Caribou Island

2

Rhoda’s beaten-up Datsun B210 didn’t belong off pavement. She was careful to keep momentum up hills but could feel her tires slipping in the mud. And she couldn’t see a thing, just the rain hitting her windshield hard, blur of green trees beyond, the brown dirt and gravel road curving away. She’d been in dealerships for years now looking for the right new truck but never seemed to have enough money when they sat down to make it all final. What she wanted, anyway, was an SUV, not a truck. And since she was expecting a raise, and expecting also to marry a dentist, she didn’t think she’d have to wait very long.

Which put Rhoda in mind of Jim, who probably was eating pancakes right now for dinner, his usual, wondering where she was. Pulling peach halves from a can to put on these pancakes, and clicking the sides of the can unnecessarily with his fork. But Rhoda was feeling a good mood come over her and didn’t want to wreck it by thinking of Jim.

By the time she pulled up to her parents’ house, she could see the truck was gone. She was late to help them move logs. She got out anyway and ran past the flower beds to the door.

Rhoda’s parents lived in a small, one-story wooden house that had been added on to in several places over the years so that it bulged oddly now and the parts did not all match. Rhoda’s father had been dreaming of frontier life and mountain men when he moved up from California in his mid-twenties, and by now he had all the Alaskan accoutrements. Antlers of elk, moose, caribou, deer, mountain goats, and Dall’s rams hung from nails along the edge of the roof and along the outside walls. The raised flower bed to the right of the door featured an old hand pump, a small sluice, and various other rusted pans, picks, pails, old boards and such from the mining days, dragged down mostly from the Hatcher Pass Mine northeast of Anchorage but purchased also from other collectors and the odd garage sale. Farther down the wall to the left of the door, he had stacked wood for the fireplace and the antique cast-iron and nickel stove, and between the wood stack and the door, an old dogsled, its hide straps and wood rotting away a little more each year in all the rain, snow, wind, and occasional sun. The place had always seemed a junkyard and an embarrassment to Rhoda. What she did like were the flowers and the moss garden. Twelve kinds of moss and all the varieties of Alaskan wildflowers, even the rare ones. Whole beds of chocolate lilies and every color of fireweed and lupine, from white and pink to the deepest purple-blues, though only the fireweed was in bloom now.

Rhoda banged on the door again, but they were gone. She drove on toward the campground and launch ramp. Maybe she’d catch them there, though she had no idea why they’d persist on a day like this. Why not stay home?

Her tires slid a bit coming down the hill to the campground. She saw their truck parked, drove to the ramp at the water’s edge. No boat. No one around. Her parents were nuts to go out in this. Why not wait for a better day? Even if it was the cabin to end all cabins, the dream of a lifetime and all that crap. What Rhoda didn’t understand at all was why her mother would allow this.

Whatever, she said, and headed back to town.

Rhoda and Jim lived in a large peaked house overlooking the mouth of the Kenai River. One of the pluses about being with Jim. The steeply pitched A-frame roof reminded her of Wienerschnitzel franchises but shed snow easily and created a twenty-foot vaulted ceiling in the living room out front and the master bedroom in back. The double-paned windows, nearly fifteen feet high, caught sunsets over the Cook Inlet, and the exposed beams were stained dark as a mead hall’s, the furniture all Scandinavian wood and leather. It was the kind of house Rhoda had once dreamed of.

And now I just live here, she was thinking as she stood at the kitchen counter and squeezed small samples of beagle poop into glass vials for testing.

I wish you wouldn’t do that while I’m eating, Jim said. He was having his pancakes and canned peaches on the other side of the counter.

Get over it, Rhoda said. It’s just dog shit.

Jim laughed. You’re the best.

No, you, Rhoda said. They had only been living together a year, so what the hell. Rhoda’s former boyfriend had been a different story, a fisherman who whined and complained daily about the forces of nature, industry, and government, all equally inscrutable and heartless. The price for halibut was too low one year, licensing fees too high to enter another fishery the next year, the sea out to get him personally every year. Boring to listen to, and the payoff had been a small trailer home with a few free halibut steaks. Whereas with Jim she had unlimited canned peaches and all the Krusteaz pancake mix anyone could ever want.

Rhoda smiled. She was happy, she realized. Or happy enough, anyway. She put down the plastic syringe, circled behind Jim, and breathed a little in his ear.

On the shore of Skilak Lake, less than a mile from where his parents were slamming into waves with their load of logs, Mark was just taking off his clothes with his partner Karen and a couple friends from the Coffee Bus. He stoked the fire and they all hopped into the sauna, then banged the door shut behind them. The sauna was right at the edge of the lake with a narrow pier straight out the door, and it was hot and dark, windowless, insulated with tar paper behind the wood, the sitting bench and foot bench so high his head brushed the ceiling and taller people had to duck. Mark always brought along a branch or two of hemlock with the leaves still on for whipping, and as soon as they had broken a good sweat and the steam was so thick that in the red light they could see each other only faintly, Karen bent over with her head between her knees and her arms locked around her calves and Mark started whipping her. This was to bring the blood to the surface and get the circulation going. It woke a person up, too, and seemed faintly medicinal and purifying. It made a loud rustling slapping sound and left Mark in a deep sweat, Karen in pain, both of them gasping.

Then it was Mark’s turn to bend over. His skin so slick and salty now he couldn’t grab his calves or grip his hands together, so he held on to the boards beneath his feet as Karen began whipping. She got a rhythm going, swinging as hard as she could, and incorporated her voice, too, after a while, until she was yelling deep from her gut with every whip. She grabbed the back of his neck with her other hand and whipped him hard until most the leaves and side branches had been ripped off and she collapsed on him and he was whimpering.

Then Carl and Monique wanted to try. Mark stumbled out for some new branches and offered to whip Monique when he returned, but she grabbed one of the branches and said, in her low, sexy voice, No, I want to do Carl. So Carl bent over, perhaps a little hesitantly, and Monique whipped him once hard and he yelped.

Hey, he said. That really fucking hurts.

Bend over, Monique said. Grab your ankles. Then she started with a few soft slaps and worked up gradually to the harder ones. In the end, Mark assisted at Monique’s request by holding Carl’s head down until Monique said, God, I can’t breathe, and dropped the tattered whip and stumbled out the door and down the pier, where she dove headfirst into the lake.

The others piled out after. Again, Carl was a bummer. He dove in last, then got a stricken look on his face, the silent scream thing, and dog-paddled in a panic back to the pier. He lay on the wood gasping and swearing, saying how he couldn’t believe this and how cold it was, how it was ice and glaciers and such, which was true in a way, since a glacier did in fact feed into the lake.

The others ignored him and swam out a few hundred feet, remarking on the beauty of the heavy rain, the constant wind, and the mountain towering invisibly above them.

I’m alive, Monique said. Even the most stupid things are true. I don’t want to be dead ever again.

But then they all had to get out of the water or they would in fact die. They had already gone numb. They piled back into the sauna and decided to get high before the second round.

Best weed in the world, Mark said, exhaling finally. Highest THC content.

Karen went semi-catatonic, her usual. She had been raised on much weaker pot, and the Alaskan stuff hit her hard. So Mark felt free to check out Monique as much as he liked. She was tall and had short dark hair in a kind of European-looking bob, like the woman who modeled for Clinique. This got Mark hard, the fact that this woman beside him, her nipples hard and skin deserving of comparisons to alabaster and marble and such, looked like a model. He reached out to touch her neck.

Yeah, she said, pushing his hand away. You’re a prince.

Hey, Carl said.

Shut up, Monique said. We don’t need a male thing now. I’m enjoying this.

I’m so high, Karen said, raising her arms and falling back against the wall, her head thumping.

So Mark helped her sit up again, threw water on the hot rocks, and in an explosion of steam, they began the second of three rounds of Scandinavian custom.