Asylum--Chapter Twelve Trusting to Luck

Chapter Twelve Trusting to Luck

That afternoon we scrambled into our clothes as we heard a four-wheeler pull up in front of the cabin. It was Billy’s neighbor, the Troll, who lived up the road with his wife and young daughter. A gangly man with oversized glasses and a reddish beard, Billy had once described him to me as looking like a scarecrow made of baling wire. The Troll had acquired his nickname the first year he’d come to Eagle, when he spent the summer camping under a bridge that crossed American Creek. He and Billy were trapping partners, and they talked about what price a prime marten fur was going for and where the best places were to put each trap or “set” once the season opened in November.

Then the Troll began talking about various adventures at his gold mining claim on the Fortymile River. Like Billy had said, when the Troll tells a story, he starts at the beginning and doesn’t leave anything out. After two hours, I was on my third cup of tea, and when it sounded like he was about to embark on another story, I got restless, wanting him to go home so we could go back to bed. I moved around Billy and hugged him from behind.

“My hands are cold.” I expected him to take my hands in his, but instead, in an unexpectedly intimate gesture, he unbuttoned a couple of buttons of his shirt and slipped my hands inside against his warm belly. I leaned into him, feeling his stomach muscles, and I wanted more than ever for his neighbor to leave.

The Troll broke off in midsentence, looked into his coffee cup, cleared his throat and said, “Time for me to be shoving off.” And he was out the door.

After he left, Billy turned around in my arms and looked at me affectionately.

 “I hope that wasn’t too rude,” I said.

He laughed and kissed me. “No, it was perfect. You did the impossible. You got the Troll to stop talking.”

The next afternoon the Troll was back with his three-year-old daughter. She had a sunny smile and the felicitous name of Spring. While he dandled her on his knee, the proud father told us Spring had just shot her first squirrel. 

 “In what sense did she shoot a squirrel?” I asked, in frank disbelief.

 “Well, we took her .22—” he said.

 “Wait a minute. She has her own gun?” 

    The little girl nodded vigorously.

“Yeah. I cut down the stock on a .22 for her. It’s about yay-high,” he said, holding his hand level with his knee. “I steadied it on a stump, got a bead on a squirrel, and she pulled the trigger.”

Spring giggled and gave me one of her sunshiny smiles.

There was no one in the room with whom I could exchange raised eyebrows. I felt a million miles away from anything familiar to me.

As soon as father and daughter disappeared down the path through the trees, I burst out, “I can’t believe Spring has her own rifle.” 

 “So?”

“She’s not even four years old!”

 “It’s a little young.”

“A little young! How old were you when you got your first gun?

“Nine.”

 “My parents would never have let me shoot a gun at age nine, let alone given me one!”

“Well how old were you the first time you shot a gun?
  “Me? Never.”

“You haven’t?” he asked incredulously. “Where have you been all your life?” 

 “I grew up in the suburbs. People didn’t shoot guns in my neighborhood.” To my parents, gun-owners were rednecks or criminals. Or both. 

Billy suggested, quite sensibly, that the only way to overcome my aversion to guns was to shoot one. I reluctantly agreed. I figured if I was going to spend time here, I needed to overcome my fear. I lived in a perpetual state of paranoia that one of his guns was going to suddenly fall from the wall and go off, blasting a hole in something or someone. I thought of Smokey and that she had been a crack shot at target shooting as a teenager and had regained her skills on Thimbleberry Island.

I gingerly took the .22 Billy offered me and walked out to the yard where he set up a Coors can filled with water as a target. I asked him three times if the safety was on and checked it myself a dozen times. Beyond the yard was nothing but woods extending for miles, so I knew there was no danger of hitting anyone or anything. Especially the beer can. Billy showed me how to hold the rifle, first demonstrating himself, then placing it in my hands and pushing it firmly against my shoulder. I squeezed the trigger, half expecting the world to explode. There was a loud noise and I opened my eyes. Nothing had happened. I was still standing. The can was still standing.

After several more tries, Billy took me by the shoulder and walked me closer. I shot again. He walked me closer. Then, to my amazement, I hit the can. I don’t know whether I was more startled that I hit it or that I felt a sense of satisfaction when it burst with a spray of water. Realistically, I was standing so close I could have beaned the thing with a rock. All the same, it was a guilty thrill I felt when I finally shot the can, and Billy had whooped in approval.

I couldn’t help being impressed by the smooth way he handled a gun: how comfortable he seemed to feel with it in his hands; how easily he swung it into position. My grandmother wrote in her Thimbleberry Island journal, “It is a beautiful sight to see Scotty raise a gun to firing position, full of swift grace and effortless coordination (of which he is totally unconscious). When he does this, he is again young, and all Marine.”

Around Scotty, she had felt “a woeful sense of inadequacy out here in the Bush.” It took Smokey a full year to gain confidence in her ability to handle life on the island. Then she took pleasure in her newfound skills: she could tell the size of a plane or the caliber of a gun by its sound; identify an animal at a distance by its gait; and tie a knot "without making a bird's nest of it." She even became acclimated to the constant rain, which averaged one hundred and fifty inches a year. And in the winter of 1961, she bragged, "This ol' cheechako (newcomer) just rebuilt the fire from scratch with only two matches and no paper!"

I thought of my own cheechako status and my sense of inadequacy here in Eagle: my fumbling attempts to start a fire; my reluctance to handle a gun; my squeamishness about killing anything. These were all natural parts of life in the north, and I wanted to be able to handle them.

Over a dinner of Spam and black eyed peas, Billy said, “I’m glad you shot the .22 today.”

“Why?”

“Because you were afraid and you did it anyway.”

I thought about my grandparents’ friends, neighbors, and family members I’d located in Southeast Alaska, all of whom had said the same three things about Smokey: she was intelligent, strong, and brave. (One person also said she was obviously well-educated and had flawless manners—something you don’t hear about Alaskans, in general.)

I found myself telling Billy about meeting one of Smokey’s old friends on my first trip to Skagway, several years ago. By the time I met Samuel Stewart, he was in his seventies and was a respected master carver and elder of the Tlingit people.

“I used to sit in his workshop and watch him carve. He told me fantastic stories about hunting giant brown bears on Admiralty Island as a boy. His people call the island “the fortress of the bears.” He talked about ‘the mosquito people’ like they were real. Then we’d sit at his kitchen table and drink tea, and he’d get out his guitar and sing Glenn Campbell songs in Tlingit.”

Billy laughed. “That must have been something.”

“Yes, I loved it. He seemed to think it was a good thing that I wasn’t just sitting at home filling out genealogy charts but was actually following in my grandmother’s footsteps. The thing was . . . the surprising thing was that six months after I left Skagway, I got a package in the mail from him. It was a red cedar ‘talking stick’ he’d carved for me.”

“What’s a talking stick?”

“In tribal council meetings, whoever was holding the stick got to speak without interruption until he passed it to someone else. Anyway, the stick was carved with three animals Samuel said represented me: a raven, for being a storyteller; a beaver, for being clever and industrious; and a bear, for being strong. I never thought of myself that way.”

I felt that the characteristics this wise elder had attributed to me were undeserved. Maybe someday, I thought, but certainly not now.

I’d already put off going back to Taiga yet another day, calling Thomas and telling him the man I wanted to interview was still not back from moose hunting. He was growing impatient, but he still did not suspect a thing. For one, he trusted me. He trusted me. That thought turned like a worm in my heart. His trying behavior was no excuse for lying to him and being unfaithful. Even his harsh words and constant criticism didn’t seem reason enough. But my time with Billy seemed to be taking place in another world entirely, one where the usual rules did not apply. Guilt loomed, but I pushed it aside. I succeeded in blocking out any thoughts of Thomas or my kids, or anything other than what was before me: another day and night with Billy. If I reflected on everything I was endangering by my presence here, my brain would explode. I refused to think.

Fortunately, I found something to distract me. Billy still had much to do before he’d be ready for winter; next on the list was digging potatoes. He asked if I would like to help. My own pathetic attempts at vegetable gardening had yielded a few stumpy carrots and a handful of bitter Swiss chard. The garden plot next to Billy’s cabin was full of knee-high potato plants, now wilted from the frosty nights. He warned me I would get muddy, so he outfitted me in a pair of canvas coveralls already caked with dirt.

I expected Billy to hand me a special tool, some sort of potato fork, but instead he just grabbed a potato plant, uprooted it, tossed it aside, and began scrabbling around in the dirt with his bare hands, coming up with one knobby potato after another. It looked like fun. I dropped to my knees, pulled a plant out of the ground, and began rooting around. Feeling something the size of a tangerine, I pulled it easily from the soil and brushed off a yellow potato. Yukon Gold, my favorite.

We dug potatoes for hours, although small, almost unsee-able insects called whitesox gathered at the corners of my eyes and bit savagely. They refused to be shooed away and I had to wipe them off my face with a dirty hand. It was like searching for buried treasure. Every time I found a particularly large potato, I crowed with delight. When Billy found a strangely shaped one, he held it up to show me. Soon it became a game, both of us competing to see who could find the biggest or oddest potatoes.

By the time we were finished, dusk was falling. Billy pulled me to my feet. My back hurt. My eyes were starting to swell shut from the whitesox bites. Billy laughed at my dirt-streaked face and hugged me. We carried the potatoes into the cabin and spread them out to dry on a piece of cardboard in the corner. We hung up our muddy pants to dry, too, and I changed into clean clothes. Billy tenderly held a cool, damp washcloth to my face to soothe my eyes. Then we cooked a whole potful of new potatoes, the small, thin-skinned ones. They were sweet and delicious. Billy kept staring at me with a smile on his face—the same smile he’d had when I’d walked up with the burbot and when I’d hit that beer can for the first time. A look of pleasure, surprise, wonder, delight, and pride.

Yet, when I finally said, “I love you” that night, he looked at me with great understanding and pity and said, “I know.” He apologized for not being able to reciprocate. After all his years alone, he said, “Maybe something just died or broke in my heart.” 

Once, decades ago, he had been able to feel love. The way he spoke about his one and only girlfriend, Julia, left no doubt of that. 

“Can I ask why didn’t you ever have sex if you were in love?”

 “We were waiting.”

 “Waiting for what?”
“Marriage,” he said hesitantly. “She was a born-again Christian.”

“You were engaged to a born-again Christian?” I asked, dumbfounded.

“Yes. I was baptized in her church, too.”

“You’re telling me you used to be a fundamentalist?”

“I still am.”

“What, and you forgot to tell me? How long have we known each other—four months, and it just slipped your mind?” I turned to look at him on the couch, my eyes blazing. I was not only surprised but mad.

 “I guess I wasn’t too anxious to tell you.”

I remembered the local man in Coming into the Country who complained the people in Eagle were either Bible-thumpers or alcoholics. Someone else had put it a different way, saying “This town is divided between the outlaws and the do-gooders.” From what I had seen, there was still some truth to that. Suddenly it all made sense: Billy’s presence at the bible chapel the previous spring; the way he whistled “How Great Thou Art” and “Simple Gifts” while going about his chores; the well-worn Bible on his bookshelf. Why hadn’t I seen it? I thought all that had just been part of his quaint old-fashioned ways. How could I be in love with a born-again Christian?

“I guess the next question is, How then do you justify us?”

Billy went silent.

“God brings good things, and you are a good thing,” he said quietly.

For me, it was not so simple. I felt my brain and my heart trying to expand, attempting to accept his religious beliefs despite my own lack of faith, just as I had stretched around the idea of guns, struggling to embrace a broader concept of what was acceptable in my world. Hadn’t Smokey had to enlarge her vision and re-think her values when she came north? Maybe I, too, had to reconsider my old restrictive ideas about who was right and wrong—the “bunny lover” vs. the hunter, the agnostic vs. the born-again Christian, pro-choice vs. right-to-life. It meant giving up my self-righteous attitudes that had sustained me for decades. But here, with Billy, I didn’t always have to be right. I was being forced to learn a much-needed lesson: tolerance.

Besides, what justification did I have for us to be together, when I didn’t have an explanation as all-encompassing as his? The only thing I knew was that I was discovering a person capable of things I no longer thought possible—someone who could act with love, compassion, spontaneity, and bold abandon. Weren’t these things, long dead in me, to be welcomed?

Shortly before I left, I told Billy I felt bad I hadn’t even interviewed one person for the article. He smiled and joked, “You could always interview me.” 

“You haven’t even read the darn book!”

“No, but I knew some of the people who were in it. I bought this land from Leonard Ross.”

 I remembered him. McPhee had portrayed him as a real woodsman, spending months trapping every winter with his wife in a cabin many miles from Eagle.

“He had a horse he’d use to skid logs out of the woods. He’d put them through his sawmill and sell the rough-cut lumber. Then he and his wife both got religion, and he became a pastor. They ended up going to Mongolia as missionaries. 

“Mongolia. That’s interesting. From one far end of the world to another.”

“Why do you even care about that book anyway?” Billy said with both puzzlement and impatience. “Everybody in town is just tired of the whole thing.”

“Because John McPhee was asking the same thing I’ve been wanting to find out ever since I came to Eagle and fell in love with it. He said, “I embrace this wild country. But how can I be of it? How can I move within it?” That’s what I keep wondering, myself: Is there a place for me here?”

Billy remained remarkably silent.

I couldn’t put off my return any longer. How beautiful Billy’s hands were as I watched him deftly tie shut a box in which he was packing a black bear skull for me to take with me. There was flesh still clinging to it. I’d soaked it like the lynx skull he had given me in the spring, scraping off the softened bits of hair and skin, leaving the clean white bone. I would miss seeing his strong hands coiling a rope, tying a knot, stroking my breasts.

The wind came up, blowing the leaves off the aspen trees along the driveway, sending them drifting in a gold cloud over our heads. We stood next to my car in the chill air.

I touched the soft skin below his beard. 

“Keep warm,” I said. 

“I feel cold already,” he said, a tear trembling in his eye.

Before leaving Eagle, I stopped at the gas station. The owner, Joe, a fit-looking man with gray hair, leaned against the old-fashioned yellow gas pump with the bubble on top and said “Nice car.” Thomas and I had bought the used Subaru for the move to Alaska, and it was the best car we’d ever had. To a mechanic, it probably looked in pretty good shape compared to all the road-weary vehicles in town with their cracked windshields.

With his strategic position at the entrance to town, there were few things that escaped Joe’s notice. He must have seen me with Billy because he said, “Now all you need is a job and you can move here.” If only it were that easy, I wanted to say. 

“So how do you like Eagle?”

“I love it.”

“It was a lot better when I got here in 1975. No electricity, no phones, no TV. You think the Taylor Highway is bad now? You should have seen it back then. Hey, your spare tires need some air?”

Spare tires? Plural? The Alaska Milepost, the Bible of travel guides, which I’d consulted before making the trip, advised travelers on the Taylor Highway to bring two spare tires. I thought that was an overly cautious advisement for tourists leery of backroads. Oh, well, I’d just have to trust to luck.

The gauge on the gas pump was broken—and had been for years, Joe said—so he made a quick mental calculation and came up with a rough estimate of how much I owed him. He pocketed my money and gave me a friendly wave as I drove away. I would have loved to stay and hear his stories about Eagle in the good old days but I was anxious to get on the road. Thomas was waiting.

I rushed up the highway, taking the curves so fast the car fishtailed through the loose gravel as if I were deliberately trying to obscure my tire tracks, evidence of my trip to see my lover. When I got to a winding ridgetop, I looked down and waved to the Fortymile River far below. It was my usual greeting of every river I crossed, from the Columbia to the Mississippi. But as I drove on, I found myself waving to everything I passed—the mountains of Canada to my left, the mountains of Alaska to my right, the stunted spruce trees and the autumn-struck tundra. I realized my salute might be a goodbye. I was on my way back to my husband, and then back to San Jose. I was married. I had a life waiting for me in Taiga once I was through with the city. Maybe I was waving goodbye not only to the river but to the mountains, to Billy, to Eagle. The feeling spooked me and I dropped my hand, gripping the wheel firmly and continuing on my way more slowly and more attentive now to the road in front of me. But it was too late; something had been set in motion.

A hundred miles farther on, the noise of the Subaru on the rough road was wearing on me, so I reached for the earplugs—the same ones I wore every day in San Jose—and as I looked down to find them, I felt the car leave the road. It slewed sideways at a sharp angle across the steep shoulder, and I knew I could not get it back up onto the highway. There was no way to control the car or what was happening to me. I had become merely a body in motion. It was all a matter of mechanics, of physics, an abstract equation of mass and velocity, and the sum would be whether I lived or died. I had no opinion one way or the other. I was in an irresolvable situation involving two men, both of whom I loved. The car started to roll, gravel spattering against it like hot grease. I was rolling like a die and I didn’t care which way it ended up.

In the sudden absence of sound as the Subaru went airborne, I knew in the next moment I’d either be in a world of hurt or I’d be dead. The car landed so hard the tires popped and I heard myself screaming. Then all was quiet as the dust began to settle around me, except for the sound of a truck backing up. It kept backing and backing. The sound wasn’t a truck at all, but the driver’s side door—still closed but now making a dinging sound. My right hand, which had been clutching my head, was bleeding, and my wrist felt like it had been caught between a cow and the corral fence at Liz’s ranch.

I climbed out the smashed window of the driver’s side, saying, “Oh, my beautiful car, my beautiful car.” Staggering up the shoulder, I walked back to where the car had left the road. I saw that the edge of the highway had simply crumbled away beneath my tires. I went around picking up things that had flown out of the car as it rolled—a prescription bottle, a grocery receipt, my driver’s license. Two men in a dusty pickup slowed to a stop. They were on their way back to Kentucky after several months working their gold claim near Chicken. They offered to drive me to the medical clinic in Tok, eighty miles away.

When I called Thomas from the clinic, he said, “What do you want me to do?” 

My head was throbbing; my neck felt like it had been almost snapped in half. I thought of the souvenir Billy had given me—a small cow caribou’s antler, which he’d removed by setting his boot against the animal’s forehead and, with a twisting motion, wrenched it off. It had come off with a pop of breaking cartilage, like my mother dismembering a chicken for Sunday dinner. 

I was still in shock and not thinking clearly enough to make a decision. “You decide,” I told Thomas. I wanted him to be the kind of man who would understand how to take care of me, but it had always been my job to take care of him.

The physician’s assistant thought I might have a serious neck injury and arranged for an ambulance to take me the two hundred miles to Fairbanks. It turned out I just had a moderate case of whiplash.

Thomas drove up from Taiga and met me at the hospital, as I had finally asked him to. He stood beside the bed with an uncertain smile on his face, unsure what to do. I yearned for Billy, who would have wiped the remaining traces of blood from my face and talked soothingly to me. I wanted him and the warm cabin and a cup of tea. But I also wished I could go home to the Palouse. I wanted our old house back, our old safe life. And I longed for the husband I had loved so much many years ago. Thomas laid his hand on my arm gingerly. His hand was smooth and familiar. Billy’s was rough and strange and lovely. Shards of glass worked their way out of my right hand for weeks.