Sukkwan Island Part 5

No.

Well, we'll think of something. We don't have enough nails, either. But we'll think of something.

That night, Roy stayed awake again waiting for the crying, needing to know if it was every night, but then he woke in the morning and wondered whether it had not happened or he had simply not stayed awake long enough. It was hard to know. His father was hiding from him now, and Roy had to pretend he didn't know this.

They shoveled enough dirt back in to bury the posts side by side. They weren't attached in any other way, just buried next to one another.

I think they'll stay like that, his father said. Just the pressure of everything on the inside against everything on the outside.

What about when we take the food out, Roy asked, or when a bear digs down and tries to take it apart?

His father looked at him, considering. He looked at him more plainly than Roy was used to, so that Roy avoided his eyes and looked at the light beard his father had now and the hair longer on the sides and flattened against his skull from not being washed. He didn't look anything like a dentist anymore, or really even like his father. He looked like some other man who maybe didn't have much.

You're thinking, his father said. This is good. We can talk about what we're doing. I've been thinking about the same things, and it seems to me that we have to bury it deep enough and put enough stuff on top that a bear can't dig down, because if he does get down there, no way of putting the cache together will keep him out.

Roy nodded. He didn't know if it would work, but it made sense at least.

And when we take stuff out, finally, late in February maybe, the ground will be so frozen that nothing will move. It won't be able to cave in even if we take the wood away completely, which we may need to do for our stove.

Roy smiled. That sounds good.

All right.

They placed the rest of the posts, like the walls of a small fort town only a few feet high, and then sat back to look at it.

It needs a roof, Roy said.

And a door. We'll cut long poles that go clear across, and we'll figure out the door in the roof. Probably just a big hole with a second roof over it.

We don't have the food to go into it yet, Roy said.

Right you are. And we won't put it in until it snows. Until then, we have to keep it from caving.

We should have waited to dig it until a few months from now, huh?

Yeah. We dug it too early. But that's okay. We didn't know.

Over the next two days, in the rain, they cut the poles for a roof and a smaller second roof. They sawed the lengths and stripped off the branches with a hatchet, Roy watching this father with his grim unshaven face when he worked, the cold rain dripping off the end of his nose. He seemed as solid then as a figure carved from stone, and all his thoughts as immutable, and Roy could not reconcile this father with the other, the one who wept and despaired and had nothing about him that could last. Though Roy had memory, it seemed nonetheless that whatever father he was with at the time was the only father that could be, as if each in its time could burn away the others completely.

When they had finished cutting the poles for both roofs, they placed them all carefully and stood back to see. The sides were already was.h.i.+ng in around the posts and caving the roof, rivulets of mud everywhere in the unceasing rain.

Some of the posts are soft, his father said. They're getting washed out. Oh well.

How can we stop it from caving in?

I don't know. We don't have enough tarp. Maybe I screwed up. Maybe it was too early. We should just be storing up now, I guess.

That night, Roy did not have to wait long to hear his father weep. It came within only a few minutes, and his father wasn't trying to hide it anymore.

Sorry, his father said. It's not the cache or anything like that.

It's other things.

What is it?

Well, my head hurts all the time, but that's not it.

Your head hurts?

Yeah. It has for years. You didn't know that?

No.

Well.

Why does it hurt?

It's just sinuses, and I'm supposed to have them cleared out, but I haven't bothered. It doesn't always work anyway, and it's an awful operation. But that's not the problem. That's just what makes me feel weak and makes it easy to cry and keeps me tired. The bigger thing is that I just can't seem to be alone.

And his father started crying again. I know I'm not alone, he whimpered. I know you're here. But I'm still too alone. I can't explain it.

Roy waited for more, but his father only cried then and it went on for a long time, Roy not knowing how it was that he could be right here and still, for his father, it was as if he wasn't here at all.

The rain continued and the cache washed in further. Roy and his father stood at the edge looking down at the fallen posts and thinking and not saying anything until finally his father said, Well, let's pull all the wood out and we'll try it again when it first snows.

Roy didn't believe they'd still be here when it first snowed, but he nodded as his father climbed down in and then he took the pieces his father handed him and carried them back to the cabin. Roy knew that somehow this disappointment was worse for his father than the other disappointments had been. If Roy spoke now, he doubted he'd be heard. And he understood this about his father, that he was often gone into his own thoughts and couldn't be reached, and that none of this time spent alone thinking was good for him, that he always sank lower when he went in there.

They stacked the wood against a side wall, and when they were done, they looked again at the pit, at the mud deepening and the walls caving, and both looked into the sky, into the grayness that had no depth or end, and then they went inside.

When the plane came a few days later, Roy was fis.h.i.+ng several miles up the coast. He thought he heard it, then thought he must have made it up, but stopped and listened and heard it again. He pulled in his line, grabbed the two salmon he had caught, and started running. He was far enough off, though, and blocked by so many small points along the way, that he couldn't see it fly into the mouth of their cove. He ran over the rocky beach and, when he had to, up into the trees and down again, becoming more and more afraid that he would miss it. He a.s.sumed his father was there cutting wood, but what if he had hiked back over the ridge for some reason and no one was there? The pilot might not come back again for a long time, might just leave a note saying, Call me on the radio if you need anything. And there was another thing, too, that Roy didn't like to admit. Even if his father was there, what would he say? Was there a chance he would just say everything was fine and send the pilot away and not have him come back? It didn't seem impossible, and Roy needed to leave here, he needed to get away. Roy dropped the fish and his pole and ran faster.

He was only a few hundred yards from the final point when he heard the drone of it again and stopped to see it rush out of the mouth, tilt free of its own spray, and lift precariously over the channel. He stood there then, looking at where it had finally disappeared and breathing hard and feeling that something terrible had happened.

He left, he said out loud. I missed him.

He went back then for his pole and the salmon and walked on to the cabin.

His father was back at the woodpile. Tom came by, he said when Roy walked up.

I heard.

Oh. Well he was just here a minute but I ordered the supplies we need and he'll be back with them next week on his way to Juneau. Though not really on his way exactly, I suppose. And his father grinned then, pleased at how in the middle of nowhere they were.

Roy took his salmon down to the water and gutted them. He scaled them quickly and cut off their heads and fins and tails. He wanted out of here. He didn't care what his father thought about it; he was just going to go.

You want to leave? his father asked when he told him at dinner.

Roy didn't say it again but just ate. He felt terrible, as if he were killing his father.

We're not doing so bad, are we? his father asked.

Roy refused to cave in. He didn't say anything.

I don't understand, his father said. We're finally getting somewhere. We're getting ready for winter.

Why? Roy thought to himself. Just so we can survive winter? But he didn't say anything.

Look, his father said. You're gonna have to talk to me about this, otherwise you're just staying and that's that.

Okay, Roy said.

Why do you have to go?

I want my friends again, and my real life. I don't want to just try to survive winter.

Fair enough. But what about me? You told me you'd stay out here a year, and I made my plans. I quit my job and bought this place. What am I supposed to do if you just leave?

I don't know.

You haven't thought about that, have you?

No. Roy felt awful. I'm sorry, he said.

That's all right, his father said. If you need to go, then you need to go. I won't stop you.

Roy wanted to say right then that he'd stay, but he couldn't. He knew terrible things were going to happen to him out here if he stayed. He did the dishes and then they went to bed.

You know, his father said that night as they lay not sleeping, it's too out of control here. You're right. It takes a man to get through this. I shouldn't have brought a boy.

Roy couldn't believe his father was saying these things to him. He didn't sleep that night. He wanted to leave. He wanted to get out of here. But as the night went on, he knew that he'd be staying. He kept imagining his father out here alone, and he knew his father needed him. By the morning, Roy felt so bad he fixed pancakes and told his father, I've thought more about it and I don't think I really want to go.

Really? his father said, and he came up and put an arm around his boy's shoulders. Now we're talking, he said, beaming. We can lick this thing. We'll have fresh supplies and we'll put away enough fish and meat and I have a new idea for the roof of the cache. I was thinking...

And his father went on and on, excited, but Roy stopped hearing him. He didn't believe anymore in exciting plans. He felt he had just put himself in a kind of prison, and it was too late to back out.

That day they began picking blueberries. They had been out here over a month, late July now, and though it was still a bit early for berry season, the berries would be fine for making jam. They picked into freezer bags, Roy remembering Ketchikan and his red coat with the hood and all the times they had hiked onto the hill behind the house to pick blueberries. They had churned homemade ice cream, soupy and rich, and stirred the berries in. He remembered the smoky smell of the air, too, and all the fall colors. It wasn't only the trees that turned in Alaska, it was everything, all the growth, and it began turning in early August. Still too early here, but it was coming soon. In more northern parts, in Fairbanks, where his father had lived, it would begin turning very soon, perhaps even now, and by September fifteenth, nearly all the tiny leaves on the blueberry bushes would have fallen and most of the leaves on the trees, also, the end of fall and beginning of the snows. Here it would be later, but not much later. One summer in Ketchikan, he remembered, it had snowed in August. He had ridden his tricycle out into it and tried to catch the flakes on his tongue.

Later in the day, they stood on the point and caught salmon every few casts. The schools were coming in finally, not just a few isolated salmon anymore. They could see them in thick beneath the clear water, dark shapes in rows undulating slowly and in time, another thing Roy remembered. They had pulled into small coves like this one in the cabin cruiser and Roy had stood on the bow with his father and looked at all of them gathered below him and he had come to believe that all waters were like this, that all waters were so populated. The Pixies bright in among them now, just as before, Roy dragging his across their noses until one rushed forward and took it, then flashed silver as Roy yanked to set the hook. He whooped like his father did whenever he caught one, and it seemed then not so bad that they would stay out here. Roy gutted his fish when he had caught five, then ran rope through the gills.

When we really get going, his father said, we'll be dragging twenty or thirty salmon a day back to the cabin. We'll be so busy we'll wish we had a second smoker.

The plane returned the next week with their supplies: more baggies, plywood, seeds, canned goods and staples, huge bags of brown sugar and salt, a new radio and batteries, Louis L'Amour Westerns for his father, a new sleeping bag and surprise tub of chocolate ice cream for Roy. The arrival of the plane made it seem they weren't really that far away, as if a town and other people like Tom were maybe just around the point. Roy felt relaxed and happy and safe and didn't realize until the plane started up again and was taxiing out that that feeling wasn't going to stay. As he watched it go, he realized he was starting over, that now it would again be a month or two, or maybe longer, and he remembered, too, that they had planned to get away for at least a week at the end of summer, which was now. That had been the plan, and somehow it had not happened.

But he didn't have much time to dwell on this. He and his father grew busier and busier in their preparations. They were up early and still working often past dusk. The mountains changing quickly then, turning purple and yellow and red, seeming to soften more in the late light, the air colder and cleaner and thinning each day, Roy and his father bundled now in their jackets and hats as they pulled in the salmon, as they cut more wood and stacked it behind the plywood walls. The time easy between them, busy and unthinking, working together to store up. Roy slept. If his father cried, he didn't know, and for a while, at least, he didn't care as much, perhaps because he knew now that he couldn't get away, that he had committed himself and would stay here with his father whether his father were sick or well.

They began the home schooling in the evenings, just two or three evenings that first week. Roy read Moby d.i.c.k Moby d.i.c.k and his father read Louis L'Amour. Roy wrote down answers to detailed and picky and seemingly insignificant questions about plot and theme and his father said, Now that was a real Western. After a week of this, they realized they just didn't have time for it with all the other preparations, so they put it off and went back to cutting wood and smoking fish and hunting full time. and his father read Louis L'Amour. Roy wrote down answers to detailed and picky and seemingly insignificant questions about plot and theme and his father said, Now that was a real Western. After a week of this, they realized they just didn't have time for it with all the other preparations, so they put it off and went back to cutting wood and smoking fish and hunting full time.

They hunted anything now, anything they came across that they could smoke. They killed a cow moose several miles away in a marshy flat where a stream gathered before spilling into the ocean. She was alone and looking at them, chewing, her s.h.a.ggy hide dark and dripping and they both fired and she went down immediately, as if she had been crushed by a great stone. His father carried the carca.s.s back one haunch at a time while Roy guarded the rest, a sh.e.l.l in the chamber, looking all around him as it grew dark, watching for the red eyes of bears and whatever else his imagination could think of to fear.

They harvested salmon as his father had promised, in long strings that they dragged back to the cabin, the open mouths still gasping, the bodies reddish late in the season and trembling on land. They caught as many as they had time to clean and cut up and smoke, the pink and red and white meat of chinook, sockeye, humpies, and chum.

They shot a mountain goat that had come down to the sh.o.r.eline, Roy wondering at how red the blood looked at first against the white hair, and then how black. By this time it was cold enough that the animal steamed as they gutted it. The mountains the next morning had snow all along their tops, as if the spirit of the white animal had somehow fled into them, and within the week, the snow had lowered halfway down toward the cabin and sat still and windless and bright throughout the afternoon.

They set to work again on the cache. It had become rounded in all its corners and the earth around it had slumped. They dug it out shovelful by shovelful and sharpened its edges and deepened it again to the base rock and then Roy handed down the posts to his father, the posts lashed this time with twine and the corners nailed. Then they set the poles across the top and lashed them as well and nailed them along their edges with ten-inch nails deep into the posts and then they lashed together a small second roof and placed it over the uneven hole in the top and stood back and admired their work.

It looks right, Roy said.

It's ready for the goods.

The spare room in the cabin by this time was full with dried and smoked fish and meat carefully packaged in freezer bags then larger garbage bags. They began early one morning so that they'd be finished burying by dark and not have to keep watch over it during the night. His father placed all of the bags inside along with a large pile of canned goods that had been flown in, in case all the smoked fish and meat spoiled for some reason, and then he nailed down the second roof.

Hope it stays good, he said.

It better, Roy said, and his father grinned.

Let's bury it and forget about it.

So they threw in a deep layer of cold ash they had saved from the stove to mask the smell, and then a layer of rocks, then the dirt and they heaped it up high so that when it settled it would be level, and then they put more rocks on top of that and another layer of ash.

I don't know if any of this is right, his father said, but it seems like it should work.

They continued to catch the last of the salmon and also a few Dolly Varden and some small bottom fish. The original plan had been to go out in the inflatable for halibut, too, but his father had decided to save the boat and all of its gasoline for any kind of emergency that might come up. They shot another mountain goat. The smoker was going around the clock still, even as the first snows came down to the cabin, and the inside of the cabin seemed a smokehouse also with strips of salmon and Dolly Varden and sculpin and lingcod and deer and goat everywhere cooling and waiting to be bagged, the baggies and garbage bags that had already been filled piling up in the spare room.

They went to bed each night exhausted, and there was no time left awake to listen for his father, and so Roy managed on some nights even to forget that his father was not well. He began, even, to a.s.sume that his father was fine, in that he didn't think about his father one way or the other. He was simply living each day filled with activity and then sleeping and then rising again, and since he was working alongside his father, he a.s.sumed his father was feeling all the same things. If he had been asked how his father was feeling, he would have been annoyed at the question and considered the matter too far away to pay attention to.

Most of the snows were light and did not stick for long down close to the water or even for a ways up behind the cabin. They did not cover the cache consistently. Roy asked his father if the weather would stay like this, because it seemed like it might be the case. His father had to tip his head back to remember.

They didn't stick long, most of the snows in Ketchikan. But then I remember skiing around, and s...o...b..nks, and shoveling snow and all the slush I had to drive through, so I guess the snow did stick and build up sometimes. Isn't that funny, though, that I can't really remember?

They went up to the cache several times a day and looked for bear tracks or any other tracks, but nothing ever came. The constant checking began to seem odd to both of them, as if they had developed some inexplicable fear of this one small piece of ground, so they decided to check less often and just trust that it would be all right, especially since it was growing colder and the days shorter. They came in earlier each evening from their work at the woodpile and the smoker and began reading again and sometimes played cards. They played two-handed pinochle, which technically could not be played, and his father rambled.

Remember what I told you about the world originally being a great field, and the earth flat?

Yeah, Roy said. How everything went to h.e.l.l after you met Mom.

Whoa, his father said. That's not exactly what I said. But anyway, I've been thinking about that again, and it's got me thinking about what I'm missing and why I don't have religion but need it anyway.

What? Roy asked.

I'm screwed, basically. I need the world animated, and I need it to refer to me. I need to know that when a glacier s.h.i.+fts or a bear farts, it has something to do with me. But I also can't believe any of that c.r.a.p, even though I need to.