Chapter Eleven

THE STORY OF Thunderbird and Whale begins with lack, an unfulfilled desire. In a Quileute version, Whale patrolled the deep, devouring. Men starved and prayed. Thunderbird heard them. He winged from his mountain aerie to haul Whale from the water. Thunderbird and Whale battled, flapping land and slapping sea until the earth shook and the ocean pulled back into itself and roared forth. Thunderbird abandoned Whale’s body on land to be cut into blubbery strips by survivors.

Many believe these stories memorialized the earthquake and tsunami of January 26, 1700. The Pacific convulsed from what is now Canada to California. Massive tree die-offs attest that a salty wave strafed the coast, scouring the shore of man and vegetation alike. A big surge with no shaking swept nearly five thousand miles west to Japan, where merchants and fishermen logged the date.

Generations later, the 1855 treaty of Neah Bay created the Makah reservation out of ancestral land in exchange for federal promises to preserve the tribe’s right to fish and hunt whales forever, a hard bargain struck by chiefs like Tse-Kaw-Wootl, who said, “I want the sea. That is my country.”

The Makah tribal logo still shows Thunderbird clutching Whale. In the midst of his people’s defense of their right to whale, which was under global siege, a Makah leader told a different story. His version began with a man, hungry and cold. Ice ruled the land. He climbed to the mountains to pray for an end to starvation. Thunderbird heard his cry—but it was Whale who came ashore to warm the land and people’s bellies. In this telling, whales beach themselves.

Daylight pressed against her eyelids. A bright smear beamed between her glued lashes. Her head was beyond aching. It pulsed.

The hangover occupied her entire body, spilling off the bed and pooling onto the floor, filling the room. She tipped her face to the window. Curtains parted onto a view of cloudless blue. Her eyes were sticky. So was her mouth. She closed her eyes again; the glare tackled her lids. From beneath, she saw a different planet, a red world veined with mauve.

Birds chirped. A car started. Tires scraped over asphalt. Children shouted in Spanish. A woman shushed them. A car door slammed. She squeezed her eyes shut, scrunching her face. Pain radiated from her temples.

Claudia spread her hands on the bed, patting rough folds of cotton. She was naked and alone but for two crumpled pillows. She reached between her legs. A swamp. Her period? She swiped at her lips and came up with silky black hairs too long to belong to her. Groaning, she turned her back to the window. She was alone now, but she hadn’t been.

Peter.

She tucked both hands between her thighs. She’d had unprotected sex with the son of her best hope for a meaningful qualitative study. Everyone would find out, if he felt like making it known. And what man wouldn’t. She swung her legs off the bed and sat up. Her headache expanded like a dying star.

A stripe of dirt and flies lined the gray carpet where it tucked into the plastic baseboard. The sound of her own breath echoed in her ears. She was sore. He’d given it to her how she liked it.

The children outside screamed and laughed. A vacuum bumped around the room next to hers. Sometimes Makahs worked these jobs; even if they lived off the reservation, they’d talk. She’d have to erase the evidence. She turned her head toward the door. It was not chained. She always chained the door. That meant they’d had sex here, or at least, come back here. She fought an image of his face moving above her, careening in and out of focus.

Her clothes were doubled over a chair. That’s not how she would arrange them. He tidied up. Craning her neck, she checked the other nightstand. Her keys were stacked next to a full glass of water. Had she driven herself here? If not, she would be seen walking an exposed and dangerous stretch of highway that had no other purpose this morning but to shame her. If so, she should already be ashamed. And she was. She had violated every code of ethics she ever agreed to hold sacred, and she did it on a whim, wasting herself on a drunk.

It couldn’t be undone. She drained the glass. Water ran down both sides of her mouth. She would have to make herself presentable. Driving down Front Street was like strolling a promenade. Everyone checked you out. If there was a halfway decent chance they knew you, drivers waved or weaved their cars to show you’d been seen.

Claudia stood up to tug the paisley curtains together, wondering if Peter left them parted on purpose. They stuck right where they were, loosing a light flurry of dust as the acrylic shimmied back into place. Okay, no. He hadn’t. She scurried to the bathroom, hiding her ass and avoiding the mirror, and checked the wastebasket. No condom, no shiny wrapper, not even a tiny, torn-off corner. Maybe he flushed them. No, that wasn’t it, and she knew that already.

She faced her reflection. Her shoulders and breasts bore rough red patches. Claudia pirouetted to check her back. On her neck, next to her spine, four bruises bloomed in a row, purple as pansies. Seeing them alarmed her.

A shower. First things first.

The motel stocked the kind of soap that splits in two when you open the wrapper, and nothing else. It would have to do. Her fingers smelled like cum and cigarettes. She didn’t dare take a whiff of her hair. She pulled the curtain and started the water, nearly falling out of the tub when a cold spray sputtered out of the showerhead. Then again, cold water was better for washing off semen, a lesson learned while camping with Andrew. Early on in her marriage, she slept under the stars, unafraid, scoffing at tents, hair full of woodsmoke, inviting dew. Early on, they zipped their sleeping bags together. Early on, they did all kinds of cheesy shit she loved, along with him. When did she stop being young? When had she become used?

She had no choice but to start again. It was that, or die alone. But not this man, a mistake. There was no future here for her, not with Peter. She knew that. She presumed he did, too. He wasn’t stupid.

This was not the life she envisioned when she married Andrew, full of admiration for his potential, and her own.

Their honeymoon passed in a happy haze as they cavorted from one meal to the next, marveling at how cheap Mexico was. At least, she marveled outwardly, pushing down disgrace that her homeland couldn’t pull it together. The peso would never strike parity with the dollar.

Still, she had fun, draped over the prow of a long boat that lay low in the water, splitting a jungle river at dusk, motoring through the hoots and hollers of howler monkeys, birds flitting by, bats swooping over them, Andrew ducking and laughing. Her smile was so big it hurt. Insects smashed into her teeth.

That night, in their riverfront cabana, he counted her bug bites, trying not to burn the mosquito net as he moved the candle above her. “Only one safe place to kiss you,” he concluded. It wasn’t her mouth.

Irreconcilable differences.

What does that mean, Andrew? Who is at peace with the daylight between who we are and who we thought we’d be?

She thought they were in it together—no matter what, like they’d promised—but ten years in, his arm across her waist in bed felt heavy enough to stifle.

“I am so close. Just wait.”

“We’re missing our window.” His voice got loud. Indignant. “I feel, I don’t know, unwelcome. By my own wife.”

The truth was that Claudia was suspicious of becoming pregnant, afraid that Andrew would take advantage of her weakness, her dependence, her need that he see it through. She’d seen it so many times—the humiliated woman discarding self-worth to hold onto her children’s wandering father, the man wafting boyish charm and keeping the indulgent affection of their mutual friends, the woman hollowing out, becoming brittle, haggard with work, scorned by those same children later for being weak, when what she’d been was stronger than they could imagine. And if she did leave, it was as a reed flattened by the receding shore. He remarried within the year, and she remained in reduced circumstances.

She was right about that bastard. He’d been boning her sister all along. He must believe Maria’s fairytale. Like many single people, Maria cloaked intense loneliness with cheer and disaffection. Her sister maintained the fiction that she was happy, insisting that she loved her life right up to the second she rehauled it, never a bad moment, just transformation after transformation, from painting to ceramics to mixed media, never investing enough time to be taken seriously. Claudia cursed the marital intimacies she shared with Maria out of despair or for a laugh, as though voicing her thoughts would let the wind take them, Maria giggling over the phone, “¡Estás loca!”

Maria must have been conscious, then, of her betrayal, feathering her nest with Claudia’s sisterly confessions. Or maybe it had been somewhat innocent, until it wasn’t anymore. Maria seemed uncontaminated by the striving that seeped into her sister. But when Claudia had something she coveted—a husband just waiting to be appreciated—Maria’s ambition unmasked itself.

Maria had been polite, deferential even, asking Claudia about her travel plans for the coming year. Symposiums where she would lecture while others nodded and mapped out their careers, conferences where she would present a paper and drink to forget the work that awaited her—Claudia described it all with the same weary candor, a frankness reserved for people she thought would not judge her. Maria nodded and sipped while they dressed for New Year’s Eve dinner. Relieved of the burden of deadlines, Claudia refilled their wineglasses continuously. Andrew had gone to visit Thomas in his study. Let them have their time, Claudia thought. Sisterhood is special.

Later that evening, Maria rolled an empty suitcase out the front door and around the cabin, repeating the names of countries she wished to visit, crunching over snow as Andrew took pictures of the ritual with his phone. In the twelve seconds before midnight, they stuffed green grapes in their mouths, one for each tick of the countdown, for each wish, for each apostle, arriving at the new year with a mouth full of sweetness and laughter, juices spilling over into wet kisses on cheeks and mouths, the whole tradition revived by Maria, who, unlike Claudia, did not eschew her upbringing when she arrived, did not watch and learn and imitate, but instead toted difference like a banner of authenticity. Thomas even threw a bucket of water out the window, a rite he claimed because it required rolling up his sleeves.

No one ever talks about how good it feels to assimilate. It was what I was supposed to do, she thought. More than that, it’s what felt right, a refuge from the insistent poverty she once thought would be her fate, fear of which drove Claudia to distance herself from those who had walked across the border. She took a plane. Thomas said it to anyone who would listen, would work it into the conversation somehow with a wry twist of his mouth, and she knew he meant to convey that he took care of her, this girl who was nobody until she became his daughter, erroneous proof that he’d had a life.

In the grand homes of her father’s friends, the only Mexicans were there to take care of everybody else. They watched Claudia when she came over, careful not to offer rapidfire conversation until the hosts were distracted, the first shy greeting given as a slight nod of the head, to spare her. They taught her that pure attentiveness requires both an inhabitance and a vacating of presence which is difficult for some to enact without letting erasure dig down to the bone. Those who survived servitude possessed dignity beyond the people who paid them.

Andrew wanted a caretaker, though he would never admit it. No one wanted to fess up. She ran from that life, ran from it like she had never sold roses at intersections—for the church, swore her mom—ran from it like that child wasn’t with her all along, observing her fraudulence in real time, knocking on the windshield. If she had to explain why she first withdrew from Maria, why she recoiled whenever she sensed her sister was about to bring up something only they knew in a room full of people, the truth was Claudia hated to see such knowing in another pair of eyes. She wanted to move on.

In bed that night, Andrew fell prone to a long silence Claudia thought was sleep until he spoke. “Why didn’t you teach me this stuff?”

“You dislike superstition. Anything related to religion. Remember?”

“Not at all. Tonight was fun!”

By which he meant these customs were so beneath him, so completely and utterly ineffectual, that he didn’t mind them. Beliefs that Andrew would have dismissed as backwards when performed by the people of his own country became something lovely in Maria’s hands, a novelty. He didn’t want an equal. Maybe they’d be happy together.

Claudia peed herself to keep warm, focusing on the shower, which was almost hot. Everything would be okay. Things would get better the cleaner and emptier she got. She scoured her scalp with shards of soap, moving down her body in brusque circles. The water was cooling. By the time she got to her thighs, it was frigid. She let the icy stream blast her face. Swollen eyes rode herd on a long night of hard drinking. With no conditioner, there wasn’t much she could do about her hair.

The towels were the size of tissues and about the same thickness. She dried her hair with unwise flips of her head, reeling against the sink as her brain sloshed back into place. Scrubbing her teeth with a wet towel corner, she rinsed and spat and searched for flashbacks to reconstruct her night.

Kelly green. Yes. It began by playing pool—his bad break.

No, it began with beers on the beach, and the slow creep to Clallam Bay. There were those Natives at the bar. They didn’t look Makah. Maybe Elwha. She could play that off, no problem.

Amber light in a tumbler, and another, and another, and another. Had she ordered those drinks? Or did he bring them to her unasked? She couldn’t remember paying for anything but the first round, which she did with cash, in case she got stopped. She saw herself sink the eight ball, watched his face sharpen, his smile lines crystalline as he held the door on their way out. Stars tumbling to her right—the passenger’s seat. Good, she hadn’t driven. Warmth on her body, a hand on her throat, her head against the wall. The clerk’s call.

Fuck. They were already famous.

A dark little boy with a cowlick peered into the window. She shook her fist at him, dropped the towel and cupped herself. He howled with delight. Another small, round head appeared just above his. She threw a pillow at them. It hit the glass with a soft whoomph. The boys took off, cackling and waving their hands in the air, running victory laps in the parking lot.

So much for discretion. Claudia sat on the edge of the bed, clothes in her lap, back curved into a bony ridge. She didn’t have the energy to be angry. She wanted to have already done what she came here to do. She wanted to run, and to have somewhere to go. She wanted to trade these clothes for a silk dress and a fancy dinner with the man who promised to love her until death parted them. She twisted her wedding ring around her finger, deciding her next move.

She needed to push forward, and that was all. “Put your pants on one leg at a time,” Thomas once told her. Claudia mulled over the possibilities while pulling on yesterday’s outfit, building herself up again, layer by layer. She would go back to Maggie. Even if Peter told other people, Claudia doubted he would tell his mother. Other people might, though; several hours had passed. He could have put the word out. Most likely, Maggie already knew.

Claudia once read that dementia swept the memory clean, sending brief surges of lucidity downstream, bursting banked trauma at the least opportune times. But it seemed that Maggie’s mind rejected things she didn’t like, or maybe it was that she failed to anticipate things she didn’t want to happen, even when she knew they could happen, or would happen.

Claudia could understand that, having let her marriage, and now, her career, sink into the mire. But Peter was kind of an outsider on the reservation, like her. Even if he did spread rumors, she would deny them. Perception displaced reality so readily.

Wetting a towel, she returned to the sheet and rubbed the stain, her headache intensifying. She was too old to need birth control, right? Forty was the new twenty, but only on the surface; inside, the body aged like always. She lifted the top sheet, snapping it twice in midair before letting it billow over the bed.

Frowning against the cold sun, she pocketed her left hand and edged past a cleaning cart on the balcony. Behind it, a maid stared from the open door of another room just like hers, but with a kitchenette, where the boys played with the faucet. Claudia gave a hint of a nod as she was passing. Maybe she could offer a twenty for a ride down the road.

Her SUV was parked between a blue truck and an aging sedan. Dumbfounded, she opened the door and settled into the driver’s seat. It smelled like coffee. The center console held a white paper cup with a plastic lid cool to the touch. And a muffin, which she disregarded, lifting the coffee to read a note scrawled on its side. THANKS!

She took a sip and pulled her wallet from her jacket. Finding no receipts, she counted cash and thumbed through credit cards. Perhaps she’d left one at the bar, or maybe he’d covered his expenses, so to speak. No and no. She felt bad for checking, then irate that she would even consider empathizing with him. He took something from her without asking, when she was in no condition to say yes. But she hadn’t said no. Not that she could remember.

She pulled down the sun visor to check her face for clues, yet again. She would go shopping at the co-op and drop hints about her day. Perhaps a walk along the strait. There was so much coastline here. If anyone said, hey, I saw your car in Clallam Bay, she could respond and corroborate. People want to believe the stories they are told.

The pole in front of the co-op was all eyes and grimaces as she pulled up to the parking lot. She stared at the carvings, trying not to look at the bar across the street, where a man leaned by the door, smoking. She didn’t recognize him from last night. At the top of the pole, Thunderbird held his wings wide, chest containing another scowl, the whole of him bursting with ferocity, talons sunk into the teeth of Whale, dangling beneath him, tail curved onto his back like an elephant’s trunk. Below the whale was a massive human face.

As she parked next to the pole, trying to be conspicuous, Thunderbird—who brought wind and hail and lightning serpents to steal someone’s wife, or so another story goes—well, Thunderbird flapped his wings. She blinked.

That didn’t happen. A trick of light, she thought, a shift in the shadows as I pulled up. A matter of perspective. Her mind refused her rationale. Maybe I should eat that muffin. She palmed its buttery dome. The top of the muffin bulged like love handles. She took a small bite. Its cloudlike goodness whirled around her tongue. Her spit kicked into overdrive. She hadn’t eaten a muffin in years. She wolfed it down, licking crumbs from the paper and crumpling what remained into a wet ball she dropped into her empty cup. There.

Caffeine, fat, carbs and sugar combined to give her spirit an angle of repose. There were more than a thousand Makahs on the reservation. Although tribal members were connected by blood or marriage, some neighbors didn’t speak to each other, carrying feuds begun by those who came before. And so it was everywhere. If it didn’t work out with Maggie and Peter, she could move on, and maybe she should, without further ado, knock on another door and start fresh. It didn’t feel right, though, to leave things as they were, sullied. She would smooth things over, take whatever she had coming face to face, and, in the process, rewrite the story of what happened last night, reclaim some of her power. She’d lost control, and whether that was his doing or hers, she couldn’t say, except that she drove to a bar after splitting a six pack, which told her she was in the mood for excess.

Her left cheek tingled. The sun? She tipped her face from its rays, careful to ensure the driver’s seat position didn’t leave age spots. The late morning light slanted through the window, hitting only the outer edge of her thigh. She touched her cheek and turned to face the heat’s source. A large lidless eye, a black and white ovoid, bore into her. The totem.

The wooden man’s mouth was downturned. His top lip cradled a divot much like Andrew’s, her mind flashing to the forbidden thought—I would rather him dead than with Maria. A great disaster could befall them both, a chasm, a flood—something terrible and cataclysmic, the kind of tragedy ascribed to God.

The corners of the man’s frown tightened into a scowl, his face glowering, brightening the red rim of his eye. I am losing it, she thought. I need a nap. She forced herself to keep looking at the gray curls of cheek and nose, their contours almost fetal between his heavy brow and chin. The air around her grew stifling so fast she understood how their first and only dog died while she shopped for dinner on a fall day. She was distraught for months, displacing Andrew’s blameless grief with her own bottomless need for forgiveness.

Don’t think about that anymore, she commanded. Get out and get going. On her way into the store, Claudia took a moment to cover the carved eye with her cupped hand, silencing its judgment.

Exactly $237.45 later, Claudia was back in her car, grocery bags nestled in the passenger seat, chugging an organic coconut water for all it was worth. She steered past the Video & Liquor store, wares stacked behind dingy windows that held old “Welcome Home Troops” flyers, and steeled herself to drive past the grocer’s hand lettered sign.

LAST CHANCE COLD BEER AND WINE

For the final winding miles to Neah Bay, she kept her wheels on the road’s white stripe—so easy to make a hard turn into nothing—and vowed never to touch Peter again, knowing that the thought was a lie, an active and intentional lie, because she hoped it would happen again, on her own terms, as soon as she recovered.