it a good shake to free wet coffee grounds from its folds.
From the kitchen, Peter studied the maze of mementos. The crates were trussed into a globe that tapered and curled up into a fan. A whale. He turned his back on it and scraped a chair from the breakfast table, sick with regret. Her madness pressed at him from all sides. He forced himself to get used to watching her stagger. “The oil is smoking.”
She scowled and snatched the pan off the burner. Oil sloshed onto the red-hot coils. Flames licked the cast iron’s inside edge, broadening into a circle of blue fire she stared into with a strange inquisitive smile, like that of a shy child.
“Don’t move!” Peter stepped in to lift the pan high and level, keeping the blaze away from the piles as he hurried to the front door and kicked it open, ripping the screen from its frame. Cold air blew the flames toward his face. Cursing, his arms hot and quivering, he lobbed the stream of fire into the grass. It leapt and fizzled.
“Burning down the house already?” On the porch next door, Dave tucked an empty bottle into a cardboard six-pack holder at his feet and withdrew another with the same gesture. “Thirsty?”
“No.”
“Sweet tea . . .”
“Next time.”
“Welcome home! Remember me?”
“Yep.” Dave, too, was whorled with years, his body bent in odd places, the strange stoop and slope of age.
“Maggie don’t have to have her place all tore up like that. We tried.”
“I’d better go.”
“Married? Kids?”
“Nope.”
“I’ll draw you a map of the best poon in town.”
“I’d like to see that.”
“What have you been up to?”
“I’m a commercial diver. Underwater welder.”
His mother shouted from inside. “Quit meddling!”
“Just talkin’, Maggie.” Dave jammed the bottle’s neck through the crook of his knee and twisted the cap. “Ahhh. There she goes.”
She beckoned Peter. “I’ll clean up and try again.”
Peter carried the pan back to the kitchen. “Hasn’t changed much.”
“Stopped boozing.”
“Huh. When?”
“Right after you left. About time, I guess. Chases tail less than he used to. So that’s something. I got tired of his advances. Ha! More like retreats.”
Peter tugged until he heard the doorknob click, wincing as his boots crushed kitty litter spilling from a tray wedged between the toilet and the wall. Rummaging through the drawers, his hand brushed against a folded Buck knife. His father’s.
He saw his dad whittling a stick for s’mores, smelled logs smoldering in rain, laughed again about genuine Indian smoked marshmallows. Heard the splatter of rain on their matching slickers, gusts blowing their hoods back and sending them stumbling across the Magdalene’s deck. Saw his dad cut two plugs from a still gaping salmon, its hooked jaw working, soundless, as he popped one in his mouth, grinning and chewing and offering the other, shouting above the wind, “Sushi! Japs love this shit! They’ll pay top dollar. Not like timber. Remember that.” Saw a pile of nets seeping blood around still feet. His dad went out right around this age, but at least he left something, had people who would remember him. Peter’s midlife hovered over him like an avenging angel, ready to exact its tribute in quiet desperation, and here he was, back at home, trying to deal with the only person who still gave a shit about him.
He needed something to calm down. He opened the medicine cabinet with a sense of reverence. Shelves and shelves of vials. Turning on the faucet to cover the rattle of pills, he rotated a few.
May cause nausea. May cause dizziness, drowsiness or brief hallucinations. Do not operate heavy machinery for 12 hours after taking. Call your doctor immediately if a rash appears. Cease taking immediately and call 9-1-1 if you begin vomiting.
Peter shut the cabinet. It didn’t matter where he went or what he took. Their shadow was always on him. His mother hadn’t asked why he came home, and he hadn’t given her a reason after decades of refusing to step foot on this reservation.
They were so goddamned alike. Biding their time.