Jim Shepard - Like You'd Understand, Anyway

She gets up and dumps her dish in the sink and goes down to the cellar. I can hear her rooting around in our big meat freezer for a Popsicle for dessert.

The phone rings and I don't get up. The answering machine takes over, and Dr. Calvin's office leaves a message reminding me about my Friday appointment. The machine switches off. I don't get to it before my wife comes back upstairs.

She unwraps her Popsicle and slides it into her mouth. It's grape.

“You want one?” she asks.

“No,” I tell her. I put my hands on the table and off again. They're not staying still. It's like they're about to go off.

“I should've asked when I was down there,” she tells me.

She slurps on it a little, quietly. I push my plate away.

“You going to the doctor?” she asks.

Outside a big terrier that's new to me is taking a dump near our hibachi. He's moving forward in little steps while he's doing it. “Goddamn,” I say to myself. I sound like someone who's come home from a twelve-hour shift and still has to shovel his driveway.

“What's wrong with Moser?” she wants to know. Moser's our regular doctor.

“That was Moser,” I tell her. “That was his office.”

“It was?” she says.

“Yes it was,” I tell her.

“Put your dish in the sink,” she reminds me.

I put the dish in the sink and head into the living room and drop onto the couch.

“Checkup?” she calls from the kitchen.

“Pilot physical,” I tell her. All she has to do is play the message.

She wanders into the living room without the Popsicle. Her lips are darker from it. She waits a minute near the couch and then sinks down next to me. She leans forward, looking at me. Her lips touch mine, and press, and then lift off and stay so close it's hard to know if they're touching or not. Mine are still moist from hers.

“Come upstairs,” she whispers. “Come upstairs and show me what you're worried about.” She puts three fingers on my erection and rides them along it until she stops on my belly.

“I love you so much,” I tell her. That much is true.

“Come upstairs and show me,” she tells me back.

That night in 1958, undersea communications cables from Anchorage to Seattle went dead. Boats at sea recorded a shocking hammering on their hulls. In Ketchikan and Anchorage people ran into the streets. In Juneau streetlights toppled and breakfronts emptied their contents. The eastern shore of Disenchantment Bay lifted itself forty-two feet out of the sea, the dead barnacles still visible there, impossibly high up on the rock faces. And at Yakutat, a postmaster in a skiff happened to be watching a cannery operator and his wife pick strawberries on a sandy point near a harbor navigation light, when the entire point with the light pitched into the air and then flushed itself as though driven underwater. The postmaster barely stayed in his skiff, and afterward, paddling around the whirlpools and junk waves, he found only the woman's hat.

“You know, I made some sacrifices here,” my wife mentions to me later that same day. We're naked and both on the floor on our backs with our feet still up on the bed. One of hers is twisted in the sheets. The room seems darker and I don't know if that's a change in the weather or if we've just been here forever. One of our kisses was such a submersion that when we finally stopped we needed to lie still for a minute, holding on to each other, to recover.

“You mean as in having married me?” I ask her. Our skin is air-drying but still mostly sticky.

“I mean as in having married you,” she says. Then she pulls her foot free of the sheets and rolls over me.

She told me as she was first easing me down onto the bed that she'd gone off the pill but that it was going to take at least a few weeks before she'd be ready. “So you know why I'm doing this?” she asked. She slid both thighs across me, her mouth at my ear. “I'm doing this because it's amazing.”

We're still sticky and she's looking down into my face with her most serious expression. “I mean, you're a meat cutter,” she says, fitting me inside of her again. The next time we do this I'll have had the operation. And despite everything, it's still the most amazing feeling of closeness.

“Why are you crying?” she whispers. Then she lowers her mouth to mine and goes, “Shhh. Shhh.”

Howard Ulrich and his little boy Sonny entered Lituya Bay at eight the night of the wave, and anchored on the south shore near the entrance. He wrote about it afterward. Their fishing boat had a high bow, a single mast, and a pilothouse the size of a Portosan. Before they turned in, two other boats had followed them in and anchored even nearer the entrance. It was totally quiet. The water was a pane of glass from shore to shore. Small icebergs seemed to just sit in place. The gulls and terns that they usually saw circling Cenotaph Island in the middle of the bay were hunkered down on the shore. Sonny said it looked like they were waiting for something. His dad tucked him in bed at about ten, around sunset. He'd just climbed in himself when the boat started pitching and jerking against its anchor chain. When he ran up on deck in his underwear, he saw the mountains heaving themselves around and avalanching. Clouds of snow and rocks shot up high into the air. It looked like they were being shelled. Sonny came up on deck in his pj's, which had alternating wagon wheels and square-knotted ropes. He rubbed his eyes. Ninety million tons of rock dropped into Gilbert Inlet as a unit. The sonic concussion of the rock hitting the water knocked them both onto their backs on the deck.

It took the wave about two and a half minutes to cover the seven miles to their boat. In that time Sonny's dad tried to weigh anchor and discovered that he couldn't, the anchor stuck fast, so he let out the chain as far as he could, got a life preserver onto Sonny, and managed to turn his bow into the wave. As it passed Cenotaph Island it was still over a hundred feet high, extending from shore to shore, a wave front two miles wide.

The front was unbelievably steep, and when it hit, the anchor chain snapped immediately, whipping around the pilothouse and smashing the windows. The boat arrowed seventy-five feet up into the curl like they were climbing in an elevator, their backs pressed against the pilothouse wall as if they'd been tilted back in barber's chairs. The wave's face was a wall of green taking them up into the sky. They were carried high over the south shore. Sixty-foot trees down below disappeared. Then they were thrown up over the crest and down the back slope, where the backwash spun them off again into the center of the bay.

Another couple, the Swansons, had also turned into the wave and had their boat surfboard a quarter mile out to sea, and when the wave crest broke, the boat pitchpoled and hit bottom. They managed to find and float their emergency skiff in the debris afterward. The third couple, the Wagners, tried to make a run for the harbor entrance and were never seen again.

Four-foot-wide trees were washed away, along with the topsoil and everything else. Slopes were scoured down to bedrock. Bigger trunks were snapped off at ground level. Trees at the edge of the trimline had their bark removed by the water pressure.

Sonny's dad was still in his underwear, teeth chattering, and Sonny was washing around on his side in some icy bilge water, making noises like a jungle bird. The sun was down by this point. Backwash and wavelets twenty feet high were crisscrossing the bay, spinning house-sized chunks of glacier ice that collided against each other. Clean-peeled tree trunks like pickup sticks knitted together and upended, pitching and rolling. Water was still pouring down the slopes on both sides of the bay. The smell was like being facedown in the dirt under an upended tree. And Sonny's dad said the time that passed afterward — when they'd realized they'd survived but still had to navigate through everything pinballing around them in the dark — was worse than riding the wave itself.