David Vann - Caribou Island

Sixteen by twelve is actually pretty big, Gary said. I think it’s fine as is.

Where does the bathroom go?

We’ll use an outhouse.

An outhouse?

They stood there in silence for a while.

What about a fireplace? Irene finally asked. Will there be a fireplace?

That’s tough, Gary said. Maybe one of those freestanding ones. We could add that.

Irene could see, in one terrible moment, that they really would live out here. The cabin would not go together right. It would not have what they needed. But they would live in it anyway. She could see that with absolute clarity. And though she wanted to tell Gary to live out here on his own, she knew she couldn’t do that, because it was the excuse he was looking for. He’d leave her forever, and it was not okay for her to be left again. That would not happen again in her life.

What about water? she asked.

I’ll rig a pump from the lake.

Will we have electricity?

It’ll be a hand pump, he said. I’ll have to track one down.

I meant for lights.

We’ll use lanterns.

And the stove?

Propane. I’ll get a little two- or three-burner.

And the roof?

Not sure about the roof yet. Geez, Irene. I’ve only just started. The floor is working out, isn’t it? All the rest will follow. He put his arm around her for a moment, pulled her in closer, a couple tugs of reassurance.

Okay, she said. I think I need to go back. My head really hurts. I need to lie down.

We’ll have you back in a jiffy, he said. And then he was prancing around helping her into the boat, gathering the tools, etc. The optimistic time that always came before his failures. And these were the worst for Irene. All the failed business ventures, the boats he had built that had gone over budget and then not sold or not sold well. They had all begun like this, full of hope. And he was smart, well-educated. He should have known better. He should have done better. Their lives should have been better than this.

Gary had seemed so promising. A doctoral student, bright enough to get into Berkeley. He had long hair then, blond and curly. She could pull down on a curl and it would spring back into place. They played guitars, sitting cross-legged, staring into each other’s eyes, singing “Brown-Eyed Girl” or “Suzanne.” She felt tied to him, felt wanted, felt like she belonged. Gary had a lopsided, goofy smile, and he was always talking about his feelings, and her feelings. So easily reachable, and he promised her he would always be this way.

Alaska was just an idea. A year off from school, a little break so he could get some distance on his dissertation, some needed perspective. They would go to the frontier, soak up the wilderness. She hadn’t quite believed they would really go. But Gary was running away. That’s what she hadn’t understood. He never had any intention of returning to California.

Gary had summer funding, to work on his dissertation, and they burned through it quickly as they traveled through southeast Alaska, Ketchikan and Juneau, all the smaller towns, Wrangell, St. Petersburg. Looking for the idea of Alaska.

For Gary, this idea was Scandinavian, connecting to his studies, to Beowulf and “The Seafarer,” a warrior society crossing the whale road into fjords in a new land, founding small inbred fishing villages. Small clusters of steep-roofed wooden houses right on the water that have no name outside themselves. These villages tucked into narrow bays in southeast Alaska between mountains that rose up three and four thousand feet almost right from the water’s edge. From a passing ferry, they seemed uninhabited, ghost towns, relics of mining days and frontier trade or even something older. What Gary wanted was the imagined village, the return to an idyllic time when he could have a role, a set task, as blacksmith or baker or singer of a people’s stories. That’s who he really wanted to be, the “shaper,” the singer of a people’s history, a place’s history, which would be one and the same. What Irene wanted was only to never be alone again, passed around, unwanted.

Gary spent his last money getting to these places, paying for rides on private boats. So excited each time they set out, and Irene was caught up in this excitement, but each new village was a disappointment. One house would have a gas pump down on a pier, and maybe a faded 76 sign in one of the windows. Another would be an engine repair place. Summer cabins and obvious hippie plantations, with stray animals and spare parts hanging around the yard and a sense that underneath one of the moldy mattresses inside, there must be some very large wads of marijuana money. Gary and Irene hippies themselves, minus the drugs, but they were looking for something more, something authentic. Gary wanted to walk into a village and hear an ancient tongue.

One larger group of houses they visited had a barber, who actually had a barber pole. It was holding up one corner of his porch. Gary liked that. It didn’t go back a thousand years, but it gave him a sense he might be able to get a bath for five cents, ten cents for clean water. It went back, at least, to mining days, maybe. But all in all, the whole thing was a bitter disappointment to him. The real Alaska didn’t seem to exist. No one seemed to have any interest in the kind of honest and difficult frontier life he would have liked to muse on, and none of these places was consistently Scandinavian. None of them evoked the village.

So they burned through all their money by the time they reached the Kenai Peninsula, and Irene had to get a job. In her field, teaching preschool, she could always get a job, and she liked her work. It was supposed to be temporary, but Gary had no intention of ever going back. He wasn’t going to finish his dissertation. He wasn’t going to make it in his field, and this search for Alaska had all been an expression of despair, the village a sign only that Gary hadn’t found a way to fit into his real life.

If Irene had understood any of this in time, she might have left Gary, back when that would have been possible. But it would take her decades to figure out the truth, not only because of the distractions of work and children but also because Gary was such a good liar, always so excited about the next opportunity. This cabin another lie, another attempt at purity, at finding the imagined life he needed because he had run away from who he was.

And now he was running from her, too, but she didn’t quite understand why. She could feel it, and anyone else would have called her paranoid, but she knew it was true. As simple as a shift in focus, letting her become slowly invisible. No other woman yet, but there would be. Gary was hitting the limits of how well this life could shield him from his despair, and after he failed at this cabin, a thirty-year dream, he’d have to move on to a more powerful distraction.

As Irene huddled in the bow watching the shoreline approach, she felt her life and Gary’s life as suffocation. An awful weight and shortness of breath and panic, and she knew this wasn’t just the Tramadol.

Rhoda faced a surly gray Persian named Smokey. Time for your pill, she told him, and he wanted to fight when she grabbed his head, but she was fast and knew how to lock his jaw open. It was over before he could blink. Now we can be friends again, she said.

Jim was not so easy. She dialed him again quick on her cell phone and hit voice mail, snapped the phone shut. Hm, she said.

Jim was in Juneau meeting with his potential new partner for the practice, a dentist named Jacobsen. That was all she knew, which was unusual. Jim tended to ramble on about details, but there were no details here, not even a phone call. Gone all yesterday, no call in the evening, gone today. He’d probably had dinner with Jacobsen, and maybe even stayed over at his house, with his family, though of course she knew nothing about Jacobsen and didn’t know whether he had a family.