Bear Down Bear North Read online

  BACK

  Two buddies backtroll for kings. They’ve anchored the boat and they’re tossing back a few beers, waiting for the big one to hit.

  “You seen a green tiger-striped glow?” says Jay. “Thought I’d try it next reel-in.”

  “You look in the box?” says D.

  “Can’t see how it couldn’t be here,” says Jay.

  “Should be in that twenty you got rigged up.” D fidgets with the reel. “Packed drift. Don’t know how no one’s hooking in.”

  “Just wait until I find this glow,” says Jay.

  D settles down into his seat. “Might as well catch what I can—get a little shut-eye.”

  “You do that,” says Jay.

  D gets into the groove of sleep, makes a racket with his pawpaw snore.

  “Useless,” says Jay.

  D’s line smacks with a bite.

  “You’ve got a live one,” says Jay.

  D jumps to attention and sets the hook. Jay reels in his line and primes the net.

  “That’s my green glow,” says Jay.

  “My yellow one,” says D.

  “You sure?”

  “Just looks green underwater.”

  Jay bags the king. He holds the mallet over the head. Stops. “That is my glow.”

  “No, it’s mine,” says D.

  The king flops on the deck between them.

  “You telling me you got the same exact one? The one I was missing?”

  “Give me the mallet,” says D. “Then we’ll fix this.”

  “You’re a liar,” says Jay. “I got it made special at Townie’s. Custom Mylar wings.” He moves toward the flailing king. “You don’t deserve this fish.”

  “Don’t you dare,” says D.

  Jay bends down and throws the king overboard. D flies at him in a fury. The two wrestle down to the deck floor. D howls a kicked-dog howl and Jay releases his grip.

  “You all right?”

  D turns on his side. He’s got the tackle, the hook jammed right in the meat of his back.

  Jay touches the hook.

  D whimpers.

  And because D’s made that sound and Jay thinks he deserves it, he touches the hook again and waits for D to wince. “Don’t move,” says Jay. “Don’t do nothing.”

  Jay asks the doctor if he can keep the green spin’n’glow.

  “The big fish here has to decide,” says the doctor, pointing at D.

  “I don’t want it,” says D. “And I don’t want him to have it neither.”

  “Fair enough,” she says.

  “Put it on that voodoo thing in the lobby,” says D.

  The doctor feels, then, each puncture, each hook, prick her body, a wave starting from her head and cresting down to her feet. And every hook is attached to a line, a fishing rod, and a body holding the rod, and each body is covered in hooks that tear open flaps of flesh, small pockets of bleeding, a web.

  Two days later, the doctor walks past the mannequin with three charts in her hand and her eye corners Jay running out of the lobby.

  “Stop him,” she yells and she charges after him.

  A man in a flannel jacket grabs Jay, tackling him to the pavement. The doctor holds out her hand.

  “Give it to me,” she says.

  “No,” says Jay.

  The man in the flannel jacket pries the green spin’n’glow from Jay’s fingers.

  She’s standing over him and shaking her head. “You don’t know what you’ve done,” she says.

  RIVER AND ISLAND

  The Kenai is a vein of turquoise, clear and glass and settled. The river cradles the island in its arms, lullabies the trees. It’s not day or night or morning and the doctor is still awake, sitting near an unlit campfire, and across the river a fisherman throws his line—cast, drift and follow, cast.

  RUN

  The days are long and thin. The salmon keep to the shallows near rotting trees. With reaching fingers, the Kenai tugs at their tails, drawing them to the channel. The salmon wrestle the water, tap their last beats of blood, and when the river wins, they drift and fodder downstream. Their bodies are carried, broken, and fed to the currents.

  THE NEW MANNEQUIN

  A man boats across Skilak Lake at the head of the Kenai. Three boys throw rocks from the shore. When he is close, he sees their target—a log in the water. But it isn’t a log. He tells the boys to get on out of there, to go home. But all they do is walk away and look on from a distance. He’s heard a woman has been missing for a week. A drowned body sinks and bloats up and eventually floats back to the top. She’s wearing a green jacket so he grabs the collar with his right hand and drives with his left. Her hair covers her face. He drives to shore and tells the boys to look away but they stare. He’s in a couple feet of water so he cuts the engine and jumps out, holds her and the boat and walks them both to land. The boys come and take the boat. He has no choice so he drags her to shore. Because she is out of the water, because she has been missing for a week, her face falls off, and there is a crater in the skull, a bullet wound. He turns his back. The boys have covered their eyes. He struggles with the latch on the box seat. The gulls announce themselves as they fly over, descending in a flock, and he hurries to unfold the tarp and cover her. The wind picks up the tarp and uncovers her face without a face. He gathers rocks to weight down the corners. The boys throw rocks at the gulls.

  The mannequin is full—clothed in deer hair, elk, rabbit, quail feathers, wire, hooks, a dress of many colors. And next to her is a new mannequin, a blank landscape. The doctor has heard the news about the girl they found in the river, the bullet wound in the back of the head. The girl’s name is Casey Bakten—she lived with her mother in Sterling, the town next to Soldotna. The doctor looks at the new mannequin, but there’s nothing she can do to record this—it’s too big. And the doctor has to sit down a while because she’s thinking that somewhere in the world there’s another one happening as she sits there next to a clumsy table of magazines. She jams a fist into her stomach, and she’s there, standing in the river and her waders fill up with water, weigh down in the current, and then she snags the bottom and she steps back toward the bank, slips, and then she is sliding under, gone, and the current takes her, drags her by the ankles into the swarm. She is melting, liquid and heat, and her limbs fuse to her body, first her feet, her arms, her fingers. She streams metallic, a core of red cooling into the shape of a bullet.

  “Only hooks,” she says to the new, blank mannequin. “I’ve got one fight in me.”

  RIVER AND ISLAND

  The doctor sits on the bank. The sun slips from the ledge and dissolves into the mountains. She’s thinking of bodies, small hooks of metal, the first tang of river. The first tang and sound—small whisperings at the halo of her neck.

  RUN

  The doctor knows the new mannequin is waiting for her. But how to mark the mannequin for this story? A man has a comfortable cabin on the Kenai and he lives alone. His days on the river are either too slow or too fast. On the too fast days he stops his truck at Good Time Charlie’s and picks up a girl, her hair parted on the side. The first thing he marks—the white line of scalp. He feels good and he feels rich so he offers her double and he drives her to his cabin. They spend an hour or so together and the girl’s laughter fills up his cabin where he lives alone. He cooks a meal. Then he takes the girl on a ride in his small plane—he’d gotten his pilot license so he could scout moose and bears. The girl likes the view of the river and mountains and sips wine from the bottle he’s brought along. He lands in a bowled spot somewhere and offers her more money to strip. She makes a show, throws her green jacket at him sitting in the pilot’s seat. He smiles as she tosses away her clothes, smiles as she tries not to shiver. She stands before him, naked, and he says, “Take off your jewelry.” She undoes her bracelet clasp, slides off her rings, and pulls the hoops out of her ears. He’s still smiling, but she doesn’t know what else to do. He takes out a rifle and fires, shooting to her left. “What a
re you doing?” she yells. He fires again. “Run,” he says. She turns and runs. She can see shade up the hillside and she pumps her arms. He shoots close to hear her scream. And then he shoots her in the back. She crawls and aims for the trees. When he walks up to her, she moans. To him, it is the same sound that the bears make.

  THE WEIGHT

  OF YOU

  Your fishing pole slams and you jump up and yank the rod out of the holder.

  “Easy,” Jack says. “Wait for him to take it.” Another tug and he’s yelling, “Set that sonofabitch,” as you pull up to set the hook and reel in and pull up again—a double set.

  “Fish On. Fish On,” you shout.

  “She’s got a Fish On,” he calls out to the rest of the river. He holds up the net, the signal for “We’ve got a king on our line—get the hell out of the way.” A few boats give you space, but the guide boats full of tourists stay where they are. The king starts running upriver and Jack pulls anchor and rows away from the tip of Eagle Rock. You hang on as the king rips out line and you crank the reel to bring in the slack. The pole tip noodles into the river and when you clench your jaw and lean into the fight, the king spits the hook.

  You’ve lost the takedown and Jack says, “You’re supposed to be the lucky one, Gracie,” and you know what your brother always says next, “God helps you and he fucks with me.”

  You’re anchored up again and he splashes v8 into an empty plastic water bottle, and then fills it up with vodka. “You want a Holy Mary?” he says with a smile, knowing you’ll say no because it’s eight in the morning and he’s the only one who likes them Holy instead of Bloody.

  “I’ve got coffee,” you say and raise the thermos.

  “It better be spiked,” he says.

  “Your Island Special,” you say, which means whiskey and cream. Three hours on the Kenai backtrolling for kings, and you still haven’t upped and told him what you wanted to say.

  He is five years older than you, married with three kids. One of the reasons you’re out fishing is your sister-in-law, Jean. She wants you to talk to him about his drinking and calls you two, three times a day at Fred Meyer where you work as a grocery clerk. He’s always been extreme, but she says he’s just taken out a second life insurance policy.

  “Who needs two?” she said. “He keeps telling me he’s going to die young. He just knows it.”

  For a couple of years growing up, he was obsessed with the afterlife. When things got bad, he had you help him make a list of ways you could get there faster: drowning in a river or bathtub, bullet wound, drinking lighter fluid, axe to the neck, holding your breath, jumping into a fire. He tried once—climbed as high as he could up a spruce tree in your yard and jumped. But it was winter and Anchorage was having record snowfall and he gave himself a good headsmack, sloshed his brain is what your mother said after he started throwing up, but she didn’t take him to the doctor.

  A cloud sweeps over and he stands up and raises his bulky arms to the sky. “Jesus, give us some sun, goddamnit. I only get a couple days a year.” The Matthew brothers, who he calls Doormat and Hazmat, laugh in their boat and say, “You tell ’em, Jack.” The tourists stare at your brother—you can tell who they are because, as Jack says, they’re “shit on oars” and are wearing matching blue jackets and have already bumped into your drift boat. Peppered beard at thirty-one, biceps the size of your head, and now waving his flannel shirt and telling the clouds to move—Jack is what they’d call Alaskan bush. Tourists come to see moose and eagles and to catch kings they’ve only dreamed about. Your brother is a bonus.

  “I’ve got to take a piss,” he says and grabs the PVC pipe and steps past you. He faces front with the tourists, unzips his pants, holds the pipe in place. You hear the tourist-woman gasp. “This is how you do it on the Kenai,” he says. “Dick in a stick.”

  He starts on another Holy Mary.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t,” you say.

  “Not you, too,” he says. “I’ve given up all of my crazy shit. This is all I got left. This and Drift Mondays. You hear this, Hazmat? G-string here wants me to quit drinking.”

  “Shit,” says Hazmat.

  “Shit is right,” Jack says.

  You’re the little sister and he’s the big brother, but the word “big” doesn’t even come close to what he is. He was your kidding wink and punch in the arm, your prince of cards, your freckled mirror. You shared a room at the house in Trapper Creek. Foil over the windows to keep out the summer sun. A ball of foil, wide as a dinner plate, hanging from the ceiling, and when the bruising sounds from the living room got too loud, he’d shine a flashlight on it and say, “Tell me about the moon, Gracie,” and the moon was different every time. But now, he’s your hook and line and goddamned captain.

  “I’m just saying.” And your words ripple toward him. You’ll have to wait to tell him your news.

  “I got Jean breathing down my neck,” he says. “I’m working sixty and we just got the new house. How the hell else am I supposed to relax?”

  “Maybe you should worry more about living,” you say.

  “And what do you know about that?”

  You’ve had a frayed string of boyfriends, and the last one you broke up with after you brought him to Jack and Jean’s for dinner. The boyfriend came to your apartment off Sterling Highway, near the old fish processing plant, and limply held your hand as you walked to his truck. Your brother opened the front door—“Gracie,” he roared and picked you up in a bear hug as if he were the only one who knew the weight of you. And you weren’t surprised when your brother showed the boyfriend his new Winchester, ran his hand along the barrel and said, “I love this motherfucking country.” You were surprised the boyfriend didn’t make hunting plans with him, didn’t talk skeet or clay or pigeon. And later that night, the boyfriend tells you, “Be gentle,” when all you want to do is bite into his Adam’s apple, because if there’s one thing you know, it’s that love is fierce. And then he says, “Is it just me, or is your brother a little off?” Fuck you, you say, and you know the boyfriend is right, so you get up and leave before he’s right about you too.

  Doormat gives a yelp and jumps up to set the hook. Hazmat pulls anchor and starts rowing, follows the king’s run upriver.

  “Don’t you worry,” Jack says. “Ours is coming.” He reels in and checks his eggs, then douses them in his secret weapon—peppermint oil. “Sometimes the smell of king eggs with this reminds me of cod liver oil and earthquake stew,” he says. “God, never again.”

  You taste it in your mouth and your stomach turns. You had a pantry full of naked, dented cans with serial numbers that your father, years before that, got cheap from the Good Friday Earthquake. When your mother ran out of groceries, she picked three cans and poured whatever was in them into a pot. Egg fu yung. Corn. Green beans. On a better day, one of the cans was ravioli. On a bad day, you let vegetables slip off your spoon on purpose, sending little waves to the edge of the bowl and back into the center.

  “I visited Mom yesterday,” you say.

  “Good,” he says.

  “Don’t you want to know how she is?” You’re trying again and he’s not having it. He hasn’t been having it since he left for the navy right out of high school, and even before that.

  “She’s got you,” he says. “Reel in. Something’s on your line.”

  Your father worked as a juggy—put in seismic line for Western Geo, and he was gone a lot. Which was a relief. But you walked into your parents’ bedroom looking to sneak some makeup and you saw he had taken red lipstick, something you don’t remember your mother ever wearing, and in a hasty flourish written, “Sheila, I miss you already,” at the bottom corner of the mirror on her dresser. Her name looped and trailed off with a comet’s tail so “Sheila” read “Shield” if you hadn’t known any better. You wondered how long the crimson wax had been there, proof, like a famous person’s autograph, that, yes, she had seen him—he had been here. You could see she had washed the mirror and deliberate
ly left it intact, a safety deposit of dust encased the letters. But there were cracks in the cursive, slight fractures where the glass glared right back at you.

  Her cosmetics bag was filled with concealer and powder and beige bottles, and, while you rummaged for shadows and color, she walked in.

  “That’s mine,” she said.

  Your hand froze, your face already pale with what you had put on. And you looked at her and she looked down at the brown carpet.

  “Don’t,” she said, quiet, and you knew you would never trespass again.

  There’s a rainbow trout on the end of your line—he’s eaten all of your king eggs and he’s small, about the length of a spoon.

  “Child molester,” Jack calls you.

  “It’s not my fault,” you say.

  The hook, made of surgical steel and meant for a fifty-pounder, has pierced through the jaw and gill. Dangling in the air, the rainbow looks like it’s being used for bait. “I don’t want you,” you say to the ink-filled eye. You release him back into the river, but he might not make it. “He good as dead?”

  “Never can tell,” Jack says. “I was out here once, drifting by myself. I put in at Skilak, and it was calm at first, and then the wind picked up and made a mess of the water. Took me an hour or two to get to The Narrows, and by that time I needed to rest, so I let the current take me and swing me wide, beached me up at some marsh near Superhole.” He stops to take a drink, a long one.

  “And?” you say.

  He’s always had a stockpile of stories, things he’s seen that get him new fishing buddies and free beers. “And I’m sitting there and I see a duck leading eight ducklings, they’re all paddling behind her in a line, keeping close to the bank. Then an eagle flies in overhead, coming toward me and the ducks. All of a sudden, mama swims away from her brood and into the thick of the river, she’s splashing and squawking and she’s got her wing bent crooked like it’s broken. The eagle swoops down with his feathers splayed back, talons going in for the kill, and I think she’s a goner and right before he reaches her, she stops flailing and dodges out of the way and swims toward the bank. That eagle looked confused, let me tell you. Flew away and landed on the top of a spruce tree and stayed there like he didn’t know what the hell had just happened.”