THE ROCKS SIZZLED, gushing a large cloud of steam that sent Beans to the bottom bench. It was hot as hell, but that was the point of a sweat. Peter couldn’t see anyone but for a faint red sheen along their paunches. Dave sighed. “That’s good.”
Plywood creaked and groaned under their weight, the corrugated roof rumbling with rain that hadn’t let up for days. The door opened. “Who’s that?” Dave craned forward. A figure appeared in a blast of cold air and rain. A white guy. What the fuck? Dave bumped fists with him. “Come in!” Peter kept his silence. Dude offered a hand before the door swung shut. “Dwight.”
“Dwight, this here’s Maggie’s son Peter, the guy I was telling you about.”
“Nice to meet you, Pete.”
“It’s Peter.”
“Nice to meet you, Peter.” He sat, blowing out his cheeks.
“Dwight cooks for the tugboat crew. Tanker breaks loose, they’re on it.”
“Big job.”
“Long day.” Dwight propped his elbows on his knees and hung his head. “Ready for it to be over.”
“We’re just getting going.” Dave shoved another log into the stove. Peter split wood all afternoon. Dave said he had to contribute something, so there it was, a nice wall of firewood from telephone poles being replaced somewhere outside of town. Forget the creosote, Dave said when Peter brought it up, but he didn’t want to be in here when the first treated log went nuclear. He stocked the sweat with old cedar and stacked the new stuff out back. “I’ll do the prayers tonight. Don’t nobody open that door.”
Dave rummaged beneath the bench, coming up with a bulk bottle of oil. He sprinkled a few drops on the rocks and turned a faucet next to him; water shot through a pipe onto the rocks. Peter sat back. Steam so loud it hurt his ears. Eucalyptus stung his nostrils. “Didn’t know they used that stuff in a sweat.”
“Smells good.” Dave laughed. “Unlike you.”
“Not what I was expecting.”
“This is Plains Indian technology, son. Might as well spruce it up.”
Beans snorted. “You want something traditional, take a swim.”
“Grandson’s right, that’s what Makahs did. Still do. Nothing like it.”
“Me and the boys thought we’d try a dip off the bow.” Dwight slicked his hands through his hair. “My balls just about crawled out my mouth.”
“Been wondering what happened to your face, buddy.” Dave hooted. “They got stuck in transit.”
Peter decided against commenting on the dunk tank set up outside. A food bank bin. You cannot make this stuff up. You would be accused of something. He always said that to people, when they asked him about rez life, but they didn’t get it. Resilience was unrecognizable to those who had never needed it.
The fire popped. Rain smacked the roof. Each breath brought the steam deep into his body. Sweat rolled from his face, arms, chest and legs, splattering his feet. At some point, he stopped thinking. Sweet relief. Sweat and breath.
He heard Dave pull a rattle from a plastic bag with a hollow clatter that sounded like shells, sending Peter back to sitting cross-legged at his grandmother’s feet as a kid, listening to the dry clap of her hands as she taught the family—work that was his granddad’s, but she was the one who stuck around—his mother making salmon hash, his dad’s favorite, and listening from the kitchen because these songs didn’t belong to her, a bystander. Before the fall, before the flight, before the world split into glare and murk, there had been that, a room full of people making music like the ones who came before, the reel of years too long to hold in his mind. When his grandmother still asked her son to show up, he made Peter a drum, giving him something to do, and he did it, pulled the boom from his heart, over and over. The drum sang its way back to him, always welcoming, no matter how hard he hit it.
“Thank you, Grandfather Rocks.” Dave shook the shells, and shook them, and shook them, and shook them. “We thank you for being here with us today to show us the way.”
What followed was a long string of words Peter could not understand, chanted again and again until it was the cadence that counted, the swells carrying him into something he could not name, like going back in time and finding himself before he fucked up, and discovering it was still him. When he couldn’t take the heat anymore, he stayed put and kept sweating. His vision grayed around the edges. His ears popped like he was underwater. He would not get up before the old guy. Dave didn’t move. They sat, liquefying. He would not get up before the white guy. They sweltered and dripped, and no one made for the door.
By the time Dave sent his prayers to all four directions, Peter was clutching his own real true self, right there, bear hugging it like the best friend he never had.
Beans was the first to break, but it was a bumrush after him, men bumping into each other like boys as they poured into the rain, heads steaming, Peter first into the pool, his whoop louder than rain, louder than fire, louder than the voice that had been riding him for years, that liar.
Stretched out on a beat up old lounge chair, Peter and Dave sat and smiled and didn’t have much to say. They watched Dwight pack up his things in contented silence. Beans was gone as soon as he touched his phone and found the world rushing by without him. Thumbs flying through replies, he waited at the wheel of Dave’s car, face aglow, stopping once when Dwight rapped goodbye on the window.
“Kids.” Dave nodded. “Don’t know how to live with themselves.”
“Hard thing to do.”
“You’re telling me.” Dave sucked down a soda. “Spending a lot of time at the beach, eh?”
“I can’t stay cooped up. It’s bad enough being on land this long.”
“Been keeping warm in Claudia’s cabin, I imagine.”
“Don’t start dirty daydreaming on me, Dave. I’m not having that.”
“You’re so sensitive these days. You probably use conditioner, too.”
“What are we talking about here?”
“Keep close to good people. Stay away from bad people. It’s that simple.” Dave burped into his fist. “Some people, they can’t help themselves, they’re all tore up inside. Bad energy. Their spirit is sick. And you know they got good reasons. But you, you got your life to live. Surround yourself with good people.” He took another swig. “I’ll give you an example. Being with someone with bad energy, it’s like singing next to someone who’s off key. Yeah, you keep singing. But you have to filter out what’s coming from them just to hold your line. And that takes energy. Costs you. They’re not trying to hurt you. They just don’t know what else to do.
“The good part of you, the part you’re trying to grow, wants to help them out. And you should. The thing is to live right, to be able to look in the mirror without judging yourself and to know that you are living right, honoring your obligations, doing right by other people. It all comes back. But at some point they need to get to a good place inside of themselves. You need to see that’s where they operate from. Or at least that they can access it. It’s too easy to get blown off course. Some people don’t want to get better. And watch how they treat other people. They’ll treat you like that one day. Believe me. I been there.
“So yes, help people. Give them a hand, give them a lift. But seek out the folks that make you feel good. Seek out the folks that know how to make themselves feel good by walking around, looking at the trees, the mountains, the water, breathing the air, feeling the sun, feeling the rain. Those people—those places—are good to be around.”
“Is there a point in there somewhere?”
“I know you know things.” Dave clapped him on the shoulder. “That’s why I’m telling you. Pass on what you know. That’s your part in this. You will have work to do when we’re gone.” He put a plastic bag of green leaves into Peter’s hands, some shaped like ovals, others like crooked hearts.
“What’s this?”
Dave said a word he could not understand, full of soft has and shs.
“What?”
“Snowberry. Good for the spirit. And the pecker. A twofer!”
“I don’t need this.”
“That’s strong medicine, Peter. Wash with water steeped with these.”
A car with subs on full blast pulled up. His teeth buzzed with each beat.
“That’ll be the next shift.” Dave uncrossed his legs. “Back to work.”
“Guess I’ll be going. And thanks, Dave. That sweat did me good.”
“Any time, son. Any time.”
Dressed, his towel and trunks slung over one shoulder, Peter made his way out to the truck, avoiding the younger men who gathered around the trunk of their car to stare into the sound of blown woofers. He didn’t recognize any of them. He might have been able to guess their families if he got a good look at their faces. Not knowing felt wrong in a way that betrayed every choice he’d made since he was their age.
His truck smelled like old smoke, and so did his clothes. He patted his pocket, out of habit, and instead rolled down the window and stuck his head out, mouth open, to taste the rain on his way back home. But at the base of Diaht Hill, he veered left, not quite ready for another night with his mom, watching TV and not talking, communicating instead with little grunts of acknowledgement, him waiting, just waiting for her to bring up the Indian party so that he could light into the idea, expose what a fraud she was.
Just after his father died, on the day she found him crying in the bathtub, scrubbing blood from his boots with the toothbrush his dad wouldn’t be needing anymore, his mom drove him to a Shaker Church on another reservation. She’d never been a Shaker. She laughed at Indians convulsing and speaking in tongues and laying hands like they were Pentecostals. But when she found him freaking out, her face went grim. She took him by the hand to his bedroom and watched him lace up his sneakers before leading him out to the car.
They said nothing during the hours to and from the church, his question—“What happened?”—met by her silence, and, finally, “It was an accident.” Not knowing hadn’t protected him, not from the nightmares, nor the self-recrimination, nor the anger, nor, for that matter, the flashbacks, which showed up on the day of the Shaker ceremony and never left.
The plain room was lined with rough pews. Candles sucked the air. Everything was white but the people with metal bells in their hands, and they were clanging and clanging, and he was back with the lolling buoys, the nets splaying like wings around the corpse of his father, who rolled to face the deep. The people were told nothing by his mother but that he had a demon inside, and they were shaking and clustering around him, words flowing from their mouths, heat pouring from their hands, which were all over him, and him feeling nothing but cold, trembling with anger they confused for holy spirit.
Months later, when he was alone in the garage billed as a studio apartment in the classifieds, he got the feeling that someone was trying to shake him awake. He took to drinking before he went to bed, just to sleep through the night after his shift. Soon enough, he lost the garage, and when he did wake to a hand on his shoulder, he was on a couch. He should never have played along with her schemes.
Tonight, though, tonight a potlatch didn’t seem so impossible. He didn’t want to get snookered into something by one good sweat. He turned up a logging road before the Pacific appeared on the horizon, his hand steadying the wheel as his lights washed over a blue and white sign, a stick figure running from a wave. His truck shimmied up the muddy gravel to Bahokus Peak, swinging its backside every time he hit a rut.
Crushed cans and cigarette butts splattered from the base of a huge boulder scrawled with graffiti. Peter pulled over and huffed up the sloped path to the top of the rock. A dog barked in the distance, setting off its neighbors crisscrossing the hills from the clamshell-shaped town to the hidden maze of houses. To the west, lit by the moon, gray clouds toppled over each other, pushing up the sky and leaving a band of night on the horizon. The coast scalloped into sand and sea foam that erupted into sea stacks at Shi Shi Beach. Peter focused on the far sound of breaking surf. The cloudbank leaked a light rain that thickened, snuffing out the separation between sky and sea, the squall line moving ashore, swallowing the earth. He was buffeted by a burst of wind. He liked being close to the ocean because the elements of survival were clear. The punishment for not paying attention was immediate, irrevocable.
He’d been up and down the west coast, anywhere there was a port and people willing to pay for progress. Seattle. Coos Bay. Grays Harbor. Longview. Portland. Oakland. Long Beach. San Diego. After years in the Gulf of Mexico for oil and gas, flying to foreign seas for deepwater jobs if they’d have him, he chose to hug land. From offshore oil rigs, he turned to dams, locks, bridges, nuclear power, shipping and docking facilities. No job was beneath him. Employers were the sole architects of his time, which he hated, but he liked barnacling barges and pilings with anodes one day and, the next, welding steel members on bridges and platforms and powerhouses.
In the end, no one saw his work, but everyone depended on it. They only came for him if he fucked up, which satisfied his inner nihilist. He wanted to be left alone.
His dad was like that. During the six and a half hours it took to motor the Magdalene to their fishing grounds, the waves foaming over the prairie in big rolls, the boat getting beat up and them with it, his dad wouldn’t say a damned thing. If Peter wanted to talk, it had better be before the trip, when they’d fix what needed fixing and bait two hundred, maybe two hundred fifty hooks to a tub, depending on who was packing. By the time they got through putting the gear together, his hands felt like they’d been out for six days.
Peter hadn’t fished since. His dad was gone. Being here changed nothing. He was in Neah Bay to get a job done, so to speak. Get his mom on her feet. He wouldn’t stay long. The gathering storm calmed his thoughts. His next gig was lined up. A jetty down south, beginning in spring. He’d been let go from his last contract and the one before that and the one before that. He didn’t like making allies. Got the best pussy in Portland, all the same. City ladies were desperate for a decent lay.
There was a city lady close by. He didn’t want to face his mom just yet.
Claudia paled when he asked her if she wanted to do a sweat with Dave. Didn’t seem like such a big deal, and he was pretty sure his neighbor would help him out, seeing as it was for the best cause on earth. Getting laid was almost a vocation for Peter, and had been for Dave, in his day.
“It’s not Makah. I mean, it is now, I guess. Didn’t used to be. You’ll like it.”
“Are you close to him?”
“Me and Dave? Oh yeah, we go way back.”
“Do you have a cigarette? I’m in the mood.”
He didn’t want to smoke, not right then, with his body swept clean, but he did it to be with her. He gave himself the pleasure of lighting both cigarettes with the same flame, their foreheads close enough to touch, the heat on her cheeks and his own, and relished her wry smile as she rocked back, satisfied, to lean on the wall of her covered patio. Smoke took root in his lungs, sending its tendrils from his tip to his toes. The Pacific churned and roared.
“Dave’s been helping your mom out over the years.”
“Yeah, you could say that.”
“Are they together?”
“What? No. He keeps an eye out for her, that’s all.”
When all was smoked, and some whiskey too, the sweat seemed like it happened to another man. Him, but not him, a shadow he, a parallel man best left to the past. He kissed her. The smoke and drink had varnished their tongues, but he kissed past the taste, kissed through the taste, until he couldn’t sense where his ended and hers arose, their mouths made one soft and soiled place.
She pulled away. “Why did you leave like that?”
On the morning his mom stunk up the house with frybread, around three o’clock, so real early that morning—what used to be night when he had a life—his mom was agitated, kept saying, “It’s coming!” Wouldn’t say what “it” was. He thought a nice big breakfast would calm her down, but she insisted on coffee, too. The last thing he wanted before dawn was a cracked out old lady, but he brewed a fresh pot. Dignity meant choosing her own destiny sometimes.
But not all the time. The coffee kept her hopped up, raving, “It’s coming! It’s coming!” He couldn’t reason with her harsh eyes, that stiff mouth. She bumped into the piles, raking her arms against the unseen weapons of frayed baskets and fistfuls of pens. He bandaged her twice before he offered a sedative.
Scratching and pacing. Scratching and pacing. At five thirty, he flat out ordered her to take a pill. He insinuated that his command came with doctor’s orders. “She gave them to you for times like this.” He wanted to summon the “Because I said so” but couldn’t make their inversion of roles irreversible, irrevocable. He wasn’t ready to come full circle. He thought she would balk, but she didn’t. Seemed relieved when he brought her a glass of water and the vial. Hell, she’d eaten, he told himself. He saw to that, first thing.
He hadn’t meant to drug his mother so he could fuck Claudia in the next room, but that’s what happened. And then Claudia had to go and plant ideas in his mom’s head, to justify her sickness, as if her hoarding had a purpose. He wasn’t to blame for what she became. He wasn’t about to reveal his mother’s trickery, how she’d never been interested in Indian things when he was growing up, except for bone game and the basketry, she always did that, and she knew how to make the old school stuff—buckskin bread, halibut chowder, salmon every which way—and she’d harvested clams on the regular. But she also went to church, and made him go. If she and Claudia wanted to come up with some kind of conspiracy theory, fine, that was on them. He would get his.
“I gave my mom a pill to help her sleep. That’s why she was passed out when you came. Groggy. I wouldn’t put much stock in whatever she told you.”
She gasped.
“She’s been having bad dreams. Wakes up crying. You should have seen her at four in the morning. She was all over the place.” He squeezed her arm. “Hey. I didn’t have a good option.”
“Do you think she knows about us?”
“I’m guessing you didn’t share that in your little heart-to-heart.” She was all up in his family’s business, but she had yet to learn that tit for tat was the key to this place. What would she call that? Reciprocation. He’d mention it later. After. “I haven’t told her.” The nasty side of him, the side he had a hard time controlling around women, the side that was good at keeping power when others wanted to make him feel disposable, added, “Yet.”
A long while passed. “Are you going to?”
“Hadn’t planned on it.”
He knew better than to ask about her husband, and whether he knew about what she was doing out here on the edge of nowhere, as far as most people were concerned. The last thing he ever brought up before banging another man’s wife was her marriage, though it was the damnedest thing—they usually did afterward, when he sure didn’t want to talk about who got first dibs. Stay single long enough, and you see the full spectrum of humanity. But Claudia wasn’t talkative, except when she was on the job. He liked that about her.
Her bed looked like a dog turned circles on it, an oval at its center and thin blankets heaped at the edges. With a knee on the edge, he leaned her into the center, pulling off her coat, leaving himself enough room to crawl in. He felt her watching him unlace his boots, the knots fighting him, his jerking movements shaking the bed.
“I know about your dad.”
He flinched. “Do you now.”
“I do.”
He lit a cigarette, tried to drop the match into the empty glass on her bedside table, missed. The ember burrowed into the laminate. “Does that change how you feel about me?” She propped herself up on one elbow. “Why would it?” “I don’t know. What I did.” “Doesn’t seem like you had much choice.” He studied her face, memorizing the set of her mouth, the calm shine of her eyes, claiming this moment within the enormity of eternity. “I been carrying that a long time.”
“So has she.”
“I don’t want to talk about her right now.” He ashed in the direction of the table. Gray specks fluttered to the floor.
“She needs you to do this thing. For him.”
“Why do you care?” He mashed the cigarette into the glass.
“I just do.”
He didn’t know what to say, so he spooned her, resting his chin on the crown of her head, his ear on his arm, which bent up and away, sure to fall asleep. She twined her toes around his calves and wiggled her hips into him. They lay listening to glass rattle with rain, to patters on the roof, to gutters gurgling. They were breathing easy, chests rising and falling as one. Finally, the solace he’d long needed and never given himself—to be seen, for who he was and what he’d done, and accepted.
But of course it had to come with a price. Nothing was free for the taking, not with women around. If he and Claudia kept on like this, he was going to fall asleep, his right arm already on its way, the deep tingle working from bicep to forearm despite slow clenches of his fist, and that’s not what he had in mind when he got himself worked up to come over.
He started out like he wasn’t in a hurry, kissing the closest bare stretch of skin, her neck, and eased his arm from beneath his head, the burn shooting through it like a vise clamped him from wrist to shoulder. Stroking the clenched cords of her throat with closed lips, he retraced that trail with his tongue, body looming, trying not to crush her, though it was inevitable in this position. He gave up on spooning and slung a leg over her, working himself up so his weight was on his knee. He had her where he wanted. His arm was almost back to normal, his hand feeling like it belonged to him. He touched her face. Most women like that. It makes them think you’re paying such close attention that you might fall in love with them while the smarter part of you, the part that knows better, is off duty.
Claudia shook him off like he was a fly. “Fuck me like you mean it.”
He caught hold of her shirt below her collarbone and tugged downward, ripping the fabric, popping buttons like bottle caps. She watched him, steady and still as though he might hurt her, which he liked, and the liking of it made him go into a quiet place he reserved for being alone. That’s how he felt on top of her, taking off her pants so she was naked, and him still in his shirt and jeans. Alone.
Her hips were bruised. Had he done that? Maybe she had another man here. Maybe someone else fucked her in this bed. He took off his shirt, deciding not to care. Her gaze told him nothing. She was otherwise pale, with brown nipples that hardened as he brushed them with his teeth. He didn’t remember their color from before. He worked his way down her ribcage and stomach, tracing her shadows with fingers and tongue, checked her smell—no one had been here—and dipped in, tasting nectarines at low tide.
Her breath caught. He cupped her hipbones with his palms, held her flat. Her back was arching. It was time. He cradled her quaking shoulders, clasping her face between his hands, and kissed her, keeping a knee wedged between hers as he rose up and unbuckled his belt.
She opened her mouth, her eyes focusing, narrowing like she was about to say something. He covered her lips, the thick side of his palm against her nose, and she didn’t shake her head, or scream, and so he went inside with his other hand, three fingers curling back toward him, the base of that palm against her clit, grinding back and forth, and her mewling and worming around on the bed until he couldn’t take it anymore, his ache contracting into pain he pushed inside her, over and over, oh my god, oh my god, the sight of her sharpening in his vision, raindrops on her breasts. Was there a leak? He checked the ceiling. Nothing. That’s when he knew he was crying. He almost turned and ran but there were her hands on his back, her legs locked behind him, releasing him and bringing him in, and now he felt her let go, felt her convulse around him, and she was conning him into falling for her, goddammit, he was careening down into her, and that’s when he took both her legs on his shoulders and drove his dick straight into her ass, and now she was screaming, now she was crying for real, and he was inside her as far as he could go. There was no stopping this, she could not stop him, but there was her hand sliding on his chest, her locked arm propping him back and her other hand on herself, caught between them, fingers moving frantic in tiny little circles he crushed against her, and she was still screaming but it was different it was building and that was his voice he was roaring she was begging oh please oh please they were shuddering, echoes of aftershocks, and he was gone, legs and arms collapsed, sweating, spent.
She pressed the heels of her hands to her lids, once, twice, and wiped his face, palms wet against his cheeks, pushing his shoulders back and working a foot between them until her sole flattened against his chest. She shoved him off, wincing as he withdrew.
From opposite sides of the bed, they stared at each other. He tasted salt that might not be his own.