CAUGHT BETWEEN HIS daybed and the wall, his arm was chilled. A downpour rattled the trailer. His trapped hand clutched the bedpost, asleep. Touch sent painful tingles through the warm, alien skin. He left it and watched rain dapple the glass.
The dream, again. That night teemed through his mind like he had never stopped bailing his dad’s blood with a sawed-off milk jug, crying and shaking and sloshing clean water on the gunwales while his mom watched from the troller.
“Gimme some light!”
“Looks good,” she hollered. “Let’s go!”
The skiff dipped and spun with the restless ocean. Staggering, he stripped and flung his clothes overboard and his boots into the troller. Winding line around his wrist, he leapt in.
The cold bit hard. He thrashed and scrubbed at his stained hands, his mind tugged down a long spiral to the sea floor, his father’s big frame falling through the deep like a feather, blown off course by sharks that would bump and nose and return, grimacing.
His arm snapped up, tangled in line she hauled in, one fistful at a time.
“Want me to take over?” Hacking out the words, his throat and lungs raw with salt, he clung to a cleat, covering his nakedness.
“I know the way.”
The skiff orbited the buoys. Two ravens circled, croaking. They flapped toward the wooded coastline emerging green and misty in the early light. To the north, dark jade mountains. Vancouver Island. Just south, Shi Shi Beach buckled into sea stacks towering above the froth. She motored past Tatoosh Island into the mouth of the strait, scanning the horizon through smears of cloud.
Waves wept from rocky shores. He checked over his shoulder. The land was gone. Sobs echoed, endless and rising beneath the boat, reverberating through his body, whirling him awake. Again.
“Shit.” He rolled out of bed, wiping his wet face, trying to shake off the dream that loomed like a hangover too many mornings.
The air in her room was humid with the warmth of slumber. A murky wail erupted from her chest, chased by splutters. Her hands raised above her head, snarled in sheets printed with basketballs and hoops. His childhood sheets, worn to holes. He took her arm. The fleece sparked and shocked him. “Ow. Mom!”
“Huh?” She pushed her face between her dimpled elbows. “What’s the matter?”
“You were crying. In your sleep.”
“Sorry.” She eased out a hand. It quavered against the folds of her neck.
“Don’t be.” His voice was groggy. “I’m going now.”
“You’re going to leave me.” Shadows moved across her face. She plucked at the sheets, fitful.
She had no right to guilt him, no right to be weak just when he was ready to reckon with the ache he held so close it had grown into his skin. This old woman came along and stole his mother, leaving someone too frail to fight. Peter went back the way he came, sidestepping through her crap, and pressed his spine against the doorframe.
“You were dreaming.” The price of his silence was flight. Always had been. “It’s four in the morning.”
“Time to get up.” She raised one knee, then the other.
“Go back to bed.” He reached for the doorknob.
“I’m old, son.” She massaged her thighs with the heels of her hands. “Sleep doesn’t come when I call.”
“Well, good morning then, and good night.”
Bleach water sluiced down the drain. Peter scoured the bathtub, mulling over whether his mother was demented, forgetful or a mastermind. Maybe she got bad on purpose to bring him back. Being here felt wrong. This was not how it was supposed to go. He rinsed the brush, yellow gloves slippery. Bit by bit, his mind rested on what was in front of him until every surface was clean but his own.
Refreshed, or at least showered, Peter paused by his mother’s room and tapped the plywood with his knuckles. Hearing nothing, he banged harder. No response. He girded himself to see her sprawled on the floor and hip checked the door. Nothing. Her bed was made. The rest of the room was knee deep. Where was she?
Bread cooled on the kitchen counter. He snuck a piece.
“Mom?” He swallowed the last bits, cleared his throat and called again, louder this time. “Mom!”
A crow cawed. It began to rain.
Could she be with Dave? Peter hurried next door. No one answered his knock. Inside, the TV blared celebrity news—boob jobs, cleanse diets and DUIs. Peter gave another three blows.
“I said, come in!”
A teenage boy cradled the remote in the middle of a couch covered in burn holes and car magazines, the television so loud that Peter had to shout.
“I’m Peter, Maggie’s son. Your next door neighbor!”
The boy made no move to get up. “I’m Beans. Dave’s my Grampa.”
“Is he around? I’m looking for my mom.”
“The waitress at Warm House called. Maggie headed up 200 Line again.”
“When were you going to tell me?”
“Grampa’s got it handled.” Beans changed the channel.
“I would have gone!”
“He’s got nothing else to do.”
“I’d like to know if my mom is wandering.”
“She goes straight for 200 Line every time.”
“Why?” His mom told him about a big development—housing and services—being built clear across town in hills where folks used to bathe and pray, out of the way of the big wave that would come when the ground shook, which was just a matter of time.
The kid stared at a starlet’s court-mandated monitoring anklet.
“I said, why 200 Line?” Peter moved closer, noticing for the first time that Beans was stoned to the bejesus. The set’s blue flicker illuminated the patchy beard on his baby cheeks.
“I don’t know, she says she can hear drumming and stuff.”
“Why didn’t you come tell me my mother is wandering around hearing things?” Peter stepped in front of the television with folded arms. Beans leaned to one side for an uninterrupted view. “Look, I’m here now. I want to be notified when stuff like this goes down. I’ll be the one to get her. I’m going to leave my cell phone number on the counter. Give it to that waitress—what’s her name?”
“She won’t call you. She doesn’t know you. No one does.”
“She can get to know me.”
“I’m sure she’ll like that.”
His mother tottered along, her back curving toward the earth, flanked by Dave and an EMT who had draped his jacket over her shoulders and held an umbrella over her head. They nodded at him as he pulled alongside.
Peter watched Dave brush his mother’s head and shoulders with a cedar bough, shaking his rattle and singing in shifting, repeating tones. He stayed far enough away that the song was an idea of song. The melody slid toward him, passing through the downpour’s insistent conversation with the pavement.
After Dave brought her back, Peter tried to stay out of the way. This mute woman was foreign to him. Her bones creaked when he led her to her chair. He wrote down the names of her medications and called the clinic, asking what they were for and who prescribed them and could he talk to that person, but the lady who answered the phone said Maggie didn’t have paperwork on file naming a health care surrogate or giving him power of attorney. He started another list, detailing signatures he would need when his mother woke up to the world.
He cleared the hallway and living room, hoping to provoke a protest. None came. She watched him like a television, sitting in her armchair for days. He dismantled egg crates and threw phone books and newspapers into a trashcan fire he kept flickering in the front yard. The rest he shoved in garbage bags.
He hoped he wasn’t being negligent by letting her snap out of it. What if she’d had a stroke? Or maybe she took the wrong combination of pills. That’s probably what it was. I’m a bad son. She needs a doctor. Someone in Seattle should look her over. Would the tribe pay for it? Or did she belong in a nursing home? I didn’t come here to send her away.
He waited, working his way down the hall, reading headlines from newspapers draped over each pile.
TWO MAKAH APPEAL THEIR WHALING CONVICTIONS
TACOMA — Two Makah men convicted of two misdemeanor violations of the Marine Mammal Protection Act have appealed their verdicts in U.S. District Court.
The yellow corner of the Peninsula Daily News tore in his hands.
In the hearings, Arnold blocked Fiander’s attempts to defend Noel on the basis of the Makah’s 1855 Treaty of Neah Bay that guaranteed them the right to hunt whales, on tribal culture and on religious freedom.
He held up items—a crusty garden glove, a button blanket, stained potholders, strings of olive shells—and studied her face for an aftermath. He did this for days and into the nights, clearing a wide path, stacking bags along the wall, beating down dread, heartbeat swift and erratic, breath hurried. “We’ll go through these bags later. What do you think, Mom?” Did she nod? Her eyes became alert, as though her mind bobbed along the surface of things, but her mouth remained below, thick with jostling silence. He stumbled, sweaty, through the trailer, trying to sever his mind’s recurrent return to buoys lolling in the Pacific.
He burst onto the porch, drawing air like a dying fish, and nearly tripped over a bucket of geoduck clams tucked next to the door. He was hungry. His mother must be hungry, too. He hadn’t taken care of anyone, not even himself, for years. It stunned him how ill-prepared he was to be needed.
Squatting, he lit a cigarette and studied the clams by the glow of his lighter. Covered by clear water, they probed the strange surrounding stillness with slick taupe siphons.
Rimmed with dirt and dead flies, the windows still opened. Fresh air flooded the trailer. The stink clung to his clothes and the carpet. He got down on all fours, sniffing. His dad always checked the registers. Peter pulled the couch to one side and smelled the grate. He almost passed out. Bingo.
Before he foraged for whatever died below the trailer, he thought twice and locked the screen door. He would hear her this time.
Dropping his head into the damp dirt, he cast his flashlight around the trailer’s underbelly, pushing into the darkness, testing deep slumps in the fabric with a push, hoping to find what his dad called the “dead skunk bounce.” He’d begged to hold the flashlight as his father prodded and cursed, ash falling onto his cheek, cracking jokes. “This underbelly has more saggy udders than a dairy farm. No, wait! Than a bar in Forks!” Peter laughed out loud, remembering.
“What’s so funny under there?”
He froze, hearing old man wheezy grumbles. A faded, stained pant knee lowered into the grass, followed by tremulous hands. Dave’s face appeared sideways. “How’s it hanging, Peter?”
“Hey, Dave.”
“You know your mom could apply for a new trailer.” Dave settled in, hands folded on his knee.
“Really?” Peter flipped onto his elbows and pulled his bandana down.
“Yeah.” Dave brightened. “I don’t know why she won’t, what with all the history in there.”
Peter’s silence was a vast sucking mudflat.
“Just making conversation, son.”
“I’m busy.”
“I can see that.” Dave wobbled and smacked the trailer to steady himself.
“Wait!” Peter army crawled into the light. “I know I haven’t been around. We had our reasons. But I’m here now. I don’t want to find out my mom’s wandered off secondhand.”
“Beans told you I was bringing her back, didn’t he? He’s my grandson—my blood. That’s not secondhand.”
“I’m here to help.”
“Might need more help than you can give.” Gripping the vinyl for support, Dave bore down and plunked his foot into the grass, snorting a bit. “Push it away all you like. That stuff comes back.”
“I’ll handle my own business.”
“We’ll get you straightened out.” Dave threw his words over his shoulder. “You can come watch me work. If you keep your mouth shut.”
Peter cut a hole in the undercarriage, loosing a flurry of rodent flakes. Another. It was like a crypt down here.
“If you’re going to lock me in my own home, better make sure there’s not a hole in the front door,” his mom shouted. “I might climb out.”
“Look who’s talkin’.” He folded his mouth down, containing his happiness out of habit.
“Look who’s talking back. Haven’t changed a bit.”
Surrounded by small piles of rotted squirrel, he grinned, the bandana hugging his cheeks.
His mother’s fingers traced the ridged clamshell, tracking the geoduck’s age in calcium Braille. Its tough neck slumped, exposed.
“I’m misplacing things, I know that.” She slid a thin blade around the siphon, slipping the severed flesh into a bowl, and lifted the shell with both hands before letting it fall into the bucket with a hollow clatter. “Even words. Sometimes I can’t find them for a long while.” She smoothed hair from her forehead, lodging shards of shell in the strands, and searched out his eyes. “But you can’t misplace love. Even if the self that’s talking forgets, I am inside. I know you. I love you.”
Her hands, small and balled up like a child’s, barely encircled his waist when he hugged her, not thinking for once. His chin rested on her head; the mist of frizz that hung around her crown tickled his cheeks. In one breath, she smelled like a powdery old woman; in the next, she smelled like the sea.
“Look what I’ve done.” She pulled back, cataracts glinting. “You’re covered in clam!” She dabbed his shirt. The wrinkles around her mouth tensed.
“It’s going to be alright.”
“I know, son. I know. But then it won’t be.”
“I’ll take care of you.” There. The words escaped without his say so. The unsayable had been said.
“But who will take care of you?”
“Let me worry about that.” His fingers curled around her arms. “Make the fritters. I’ll get started on the windows.”
The shells splayed open like wings. She held them over the bucket.
Roberta opened the door with a quick knock, the kind of knock that isn’t meant to warn whoever lives inside. Peter was caught wearing boxers to a reunion he’d been daydreaming about for years. He tried to rearrange his expression from “What the fuck?” to “Welcome!” but the strange pulling of his cheeks told him his face landed on a grimace. He stood, solemn, as three kids blew past him to crowd around his mother, who let them stir the batter.
“You’re quite a sight.” Laughter had worn grooves into Roberta’s cheeks, intensifying her angles. Her cheekbones had risen and rounded. They nudged up next to her eyes, opening a fan of wrinkles toward her temples.
“It’s good to see you.”
“No hug?” She held her hands out, right arm drooping with an enormous slouchy purse.
“Let me get some pants on.”
Peter hustled down the hallway, glad he’d been able to resist his first and near fatal impulse to scream and cross his hands over his chest like a goddamned girl. He stepped twice into the wrong leg of his grimy jeans. He could hear Roberta call his mother “Auntie”—she started that when their mothers made them stop dating, and it pained him to hear it again. Those were her children. Were they all by Randall?
Roberta had her arm around his mother, who was smiling and saying, “Now just look at these kids. Can you believe it?”
“They’re beautiful, Roberta. How old?”
“Sarah’s five, Layla’s seven, and John is twelve. Kids, this is your Uncle Peter.”
Two high voices said hello.
His mind scrambled on Roberta’s nearness. White wires threaded the shiny black curtain that hung around her shoulders. What she must think of him. Left his mother to rot. Roberta would have seen it happen in real time, the slow creep of trash like moss on a log.
The boy stared him down. She cleared her throat. “You’ve cleaned up.”
“Not done yet.”
“She wouldn’t let anyone else do it, you know.” She squeezed his mother’s shoulders. “Waiting for him, eh?”
The oil in the pan hissed and spat.
“Still don’t talk much.” Roberta kicked his foot.
“Don’t know what to say.”
“You can’t be eating. You’re skinny.”
“Is that Indian for in shape?” Peter flexed a bicep, like he did in high school, when she would clutch his arm with small fingers.
“Don’t talk to my mom like that,” John said.
“Relax, buddy, he’s joking.” She palmed her son’s head. “We’re old friends. Family.”
“I’ve never seen him before.”
“That means you should be extra nice to him, not the other way around. Our great-grandfathers were brothers.”
His mother spooned golden clam fritters from the oil, soaking the paper towel and the plate beneath it. “Who wants one?”
John grabbed two and walked out. “I’ll be at Dave’s!”
Roberta blew on a fritter. “He’s testy lately.”
“I was a punk at that age. If you remember.”
“For you, son?”
His mouth blistered. He tried not to make a big deal of it, but his cheeks puffed out like a blowfish. Roberta smiled into her hand.
“I’ve still got it, don’t I?” Maggie tested a fritter with the back of her forefinger. “Too hot, Sarah. Wait a minute. You don’t want to end up like him.”
“I’m fine. Let me at another one. I’ll show it what’s what.”
“The rest of this batch goes to the girls.” Tiny hands made quick work of what was left. “Stay for dinner, Roberta?”
“Well, I thought I’d pop by and clean those clams, but you beat me to it. I have to make dinner for Randall.”
“Invite him over!” His mother spooned more batter into the pan. The oil attacked from all sides, bubbling and frothing.
Peter was sick to his stomach. A cop, in this trailer. Chill out, he told himself. Roberta would have kept up her visits to her uncle. Dave was right next door. Randall had been coming here for years. He’d seen the piles, the stains. It was an old kitchen, an old story no one was thinking about but Peter—and maybe Dave, who acted like he felt bad, real bad, after Peter’s dad went missing. They always threatened to net smelt after a night out. Dave said he thought Sam was joking. “You know, catching tail.” After the accident, as his mom took to calling it when search parties found the skiff, Peter avoided hangdog eyes; some people were glad to fade away. Not Roberta. Peter took off before he weakened enough to tell her what happened. He was glad she couldn’t see who he was inside. And then she got over him and married Randall, who was fair game because his mother was Yakama, far from the family tree.
“You brought the clams?”
“We dug ’em up this morning.”
“Thank you.” Peter always felt a slight sense of vertigo when he was about to do something he’d regret. He tried to keep himself from saying what he was about to say but couldn’t, even as his pulse quickened and the nausea started. “Leaving them in still water kills them faster.”
“Oh, yeah?” Roberta tucked her hair behind her ears. “Figures. My grampa used to wrap them in an old shirt. The girls wanted to make them feel at home.”
“When they’re in a closed environment like that, they asphyxiate.”
Layla piped up. “What does that mean?”
“They suffocate.”
She looked puzzled. He tried again. “Like drowning.”
She grinned, sure she had him. “They can’t drown! They live in water!”
“Um, it means they run out of oxygen. They use up what’s in the water.” I should listen when I have that feeling, he thought. Why don’t I listen?
His mother snatched up the spatula, dragging the greasy paper towel with it. Fritter crumbs formed a constellation across the linoleum. He stared at the stained plaid, saw his shirtless dad sprawled in jeans, bleeding out. He blinked and blinked again, started counting, clinging to the numbers.
“Mom!” She was stooping below the counter. He pulled her up and used the paper towel to wipe up the crispy bits, fighting his revulsion at the warm wetness against his palm, fighting the sound of sopping up swirls, fighting and wiping harder to hide the shake in his hands.
Someone tapped his shoulder. Roberta’s childhood face stared at him from between Layla’s braided pigtails. “I think you got it, Uncle Peter.”
A semicircle of women stood above him. He stopped. “Got carried away.” He smeared his palms on his jeans. “So. Fritters for dinner?”
The girls gathered close to their mother. She clasped a braid from each. “They’re tired. It’s been a long day. Maybe tomorrow.”
Peter tried to think of what to say, mourning their forgotten hug. “We’ve got company coming. A lady from out of town.”
“Anyone I know?”
“I doubt it.”
After they packed up and left, he scuffled to his room and dove back into the musty palm of his bed. Sleep called to him, a siren swaying in the dark. Tomorrow, we’ll work it out, he thought. That woman will turn up, get them talking about old times. Maybe he could take her out later, somewhere off the rez.
He hadn’t looked in on his mom for hours. Padding down the hall, he flattened his ear against her door and held still. Was that her breathing?
“Stop snooping, you big snoop!”
“Sorry! Just checking.”
“Good night! Keep going!”