Asylum--Chapter Thirteen Holding Back the Silence

Chapter Thirteen
Holding Back the Silence

Billy wanted to get his young huskies, Smokey and Nicky, trained to pull a sled so he could use them for transportation. Corbin, the man I’d met on the mail plane, had offered to lend Billy three of his huskies. The more experienced dogs would train the younger ones. This was fine in theory, but there were problems when Billy tried to put the plan into action. He decided to start with training Smokey, not Nicky. Excitable Smokey wouldn’t stand still for the harness, so Billy had to tackle him and wrestle him to the ground. Corbin’s dogs were so eager to run they kept lunging forward.

“You’re going to have to stand here and step on the brake,” Billy said. I cautiously stood on the sled runners, unnerved by the combined strength of the dogs as they tried to take off. I put one foot firmly on the brake, a simple drag mechanism between the runners. Billy went forward to straighten out the dogs several times but whenever he got back to the sled, they were tangled again. Finally he said, “I’ll just have to hold Smokey until they get going. You start off and I’ll jump on behind you on the sled as you go by.”

But what if Billy couldn’t get on in time and I went screaming down the trail behind four maniacal dogs? That won’t happen, he assured me. He went forward, got the dogs untangled and stood next to them holding Smokey by the harness. He yelled “hike,” and they took off like a gunshot. Billy was able to grab one handlebar as we zoomed past him. I was grateful to feel his weight as he landed on the runners behind me, slowing the dogs just a hair as they ran down the trail, narrowly missing low-lying branches that scratched at my hat. I grabbed it off my head. I was thrusting it into my pocket when the sled lurched up into a drift as we rounded a bend to the left. Billy yelled “Lean to the right.”

 Mushing, I’d heard, was a lot like skiing, requiring balance and a quick response time. I’d never been any good at skiing. The dogs ran out onto the road. On the hard surface they increased their speed, and we quickly reached the trail down to the river. Packed down by snowmachines, the trail provided the perfect running surface, and they redoubled their efforts. The sled was now going at breakneck speed, engendering the same kind of flat-out fear I’d felt the few times I’d hurtled down a ski run, knowing I was about to wipe out.

“I’m scared,” I yelled.

“Me too,” Billy yelled back. “Step on the brake.”

Hell, I was standing on the brake and it wasn’t doing any good. We were headed downhill with a ninety-degree turn coming up.

“Hang on, and throw your weight to the left.” He yelled, “Gee,” to the dogs, telling them to turn right.

Hardly slowing a bit, the dogs rounded the corner and the sled tipped. Billy and I both leaned to the left and for a moment we teetered on edge. I felt us going over.

I tumbled to the side and skidded on my stomach. Billy did an ungraceful version of the splits and came up groaning. I sat up, grateful the nasty-looking snow hook—a grappling hook used as a stake to hold the sled when it was stopped—hadn’t come loose and planted its steel claws in my leg.

The dogs had come to a stop below us and once we got the sled onto its runners again, they took off, rocketing down the steep trail to the river, hurtling over the jumbled heaps of ice at the shore. The sled hit the bare ice with a screeching sound. The dogs settled into an even stride, happy to be out on the river, released from their chains.

We headed up Eagle Creek. When the snowmachine trail ended after several miles, there continued a faint snowshoe trail that wound from one side of the stream to the other, skirting the thin ice and open water. I was nervous about the open “leads” but Billy reassured me the water was only a few feet deep. With the air temperature around zero and frostbit feet a possibility, that wasn’t much consolation. Billy pointed to fresh moose and calf prints, which Smokey tried to stop and sniff but the other well-trained dogs ignored and continued on. The trail petered out and at last we could go no farther in the deep, unbroken snow.

“Why did you bring me all the way out here?” I asked.

“I wanted you to hear how quiet it is.”

I didn’t think there was a place quieter than Billy’s cabin, but here it was. The silence pressed on us invisibly, as if it were not just the cold, but the stillness that made people freeze to death, slowing their steps, making their limbs grow heavy. Here, they don’t speak of “breaking the silence,” as if it was fragile and brittle. Billy talked of going over to Arliss’s to “help him hold back the silence,” as if it had great weight and substance.

Just as all the noises of the city combined into one, creating a background hum, here all the small noiselessnesses created one larger silence, the way snow accumulates, flake by flake. I thought of Sunday mornings in San Jose when the construction stopped and the traffic stilled and all I could hear was the birds singing and the gospel choir from the church across the street. I thought of Billy’s silence that first time I took his hand: silence as assent. The yawning gap between Thomas and me: silence as dissent. I yearned for a stillness so complete it was beyond yes or no, so engulfing that I no longer had to decide anything, no longer had to choose. It would swallow me up like a slow snowstorm, blinding me with its brilliance of non-sound. 

That night we made love in the utter darkness of the midwinter night. The log walls seemed to dissolve as the darkness inside the cabin extended outward and went on for hundreds miles, all the way to the North Pole. I felt a part of everything. The river running soundlessly beneath the ice. The lights wavering overhead. The foxes leaving light tracks across the land. The bears sleeping in their dens.

As a late birthday present, Billy had given me a BB gun. It was surprising to me that my response was a thrill of excitement. My own Red Ryder rifle, with a cowboy twirling a lasso on the side of the stock! Billy, unsure how I would respond to the gift, was shyly pleased. When Spring, who stopped by with her father, the Troll, saw I’d been given a BB gun, she looked incredulous. I said, “Kind of silly, huh?” She laughed, her laughter as bright as the peel of a bell, apparently finding it delightfully ridiculous that a grown-up had a toy gun while even she, a four-year-old, had a real .22.

As we were going out the door to the airstrip the morning I had to leave, Billy said, “We forgot your gun!” He grabbed it from the corner of the arctic entry and stuffed it into a canvas duffel bag along with a small coffee can full of BBs.

I told the pilot there was a BB gun in the bag, and he didn’t give it a second look, just set it carefully on top of the mailbags in the back. I hurried into the main terminal at the Fairbanks airport with the duffel bag in one hand and my carry-on bag in the other. The ticket agent was marking some tags, and without looking up, said, “How many bags do you have to check?”

“Two. Uh, one of them has a BB gun in it.”

She looked at me wide-eyed, glanced at my luggage, and said in a horrified whisper, “You’ve got a gun in that bag?”

“Yes.” Hunters in Alaska took guns on airplanes all the time. I hadn’t foreseen a problem. What had I been thinking? Sure this was Alaska, but sometimes the real world intrudes even here. 

“You can’t check a gun with your regular baggage,” she hissed, glancing around to make sure no passengers were within hearing range. “It has to be checked in through security.”

“It’s just a BB gun.”

“Any kind of gun has to be in a gun case with a lock.”

“I don’t have a case. It was a gift.”

“Well, then you have to buy one from TSA or surrender the gun.”

“How much is a case?”

She quickly looked up the price on her computer.
“Ninety dollars.”

“That’s three times what the BB gun cost!”
“You either buy one or you don’t fly with it. Those are the regulations.” She looked at me suspiciously, something suddenly occurring to her. “It’s not loaded, is it?”

“Yes, actually, it is.” I jiggled the duffel bag so she could hear the BBs in the gun. What she heard was the loud noise of hundreds of BBs rattling in the coffee can.

“Oh, my God! A loaded gun.” She picked up the phone and called airport security.

“We’ve got a loaded gun here. I need someone over here. Now.”

Within seconds two TSA agents were at my side.

“Step this way, please,” the taller of the two said as they escorted me behind the counter and into a back room. They stopped at a table with a wastebasket next to it and then moved away from me. 

“Unload the gun and put the ammo in the trash,” instructed the shorter one.

“I don’t know how to unload it. I just got it a few days ago. Can’t you do it?” I asked, holding out the gun.
They both stepped back. “Sorry ma’am,” the agent said severely, “we’re not allowed to touch it.”

I pulled out the BB gun Billy had put into my hands with such sweet affection, never dreaming it was going to cause a problem. I might miss my flight. I turned it upside down, trying to figure out how to remove the BBs, switching it end over end and even looking into the barrel. Every time I swung the gun in their direction, the agents ducked. The BBs coursed from one end to the other, sounding like an Australian rainstick. I poked and prodded until I succeeded in sliding open a small compartment. I shook out the BBs, which ricocheted loudly in the empty metal trashcan. 

I wasn’t about to give up the gun. It had been a gift from Billy. I bought the damn case. It was enormous, and strapped inside, the little Red Ryder looked like a kid’s violin in a cello case. My flight was leaving in less than half an hour and I still had to check the gun case at the TSA security counter. I stood self-consciously in line with several burly men, all carrying rifle cases. The guy behind me, decked out in clothes fit for a safari, looked at my brand new case and said, “D’ya get anything?”

“Excuse me?”

“Did you get anything? Caribou?”

I just said, with what I hoped was a knowing look, “Nope, not this time. You?”

He shrugged sympathetically and shook his head.

Hurrying through the final checkpoint, I emptied my pockets and threw into the plastic bowl the last thing Billy had given me before I left—a single black bear claw.

I made my flight with four minutes to spare.