What Is Time to a Pig? Page 2

  “If we’re lucky,” Lilly had said to Nix just that night, “if we’re lucky this is how we end up, I suppose”—she paused—“at home with people who care about you.”

  Nix had been putting on her slicker to go out to the bar as Lilly stood in the kitchen kneading bread dough. “Yes . . .” Nix said.

  Lilly was looking down at the floor. “I don’t mind it,” Lilly said softly. “He’s got the long trip ahead. I don’t mind helping him get ready now.”

  Lilly was a blessing to Nix. She gave her time to get out of the house. Time to sit and work on her drawings. Blessed time away from the dying in the upstairs bedroom.

  Nix hated it. She hated the smell of the house, the disinfectant in the bucket for dirty linens, the sour smell that made even the warm kitchen with baking bread smell boggy.

  Norma the barmaid on duty brought Nix a martini. Nix held her mechanical pencil above the paper. Every time she was about to begin a new drawing she would remember the words her art teacher had made her write in ink all around the top of her computer monitor at school. She had looked at those words every day whether she consciously read them or not: When beginning any depiction, the artist must consider the angle and the source of the light.

  She held her pencil steady and took a drink. She didn’t really like martinis, but she wanted something that would change her mood. Yet, when she sipped the cocktail, all she tasted was the disinfectant in Clive’s room. She set the long-stemmed glass down gently and took a deep breath.

  This moment of beginning a new drawing always created tension within Nix. It was a delicious tension, like the moment just before kissing a stranger. She placed the tip of her pencil down and drew the first curve of a raven’s beak. Like with the kiss, she could tell how propitious the next move and the one after that would be. There was the curve of the head in profile; there was the raucous call and the weird intelligence. There was the source of light slanting in at a long angle from the southwest, where Raven stood on the ridge of a roof, tipping forward and ready to fall into the gliding first curve of flight.

  This first feeling having been revealed to her, Nix hurried on to capture the moment. She sketched from the top down. She even put in a faint background. The world itself became visible as the new light fell upon the bird.

  Norma walked down her side of the bar, turning and twisting her back to loosen her tight muscles. “You wanna trade for your tab?” Norma joked.

  “Can’t afford to.” Nix smiled as her forearm moved across the page. “I might, if I drank more. But I’ve got to zap these down to the editors and the book designers in three weeks or I don’t get the second half of the advance.”

  Norma craned her head and watched Nix draw. Raven on a roofline, the islands in the background. Raven leaning forward as if he were going to spill out the rest of the drawing. Norma was some twenty years younger than Nix. She was thin, weathered, with short brown hair and a bright scar on the left side of her throat. Nix never asked about the scar—not because she wasn’t curious but because she already knew part of the story and didn’t care to know any more. She knew because she had shared in the events that had left the mark on her old friend’s throat.

  “How’s it going at home?” Norma said, and her voice softened, hesitant to ask.

  “It’s going . . .” Nix said absently, then stopped and looked up at the barmaid. “It’s going slowly,” Nix said finally, staring into her friend’s eyes. “I had to get out of there.”

  Norma reached over and covered Nix’s hand with her own, and she let it sit there a moment without saying a word. “Well, tonight will be some distraction”—Norma’s voice brightened—“Halloween. My God, there will be some loonies in here for sure.”

  Nix swiveled around in her chair, looking out the windows of the bar as if to remind herself what time it was, and what month. “Halloween?” she said. “I must have forgotten.”

  It was early evening and already very dark. The wires above the boardwalk along the beach swung crazily in the gusts of wind. Rain sheeted down the smudged windowpanes, the windows fogged where they reached the level of the booths. Outside, one light flickered as if it couldn’t decide whether it was going to burn out. The rain fell through the light as if it were a ripped curtain flapping there. Two electric carts hummed by and a rusted-out gas cart sputtered down the boardwalk like a rockslide. Dance music wheezed out of a radio and then faded into the clatter of the bar. A guy by the pool table was bobbing his head in time to the sound effects of the game he was playing on his goggles. His vision obscured, he slowly pulled his beer glass toward his mouth by instinct and feel alone.

  Nix thought of the man dying in her house. He had been a jailbird and a drug dealer long ago. But he and his brother were good men and had built a community in Cold Storage that she had grown to love. She loved him. She loved his crazy preaching on Sundays. She had sat with him for days during his sickness, she had cried, and now she was ready for him to die.

  She looked down and pictured his shrunken body as his bony chest slowly rose and fell.

  “I’m not worried,” Clive said as if he could read her thoughts. Then he said in his reed-thin voice, “Not near as worried as you are, girl.”

  Nix tried to smile. “That’s good,” she stammered. “I don’t think there’s anything to worry about.” But as she said the words she felt icy gravel gather in her chest.

  “There’s nothing to worry about,” she said again, this time with a little more force. Clive had been so much fun, so irreverent and funny, but now he was pale and his eyes were still. He blinked once in slow, reptilian consideration. She felt her hands shake, and he gripped them firmly, as if to apologize for the awkwardness of dying.

  “Here we go,” Norma said, and took a deep breath.

  At the door some kids were running back and forth, daring each other to knock. They were all wearing sheets over their heads.

  “Come on,” Norma said. She elbowed Nix as she reached under the bar for two big handfuls of wrapped toffee. “Let’s give the ghouls something . . .” she said as she moved around the end of the bar.

  A couple of fishermen in wool coats with the sleeves cut off pushed their dirty linen caps back off their faces and sat up straight in the booth by the window. They made faces at the specters running back and forth on the sidewalk. They looked through the records that the bar kept near the old stereo system, and one looked at Nix to make sure he had her approval. Nix smiled at him because she recognized him and liked his taste. The fisherman put on Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald. Knowing there was a scratch on side one, he put on the second side and sat down with his partner, who spilled his beer. The other started swearing as he squeezed back into the booth, never taking either of his hands off his beer. Nix threw them a bar rag because Norma’s hands were full of candy.

  Both women arrived at the door at the same time and just as the smallest of the four ghosts was about to knock, Norma jerked the door open.

  “Boo!” she shouted, and she sent the ghosts shrieking and jumping back. They laughed and then eased forward, holding out plastic bags with their dark mouths open.

  “Trick or treat!” the four of them sang out in unison.

  Nix stood behind Norma’s right shoulder. She looked at the children and for some reason felt short of breath. It was a familiar feeling, that of struggling for air. She did not move but stared at the tiny ghosts with half dollar–sized holes in the white sheets. Their eyes were far back from their ill-defined skulls. The smallest wore a plastic garland of flowers that had been used in last year’s fifth-grade play.

  As Norma was doling out the candy, a rumble came from the south as a plastic garbage can rolled in the middle of the boardwalk, for there were no roads in this little boardwalk town in the Alaskan wilderness. The wires running to the back of the hotel started howling and a great gust of wind hit the side of the building.

  Th
e kids shrieked and the wind pushed the door wide open against the wall. The napkins on the bars scattered like leaves, and the kids howled all the louder, wind billowing up underneath their costumes and lifting the sheets up off their heads faster than they could grab them while still holding on to their bags of candy.

  Norma stepped back, turning away from the blast of wind, but Nix watched with a kind of fixed panic as the ghosts’ costumes rose up into the air, twisting and spinning like single sheets of newspaper blown down the canyon of the street. They rose straight up above the roofline, toward the waterfront, until all four sheets became entangled in the power lines running down to the harbor.

  The rain came suddenly, pelting down out of the blackness of the squall. The little-girl ghosts ran into the bar shivering and laughing, holding on to their candy bags with both hands.

  Norma got a dry towel and the fishermen ordered another round of beers. The embarrassed little girls covered their mouths as they spoke and sucked down their giggles as they asked if they could call their mothers. Nix walked over to the windows and watched the wind push the twisted sheets against the power lines. When the wet tip of one of the sheets slapped against another, sparks showered down on the street and the bar went black.

  “There’s no saving them now,” Nix said aloud, although she hadn’t meant to.

  The girls who had once been ghosts laughed and shivered in their thin, wet clothes, as Ella Fitzgerald’s voice skittered up into the darkness.

  Chapter Two

  Like all inmates on Olympus, Gloomy Knob had tags around his neck. On these metal tags were stamped his real name and his identification number. These tags could either be swiped through a reader or placed into a machine, and, given the proper access codes, the corresponding inmate’s entire file would be pulled up, including his medical, legal, military, NSA, OGA, and CIA files—and even nuclear regulatory and security information. Almost any bonehead at the prison could read that Gloomy’s real name was Christopher McCahon. What they might not have known was his father was Clive McCahon, and that Gloomy had grown up in a bar in Cold Storage, Alaska, called Mouse Miller’s Love Nest—the very same bar Nix was sitting in at this moment. Clive ran the bar as a genuine community center, and on Sundays it was a spiritual meeting place. Clive once told his brother, Miles, who had been a medical practitioner for the village, that he “loved Jesus like Elvis loved his momma.” Clive loved Jesus the way he loved Duke Ellington or the great Satchmo, or the early music of Joni Mitchell or Bonnie Raitt. He loved Jesus the way he loved the opening paragraph of One Hundred Years of Solitude or all the novels of P. G. Wodehouse. This is not to say that Clive McCahon was a pious man—remember his house of worship served mixed drinks—but Clive McCahon was a man who had been moved by the Spirit.

  Gloomy Knob grew up both in the bar and in his grandma’s house, where his father and mother lived. His mother had been a bass player in the first house band at the Love Nest. The band had been called Blind Donkey, his mother was named Maya, but everyone called her Nix. Gloomy had a sister who had been baptized (in the bar) as Nancy Vishnu McCahon, but everyone called her NoNo. Gloomy was serving a life sentence for the death of NoNo. Gloomy had never given a statement as to the circumstances surrounding her death and had insisted upon pleading guilty to the crime. He refused to testify against his codefendant in his implicated crimes.

  Gloomy Knob, his sister, and Ishmael grew up together in Cold Storage, Alaska. There are no roads either in or around Cold Storage. The only road is a short lane up to the dump used by the city truck, which serves as a police van and also pulls the garbage trailer up. The only ways into the village are by boat or float plane. The nearest large towns are Juneau to the east and Sitka to the south. Pelican, Alaska, lies up the coast a bit, and Gustavus is across Icy Strait toward Glacier Bay. Cold Storage has a hot springs, a small ice plant, and a fish-buying station for the small boat fleet. It also now houses a few prison employees along the coast, though not many, since most of the employees choose to take their two weeks a month off in a more lively setting. All told, Cold Storage has about two hundred year-round residents, and in the summer there are a few more charter fishermen and operators along with some lodge operators.

  Gloomy’s great-aunt was an anarchist named Ellie Hobbes. She was the one who built the bar in the first place after she came to Cold Storage in the thirties with the man who would be her husband, Slippery Wilson. He had been a rancher, but they were on the lam when they arrived in Alaska. Gloomy never knew her and he never knew his grandmother Annabelle, who had also made the trip up in the dory with Ellie and Slippery, but he had heard the stories told endlessly in the bar at night. His father would toast to them at closing time. Somehow, there was a strong link with both anarchism and Christianity in Clive McCahon’s faith, which had begun to irritate Gloomy in his early teenage years. When Gloomy started hanging out in Glacier Bay and sitting up on the actual Gloomy Knob in the national park, he would take only the scriptures and read them under a tarp. And there he would pray out toward the water and try to imagine the arid Holy Lands as the rain sluiced down the sheer face of the black rocks, where the mountain goats gamboled and would sometimes stop stalk-still and stare at him.

  Nicknames for their generation had become almost required. There had become a naming ceremony that took place on thirteenth birthdays, like a bar or bat mitzvah, which happened at the Love Nest. The young initiate had to give a spiritual reading, and their mentor also gave a talk as to their spiritual progress. Gloomy gave a reading from Moby-Dick, and, as a poke in the eye to his father, he asked the pastor from the other church in town to talk about Gloomy’s faith in Jesus. Nix played a favorite family song called “Love Is the Answer, but What Is the Question?” and Clive played an old vinyl recording of the Barrett Sisters singing “I Don’t Feel No Ways Tired,” followed by scratchy gospel records all night long.

  Gloomy didn’t like that his father had been a drug dealer. He didn’t like that he sold alcohol six days a week and only quoted scripture about God’s love and never about our duty to be obedient: our absolute duty . . . what Gloomy saw as the first commandment. “No truth. No justice”? Wasn’t that what all the people chanted out in front of the buildings? He had seen them in the news. He could not imagine his father crusading for anything. He was a good-times Christian. He was only in it for the love, the art, and the beauty. But none of that mattered now. Gloomy was being put through his own trial. He had killed his own sister. There were no more good times to be had. There was only his prison job tending a bonfire at the construction site for the new women’s prison. That was the best life he could hope for, or want.

  Gloomy loved this job. It got him outside. It made him feel at home. Others didn’t want it, thinking it cold and awful, but he could think of nothing he wanted more than to stand on the beach and burn construction trash with a guard holding a gun on him.

  A short piece of pipe insulation floated out into the inlet. It was curled like a piece of macaroni, moving toward a rock in the middle of the channel. The moon was pulling all the water of the world to one side of the planet and pulling this bit of pipe insulation along with it. The rock looked like an elephant garlanded in slippery kelp banners. An eagle launched from an overhanging spruce and swept down for a look. Gloomy blew his warm breath on his hands and watched the whole scene. The eagle flew close to the pipe insulation and lowered its talons toward the gray-green water but at the last moment pulled up and flew around the point of the island and out of sight.

  A fat guard came out of the construction shack, carrying a propane torch. He had been at this work site a long time with Gloomy and over time he had let the convict refer to him by his first name: Tommy. As long as no other prison personnel were around, Tommy didn’t mind. It seemed to make the time go faster. Tommy lumbered clumsily over the slick rocks and, in his full uniform and heavy utility belt, bent over the firepit and flicked the lighter in front of the torch. The b
lue flame jumped toward a corner of a cardboard box filled with two-by-four scraps. Smoke rose and curled out into the gray sky. Ravens hopped near the firepit, where Tommy always threw the remains of his pastries from the day before. The ravens had come to expect it and arrived as soon as the shore boat pulled up to the construction float, which was ten yards from the firepit. Tommy threw a vanilla almond croissant to a big black bird and then jacked a shell into the chamber of his rifle. He set the safety and slung the gun with the laser sight around his shoulder using the clip sling, which would let him pull the gun into a firing position with one motion. Tommy kicked more boxes over to Gloomy and motioned with his chin that it was all right for Gloomy to pick up his fire tool.

  The tool was a pitchfork with four blunted tines and a bright red four-foot handle. Gloomy pitched a roll of electrical wire into the fire, and black smoke sizzled out of the flames. Tommy nodded at the wire. “Geez. They still getting rid of that order?”

  Gloomy nodded and said nothing, just as he was supposed to. He had been burning a roll of this wire every day for more than a month. Apparently the wrong shipment had come in and because of problems in purchasing it was better to burn the first order. Gloomy poked the roll of expensive wire into the flames and watched the insulation burn black, exposing the glass and silver core.

  “Did you hear about the penguin who rented a car in Arizona?” Tommy asked, and Gloomy shook his head. Tommy went on, but Gloomy didn’t listen, just as he hadn’t listened for the last 654 days that Tommy had been working. Rain began to fall and Gloomy pushed dry wood from some broken pallets around the burning spool of fiber optic wire. The raven had lumbered away with the croissant. Three small crows were harassing the larger bird. Two other ravens pulled a cruller apart and then hopped in and out of the smoke while they tried to fly away with their booty. Sparks rose up in the smoke and blinked out.