Cold Storage, Alaska Read online

  Also by the Author

  The Woman Who Married a Bear

  The Curious Eat Themselves

  The Big Both Ways

  Copyright © 2014 by John Straley

  All rights reserved.

  First published in the United States in 2014

  Soho Press, Inc.

  853 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Straley, John, 1953-

  Cold storage, Alaska / John Straley.

  p cm

  ISBN 978-1-61695-306-5

  eISBN 978-1-61695-307-2

  1. Ex-convicts—Fiction. 2. Small cities—Alaska—Fiction.

  3. Alaska—Fiction. 4. Domestic fiction. I. Title.

  PS3569.T687C65 2014

  813’.54—dc23

  2013019796

  Interior design by Janine Agro, Soho Press, Inc.

  v3.1

  For Sophie Rosen

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Author’s Note

  CHAPTER ONE

  ANNABELLE HAD PUT the tea kettle on just moments ago. Now it was whistling, yet she didn’t get up to attend to it. Recently the past had become a hallucination constantly intruding into the present moment, so she wasn’t certain what really needed doing.

  She had been thinking about Franklin Roosevelt: the grinning man with the cigarette holder who was never photographed in his frailty. But now it was early spring in the last year of Bill Clinton’s presidency, and all the news was about the president’s failings. Flawed men kept ruling the world, and the radio in the corner with the long antennae squealed on and on about it. Not that the news mattered much to Annabelle now. It was raining hard, and all of the events of her life—past, present, and possibly future—were taking on the quality of a slightly malevolent screwball comedy.

  She sat in her chair looking out the window. She had been distracted by so many things lately: presidents, family members, and lost animals all swirling around her. The glass on the door rattled, and she looked up expecting to see her uncle, Slippery Wilson, walk in slapping his wet leather gloves against his pants, even though Slippery Wilson had been dead for more than three decades. She found herself listening for crying from the crib, even though both her boys were grown men. The younger one, Miles, was down at the senior center cooking dinner, and Clive was getting out of prison.

  “Never matter,” Annabelle said aloud to herself. She got up and turned off the radio in the corner.

  Throughout the afternoon, she had been trying to remember the joke she had heard the day before. It was good, she remembered, and she thought that it would have been good to tell Miles. But the joke eluded her in its detail.

  Out her window, the hillside fell away to the inlet. Alder trees grew quickly on the disturbed ground where the boys had built her house. A gust of wind came, and she thought she saw some darting color. A flash of yellow, she couldn’t be sure, but it seemed like a match head exploding. Yellow with red sparks flaring in the trees. She slid her glasses up her nose and was almost certain that she saw the bird fluttering up and away.

  “Buddy?” she said aloud, as the kettle boiled over and doused the flame.

  ON THAT SAME day in April 2000, Clive McCahon, Annabelle’s oldest son, was released from prison. He was thinking about his plan to get home.

  He had hated living in Alaska as a kid. His father had assumed he would become a fisherman. His mother had assumed that no matter how he made his living, it would be made right there in Cold Storage. Only his grandma Ellie had told him not to listen and to dream his own dreams. Having grown up on an island on the North Pacific, Clive had longed for the great American highway. He dreamed of cars and deserts and long, straight roads. Ellie had always given him books about cars for every birthday and Christmas. Cars and guitars, he dreamed of, bands he heard on the radio and beautiful girls who didn’t know everything about him. Ellie had understood his itch to move on. Only she seemed to understand that living in Cold Storage, Alaska, was like being born into a small maze where everyone constantly bumped into one another. As soon as his father died in the Thanksgiving Day storm, Clive had left. He had flown north to Haines, bought a car without ever owning a license, without ever learning to drive, and took off. He was fifteen. Ellie’s ashes had been scattered at sea and his father’s body had never been found, so he didn’t consider that he had anything holding him to his cloistered island town.

  Clive was thirty-five now. It was early April, and the clouds were clearing away after a morning rain. The air was so clean it almost burned his lungs. Clive had served seven out of his ten-year sentence in McNeil Island Penitentiary, and he was wearing his old court clothes: a dark blue suit his mother had bought him on one of his few visits home as an adult, now far too tight in his shoulders and upper arms. Feeling the sun cut through the trees, he set his cardboard box on the ground, slipped off the coat, folded it neatly, and placed it on top of the box. He had called ahead to order a cab.

  There were only a few people getting off the prison boat, mostly staff members carrying lunch boxes and rain gear. There was one other inmate, a skinny white kid with red hair who walked down the dock to meet an old man waiting beside a sputtering Ford LTD. The convict approached, the man opened the passenger side door, and a woman in a blue house dress got out and threw her arms around the boy before he could put down his gear. She cried and snuffled into his neck, while the old man rubbed the back of his shoulders.

  Clive shifted from one foot to another, waiting for his ride. A yellow minivan finally rolled up.

  “You Stilton Cheesewright?”

  Clive was still watching the kid being greeted by the old couple. He wondered if he had seen the kid inside but didn’t recognize him. He hadn’t recognized the false name the cabbie was saying, either.

  “You’re Stilton Cheesewright, yeah?” the driver said again. He reached behind and opened the back door of the van.

  “Absolutely.” Clive didn’t know why he’d given the cab company a false name; it was simply the first name that popped into his head and had nothing at all to do with the plan. He set his box of personal effects in the back seat, slammed the door, and walked around to sit in the front passenger seat.

  “You want to go to a grocery store?” He squinted at his run sheet.

  “That’s right,” Clive said. “If it’s not too much trouble.”

  “No problem, Mr. Cheesewright. Would you like me to wait while you shop?”

  “Naw … just drop me. I might be a while,” Clive said, but then added, “You know a place with really fresh lettuce?”

  The driver smiled. “I think if you want the really fresh stuff you should go over to the Farmfresh store down Sixth. It’s good, you know. They really do buy it from the farmers and everything. It’s a couple of miles out of town, but it’s worth it.”

  “Perfect,” said Clive. The driver punched the meter and wheeled to his left, down the road away from the prison.

  Clive watched the fence posts stutter
by. He watched the sunlight filter through the evergreen trees, and he watched a cow eating in a green field, a rusty bell hung from her neck. She lifted her head as the cab sped past, and Clive could imagine the soft clonking of her bell. Clive asked to stop for a moment; the driver put on the turn signal and eased the van to the gravelly edge of the road. Clive thanked him, leaned back in the cab’s mildewed seat, and smiled. He sat that way for a few moments, smiling and listening for the cow’s bell.

  “You do a long stretch?” the driver asked.

  Clive nodded, his eyes closed. “Yes,” he said. “It’s time to go home, I guess.”

  “You want me to get going?” the driver asked.

  Clive nodded again, his eyes still closed.

  “Let’s go get you some lettuce then,” the driver said, and pulled the blinker all the way down, rolling the cab back onto the road.

  CLIVE WAS BOTH happy and nervous. He had looked forward to this day with an urgency that few people who haven’t been in prison could know. But just as it was happening he felt a kind of raw anxiety. He could not go back to crime, and although he had scrubbed his mind clean, he knew that in this world of free men he understood little else besides crime. Crime was now, in his new state of mind, too chaotic, too unpredictable. Clive wanted to be rooted to something as certain as the rising of the sun.

  McNeil was an old federal prison that had been remodeled as a medium security jail when it was turned over to the state of Washington. The Birdman of Alcatraz had actually done most of his time at McNeil. The main building had the original feel of the place: thick iron doors, WPA-style murals on the walls of the mess hall. It could have been a large public library in some small Midwestern town if it weren’t for all the sex offenders.

  In jail, Clive had been known as the “Milkman,” for that’s what the newspapers had dubbed him. He had been a semi-famous drug dealer when he had been caught—famous for his method of delivering his drugs and famous for never snitching on his customers or his partners.

  He had seen arterial blood spurting and painting the shower floor red. He had seen the black holes that handmade knives leave in young white skin. He had heard all the swearing that there was in the world and the blubbery threats made through spit-stuffed lips. All he wanted now was peace. No grittiness. He was done with it. He would always be a sinner, he knew that, but he could at least try not to sin as much. He had thought that even if he could cut back on his sinning by ten percent, that would still leave him plenty of room, while giving him a shot at some minor redemption at least.

  In the last three years, he had purposely kept himself in segregation. He told the jailers he was going to be killed and that was the truth of it, but that was not what mattered. He wanted the quiet of the stone slice of ten by ten, the only noise a basketball bouncing on echoing concrete in the exercise yard where they let the segregated inmates out, one at a time, an hour and fifteen minutes every day.

  All he took into segregation with him was a Bible and a pencil. He kept his journal in the margins.

  It wasn’t until the beginning of his third year in segregation that he started listening to bugs. A blue fly landed on the edge of the Bible page, which was open to Numbers. The fly twitched what he imagined to be its filthy legs. The spidery printing of the first word was almost the size of the fly itself:

  How can I curse whom God has not cursed?

  How can I denounce whom the Lord has not denounced?

  For from the top of the crags I see him,

  From the hills I behold him;

  Behold a people dwelling alone,

  And not counting itself among the nations.

  “What?” Clive said aloud, leaning even farther toward the book. “What was that?” But the fly had not said anything.

  THERE WERE TWO picnic tables beside the store where Clive was going to eat his salad. Cigarette butts fanned out on the pavement. An overflowing garbage can sat next to a bike rack. Clive brought his packages out and set them down carefully. He had asked the produce manager to wash all of the vegetables. He had bought a plastic bowl, a cutting board, a knife, and some bottled oil and vinegar dressing. He reached inside his bag and took the knife and the cutting board out first. A kid, riding a trick bike in the parking lot, stopped long enough to stare at the skinny man in the dark suit smelling a tomato, then hopped the bike onto the rack, skidded down the top pipe on his cranks, landed, and wheeled away.

  The spring weather in western Washington was strangely warm. Clive sat and slowly cut the vine-ripened hothouse tomatoes. He washed all the vegetables under the outside spigot once again, just to be certain. He peeled the carrots and sliced them into thin strips. He had two kinds of lettuce, one red pepper, a bottle of artichoke hearts, and one fresh avocado. He spoke to no one, but chopped and sliced with great deliberation. After all the vegetables were laid out in his bowl, he stared at them and licked a bit of ripe avocado off his fingers. He added the fresh Dungeness crab meat to the salad. He opened a bottle of white wine and poured himself a glass. He said a short prayer, swore that he would never eat canned spaghetti or unidentifiable meat ever again, and ate his first meal in the free world.

  The bottle of wine was three-quarters empty by the time the cabdriver came back to check on Clive. He was sitting at the picnic table with his back against the building; long shadows from the poplar trees next door played out across the parking lot. The salad was gone, and Clive had the wine bottle stuck down between his legs and a plastic fork in his mouth.

  The cab rolled up on the crunching gravel and came to a stop. The driver lowered his window.

  “You got a place for tonight, Stilton?”

  “No, I guess not.” Clive pulled the fork out of his mouth.

  “You got a plan?” He fished out his smokes.

  “Oh yes, I have a plan.” He looked back at the cabdriver. “Foolproof.”

  It was only then that Clive noticed that the driver had brought a little dog back with him. The corgi stood now on the driver’s lap, sniffing the damp air through the open window.

  “What’s your dog’s name?” Clive asked.

  “Bandit,” the driver replied, and the dog wiggled up and put his whole head out the window.

  “You haven’t got a plan,” the dog said.

  “Excuse me?” Clive said, a little distressed, for never before had he heard an animal speak so clearly. But then again it had been a while since he had seen such a large non-human animal.

  “You got a place to go?” the driver asked.

  “Sort of. I’m going to pick up my dog.” Clive offered the driver the bottle of wine. “Then I’m going back to Alaska.”

  “It’s a long way to Alaska,” the driver said, and took a drink from the bottle. “You’re going to need some money for that.”

  “Well, that’s what the plan’s about,” Clive said. “I’ve got my money the same place where my dog is.”

  Bandit sniffed the air again and shot his ears straight forward. “You don’t have a plan,” the corgi said again. Which distressed Clive all the more. The dog was telling the truth.

  “I got a little travel trailer out back of my place. You can spend the night there if you want,” the driver said as he stroked the little dog’s head.

  “No. I’ll be all right,” Clive insisted.

  “Get in,” Bandit said, and Clive gathered his things.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE JOKE WENT like this: The doctor comes back into the waiting room and tells his patient, “I’m sorry, Mr. Smith, but I have some bad news. It appears you have only eleven minutes to live.” The horrified patient beseeches him, “Please, doctor, isn’t there something you can do for me?” The doctor looks around the room and at his watch and says, “Well, I suppose I could boil you an egg.”

  The joke was everywhere on the boardwalk. It seemed to Miles McCahon that it had infected the residents of Cold Storage like a flu virus. He heard it everywhere, and he was beginning to wonder why.

  Maybe it was t
he darkness or the rain. Maybe it was the fact that almost everyone in Cold Storage was either clinically depressed or drunk most of the time. But they loved that joke, and Miles was beginning to take it personally.

  Miles had spent most of his life in Cold Storage. There had been trips out for a few years in college and his years in the Army Rangers. When his brother had gone to jail in 1993, Miles had been in Mogadishu as a medic with his delta team and had mustered out soon after that well-publicized mess. He had told himself he was never again going to leave the quiet of Cold Storage, but now he was beginning to wonder.

  Miles was the medical technician and physician’s assistant in a village without a doctor. He splinted broken bones and stopped bleeding. He stitched up severe cuts and treated people for shock. He monitored medications and researched medical issues for the 150 residents of this failing fishing village on the outer coast of southeastern Alaska. He was the closest thing to a doctor they had, and maybe it was for this reason he didn’t get the same amount of glee from the joke as everybody else obviously did.

  Miles was cooking Sunday dinner at the community center. He had used some of the money left over from a health and prevention education grant the previous PA had written. That PA had tried to hold classes on heart disease and diabetes; he had started “Healthwise” informational gatherings to which only a few people came, but none of those people were the ones who really needed the information. The principal of the school and the secretary came to the first two classes, the city administrator and her husband came to a few more, and then nobody came. The PA left town after six months.

  But the money had to be spent because the administrators in Sitka could not show unspent money in their program at the end of the fiscal year. They phoned Miles and told him to do whatever he could to clear the account. The administrators had kissed a lot of ass in Washington to get these funds, and it would be an insult to leave them unspent. So Miles started hosting dinner parties on Sundays. He tried to cook reasonably healthy food, but health concerns couldn’t get in the way of turnout. This Sunday he was cooking three meat loaves, each roughly the size of a carry-on luggage bag.