David Vann - Caribou Island

Hollows inside him, only hollows. No substance. She had somehow blown the center out of him. He could see her face, when they had first gotten together, when it seemed that she loved him. Her smile a little hesitant, even, as if she were nervous too.

Carl felt tremendously sorry for himself, a sorrow without limitation, and he just lay there for hours until the campground manager came to his tent and told him to get out or he’d be charged.

Sorry, Carl managed to say between sobs. I’m leaving. Just a few minutes.

You need to leave now.

Okay. I’m leaving.

Now.

So Carl crawled from Monique’s sleeping bag and out of the tent into a light drizzle, exposed and cold, the sky dark. He pulled out both packs, broke down the tent. Had to blow his nose again from being such a crybaby.

His backpack was heavy, about sixty pounds, and then he reached down for the straps of Monique’s, which weighed at least forty or fifty. He pulled up and got her straps to go over his shoulders from the front. Slipping a bit, his face mashed against her frame, and he locked his hands low. More than a hundred pounds of packs, and he weighed only one-fifty, so he didn’t know how far he’d make. He had to turn sideways to look where he was going, then walk ahead blind, then check again.

Carl staggered out the camp entrance down a gravel road toward the highway. Drizzle and a breeze. He felt like his knees were compacting into his leg bones, his lower back crunching also, his arms burning.

It was a long way out the gravel road, and when he hit pavement, he dropped both packs and his steps afterward felt like he was leaping into the air, gravity gone. Wow, he said.

He put his thumb out just as a truck roared past. There was no way he could carry these packs three hours into town.

Several cars went by without slowing, and he realized he had forgotten about her for a few minutes. That was the key. He had to keep occupied. He needed a job. Also because I have no money, he said aloud. Maybe Mark could set something up for him.

Rhoda decided to go with her parents to Anchorage. I can skip work, she told Jim. I need to be there for my mom.

Okay, he said.

I’ll be back tomorrow. We’re staying the night.

So after Rhoda left, Jim picked up Monique at the King Salmon Hotel and brought her back to the house. She was wearing jeans and boots, her old down jacket. Sat on a bar stool and looked at what would have been a view if not for the sky.

Seems like you could use a new jacket, Jim said.

It was my dad’s.

Oh.

It’s fine, she said. I don’t care. Just a little nostalgia. We’re allowed a little bit.

Yeah, Jim said.

I’m bored out of my mind, Monique said. I think I have to go back to D.C. There is nothing here.

I’m here.

Yeah.

That didn’t sound good.

I’m just bored. Maybe I’ll take a bath.

So Jim pouted on the couch while she took a bath. She was in there for over an hour. He thought about sex the whole time, pretty much, and when she came out, she seemed brighter. She wore a white towel on her head, nothing else. Long and perfect. She walked over and sat on an ottoman, back straight, and he was thinking that even her posture showed class.

I’ve never been paid for sex, Monique said. The idea of being paid is kind of turning me on. I think I might do things I wouldn’t otherwise do, too, and that turns me on even more.

Money? Jim asked.

Yeah, money. That’ll make it interesting, I think. It has to be a decent amount, though. Go get five thousand in hundreds. That will get me through the afternoon, I think.

Five thousand?

Go now, she said. And get me some ice cream. New York Superfudge Chunk. And whatever you want. Food sex, bondage, toys, costumes, kinky shit, whatever floats your boat. Make it interesting. And bring more cash if you want tonight too.

Are you serious?

Are you over forty? Am I twenty-three? Do you have a muffin top? Did I shave?

You don’t have to put it like that.

Wake the fuck up.

I don’t think I like this.

Then why do you have a boner just looking at me? I think you like it. And I think we’ll start today by parading you around in a dog collar. You’re going to crawl around and beg before I let you start paying me. Don’t come back without a dog collar.

What the fuck?

Fine, she said. I’m getting dressed. And she walked back into the bedroom.

What’s happening here? Jim asked.

I’m getting dressed, Monique said. Then we’re driving to the bank, where you’ll get me five thousand, then to my hotel to pick up my stuff, maybe the campground, though I’ll probably skip that, then to the airport where you’ll buy a ticket. We can have lunch at the airport if you like. But I’m leaving this shithole.

I’m not doing that. He was standing in the bedroom doorway now, watching her put on panties, bra, jeans.

Then I’m telling Rhoda everything, she said.

That’s blackmail.

Not really. I’m a trust fund brat. I don’t need money. I don’t ever need to work, in fact, which is my own cross to bear, something you wouldn’t understand. It turns out it sucks. But this is just teaching you a lesson. You didn’t seem to realize what you had here, so I’m helping you realize that.

You can walk to the airport, Jim said.

The price just went up to ten thousand.

Jim was so angry he wanted to kill her. The first time in his life he felt this. She wasn’t even upset. Just putting on her boots like nothing was happening. Like he was nothing.

She looked up and smiled at him. Fists, she said. Are you thinking of hitting me? Would it make you feel better to fight? She stood up, smiling bigger now, and took a couple steps forward then kicked him, too fast for him to do anything about it. Her long leg out straight, her boot in his stomach, and he was falling backward into the hallway. He curled up and couldn’t breathe.

She stepped over him. I’ll be in the car.

On the way to Anchorage, the sky seemed to press down, gray and moving, darker bands of rain. Fall now, the snow coming. The trees already turning.

Rossland had been similar. A river rather than ocean, but these same wide mountain bases, thick forest, snow-covered peaks. The same heavy sky, the same cold breeze even in summer, gusting, her skin always goose-bumped. Irene closed her eyes and tried to remember, tried to stand there, tried to turn flat images into a place she could walk through again, because she had spent forty-five years trying to forget. She had wanted to erase, and that seemed a terrible loss now. Irene wasn’t sure what had shifted, but something had. She wanted to remember her mother, wanted to remember her father, wanted to remember the time when they lived together.

The sound of Icelandic, not flat like English. A kind of music, longer vowels, each sound a clarity, a shape, a liquid, or a shot of breath. In that tongue, the world could become animated. More fearsome, more lovely, never empty. A tongue unchanged for a thousand years, a way back to that time. This was what Gary liked. Her connection to the ancient past, Icelandic spoken now almost the same as Old English spoken then. In this way, she had never been real to him, only an idea.

But she didn’t want to think about Gary. She wanted to find her parents, and they remained shadows. If she could hear them speak. How was it possible to forget every word, to not be able to hear the voices she’d heard every day of her childhood?

Irene tried to remember the kitchen, sitting at her own small table. Yellow, painted wood. Rough-grained. Her mother at the sink, wearing a dress, though she couldn’t remember any pattern, any color, and she could almost hear the water running, and she knew her mother would have been speaking. No face, no voice, her father even more distant. And so all she had left were ideas. There was another woman, she knew, though she didn’t know how she knew. When was the moment she learned? And did she understand that idea, that her father was leaving them? Could any of that have made sense? The adult world a thing of mystery and weight, she remembered that much. A despair as immovable as a mountain. Her parents making their decisions, determining her fate, and now they’d gone even farther away, into myth. Stories transformed, impossible to know what was true. Another woman, and her mother hanged herself, and her father left forever and she never saw him again. But what story to make any sense of this?